Paradox Hour (16 page)

“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.