Paradox Hour (9 page)

No… He was not the only thing. We also left behind downed aircraft, battered ships, thousands of dead men, and the lethal haze of radiation over the sea. And we left behind a history that was perhaps fractured beyond hope of repair, even before I took that daring journey along the Trans-Siberian Rail to find Orlov. I did that as much to try and preserve that unseen future as to mend the broken past.

That chance encounter at Ilanskiy was the great unexpected wrinkle in all of this. So now I learn there are other places like that, rifts in time, cracks and fissures in causality, so deep that a man can slip right through to another point on the continuum. They may have all been caused by that initial impact at Tunguska, and one by one, they were discovered, sealed off, and put under lock and key.

Strangely, the Watch was knighted with the task of minding those rift zones, and each one had a key that could open the doors and allow access. The men and women of the Watch became the Keyholders, or so Elena Fairchild had told him. Yet they were not the ones who built the doors and set the locks. They were not the makers of those keys. They had come from the future, just as those strange signals had come to ships at sea during their long, lonesome patrols. And with those keys there had come a warning—beware another ship, beware a phantom intruder on the high seas of time and tide, beware
Kirov
.

That was enough of a shock to him, to realize that his ship and crew were regarded as pariahs, outlaws, brigands. Now the revelation that those future voices were finally stilled was chilling to the bone. It meant that they would fail here, in spite of every effort. This time they had tried to make amends, first with Admiral Tovey and the Royal Navy, siding with Great Britain as an ally instead of allowing themselves to be drawn into confrontation. It seemed the only reasonable thing they could do, to try and preserve the Grand Alliance that had been forged here to defeat Nazi Germany and the other Axis powers, and by so doing, to preserve the future world that would be born of that alliance.

But if it all fails, he thought, if those future voices fade into silence, then what do we do wrong here? What do we overlook? Elena Fairchild seemed to think it had something to do with that missing key, and by extension, that hidden rift in time that the key might reveal. The keys were important, crucial, and they must all be found. Yet she was as shocked to learn about Ilanskiy as I was to hear all of this. That must be the answer! Ilanskiy! Yes, she said the Watch knew nothing of that place, or its perfect alignment along a rift in time. If that was true, then perhaps those unseen men and women of the future knew nothing of it as well. That could be the one rogue element that results in the chaos she was trying to describe—calamity.

A sudden heat was on him when he realized that he was the one who had discovered that rift. No one in the future knew about it—there was no key for that door. It was not locked away and guarded. But how was that possible? I have just told Elena Fairchild about it, and others know of it here. Certainly Sergei Kirov knows about it, as he walked those stairs to see the world Josef Stalin built, and made an end of that monster. And that was all my fault…

Again the sense of shame and guilt was on him. He wanted to save the life of one good man, and that took the life of one of the greatest demons ever to live on this earth. Stalin killed and tortured more souls than any man who had ever lived. Some say Mao Zedong’s policies killed more, but for pure deliberate murder, Stalin claimed the laurels. It was Stalin who said that death was the solution to all problems—no man, no problem, and he went about solving his difficulties by simply eliminating any man he perceived as a threat. Wasn’t it a good thing to rid the world of a man like that? How could it lead to this Grand Finality?

He realized that there was no way he could learn the answer to that, yet at the same time he felt compelled to try. What are we here for, he thought, if not to try and find a solution to this mess we’ve created? But did we cause it? Is all this my doing, or simply the inevitable result of Stalin’s death? Did it take a man as ruthless as Josef Stalin to hold the Soviet Union together through the revolution and long civil war?

That thought led him nowhere, because he had to believe that his efforts here had some hope of saving those future lives, and preventing the calamity that Fairchild spoke of. What was this Grand Finality? How could it be avoided? Did that possibility rest on the finding of these strange keys? Where were these other rift zones in time? Were they all caused by the Tunguska Event? Where did they lead? How deep were the fractures? How far back into the history did these rifts go? Did the fractures also extend into the future? Was it possible, for example, to get to that inn at Ilanskiy in 2021 and go
up
the stairs to another future time?

His mind was flooded by a hundred questions like this, and the feeling that the sheer magnitude of this problem was beyond him. I tried to seal off that breach in time at Ilanskiy with that raid staged by Sergeant Troyak. Yes, I’ve led Troyak and his Marines about these last months thinking I could find some moment in the history that would make a difference. I suppose I did some good with that, and the presence of Brigadier Kinlan here was the great unexpected dividend—or curse. The consequences of his intervention here remain to be seen. Yet that all has something to do with Orlov, doesn’t it?

He thought about that, realizing it was Orlov that sent him west on the rail to Ilanskiy, and Orlov who found that strange object in Siberia, the Devil’s Teardrop. Somehow his fate has had a great deal to do with all of this.

Now he felt restless, anxious, like a man watching a candle burn away, and when that light went out, there would be nothing left but darkness. Darkness, a Grand Finality, calamity… Call it by any other name, that black rose was seeded now, and growing here in the Devil’s Garden of this war. Its thorny stalk was lengthening, the dark buds opening to a bloom of death.

That was how Director Kamenski had described it, and that thought made Fedorov remember his first discussion with the Director over the question that still plagued him—what was going to happen to them if they remained here on July 28th of this year? That was the day
Kirov
first arrived in the past, and clearly there could not be two ships occupying the same moment in time. Kamenski had suggested something quite different might be going on…

“What you say is very interesting, Mister Fedorov, assuming this is the same meridian of time we were on before… much has happened to the world, and most of it our doing… If something happened in 1908 to change the history, then the 1940s we find ourselves in now may not be the same as those you visited earlier.”

Fedorov had heard such theories before. Some call this notion the “Many Worlds” theory, saying that a world existed for each and every possible outcome of events, which would mean there might be an infinite number of worlds, an infinite number of Anton Fedorov’s out there somewhere, each one living out the infinite number of possible choices he might make in life. He remembered his objection to that, the fact that he was standing right there on the deck of the battlecruiser
Kirov
.

“I do not see how that is possible at the moment,”
he had said.
“Wouldn’t the history have to remain cohesive enough to give rise to the building of this ship? That would have to occur for us to even be here at this moment. It’s maddening, sir.”

“Yes it is,”
Kamenski said in return.
“Other men have gone mad over it—the Siren’s Song of time—yet we dare to sit here and listen, and it seems we have been bold enough to hum along as well! Remember that we remain loose variables at large in history until all these events reach some definite conclusion. We undertook the dangerous mission to try and reach the ship in 1908 and remove it from that time, and that we have done. But the job is not yet complete. We are still a needle in Mother Time’s finger as she darns her dress, and as long as we are here, the possibility of changing everything that follows this moment still exists. That said, we must not be surprised to find that all the days between 1908 and this moment may have already changed, and that the world we sail in now is not the same one we left. I do not know if we can untangle that knot just yet, but at least we have a year before we would ever have to face that paradox you raise, which is plenty of time to shift elsewhere.”

That time was now running thin, thought Fedorov. The year has burned away, like that candle, and it is already May. That was one fear, but another arose from what Kamenski had asserted—
the possibility of changing everything that follows this moment still exists.

There was hope in that, or why would they remain here in this struggle, but there was also fear. He had already seen the terrible consequences of his blundering. What if these changes give rise to a future where his objection could not stand? What if the history never leads to the design and building of a ship like
Kirov?
After all, it was the enmity of the long cold war that saw this ship built in the first place. Suppose this Grand Alliance here does succeed, and we avoid that cold war. Would the Soviet Union have built
Kirov
anyway? Would we have built
Kazan?
Would the ship have ever left Severomorsk like that, packed with missiles and bombs to conduct those live fire exercises?

He realized now that his very existence here rested on a tall stack of plates and cups that was teetering on a very shaky table. And everything they did here was like trying to remove a chipped plate from that stack, and replace it. One slip and the whole thing could come tumbling down and break into a thousand pieces. The life of this ship, its very existence, and his own life and fate was all there in that stack of plates, and behind that thought was that persistent thrum of anxiety again.

We
are
outlaws, he thought.
Geronimo
was a very good name for this ship. We’ve caused nothing but trouble on this long sojourn in time. Yes, we’ve been a needle in time’s thumb, and she must be very upset about our meddling here. So this time we shifted to a place where we must finally account for our actions, an hour where our very existence rides in the tightening knot of paradox, an hour when we face the prospect of our own Grand Finality, our own personal calamity—
annihilation.

Now he remembered how he had tried to explain his fear to Kamenski:
“Paradox is not simply some thorny problem—I think it is the force that rearranges things when time is confronted with an insoluble contradiction. It is a real and dangerous force.”

Fedorov had hit on a great truth. Paradox was time’s black hooded executioner, the slayer of impossibility, a sharp sword that cut through the Gordian knots they had twisted with their meddling.

Kamenski had given him a solemn nod.
“This is the first time our own necks have been on the chopping block,”
he had said.
“Yes, the edge of paradox is a very dangerous precipice to hike along. We must be very careful here. I cannot say how that problem might resolve itself, Mister Fedorov, but something tells me that time would find a way. Yes. Mother Time does not wish to have her skirts ruffled any more than necessary. She would find a way.”

Fedorov wondered if that were true. They were putting Time in a very difficult position here. Suppose Kamenski was wrong, and the Many Worlds theory was only that, a theory, but not a reality. Suppose there was only one world, one ship, one Anton Fedorov. I am more than matter and material, he thought.

 I also persist through time. Now I find that because of this impossible journey in time, my own future self may be coming to judge me here. But I am that self! How could this happen? That future Fedorov cannot exist until I go there in time, either by living out my life, day by day, or in one great leap through time as we have done with
Kirov
. And what if our actions here change that future, and this ship is never built? What if we change things and some of  the crew are never even born? What if I am never born? One question tumbled after another…

His dilemma was the very essence of the word paradox, and that was the heart of his fear—Paradox Hour.

If there was only one world, then these changes we have made in the history might be permanent. We’ve been chipping away at the decades, like a sculptor chiseling fine marble. One false tap; one slip of the hand, and we could chip away a piece that can never be recovered. This is what we have been doing here, what I’ve been doing. I presume to have the skill and knowhow to chisel time. It’s like a man trifling with one of Da Vinci’s greatest works, and thinking he can fix the weathering of time by altering the sculpture or painting! Time took the careful progression of countless moments to create this history, and now along comes Anton Fedorov…. Isn’t that what those voices from the future were trying to warn the Watch about? Beware a ship,
Geronimo, Kirov…

This was what he realized when he called off Troyak’s mission to try and use the stairway at Ilanskiy to go back in time and fetch Ivan Volkov. He realized that Troyak could not bring the man back to this era from 1908, because he already existed here. A person cannot go to a time or place where he already exists, and if he tries to do so he puts Time in a most uncomfortable position.

It was that same basic paradox that had led him to the more desperate decision to simply demolish the stairway, to close the breach in time, if only for a while. But now he had learned another startling truth. There were other breaches in time, other rifts, hidden passages under lock and key.

And one of those keys had gone missing…

Chapter 8

Yes
, one of those keys had gone missing, but they knew where it was—or at least where it once was. And they also knew the approximate time and circumstance of its disappearance. The key was embedded in the base of the Selene Horse, a precious artifact that was about to be shipped to Boston for safekeeping. When he learned that, he urged Admiral Tovey to simply send a message to Scapa Flow and prevent that shipment from being loaded, which he did as soon as the meeting concluded. As fate would have it, they soon learned that they were too late. Due to the secrecy involved,
Rodney
had been loaded three days earlier than the Admiralty originally planned. The battleship was now well out to sea.