Paradox Hour (18 page)

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.”