She took his hand and he drew her to her feet. She sat down on the bed but didn’t get in.
‘So, talk,’ she said.
There was so much to discuss. Stanton decided to start with the most recent astonishing revelation.
‘You actually read my letter? It was still there? After a hundred and eleven years?’
‘Yes, it was still there. In the time that I come from Istanbul had been a dead town for nearly a century.’
‘Dead?’
‘It was cleared in the great starvations of the 1930s. All the cities of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor were. Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Istanbul. The Party couldn’t feed them so instead they drove the people out into the country to make war on the peasants for what could be found. They died of starvation in their tens of millions, which of course was what was intended. Those that survived tried to fight back and the Party responded using chemical warfare. They poisoned everything south of the Danube. When the Master and I entered Newton’s cellar, no one had been near the place in eighty years. The cellar was still locked.’
Stanton’s mind was reeling. Chemical warfare? Mass starvation? Cities dead for decades? What sort of world had this woman come from?
He tried to focus his questions. Start with the most immediate. Like in all good fieldwork, deal with the most pressing issue first.
‘Why did you try to kill me just then?’ he asked. ‘Surely you can see I’ve tried to help you?’
‘It’s my mission to kill you,’ she replied.
‘Yes, but you failed. Your mission was to kill me before I killed the Kaiser. Why bother now?’
She looked at him and suddenly the fire reignited in her eyes.
‘Because you ruined my fucking century, you stupid fucking cunt!’
She lifted her nightdress, all the way to above her breasts revealing the length of her tortured body. ‘You did this to me. You did it to millions and millions of people. Billions. You killed my children!!’
And suddenly the rage was on her again. As she dropped the nightdress hem he saw her abdominals tense into rigid corrugated iron. One foot was moving backwards, preparing to anchor a second spring at him.
‘Stop!’ he said. ‘Don’t do it! I’ll win and you know it. Maybe not on your day but this isn’t your day. You’re weak. You’ve been bedridden for a month and lost whatever weight you had. You can’t beat me, so stop. You’re just not well enough to fight me yet.’
She paused and looked at him hard.
‘You’re right. I’m not well yet,’ she conceded. ‘But soon I will be.’
She sat back on the bed and Stanton went into the vestibule where the internal telephone was situated. He ordered some tea and coffee and food.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked when he returned.
‘They call me Katie.’
‘Short for Katherine?’
‘No. K-T. Short for KT503b678.’
‘I’m Hugh Stanton.’
‘I know your name.’
‘From my letter?’
‘No. I’ve known it since I was six years old. All young pioneers learn it. You’re in the history books.’
That certainly took him aback.
‘Really?’
‘Of course you are. We all learn of the unbalanced bourgeois British zealot who unwittingly lit the spark of revolution by trying to frame honest Socialists. How you were sheltered by the Irish whore Burdette, but that you betrayed her and ran like a coward, leaving her to the Fascist Monarchist police.’
Stanton swallowed hard.
‘Well,’ he said, trying not to think of Bernadette or what might have happened to her after the police realized she’d let him go. ‘You know now that I’m not a zealot and I’m not unbalanced. I am just like you. I was brought to Cambridge in 2024. I presume you were brought to Cambridge too?’
‘I heard the Master use that name,’ Katie conceded. ‘It’s a bourgeois name. The place has a number now.’
‘I was brought there by the Companions of Chronos.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you, we read your letter.’
‘Well, then you know something about the terrible events of my own century,’ Stanton said. ‘You know that I killed the Kaiser to prevent the most terrible war in history. A war that marked the beginning of a terrible century. A century in which humanity learned to murder on an industrial scale. Whole populations died in the 1930s and 1940s, the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, the Ukrainians, all slaughtered. All slaughtered by Russian Soviet Communism.’
Now she really did smile. A broad wide smile that stretched fully across her face. And yet still a smile with not a single gram of joy in it.
The smile of a corpse.
‘I know,’ she repeated. ‘I read your letter. I know about your “terrible” war, your “Great” War, which began with the killing of an archduke at Sarajevo … Tell me, Hugh Stanton, how long did it last? This war that so corrupted and cursed the century into which you were born?’
‘Eleven years,’ Stanton replied. ‘1914 to 1925. The Great War lasted eleven years.’
‘Oh, eleven years,’ Katie replied with bitter sarcasm. ‘And tell me, Captain Stanton, how long did the Second World War last?’
Stanton was confused.
There had been no Second World War in the century from which Hugh Stanton had come.
The century which McCluskey had sought to correct.
In Stanton and McCluskey’s century there had been only one world war. The Great War.
‘One was enough,’ Stanton asserted. ‘More than a decade of deadlocked butchery. A butchery that ruined all the great nations of Europe utterly. Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia.’
‘But not America,’ Katie sneered. ‘They didn’t fight in this terrible war, did they? This war which you call Great?’
‘No, they kept out of it. That was why it went on so long. Woodrow Wilson would have brought them in but he was shot on the steps of Congress by Isolationists. So the war dragged on in deadlock until in the end both Germany and Russia had Communist revolutions. Germany’s under Luxemburg; Russia’s under Stalin. You know what happened then from the letter I wrote. Stalin was stronger. He betrayed Luxemburg. He had her and Liebknecht murdered in the streets. The Russians spread their ‘revolution’ west, through the Ukraine and Poland, through Germany and into France and on to Spain. By 1930 only Britain remained free, holding out under Winston Churchill. Isolated, alone, with the Russians on the Channel. The rest of Europe and all of Asia was enslaved under Stalin’s paranoid genocidal regime … a regime which murdered millions and millions of people, right up until 1951 when the Americans produced their bomb and destroyed Stalin’s Soviet Empire in a single day. All those decades of misery for half the globe stemmed from the terrible Great War. The war I stopped.’
‘Yes, you stopped it all right,’ Katie agreed. ‘Because of you, in my century there was no war in 1914. Germany was not destroyed. So Rosa Luxemburg didn’t have her revolution in 1925 in a nation exhausted by a great war; instead she had her revolution in 1916. As a reaction to the brutal police state you brought about by killing the Kaiser. Her revolution didn’t begin in a nation blighted by poverty and starvation and war exhaustion, like in your century. It began in the richest, most developed country on earth with the biggest army and the most advanced technology. In my century, the Russians weren’t the top Communists, the Germans were. The German USSR that Luxemburg established in 1916 was a global colossus. So when the vermin Strasser had her killed and made himself German Soviet dictator, he was the most powerful man in the world. A red kaiser. The revolution spread to Russia and was unstoppable. Then Strasser began his war and along with his Russian servant Stalin he took over all of Europe, including Britain. There was no “Churchill”, whoever the fuck he was, to “stand alone”. Britain wasn’t fit to fight anyone; it and its Empire had been fatally weakened and divided by the Civil War over Ireland. Strasser’s “revolution” spread to China, India, South America. Soon only America remained outside German Soviet control. But they didn’t save the world. Because when the atomic bomb was finally developed, it was Germany not America that had it. Berlin ordered a nuclear strike. I was one of the soldiers that occupied the rubble of New York. The globe was conquered! You think you lived in a shit century? With your one war, a bit of genocide and a half-arsed little nuclear strike. And after that nothing to worry about but something called global fucking warming, whatever that is. Try living in a century where the entire planet is ruled by a fourth-generation Communist lunatic. Where the entire planet is one vast network of prison camps. Where love is treason and they make you drown your own babies and every person in the world is an ant, a drone, a robot. Beaten, murdered. Dying in the mines, starving in the fields. Or doing mass synchronized dances in the Red Squares of Berlin, London, Moscow and Washington. Thousands prancing about with red ribbons in their hands while the Party fossils stand on their platforms and gloat. A world where there is no freedom. No individuality. No joy of any kind. That’s the world you bequeathed us, when you shot the Kaiser and sparked a revolution. You stupid bastard. You stupid stupid bastard. Your century was paradise! Why didn’t you leave well alone?’