Paradox Hour

Chapter 13

Fedorov had never seen anything like this before. It was shocking, horrifying, the stuff of science fiction made real before his eyes. Lenkov was stuck in the galley… literally. His body was embedded in the deck, with head, shoulders and half his torso above the level of the floor, and all the rest embedded in the structure of the ship itself. One arm extended looked as though he had tried to reach for the table or chair to prevent himself from being swallowed, and an agonized look was frozen on his face, blotched with eerie blue-pink bruises. The eyes bulged from their sockets, wild with fear. The mouth gaped open, as if the man had died while screaming with terror and panic.

After the shock of seeing that face subsided, Fedorov’s mind reasoned the deck must have collapsed beneath him, but upon closer inspection, he saw that was not correct. There was nothing wrong with the deck at all. It was as if the man and ship had simply merged, the deck losing its integrity for a moment, just long enough for Lenkov to fall, before solidifying again, like a man falling into water that suddenly froze all around him.

Admiral Volsky and Doctor Zolkin were there, with two Marines keeping the other crewmen away from the scene. The rumors were already racing through the ship—that Lenkov had fallen right through the deck!

One image now immediately came to mind for Fedorov, that horrifying moment in the Pacific as they raced away from the burning hulk of the Yamato, and the cruiser Tone suddenly appeared on a direct collision course with Kirov. The ship had been pulsing, as Fedorov described it, fading in and out of that moment in time, like a radio signal that could not be fine tuned, quavering on the airwaves of infinity. Volsky was looking to his Captain, his eyes carrying the obvious expectation that Fedorov would know what had happened here, and that was the only thing he could think of.

“So it begins,” he said darkly.

“Fedorov?”

“We must be pulsing again,” said Fedorov. “The ship… Like we did before in the Pacific.”

“Pulsing?”

“Our position in time is becoming unstable. Remember, Admiral, we no longer have Rod-25 aboard, and the other two control rods have been stowed in Rad-safe containers. In the Pacific, we began to shift in and out of that timeframe. I first noticed this during that surprise strafing run that wounded you, sir. Some of those rounds went right through the command citadel, and through the deck, but left absolutely no mark. They could not have penetrated the citadel armor in any case, but several men on the bridge saw them. It was just as we were shifting to another time in the Mediterranean. We were there, but yet not there, still not completely manifested in that moment. And then do you recall how that Japanese cruiser seemed to go right through us?”

“Who could forget that little experience,” said Zolkin. “The men had nightmares about it for weeks after. I nearly ran out of sedatives.”

“Well, it’s happened again,” said Fedorov. “The ship must have faded, pulsed, I don’t know what to call it, but we wavered in this time briefly, and became insubstantial.”

“But not Lenkov?”

“Apparently not.”

“How could this be, Fedorov?” asked Volsky.

“I wish I knew, sir. Does his body extend through to the space below this deck?”

“That is the strangest thing,” said Volsky. “No, there is nothing there. It is as if he was ripped in two, with half his body somewhere else.”

“Very strange… He must have fallen out of phase with the rest of us… with the ship itself.”

“Out of phase?”

“It’s as if he lingered in this time when the ship began to move. His link in time with us became broken somehow, and he fell through…”

“Right through the deck?”

“Right through time itself,” said Fedorov, not quite understanding what he was saying, but doing his best to put some rational explanation to the horrific scene before them.

“Wonderful,” said Zolkin facetiously. “Now each time I roll over in bed I must worry that I might fall right off the edge of infinity? What is going on here?”

“Believe me, Doctor,” Volsky placated him. “We’ve all been wondering that ever since that first accident in the Norwegian Sea. Can you shed any more light on this, Mister Fedorov?”

“That’s the only way I can understand it sir. Either Lenkov, or the ship and everyone else, pulsed in time, and Lenkov was not in sync.”

“This pulsing you speak of. Will it continue?”

“It might, Admiral, but I cannot know that for sure.”

“Why is it happening? Any ideas?”

Fedorov took a deep breath. “This may sound stupid, sir, but the simple fact is that we do not belong here. This is not our time. We are intruders, and we have already seen that our position in time is often not stable.”

“Yet wasn’t that because Dobrynin was dipping that control rod every twelve days?”

“We thought that was the reason,” said Fedorov, “but these odd pulsing effects lead me to suspect that time is having difficulty with our presence in the past.”

“Difficulty? No argument there, Fedorov. We’ve been giving her fits! Look here, is this part of that paradox business you keep bringing up? Did this happen because we are getting close to the time of our first displacement to the past?”

“I must suspect that, even if I cannot say anything for certain.”

“What paradox business?” Zolkin gave them a questioning look.

“It’s a long story, Dmitri,” Volsky explained. “We first shifted to the past on July 28th, and appeared in this very year, 1941, on that same date. Rod-25 was very meticulous in the beginning, though we did not know that at the time. Then, as Dobrynin performed that maintenance procedure, we began shifting all over the place. We would lose hours, days even, and skip about—how did you describe it Fedorov?”

“Like a rock skipping over water, sir.”

“That’s it. We hopped from one time to another, causing a good deal of mayhem every time we appeared. We got Tovey and the Royal Navy up in arms, and if that wasn’t enough, then we took on the Japanese in that trip to the Pacific!”

“Not to mention Karpov’s sortie to 1908!” Zolkin folded his arms, his eyes still riveted on Lenkov. “Now how in god’s name am I going to get that man out of the deck? It looks like he has been welded in place! And where did the rest of him go? Headaches, I can handle. Broken bones? No problem. I have pills and splints for that. But we never discussed anything like this in medical school.”

“Alright, alright…” Volsky raised a hand, as if trying to impose some sense and order on the scene by virtue of his rank and authority in the navy. But Mother Time was not a member of his crew. He knew that, yet his instincts led him to look for a solution in any case. He was the Admiral. It was his to give the orders and keep the ship on an even keel. Yet now, as he stared at Lenkov, his mind was completely lost, aghast, nonplussed by this bizarre twist of fate. Was a similar doom awaiting them all? Were they all going to be devoured by time, fall through the deck into oblivion like poor Lenkov?

“First things first,” he said. “Doctor, I will leave it to you as to how the body is removed. If you need the engineers, just call them, but I would like to keep this incident quiet, if possible. Did anyone witness this happen?”

“Three other men were here in the Galley,” said Zolkin. “Two came to the sick bay, Shorokin and Gorich. They say they were cleaning the pots and pans when they heard a scream, then they ran in here and saw this mess. I sent them on leave to their quarters and I’ll check on each man soon. As for Mister Kornalev, he went straight to the bridge. I haven’t spoken with him.”

“I’m not sure you will have anything in your Doctor’s bag for this, Dmitri,” said the Admiral. “But do your best to keep things calm. I will walk the decks for a while and see to the crew. We’ve been plotting grand strategy up on the bridge, and in all these meetings with Admiral Tovey, and I have neglected my boys here on the ship. That ends now. Let’s get this cleaned up, a fresh crew assigned here, and a good meal ready for this evening mess. As for you, Mister Fedorov, I think you might wish to go and discuss this with Director Kamenski. Perhaps he knows something more. I wonder if that key of his has something to do with this?”

“Key?” Zolkin gave the Admiral another clueless look.

“Never mind that, Dmitri. See what you can do about Lenkov.”

Volsky crossed himself, then started for the hatch.

“Yes, Mister Fedorov, I hear what you are saying,” said Kamenski, “but consider this. Everything on this ship existed in some other form in this time when we arrived here. Some of the metals and materials used to build Kirov were fabricated, but we didn’t really create anything new, just re-arranged the particles, if that makes any sense. The hull was in the ground somewhere, as raw ore, I suppose.”

“I never thought of that,” said Fedorov. “I thought it would be impossible for us to shift to a time when we already existed, but I never gave a thought to the metal in the ship itself. Yes, what you say is true, but if that is the case, how could the ship shift here?”

“Quite the mystery,” said Kamenski. “Perhaps that material simply vanished when the ship manifested in the past, and gave up its seat at the theater to us, though I doubt that. As for the men, none of them existed in this year, so every molecule in their bodies was… new to this time.”

Fedorov frowned, trying to comprehend what Kamenski was telling him. The Director had explained that things had vanished during their nuclear testing, a consequence of time being fractured by the intense shock of the detonations. Yet the odd thing was that these items later reappeared, and they had never discovered where they had gone in the time they were missing.

Things tumbled over and over in Fedorov’s mind, then he suddenly remembered what he had learned about those American destroyers.

“Desron 7,” he said. “You told me those ships reappeared like that, all on their own.”

“Yes, at the time I described them as little fish time threw out of her nets. They must have shifted forward in time with Kirov, perhaps because they were within the sphere of influence of Rod-25 when this ship moved in time.”

“But we saw nothing, Director. There was no sign of them. If they did shift—”

“Yes, they did not quite reach the same moment Kirov did.” Kamenski completed his thought for him. “Perhaps they were ahead or well behind you in time. In that case, you would have never seen them. They were obviously in that same bleak future you sailed through for a time, but their position in that timeframe was not ever stable. They did not belong there any more than Kirov belongs here. So time cast them back to their own era, and they reappeared in 1941. The story they told has been a mystery ever since, but one we may have solved. Yes?”

“Then do you believe that the same thing is happening to us,” asked Fedorov. “Are we being pulled back to our own era? Is that why the ship lost its solidity in this time for a moment?”

“Possibly. This pulsing effect usually occurs just before or after you were about to displace in time, correct?”

“Yes sir, but that was because we had Rod-25 in play. Yet it isn’t even on the ship now, Gromyko has it in Kazan. How could we be shifting or pulsing in time without it?”

“How did those destroyers get back to the Argentia Bay of 1941? I hate to answer your question with another, but that is what happened, so it must be possible. What we have seen, Fedorov, is that once a thing first displaces in time, it is never really stable again, in any timeframe. It’s as if it has come unglued from the fabric of reality—a slippery fish, as I like to say. And when it moves, slips away, it often disturbs things, as we have seen. If my theory is correct, then all the material that makes up this ship had to pay a very heavy price for our admission to this time.”

“You say it may have simply vanished?”

“Just like Lenkov’s legs.”

“Where did they go, sir?”

“Where does the flame go when you blow out a candle, Mister Fedorov? That’s an old Zen Koan, is it not? The Zen Master wants his answer, just as you do.”

Kamenski was lighting his pipe now. “I am blowing out this match,” he said calmly. “Tell me, where has the flame gone?”

Fedorov looked around, realizing the question was a deliberate trap, designed to challenge and frustrate the reasoning mind, and bring it to a crisis point where no answer it could give would make any rational sense. Then his mind seemed to slip, like Lenkov falling through the deck, and he realized what the trap was.

“The flame isn’t a thing,” he said suddenly, prompting a smile from Kamenski.

“Ah, yes, the solution is in the grammar, is it not? This isn’t a word puzzle, Mister Fedorov, but a literal truth. The flame is not a thing, not a noun as we choose to label it. What is a noun? A person, place or thing, as the teachers would drill us over and over. But there are no nouns in this universe. Everything is a process, a relationship. That flame is a result of the interaction between chemicals, the match stick, and the oxygen in this room. All three must be present, and then we get that flame, leaping into existence as if manifesting here from nothingness! It is a process, an activity, a verb. Yes, my friend, everything in the universe is like that. Everything is a verb. There are no nouns, if you really think about it. That is just a pleasant and useful convention. Everything is a process. When I blow on this match, I disturb that process, and also disturb the delicate relationship that has conspired to bring us that flame. But where does it go?”

“Out of existence,” said Fedorov.

“Correct. The process we call ‘flame’ simply stops. The oxygen is here, the match stick still has substance to be burned, but my breath has forced the heat away from that one vital element of the process, and so it stops, taking that flame to the void from whence it came.”

Silence. A ship’s bell rang, timing out the change of crew shifts, the sound emerging from that same void, lingering for the briefest moment, and then vanishing. Where did it go?

“And now the reason for the Zen Master’s question.” Kamenski took a draw on his pipe, blowing the smoke and watching it for a moment. “You see, we are all candle flames, are we not? We aren’t nouns either, Mister Fedorov. We are just a process, something the universe is doing right there where you stand in your uniform, and right here where I sit trying to keep warm in this old wool sweater. If you had the eyes to see, then you would know that all these so called things in the world are mere conventions of thought, just like that flame. If you could see it all, right down on the level of quantum particles, it would just be this undifferentiated soup, a quantum haze where everything was happening—every thing, and I separate those two words deliberately. Understand?”

Fedorov blinked.

“Understand that, my friend,” said Kamenski, “and you will know what happened to Lenkov’s legs.”

Chapter 14

Tasarov had heard the rumors circulating below decks. He had collected more than an earful on his way to his shift on the bridge. Now he sat at his station, settling into his chair and initializing his surveillance panel. One screen remained dark, the feed from the forward sonar in the bow that had been shattered when Kirov struck an old mine—in 1908! He still had difficulty getting his mind around all that had happened to the ship, and everything they had seen and done.

“Hey Samsonov,” he said to the big man at the CIC station near him. “Have you heard about Lenkov?”

“Who’s Lenkov?” said Samsonov.

“The galley server. You know, the one who gives out extra portions for cigarettes.”

“So what of him?”

“He’s dead! They found him on the floor of the galley—or rather in the floor of the galley. He was stuck there, right in the deck!”

Samsonov gave Tasarov a look that said he was listening to some bad vranyo now, the exaggerated stories one Russian would tell another. The rules of vranyo were well established. The teller spins out the tall tale, and the listener was supposed to take it all in, without objection, simply nodding his head until the story was concluded. Only then could he make any complaint. But Samsonov was not a stickler for convention. He frowned at Tasarov, waving his story away.

“Someone is chasing the wind,” he said.

“But it’s true,” Tasarov insisted. “Doctor Zolkin was there with the Admiral and Fedorov, and Marines had the whole place sealed off. The engineers are doing something now—they say they are trying to get the body out of the deck.”

“Yes? Well I am trying to get the missile crews to respond to my maintenance cycle checks. Forget these stories, Tasarov. Just mind your sonar.”

Tasarov could see he would find no sympathy with the weapons chief, so he slipped on his headphones and sighed. Time to take an initial sounding of the sea space around them. He would listen, with eyes closed, getting a baseline feel for the acoustics. His information wasn’t as good as it used to be without that forward sonar dome, but he still had his side hull sensors, and the towed array trailed behind the ship on a long steel cable.

He found it difficult to get settled into his shift. Normally he would chat with Nikolin for a while, but he was on leave for another hour, and probably eating. I hope he’s not anywhere near the galley, he thought. Better in the officer’s mess hall now. He’ll probably have more news about Lenkov when he gets here.

Tasarov wasn’t just missing a sympathetic friend to talk to now. It was more than that. He had been listless and fatigued of late, and had trouble sleeping. They said he was the man with the best ears in the fleet, so when he slept he always put in earplugs to filter out the sounds of the ship. But even so, he had been hearing something, though he did not quite know what it was. It was more a feeling than a sound in the beginning, a strange sense that something was amiss. He knew that even a hushed silence could carry that feeling. People would often say they felt ill at ease when things were too quiet.

That’s how he had been feeling—ill at ease. It was too quiet when he put the ear plugs in, and out of that silence there came a growing sense of dread. So he had taken to listening to music on his earbuds instead, and hoping that would lull him to sleep. He always started with an old favorite band, the song “Good Night” by the Beatles. “Now it’s time to say goodnight, good night, sleep tight.” But he had been unable to do so for the last several days.

It was probably the fatigue setting in from the long journey. He had seen an attempted mutiny right here on the bridge, defended the ship against numerous undersea threats, and even launched Vodopad torpedoes against enemy battleships. He had watched enemy planes blown from the sky; seen the awful carnage inflicted by the ships missiles, and the terrible fire of a nuclear warhead. Closer to home, he had seen Captain Karpov shoot the Doctor with a pistol, right in front of him, and that had been a very difficult moment. The stress had been building up for some time, and his good friend Nikolin had been away too often in his role as a translator for Volsky and Fedorov.

Maybe I’m losing my edge, he thought. At least now, with Kazan along, my job in being vigilant against enemy submarines was a little easier. It was always a relief to know that Gromyko was out there somewhere on patrol ahead of the ship, clearing the sea lanes of enemy U-boats. So why do I still feel so uneasy?

He settled in, headphones on, thinking he might go into that deep listening mode he was famous for, like a man sitting in meditation, eyes closed, ears sensitive to every nuance in the data stream. One of his favorite games was to try and hear Kazan, the fleet’s most stealthy sub. If he could do that, then he thought he was still sharp enough to find anything else in the sea. So he closed his eyes and listened, and it wasn’t long before he heard it again.

Not the submarine. Not Kazan. It was the sound again, the same deep, threatening sound that had been disturbing his sleep. It emerged from the unseen depths of the sea, like sound emerged from nothingness. What was it, a whale song the like of which he had never heard before? Was there some great behemoth down there plying the depths and moaning in this deep vibrato?

Yet it wasn’t that kind of sound…. It wasn’t a vibration, though he reacted to it as if it was exactly that—a thrumming sensation, deep, powerful, threatening. Something was growling from the depths of the ocean, and this time it was not the distant subterranean rumble of a volcano. He switched on his seismic processor, to see if he could find any known correlation to the sound in that database, but no match was found. It wasn’t an undersea landslide, or an earthquake. It wasn’t the gurgling of a hot spot on the mid-Atlantic ridge. It wasn’t Kazan…

He opened his eyes, taking off his headset for a moment to chase the strange chill the sound instilled in him, a feeling of dread and fear. To his great surprise, the feeling remained heavy on him, like a shroud. He closed his eyes, and even without his headset on, he could hear it, feel it, sense that dread.

“Samsonov…”

“What now, Tasarov. More Vranyo?”

“Not that… I’m hearing something.”

“Contact? Something on your board? Report it to Rodenko!”

The ship’s Starpom heard that exchange and Rodenko drifted over, curious. “Something to report, Mister Tasarov?”

“No sir. No formal contact. It’s just that… Well, I’m hearing something, but I can’t make out what it might be.”

“Nothing in the database?” asked Rodenko. “No there probably wouldn’t be any correlations here in 1941. Describe it.”

“Very deep. I’d say it is below the threshold of human hearing, but I can pick it up, sir. I can feel it.”

“And what does it feel like?”

Tasarov hesitated, not wanting to sound like a fool, but then he spoke his mind, just one word that seemed to sum the feeling up well enough. “Fear.”

Rodenko had been the ship’s radar operator before being promoted to his new post as Executive Officer under Fedorov. “Mister Kalinichev,” he said. “Anything on your screens?”

“No sir, all is clear.”

“Switch to phased array.”

“Aye sir. Initiating phased array feed now…. No contacts. My board is clear, except for the Invincible.”

So there was nothing in the sky, or on the surface of the sea within the range of their radars, but Rodenko knew Tasarov too well to dismiss what he was saying here lightly.

“When did you first pick this up, Tasarov?”

“Three days ago, sir.”

“And you didn’t report it?”

“Well sir, I was off duty at the time, trying to get some sleep in my quarters.”

“You heard this in your quarters?”

“And I heard the same thing again here, sir. Just now. I know it sounds silly, but I feel something is wrong.”

Rodenko crossed his arms. He had heard the rumors about Lenkov as well, though he had not been fully briefed on the incident. Whatever had happened to the man, it seemed to have a good many crewmen upset. But Tasarov was telling him he heard this three days ago. He might have a case of the jitters, he thought. Lord knows they all had frazzled nerves these days. But something in what Tasarov was saying touched one of those nerves in him as well. He could not quite put his finger on it himself, but it was an odd feeling of discontent, a strange, unaccountable disquiet that had come over him of late, and he could sense that others in the crew also felt this way. Now, for the first time, he had Tasarov telling him he was hearing something—a sound—something deeper than sound at the moment—and it was raising the sonar man’s hackles. He looked across the bridge to the weather deck where Orlov was taking in some air. Then he remembered something.

“Very well. Mister Tasarov, I want you to listen for this as you would any potential undersea contact. Let us classify it as Alpha One for the moment—One being an unclassified sound that cannot yet be reported as a contact. Report suspected contact on Alpha Three. Alpha Five is your threshold for confidence high, and Alpha Seven is your threshold of absolute certainty. Listen to this sound, whatever it is, and treat it like any other potential undersea threat. You are the best in the fleet, but I’ll get a message off to Kazan as well and tell them we may have hold of something. Their man Chernov can lend a hand, and he can send us data from beneath the thermocline.”

“Very good sir.” Tasarov felt better now that he had at least reported the matter. He always liked Rodenko. The Starpom was a sensor man at heart, and knew what it was like to ferret out certainty from the data cloud that was at times very fuzzy. He felt relieved, the situation was heard and handled as any ship’s business, and now he also had an ally out there on Kazan. He knew Chernov, and together they made perhaps the best sonar team in the world. In this world, that went without question, but even the Americans of 2021 would have a tough time standing up two men as skilled at the art of sonar as Tasarov and Chernov.

Now Rodenko was out through the hatch to the weather deck where Orlov was just finishing a smoke. The moon was finally rising, a thin crescent low over the sea, as they were now some hours west of Gibraltar after their successful run through the straits.

“Looks like nobody is getting any sleep tonight, Chief,” said Rodenko. “Aren’t you scheduled to go on leave soon?”

“Ten minutes,” said Orlov. “I always have a smoke on the weather deck just before I go below.”

“Tasarov is on to something.”

“Oh? Enemy U-boat?”

“He doesn’t think so. The signal is too undefined at the moment. Funny thing is this. He says he heard it three days ago in his quarters.”

“Off duty? I know he listens to his music on those head sets down there, but how could he hear anything unless he was processing it through our sonars?”

“Best ears in the fleet, Chief. You know that as well as I.”

“So what did he hear?

“He wasn’t sure—just a feeling, but it has him a bit rattled. He says it’s some kind of deep sound, and maybe below the threshold of hearing at this point. But he can feel it. Didn’t you report something like that on the mission to Ilanskiy?”

Orlov had been trying to live that down for some time. “So I got spooked down there on the taiga, what of it? Better men than me have gone mad down there. You know where we were?”

“The Stony Tunguska. Yes, I heard the story. Look Chief, I’m not riding you here. I just want to see if Tasarov might be hearing something like that sound you reported.”

“I see… well I wasn’t the only one. Ask Troyak, he heard it. The other Marines heard it too.”

“What was it like?”

The Chief took one last drag on his cigarette, and blew the smoke away, flicking the butt over the gunwale into the sea far below them. “It was just like that,” he said. “Like something was breathing you in, and out again, real slow, and then they threw your burned out soul off into oblivion. It was feeling like you were a doomed man, damned, and hell was finally right there beneath your feet. Oh, you couldn’t see anything, just the trees, the sky, and that weird cauldron in the clearing where we landed. You couldn’t really hear anything either. It was so still you could barely breathe. In fact, your breath was the one thing you could actually hear, that and your heart beating fast. You wanted to run, but could see no reason why. Ask Troyak, He has a name for it. Deep sound. That’s what he called it. He says they trained the Marines to listen up to that shit and take it like a man. Well, I never got the training. Whatever it was, it made me feel like I wanted to crap in my pants. Seriously!”

“Ever hear anything like that again?”

“Nope. Not since we got away from that damn place…. Wait a second. Now that you mention it, I found that object there, the thing I gave Fedorov. Troyak called it the Devil’s Teardrop. Well, I still had it in my pocket when we went out to the Libyan Desert with that Popski fellow. I was playing with it, just tossing it about from one hand to another, when I started to get that same odd feeling again, just like before. Next thing I knew the damn thing got hot as hell, and I dropped it right in the sand. It was glowing like those radar screens of yours, and the sky was all lit up. After that we ran into the Brits, and Fedorov says he thinks that Devil’s Teardrop had something to do with that. Who knows Rodenko? That thing is still on the ship here. Fedorov says he’s locked it away, but its right here on the ship. Maybe its acting up again. Tasarov feels upset? So do a lot of other people on this ship.”

Orlov looked at his watch, seeing his last ten minutes were up and he was now scheduled for leave. “That’s my shift, Rodenko. I’m off for a good meal and a good sleep, and I better not hear any of this Tasarov crap, or this Lenkov shit either. Can you believe that?”

“I heard the rumors. Sounds pretty strange. You going to check in on the galley? I hear Zolkin is still down there with the engineers.”

“No thanks. I eat in the officer’s mess again, like always. Have a good shift, Mister Starpom.” Orlov nodded as he left, leaving Rodenko alone on the weather deck..

Deep sound, he thought. Orlov is no pushover. If he was rattled by something like that, then maybe it does have something to do with that thing he found on the taiga. After all, Tasarov says he heard this sound in his quarters. He first heard it right here in the ship, not by listening to something in the sea. Yet now he hears it on his headset, if I understood his report. I’d better keep an ear on this one as well. Fedorov may want to know about it, and the next time I go below, I’ll run it by Troyak and see what he says. If he gave that thing a name, maybe the Sergeant knows more than he’s said about it.

As for this business with Lenkov… What in god’s name happened to that man? Stuck in the galley deck? Fedorov should be back soon. He’ll know something about it. But why do I have the feeling that something is starting to slip here. The ship seems fine. Engines are running smooth. Dobrynin has not reported anything unusual. Yet Tasarov had it right. Something is wrong.

I can feel it…

Chapter 15

“You mean to say that Lenkov’s legs simply ceased to exist?” said Fedorov. “Why not the rest of him?”

“Who knows?” said Kamenski. “He was out of phase with the rest of things. Why? Who can say? It could have been mere happenstance, a local event that was confined to the space he inhabited at that moment.”

“Why did this happen to him and not anyone else?”

“Now you question the choices Death makes,” said Kamenski. “Yes, why not you; why not me? I’m an old man, with far fewer days ahead of me than those I left behind. Lenkov was young, with his whole life before him. Yet it was his process that fell out of sync with the rest of us, and through no failing of his own. Why do leaves fall in autumn, Fedorov? Who decides which ones go first?”

Fedorov knew the questions he was asking were those asked by millions before him. Why my son, my daughter, mother, father? One day we all realize the truth of what Kamenski was saying, that the solidity and apparent permanence of our lives, our minds, was a fragile and transitory thing. Yes, one day we realize we are verbs, and not nouns after all. But none of this was going to help him with the problem he struggled with now.

“But the galley table and chairs are all there,” he said. “Nothing seems disturbed or out of place. If this was a local event, wouldn’t it effect the table, or the chair he was sitting on?”

“Everything has a vibration, Fedorov. Those things may not have phased.”

“Phased?”

“Yes, we had a name for it, or at least the technicians and scientists did. They called it quantum phasing. It happens in the thermodynamic universe as temperatures change, like water changing to ice. In this case, it is something more. The phase change causes the object to fall out of sync with time. It falls behind, or moves ahead, and if the ship itself was also phasing, then when Lenkov settled down, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, quite literally. I have seen this before. We put an apple in a lead box during one test, and watched it disappear. Where they went, nobody knows, but the box reappeared some hours later. The apple, however, was gone.”

Fedorov did not like the sound of that. Thus far all their time displacements had left the ship and crew remarkably intact—until Lenkov. These phase changes, as Kamenski described it, were only transitory effects on the edges of a shift. But here they were, with no Rod-25, no nuclear detonations, and yet the ship was phasing, pulsing, as he liked to think of it. And now Lenkov’s fate endowed that behavior with a peril he had not considered before.

“Do you think this will happen again?”

“You might ask Chief Dobrynin how the ship is doing,” said Kamenski. “You say this pulsing has happened before, then yes, it seems likely it will happen again. Lenkov’s fate was a new twist in that rope, a new consequence.”

“I have wondered if it is an effect we experienced because we are approaching Paradox Hour,” said Fedorov. “I have come to believe that Paradox can exert the force of annihilation. That’s what I thought was happening when I first saw Lenkov. In fact, I was thinking we would be forcing time to do something about us if we lingered here, and Lenkov’s fate sends chills up my spine. Yet now you bring up this point about the ship itself. It shifted here safely, yet surely the metal in this hull was in the ground here somewhere, just as you say.”

“But in another form,” said Kamenski. “Down on the atomic level, yes, the atoms were here. They have very long lives. Do you realize the atoms that make up your body this moment are ancient, perhaps billions of years old, all forged in the heart of stars eons ago? Yet there they are, all neatly arranged to give us the pleasure of your company. The same is true of me, though they might have worked in a few more for the hair on the top of my head.”

Kamenski smiled, tamping down his pipe a bit. “All this talk, sounding like philosophy, is actually the reality of things. A billion years is a very long time, Mister Fedorov. Who knows what those atoms in your body were once part of, and what they have been doing in all that time? Might they have been a dinosaur once? Now they are a ship’s Captain, with a lot on his shoulders at the moment. Just remember, you are not responsible for the way fate and time chooses to play with all the particles of this universe. We won’t be here long, you and I. My flame is already guttering, though yours may have a while to burn before it is blown out. Yet all the time that remains to us both here is but the wink of an eye in this universe. It’s a pity that we will never know what time chooses to do with the stuff of these old bones down the road. Forgive me for running on like this. I realize this does little to console you or solve your immediate problem.”

“I think of these things myself,” said Fedorov. “Yet now, facing the prospect of this Paradox, I reach for the answers with a little more urgency. Your point about the metal in the ship’s hull caught me off guard. How could the ship be here if the atoms that make it up were also here, no matter what form they were in? You just said they have a very long life span. They were here! Yet so is Kirov. I don’t understand.”

“Quantum entanglement,” said Kamenski. “Do you know down on that level just about everything is a real slippery fish. Particles wink in and out of existence, like Lenkov’s legs. They are here, then not here, which is also true of particles that make up our bodies at this very moment. You see, we are really very insubstantial, speaking in quantum terms. Everything is inherently uncertain, according to a fellow named Heisenberg. You can’t even specify exactly where any of these little particles are. Particles arise in pairs where one partner seems to know what is going on or happening to its mate, even though that other partner may be millions of miles away… or millions of years. Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ He didn’t like it, but the theory put forward by Niels Bohr has subsequently been proven correct. Yes, things act that way. It’s as if you had an identical twin back in Vladivostok, and still living in the year 2021. Yet he seems to know what you had for breakfast this morning. Interesting, yes?”

“Are you suggesting the atoms in the ship’s hull were paired with those in the ground? Entangled?”

“That’s one possibility. If so, they would get on quite well together, like a pair of dance partners, no matter how far away they were from one another, or how close. Here’s another idea. In making this ship, we interacted with that material to a very significant degree. Interacting with quantum particles, even something as simple as observing them, can change them. We altered temperatures, blended the metals into alloys and with other synthetic materials, moved electrons around. Frankly, I think that interaction was sufficient to alter the state of the material on a quantum level, so when the ship displaced here, there was no conflict with the atoms that were already in the ground. They simply were not sharing the same quantum state any longer.”

“Altered states,” said Fedorov slowly. “What you said a moment ago is very intriguing… quantum entanglement… Like Tovey!” Fedorov exclaimed. “Yes… A quantum pairing. Admiral Tovey seems to be able to recall experiences he had with us when we first met him in 1942, yet here he is in 1941, before any of that ever happened, and in a life line that will probably preclude those events from ever occurring here. Yet he knows about that other John Tovey. The word Geronimo struck through him like a bolt when he first heard it. He instinctively knew it referred to Kirov. How is this possible, Director? How could he know things he experienced in the future?”

“Yes, it is very surprising, But it has been demonstrated that quantum particles can do some amazing things. Another physicist, Yakir Aharonov, was looking at entangled particles, and trying to gain information about them without disturbing them or altering their state—taking a little peek at them without really looking. I suppose we’ve all done that when a pair of pretty legs goes by. Yes? It was determined that these little peeks, which he called weak measurements, might be added up to provide enough information about the particles to predict the state of one or another. Then it was shown that this activity also caused the particles to alter in the past! They were changing to make the information he was obtaining possible! Consider that for a moment. We easily grasp that things we do in the here and now might affect our future, but never our past. In this case, Aharonov showed that activity in the future can indeed affect the same particle in the past, because entangled particles seem to possess information or qualities from both temporal localities, past and future. This all gets very confusing, Fedorov. But there is your Admiral Tovey, here in 1941, and he is being obviously affected by experiences he had in 1942! I do not know if this theory is correct, but it at least gives us some way of trying to understand it. Think of it as backward causality.”

“But how, sir? Are you saying that the future Tovey was in another world, another universe, yet remains entangled with the man sailing off our port side in this moment?”

“Some people think of time like a tree, Mister Fedorov. Think of the trunk as the present. It grew from the roots of many possibilities in the past, which all joined to create this reality, and here we sit like a pair of squirrels clinging to the bark. Above us the tree again branches out into many possibilities—the future. As we climb, we have to choose which branch to jump on next. Maybe we choose a branch that eventually leads us to fruit, but suppose we end up on a dead branch instead, with withered foliage. That’s life at times, eh? Sadly, we never get to back-track, as the squirrel might, and choose another branch—until now… You were here before, Fedorov. You have seen that withered branch and returned to the 1940s, and now you make choices and decisions that continue to prune that tree and shape how it grows in the future.”

“Is information from that other world being communicated to this one? Like a squirrel finding an acorn on one branch, and bringing it with him when he jumps to another?”

“That may be a good way to understand it,” said Kamenski. “It’s a trick entangled particles pull off quite easily, in spite of Einstein’s objection. No one knows how they do it yet, but it happens. It’s been proven in physical experiments. Lagrangian mechanics says that if the past affects the future, the opposite relation is also true—the future can affect the past. That said, neither you or I are going to solve this by discussing quantum mechanics. The fact remains that Admiral Tovey has been influenced by those future events, even if the new state he finds himself in now precludes those events from ever taking place. Information is coming to him from another branch, and you may be the squirrel that brought it here.”

“Me?”

“I should say we, the ship, our presence. These things started with Tovey only after Kirov manifested here. He was not remembering things from your earlier encounters before our arrival. Correct?”

Could this be so? Fedorov had been doing a good deal of reading in the ship’s library, trying to find any information he could that might help him sort through this situation. Could this be so? Could our very presence here be catalyzing these entanglements? Then he suddenly remembered the other anomalies Tovey had revealed.

“It was more than information that passed from that world to this one,” he said. “There were physical objects, photographs, reports.”

“Those may have been brought here, like this ship we are sitting on, Mister Fedorov.”

“Agreed, though we have yet to put our finger on who may have done that. Alan Turing suggested something else, and it had something to do with his watch. Yes, Turing’s watch!”

“Refresh me on that, Mister Fedorov. Things go in and out of my head too easily these days.”

“Alan Turing, sir. Surely you know who he is, the famous British cryptographer.”

“Of course,” said Kamenski. “We owe a lot to that man. What would the KGB have done without him?” He smiled.

“Well sir, I was told something by Admiral Tovey that was quite startling. He said Turing had a favorite watch that went missing one day, and it was later discovered in that file box I told you about.”

“You mean the one with all that material dated to 1942?”

“Yes sir. Now the odd thing is this… Turing claims that the watch appeared the very same day we arrived here, in June of 1940.”

“I suppose he had some evidence for that?” said Kamenski.

“Apparently so. Yet the point is that he correctly deduced that the file box was a remnant of our first encounters—from that other time. He suggested it may have been dragged into this time when we appeared here last June, like a bit of seaweed trailing behind the ship. The problem was that he found his watch in that file box. Who knows how it got there, but this is what Tovey told me. Now then… when that file box appeared, Turing says Time would have been faced with a little problem. His watch was already here! Yet it went missing in this world, until he found it in that file box.”

“Interesting,” said Kamenski, taking a long draw on his pipe. “Very interesting…” He leaned forward, and Fedorov could sense something was of some concern to him now.

“I was not sure what to make of that file box being discovered here,” he said. “In fact, I hoped my first assessment of that was correct—that it was brought here by someone. That alone is enough of a mystery to keep one up a good many nights, because it would mean we have another agent at large in the history here.”

“Another agent? You mean someone else capable of moving in time? That would mean they deliberately brought that material here.”

“Indeed it would,” said Kamenski. “Yet this business with Mister Turing’s watch is another unexpected wrinkle. You are correct in thinking it was a nice little bit of work for Paradox. The way it resolved itself was rather clever, don’t you think? It simply moved the watch, but moving it may have meant that when it first disappeared, it literally winked out of existence for a time until manifesting again in that file box.”

“Like that apple that disappeared from the box you mentioned,” said Fedorov. “So now you see what has been weighing on me so heavily, Director. In my mind, Kirov is like that box, and everyone else on board is just like that apple. Time will soon be faced with the arrival of this ship here on July 28th, and I would hate to think my fate, and yours, would be resolved in the same way Turing’s watch was handled. Winking out of existence may be very uncomfortable. Thinking about that, and seeing what happened to Lenkov… Well that will keep me up a good many nights. My great fear is that this is only just beginning.”

Now Kamenski was silent for a time, thinking… thinking.

“Do you play chess, Mister Fedorov? Most people think of time like that—a good game of chess. It has a clear opening, development, and then the end game—beginning, middle, end. The pieces dance around the board until one King or another, light or dark, becomes frozen, unable to make any move without exposing itself to fatal capture—checkmate. People think of their lives that way, piece by piece, move by move. They play the white pieces, always stalked and pursued by the dark side—fate. Each new move creates a new position or circumstance, and the players sit there, thinking through each position and trying to analyze all possible outcomes in the future. Those chess positions, the placement of pieces on the board after any given move, are like the moments of our lives. We decide something, push a piece to another square, then swipe the start button on the chess clock, while the other side, dark fate, acts in consequence to what we have done. As the game progresses, the board changes from one position to another, like the days of our lives. And so people think it goes, move by move, day by day, moment by moment…”

Kamenski smiled, taking a moment to savor his pipe. “But time isn’t like that at all,” he asserted, “because there are no moments in life, only moves. Yes, that is the reality of things! The pieces always keep moving, and there is never ever any instant when they are frozen in place for us to contemplate what we might do next. A good chess player must think on the move, because that clock is always ticking. Consider that, Mister Fedorov.”

Kamenski shifted quietly in his chair, scratching his chin as he continued. “There are no ‘moments,’ only a constant expression of motion. That realization alone upsets Zeno’s applecart full of paradoxes. He was another fellow a bit obsessed by the notion of paradox. Take his assertion about the arrow, for example. He said that if every object occupying a point in space is at rest, and a moving arrow must past through a series of points in space, then it must be at rest in each and every one, and therefore could not be moving.”

“Very clever,” said Fedorov.

“But very wrong,” said Kamenski. “Old Zeno tried to prove motion was an illusion, that life was like a series of frames in a movie—or a series of positions in a chess game, but he actually had it backwards. This notion of fixed moments in time—that is the illusion, a mere convention of thought. To put it simply, things don’t stay put. They are never here, never in any frozen moment we may choose to call this present, because there are no such moments, only constant change and motion—constant uncertainty. And if they are never here, then they are never anywhere else either. In that light, time takes on a whole new meaning. 1941? 2021? These are not places, Fedorov, they are activities, movement in a dance. To go to one or the other you simply have to change your behavior—step lively, and learn the dance of infinity. You see, anything can be expressed in that dance—anything—but the opposite is also true. Nothing is just as satisfactory a state of affairs as everything, as far as the universe is concerned, and one may become the other in the wink of an eye…”

Kamenski set down his pipe with a sigh, watching the last curling wisps of smoke rise from the bowl, thin and insubstantial. When he finally spoke, his voice had a grave tone, and the usual glib confidence of the man was gone. Instead he was darkly serious, eyeing Fedorov with his unwavering gaze as he spoke.

“Your fear is that Lenkov’s fate is a foreshock of what is to come for the rest of us—for the ship. That may be so, Mister Fedorov. Soon it won’t be just the watch we quibble about, or those file boxes, or even the fate of this ship and crew. You see, time is not what you think it is. Nothing ever stays put, and things seem to be shaking loose in some rather alarming ways these days. If this continues, that word Miss Fairchild used to describe the situation we may be facing here was quite accurate—Grand Finality.”