by Alex Scarrow
She noticed how many people in the bustling space turned to look. The trams continued, of course, the bubble cars rattled on, but the bicycles pulled over, the pedestrians stopped and turned. All those who could stop seemed so very keen to view the screen and listen to the news.
A newscaster appeared in blocky black and white pixelvision: smart, formal, a bow tie and a dark jacket. Silver-haired and with a reassuring fatherly smile, he looked like Dumbledore after a wet shave and a sensible haircut in smart gentleman’s-club evening wear.
‘Good day, citizens. This is your News at One.’ A pause. A very long pause.
Looking around, Maddy noticed how many of the upturned faces around her seemed to wear a frozen expression of anticipation.
No … more than that. Dread.
‘The ultimatum presented by Secretary Andrei Bechemov of the Soviet Republic, and Secretary Andrew Benn of the Socialist Republic of Britain, has expired without any official response from President Jonathan Elroy Bush. The convoy of American warships crossing the Atlantic carrying the atomic materials to France appears to be proceeding undaunted. It is thought that the convoy will cross the 20 degree west longitude – otherwise known as the Bechemov Ultimatum Line – at some point late tomorrow afternoon. Discussions are continuing among the other gathered heads of state in Berlin as to the official response to the crossing, should it happen. There have been increased calls for a naval interception. Soviet warships despatched over a week ago across the Arctic Sea and around the top of the Atlantic and into the American-enforced “Trade Embargo Noose” will be in a position to meet the convoy should it make any attempt to cross the line.’
The newscaster took a breath.
‘Secretary Benn reiterated that the proliferation of atomic weapons, specifically President Bush’s insistence on deploying a forward atomic weapons base on French soil, was a flagrant attempt to provoke hostilities. French leader, President Durant, responded that France was at one with American foreign policy in wanting to preserve a robust frontline against socialist encroachment.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t seem good,’ Maddy whispered. She checked her watch. The one-hour window was due in just under ten minutes. She decided to make her way back across Piccadilly Circus; now, with the exception of the rattling wheels of the trams and the overhead fizzing of sparks along the contact wires, it was an almost completely frozen tableau.
She walked up the steps and through the frosted-glass double doors they’d emerged through earlier. Halfway down the dimly lit hallway, she passed the office on her left. The sound of clacking keyboards had ceased and she glimpsed inside – every typist in the long room was now gathered round a single desk, watching something glowing a flickering blue. She could hear the thin warble of the newscaster’s voice echoing out of the still and silent office, following her down the dark hallway towards the doorway opening on to the yard.
‘… for everyone to be prepared for the worst possible scenario. That a state of war may soon exist between …’
In the yard she was relieved to see Liam was waiting for her, a fat, heavy-looking book tucked under one arm.
‘I think this might not be a future we want to hold on to,’ said Liam as Maddy joined him.
She checked her watch. Five minutes to go.
‘I’ve got a feeling you may be right.’
Chapter 65
15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London
‘This is incredibly fascinating,’ said Maddy. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘From Jack the Ripper goofing up and getting himself killed in 1888, here we have a 2001 sitting on the brink of global thermonuclear war!’ She looked at the others. She had the history book Liam had ‘borrowed’ open on the desk in front of her and resumed reading passages aloud.
‘The revelation that the Whitechapel murders were perpetrated by a Cathcart-Hyde, a member of the House of Lords, proved to be the final straw. His intended victim, Mary Kelly, a common street woman, was hailed as a hero for overpowering him and killing him in self-defence. Upon her arrest for his murder, riots erupted across the East End of London.’
She looked up at them. ‘Which we saw for ourselves.’ She resumed reading. ‘Her trial in the spring of 1889 led to mass riots across the country. She was prevented from taking the stand and testifying publicly, because the authorities feared Mary Kelly would incite the working class to open revolt, so popular a figure was she by then.’
Maddy turned the page, and scanned the text.
‘December the fifteenth 1890. The hanging of Mary Kelly led to the Winter of Rage and the subsequent “Trafalgar Square Massacre”; three hundred rioters were shot dead by soldiers of the fifth Hampshire rifles and another hundred and seven people were cut down during a charge down Oxford Street by the Queen’s own Blues and Royals of the Household Cavalry!’
She turned another page. ‘May the seventh 1891, Queen Victoria and the royal family escaped to Canada as the Libertarian Workers’ Transition Council took control of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament and the first socialist state in the world was officially declared.’
She flipped through several more sections of the thick book, taking her forward through time. The others sat in silence as she skim-read the pages and timelines of dates and events.
‘So …’ she said presently, ‘it seems … then, when the Second World War should have been happening in correct history, there was no war in this timeline; instead, a growing consolidation between two sides. And an escalating arms race.’
‘Two sides? What, America versus Britain again?’ said Sal. ‘Just like that time when the American Civil War didn’t finish?’
‘No, not so much countries, Sal. Ideologies: socialism versus capitalism.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’ asked Liam.
Maddy looked at him. ‘Oh, come on! Seriously? You must’ve read enough history books by now to know what those words mean, right? It’s the struggle of the worker versus the banker. The poor versus the rich. The idea of shared wealth versus personal wealth.’
‘Oh, right, that.’ He shrugged. ‘Aye, I knew that.’
‘On one side we have Russia,’ her finger ran across a colour-coded map of Europe, ‘which has its revolution in the 1920s. Germany, Britain, Poland, Austria … one after the other, by the look of these dates, they experience their own workers’ revolutions. And then on the other side we have America and Canada and some of the South American countries becoming one big “Free World Zone”. That’s what they call themselves.’
‘It’s an Atlantic divide, then?’ said Rashim. ‘The Americas against Europe?’
‘No, not exactly.’ Maddy flipped through some more pages until she found an entry she’d read earlier. ‘Ah, here it is … 1937: The DuMann/Roosevelt Accord. President Roosevelt and Congress approve a loan of several hundreds of millions of dollars to the French to help them invest in industry and weapons development. France is seen by the American public as one of the last major outposts of capitalist values in Europe.’
She checked an index at the front. ‘The rest of this century, it seems, is one long Cold War. Tensions rising on both sides. There’s a doozy of a quote right here at the front of this book.’ She flipped to the title page.
‘The twentieth century will prove to be a century devoted to one purpose alone – preparation for an inevitable war. Almost a hundred years spent in a race for industrial and technological supremacy. A race in which the winning post will almost certainly be a brutal and catastrophic global war … and no country will emerge unscathed.’
‘Jay-zus,’ muttered Liam. He recalled the strained look on that poor young girl’s face in the library. She’d seemed so worried, so haunted by looming events. And Liam reminded himself how he’d casually, glibly, batted away her concerns as if she was being silly. So easy for him to be devil-may-care. His was a fleeting visit. But she … she was stuck there waiting, like every other person in the country, to see how far the Americans were prepared to p
ush their challenge.
The young lady had returned with his book and a mumbled apology for the awkward invitation she’d extended to him. She’d covered her mouth, her braced teeth, as she’d whispered, but he could have sworn she’d said something like, ‘I just don’t want to be on my own … if … when … it happens.’
‘Everyone knew what was coming,’ said Liam. ‘They could see it coming, God help ’em.’
Maddy picked up one of the newspapers. She looked at the others, Rashim and Sal in particular. ‘They have nuclear weapons in this timeline, but they call them “atomics”. It looks like both sides have “atomics”. They’ve been stockpiling warheads for decades.’
‘We need to see how it turns out, Maddy.’
She nodded at Liam. ‘I think so. It didn’t look good. We need to go further forward, Rashim. Can we do it?’
He shook his head. ‘I said it before. We don’t have the power to send you any further, Maddy. Maybe remote-viewing. A pinhole-viewing.’
‘That’s fine. That’s all we need. How far forward can we go?’
‘I need to work it out.’
‘2070? Can you get us a look at that year?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll work it out. Just give me a moment.’ Rashim took a chair at the desk and pulled up a program on the screen.
They waited silently, listening to him tap on the keyboard and mutter calculations under his breath.
‘It’s always the same,’ said Sal after a while. ‘One way or another, mankind ends up wiping itself out with some big weapon, doesn’t it? Why are people so completely stupid?’
‘It’s what we do best, isn’t it?’ said Liam. ‘Invent things that we can use to kill everyone. It’s what we’re good at, I suppose.’
‘That is correct,’ rumbled Bob. His eyelids were fluttering, revealing the rolled whites of his eyes. He was Bluetoothing data. One of his sporadic back-ups. ‘Mankind is essentially sociopathic,’ he continued. ‘That is probably why Homo sapiens became dominant and wiped out the Neanderthals and the other sapient species; your killer instinct was more clearly defined.’
‘Aye, we were tougher nuts than those apemen,’ said Liam.
‘Negative. Not tougher,’ said Bob, ‘just more ruthless.’
‘Thanks for that, Dr Phil,’ said Maddy. ‘Since when did you become an expert on the human psyche?’
‘I have files on –’
Maddy raised a hand. ‘It’s OK, I was just being snarky.’
‘OK, I’ve got some rough figures,’ said Rashim. ‘We can’t project a pinhole field all the way to 2070, I’m afraid. It’s just not possible on the power we’re drawing in right now.’
‘Jesus!’ Maddy gritted her teeth. ‘We need to do something about that. This Holborn generator’s a pile of junk!’
‘I have some thoughts on this. We could do some reconfiguring, perhaps insert some kind of capacitor to build up a store of surplus energy –’
‘Later. We’ll discuss that later. Just tell me how far we can go right now.’
Rashim looked at the scribbled notes on the desk in front of him. He sucked air through his teeth. ‘I think we can reach as far forward as the early forties – 2042, perhaps 2043. But not much more.’
Liam cocked his head. ‘Wasn’t that round about when Waldstein showed off his first-ever time machine?’
‘Yeah, round about then, I think.’
‘I wonder if this future has a version of him in it,’ said Liam. ‘Eh? That would be weird.’
Maddy shrugged. An intriguing idea – that another version of him lay ahead of them now, perhaps a version of him that was living a very different life. A happier life perhaps with his wife and his son? A life lived in blissful ignorance of time travel. An Einstein who remained a humble patent clerk; a Bill Gates who ended up a computer repairman.
Wouldn’t that be a thing, though? A timeline that survives this looming nuclear crisis and perhaps finds a peaceful future. But also a timeline without Waldstein’s displacement machine in it. Perhaps even a timeline without a Pandora. Wouldn’t all of that be a wonderful thing? She could only hope. ‘Rashim?’
He turned to look at her. ‘Yes?’
‘Do it. Set that up, please. Let’s go get a look at our future.’
Chapter 66
2043, the ruins of Piccadilly Circus, London
The dog, a small, virtually hairless thing that might, once upon a time, have been mistaken for a Jack Russell, chased the rodent through a dark maze of creaking wooden tables and desks – furniture that for many a year had held true until a decade ago a portion of the building’s roof had finally caved in. Ten years of wet summers and freezing winters had done its work and damp was rotting the wood.
The dog scurried between chair legs and desk legs in a desperate, ravenous pursuit. The rat was a good-sized one and yet fast. Its small feet skittered across a long-forgotten floor covered in grit and plaster; moistened by the damp, it was almost soil and in several places clumps of weed and moss thrived.
Out of the maze of the long-dead office, the rat scampered up a slanted fallen roof timber, on to a chair and over a stick-dry bundle of bones in rags slumped across the grit-covered surface of a service counter. Its body and beady dark eyes reflected all but briefly in a mildew-spotted oval of magnified glass. Along the counter now, it found a dark corner behind a rusting box spewing corroded wires.
A moment later the dog scampered past the counter in hot pursuit, out into a large hall of round wooden benches and long tables. As with the counter, there were other bundles of white bones and tufts of hair wrapped up in decaying fibres of clothing to be seen: lying along the benches, slumped on the reading tables, spread out on the floor. Shards of sunlight speared down into this place through the collapsed domed roof of the building, and a cheerful, welcoming blue sky was visible beyond, framed by the broken fingers of iron spars and crumbling masonry.
The balding dog sensed it had lost its prey and wandered over to an opening that led out into the warmth of a pleasant summer’s afternoon. It emerged into the sunlight, blinking back the brightness of the sun, sat on its haunches and panted. It decided to rest and recover for a while before returning inside to sniff out another rodent. The pickings were too rich in this building to give up yet.
Its pink tongue darted out and slapped its muzzle. Skinny flanks heaved with the rapid in-out in-out in-out of hot breath being expelled and oxygen pulled in.
And dark beady eyes looked out impassively on a crowded vista that meant nothing to it. A place once upon a time known as Piccadilly Circus.
Tall grass and nettles grew waist-high here, a sea of gently swaying ochre-green giving way here and there to hummocky islands of rust-red vehicle roofs. Lost to sight, but certainly down there where the wild grass and the tall weeds spread their roots, was a rich compost of decaying clothing fibres and bleached bones still able to leak some goodness into the forming soil.
In the middle of this shifting grassland was a circular plinth topped by a still-recognizable human form with wings. Eros. Its bronze base was now a peppermint green, the statue itself – aluminium – was a marble-like pattern of rust spots and algal growth.
Everywhere a pleasing prairie sound. The gentle murmur of breeze haunting the skeletons of dead buildings. The grass whispering a soothing white noise. Crickets chirruping in chorus. Far away another dog barks to find its pack. And slowly the late-afternoon sun eased across a cloudless sky towards a craggy horizon of falling buildings. Eventually that same horizon would be shallow humps beneath a blanket of vegetation. Eventually that horizon would be flat grassland or a wood or something in between.
Peaceful.
But life goes on. Big bugs eat small bugs. Rats eat bugs. Dogs eat rats. A dozen crows circle overhead prepared to eat anything. Life continues despite a gradually decreasing background level of radiation that might still give concern to a radiologist.
Just over four decades ago, it wasn’t peaceful here. Just over four decades
ago, there was a period of horror and panic. The sound of wailing sirens filled the air.
Screams.
Prayers.
This same blue sky was criss-crossed with several hair-thin lines of vapour: the approaching and departing vectors of missiles. A day in which the skies all over Earth looked largely the same. Vapour trails and mushroom clouds.
But that’s all long ago. Forgotten now. Silly, vain, stupid, violent humans are history and in a couple of hundred years the last visible remnants of their buildings will be too.
Peaceful, except for a tiny disturbance now. Minute – the size of a mere pinhead. If one knew precisely where to look, you would see nothing more than a spot of darkness floating six feet above the ground. Like an errant pixel on a computer display, grain on an old photograph, the tiniest freckle on porcelain-fair skin.
There for a second, gone the next.
15 DECEMBER 1888, HOLBORN VIADUCT, LONDON
They stared at the low-resolution image on the computer screen for a long, silent minute before Liam finally spoke.
‘That’s Piccadilly Circus, is it?’
No answer. In his own Liam way he was being rhetorical. ‘Well now, that’s not looking very good, is it?’
‘You’re quite right,’ said Maddy. ‘Not good. Not good at all. I think it’s safe to say we don’t want this future.’
‘That means we have to make it right,’ said Sal. ‘Jack the Ripper has to kill this Kelly lady?’
‘And get away … never to be identified.’ Maddy nodded. ‘Kinda sucks, but yeah. That’s how it has to be.’
Chapter 67
8 p.m., 8 November 1888, Whitechapel, London
Mary Kelly wiped muffin crumbs from her lips and smiled across the table at Faith. ‘I ain’t felt so ’appy in a long time.’
Faith had been gazing out at the street. The late-night market was closing up for business. By the amber glow of lamplight, costermongers, butchers, grocers packed their wares away as weary-looking stevedores returned home from the docks and warehouses along the Thames. A narrow street heaving with activity; a seething mass of grubby humanity seen through the sooty window of this small tea shop. Faith had logged, analysed and dismissed seventy-six faces in the last minute alone.
