‘By any reasonable measure, sir, I should say a very long time.’
‘So by reasonable measure, we are in fact talking about your measure.’
‘Because I am, I hope, a reasonable man.’
Newton’s anger flashed. ‘You may hope it, sir, but on present evidence I would dispute it. What seems a long time to you would be but an instant if you were a planet and even less so if you were a star.’
Bentley gave a gentle laugh, maintaining his patronizing manner, making it clear that the Master of Trinity College was not to be goaded even by Trinity’s greatest son.
‘It might seem different, Sir Isaac, but it would still be the same amount of time. Just as a day seems long to a bored schoolboy and short to a busy adult but it remains the same length of day.’
The Master took a delicate sip at his claret, clearly pleased to have delivered such an elegant and telling argument and confident that Newton must concede his point.
His confidence was misplaced.
‘Remains the same?’ Newton demanded angrily. ‘Does it? How so?’
‘Well, of course it does!’
Newton banged the table with his fist, upsetting his wine for the second time that afternoon. ‘What do you mean, “of course it does”?’ he shouted. ‘What sort of argument is that? You’re a teacher! Or so you claim to be! You must know that it is not enough simply to assert a point. You must make some demonstration, offer up some reasoning, some proof.’
Finally Bentley’s smug reserve deserted him.
‘Proof? What proof can I give beyond the fact that logic requires it?’ he said, his voice rising. ‘Time is time. It ticks away from the beginning until the end.’
‘But it doesn’t, you damned fool!’ Newton exclaimed. ‘Am I really the only person on earth to have grasped this fact? Time is not linear. It does not go along on a steady course like a road from London to York. It does not have a beginning and it does not have an end, nor is it the same to one person as it is to another, nor to two planets or a million stars. It is different in all circumstances. Because it is relative.’
‘Sir Isaac, I beg you calm yourself!’ Bentley implored, alarmed at Newton’s passion and regretting having allowed himself to be drawn into it. He did not want the most famous scientist in the world dying in his sitting room. ‘No man on earth is more sensible of your genius than I, but what is relative about it? Time is time. Listen to the clock, you hear it ticking? Each second recorded, the same to all men. Seconds that were once in the future and now lie in the past. Seconds which progress, one after another, be they noted or ignored, here, there and everywhere. Tick tock – another gone! In this room. On the sun. Amongst the stars. In heaven and in hell. Tick then tock. And so God’s Universe moves on second by second from Creation until Judgement Day.’
‘Tick tock tick tock! What are you talking about, you imbecile!’ Newton shouted, actually staggering to his feet and shaking his fist. ‘The thing your clock records, Mr Bentley, and which announces itself with its tick and its tock, is quite obviously an invention of man. An essential convenience to give order to his day. It lends an imagined shape to the experience of time within the vicinity of the clock. Surely that must be blindingly obvious, even to you! Your solid and unchanging second is in fact nothing of the sort. It is a mysterious and flexible thing. It is different everywhere it exists. Because it is relative.’
‘So you keep saying, Sir Isaac!’ Bentley snapped, rising to his feet also, once more giving way to his own irritation. ‘But relative to what?’
‘To the conditions in which the person who is experiencing it finds himself. Where he is. Whether he is in motion. How fast he is going. If he is travelling towards something or away from it. Whether that thing is also in motion. And beyond all that you must factor in the position and parameters of every other atom in the universe because every single one of them is relative to absolutely every other one.’
The two men were face to face now, Newton’s spilled wine on the rug between them, his great nose almost touching Bentley’s chin.
‘Please, Sir Isaac,’ the Master said finally. ‘Can we not debate this in a civilized manner?’
‘There is nothing to debate,’ Newton replied, collapsing back into his chair, old and tired once more. ‘I understand what I am talking about and you do not. You are to be forgiven. None understand it but I, and I curse a cruel fate which has given me the insight to do so. I have discovered how to change the future. Only God should be able to do that. And yet God has given me the key. I cannot ignore what I know, what God has revealed to me. Even if it drives me mad. And so, Master Bentley, I bequeath to you and your successors these letters and this sealed box.’
42
STANTON STARED AT the footprints for a long time.
He examined each one with his torch. Almost pleading with his eyes to see a different story than the one that lay before him. But there could be no doubt about it. The footprints started in the middle of the room and headed for the door.
Just as his and McCluskey’s did.
His mind simply reeled at the dawning realization of what this must mean.
Someone had followed him through time.
But that couldn’t be. He’d seen the equations. Professor Sengupta had been quite specific. The timing was absolute, the junction in time lasted less than a second. The Chronation traveller must leave at midnight on the night of 31 May 2025 and arrive at fifteen minutes after midnight on 1 June 1914. There was no chance to sneak through afterwards. No next bus that would be along in a minute.
He turned off his torch for a moment and allowed the darkness to envelop him, concentrating on computing all known facts. What Sengupta had explained. What he had experienced. The new evidence on the dusty floor before him. The truth was hurtling towards his consciousness like a battering ram at an already half-smashed door.
The next bus hadn’t come along in a minute.
It had taken one hundred and eleven years.
More than a century had passed since he and McCluskey had first left their footprints in the cellar.
That was the awesome truth.
And now that century had been consigned to oblivion just as his own had been. The loop had been rebooted for a second time. This was now the third version of the century, not the second. Another agent had come visiting from another future, from the future Stanton had created.
That agent had come to change the past.
The past Stanton had created.
And through which he had lived.
His mission had failed. Whatever had happened during the century that had unfolded after he had saved the Archduke and killed the Kaiser must have been terrible. Perhaps not as terrible as his own but terrible enough for another generation of Chronations to gather in a different 2025 and seek to use Newton’s calculations to change history.
Stanton wasn’t making history any more. He was just part of the history another agent of Chronos had come to make.
Stanton sank to his knees in the dust. His torch falling from his hand.
He had lived a whole second life. And yet he knew nothing about it because he and the whole world had been rebooted. From the moment this second Chronation arrived in 1914, Stanton’s second life had disappeared from history just as his first had disappeared at the moment of his own arrival.