‘I suppose on the off chance that Newton’s right I should have my wits about me,’ he remarked. ‘Don’t want to time-travel under the influence.’
After they’d eaten, Stanton left the professor to her coffee and cognac and went to his room to change. Looking at himself in the mirror he reflected that he would cut a fairly unusual figure in Istanbul that night, wearing the socks, knee britches and thornproof tweed of an early-twentieth-century man of action. But then Istanbul was a renowned party town so he doubted anyone would notice much. Next he checked his kit, which he was carrying in one large holdall bag, plus a smaller one with an emergency version of the same. He had guns and explosives, medical supplies, his computers, IDs, and a great deal of money in various currencies and government bonds. These last had all been expertly forged from originals taken from museums and bank archives.
At 10 p.m. he met McCluskey in the lobby and once more they took a limousine across the Galata Bridge. The streets by this time were full of evening revellers so their progress was slower, which was why they had allowed themselves plenty of time.
Stanton stared out of a car window and decided that nothing was going to happen that night. The twenty-first century was just too real, too solid. It was the weekend and the city was in a party mood. Music could be heard through the doorways of restaurants. There were smiling, laughing faces everywhere. It didn’t seem possible that so much living, breathing, tingling life could suddenly cease to exist on the stroke of midnight.
Once more McCluskey seemed to read his thoughts. Perhaps they mirrored her own.
‘The world looked solid and unchangeable in the summer of 1914 too,’ she said. ‘Never more so. People thought no world had ever been more secure or enduring. But it evaporated into thin air. It disappeared from the universe within a few short summers. Don’t you think this one could vanish just as suddenly?’
‘Their world was destroyed by hot lead, poison gas and high explosives,’ Stanton replied.
‘Gas. High explosives. Gravitational shifts in space and time,’ McCluskey answered. ‘All physical phenomena at a subatomic level. A single shell from a big gun in the Great War could vaporize any number of men. Literally reduce them to cellular level. Transform their matter and send them spinning across the universe. I suggest that your component parts are about to embark on a journey no more dramatic. Gravity is without doubt the most consistent force in the universe. Everything exerts it, everything is affected by it. Why should time be an exception?’
As they got closer to their destination the crowds began to thin. This was not a fashionable area. The shouting, smiling faces had disappeared and the noise of carefree youth and partying was ever more distant.
‘Nice and quiet,’ McCluskey muttered. ‘Just how we like it.’
But it wasn’t to be. As the car turned into their street they were confronted by throbbing trance music. The pavement outside the previously deserted building was pulsing with light.
‘Oh fuck,’ McCluskey said.
The single security man was standing outside in the street looking extremely sheepish.
‘I’m sorry, professor,’ he said. ‘They just invaded. It’s somebody’s twenty-first birthday. There must be two hundred of them inside.’
‘Oh Christ in a box,’ McCluskey said. ‘Flash rave. Pop-up party. Newton didn’t think of that.’
‘You want me to call the police?’ the guard asked.
‘No!’ McCluskey said quickly. ‘Absolutely not. No time. It’d take hours to shift this lot and there’d probably be a bloody riot if we tried. Come on, Hugh.’
They pushed their way through the stoned and loved-up partygoers who were milling around the front door and made their way into the house. It was completely transformed from the afternoon. There were strobing, flashing lights, pulsating music and dancing, kissing, squirming bodies everywhere.
‘You see, Hugh,’ McCluskey shouted, ‘it’s like I always said to those bloody Marxist dialectical materialists. History is about people. Coincidence and capricious chance. This bunch of pissed-up ravers may turn out to be the reason the Great War happens and Europe is destroyed. Because of a fucking birthday party! But not if we can help it. Come on.’
McCluskey pushed her way through the sweating throng. She was, as usual, carrying a large handbag. In fact, this particular item was more like a small holdall and she wasn’t shy in swinging it about to get people to move out of the way. Stanton followed on as best he could, struggling with his own heavy bags.
Finding their way was difficult; the rooms and corridors had all been hung with painted sheets and murals and looked nothing like they had done that afternoon. At least there was light, supplied by a generator that seemed to have been placed in the back garden since the cables were running out of the windows.
‘They’ve got it bloody well organized,’ McCluskey shouted back over her shoulder. ‘Can’t believe they’ve set this up since we were here. If they were as creative and innovative getting themselves jobs they wouldn’t all have to be bloody anarchists.’
Stanton could hardly hear her. There were speakers hung in every corner of the building and the DJ was not shy with the volume dial.
Eventually they found their way down into the cellar, descending the little stairwell towards the battered and broken door, still hanging on a single hinge. The same door that Newton’s men had locked three centuries before.
Any hope that the rave might have confined itself to the upper part of the house was quickly extinguished. There was a separate and if anything even wilder party going on in the basement. A different DJ, naked but for a tiny pair of glittering shorts, was dancing crazily behind his decks.
‘The guy upstairs was steady drum and bass,’ McCluskey shouted, ‘but this bloke is real old school Hi NRG trance. Fucking awful, if you ask me. All music was shit after the kids switched from spliff to E.’
Whatever drug it was that the revellers were on, they were certainly having a fantastic time. Bounding and leaping about and throwing shapes with absolute abandon.
‘My place-marker’s gone and the chalk’s been danced off the floor,’ Stanton shouted into McCluskey’s ear. He pointed at the broken chair, which had been kicked into a shadowy corner of the cavernous room. ‘We’ll have to re-establish the coordinates.’
If any of the young Turkish party people found it strange that an old lady in a woolly cardigan and a man dressed vaguely like a character out of King Solomon’s Mines were pushing their way among them staring intently at a satellite navigation device, then they did not let it show. This was a flash rave after all and there were no rules. People could act as they pleased. As if to demonstrate this very point, a young woman with a shaved and tattooed head leapt suddenly in between McCluskey and Stanton.
‘Guts!’ she shouted in heavily accented English. ‘I love you, Guts!’
Then having paused momentarily to bare her breasts, she clasped Stanton by the head with both hands and kissed him.
Fortunately the music was too loud for anybody but Stanton and McCluskey to hear the girl, otherwise Stanton might well have been mobbed. These were young people after all, Stanton’s web constituency. McCluskey grabbed the girl and pushed her away.
‘Bugger off, you disgusting slapper,’ she shouted. ‘And put your tits away. What would your mother think?’
Stanton looked at his watch. ‘Two minutes to midnight!’ he shouted, before focusing once more on his sat nav. ‘The place is just over here, where those two are making out.’
Stanton pointed at a position on the floor where a young couple were dancing cheek to cheek and groin to groin, locked in a passionate embrace, mouths gnawing at each other.