That was to be an understatement.
Chapter 29
“Admiral,” said Gromyko. “It’s time we came to a decision as to what we will be doing on this sortie. I think the boat has settled down now.”
As far as they could tell, it had been September when they first arrived, making contact with Fedorov to arrange that rendezvous off the Dolphin’s Head. He never showed, but even if he had, Kazan would not have been found there. As it happened many times with Kirov, the shift back was somewhat bumpy. They appeared, then pulsed again, apparently vanishing into the ether. When the boat finally reappeared, months had passed. Their return to the past had been like a rock skipping on a pond, taking a short hop before it finally settled, and during that hop, they had taken on a new crewman, and a very important one—Admiral Volsky himself. 1942 was waning, and on New Year’s Eve, Volsky remembered everything.
Since that time they had been up under the ice for a good long while. Even though they had excellent charts of navigable channels from the Kara Sea to the Pacific, they all dated to the year 2021, where global warming had thinned out the ice considerably. This was 1943, and for some reason, the winter was unusually severe. Gromyko had consulted the historical records, and found temperatures much colder than those recorded, most likely due to the eruption of a volcano in the South Pacific. His radio man had picked up talk of that, but he could find no historical reference for it either. Clearly they history, as they once knew it, was no longer reliable—nor were their charts for submerged transit under all that ice.
Channels that should have been open were much narrower, and the ice was far thicker and deeper than they had believed it would be. This made for very slow going, easing along at five or six knots, and often slowing to a near crawl while sonar probed the way ahead. The only benefit of the process was that he would build all new charts for the ice in January 1943, though he did not see how he might ever use them again. So averaging no more than 120 nautical miles per day, it was going to take them over two weeks to make the transit. They would be under ice until they got all the way through the Norton Sound, and then down the coast of Kamchatka to the approach to Petropavlovsk.
Gromyko had a mind to consider stopping there to take on fresh food for the crew, but he needed to resolve a political problem first. He remembered very well the mission he had been given by Kamenski. When the Director first proposed it, they thought he would have to try and find Admiral Volsky after shifting back to the 1940s. He had disappeared well before Kirov’s final shift, and had no direct experience of the events that led Karpov to seize the ship in Murmansk after its second coming. There was a good deal this version of Kamenski did not know at that time, but as they continued the discussion, an idea came to him.
“A pity we can’t just send the man we have at hand here,” he said to Gromyko.
“Excuse me?” said Gromyko, not understanding.
“Volsky,” said the Director. “There’s a perfectly good version of the man right here, but he’s from this sequence of events, this meridian in time, and has no knowledge of anything that happened.”
That was one thing Gromyko could not quite fathom yet.
“Are you not from this same meridian of time, as you call it?”
“Yes, and I know what you are asking me with that. If I am from this timeline, then how is it I know all the things I’ve been talking about?”
Kamenski had given him a long and confusing explanation, and he had sorted through it in his mind for some time, remembering the Director’s words.
“Time is rather fastidious,” he had told him. “She doesn’t like wasting things, and is very fussy about that. I was almost certain that my lease on life had run its course. Heaven knows, I’ve been given more than enough time in this world. But it seems there are more worlds than we think, and this is just another one. Fedorov wanted to know where the missing men were going. Where was Orlov and all the rest? Then he became one of those missing men himself. Yet time takes away, and time gives back as well. She found a place for him, as she just found a place for me when I vanished aboard Kirov. You can feel it coming, you know. You tend to feel a bit… insubstantial. For the longest time I thought it was that little treasure I had in my pocket, the key. You know nothing of that, but let’s just say it was a kind of lucky charm. I thought it kept me safe and sound, but now I think it’s just something that helps time go about her business.”
“Director… I’m just not sure I’m following you here.”
“Ah, forgive me if I tend to ramble on. The older you get, the more things you have tucked away up here, and time keeps pouring more tea in my cup. One day it will run over, but for now, I still hold it well enough. Let me put it to you this way. Suppose you were writing a story. You think you have it just the way you want, then you get an idea that simply must be given form and shape in the narrative. So you do a little editing here and there, and write a new chapter. At the end of the day, you save it, overwriting the old file with the new. That’s what time is doing. Well now, you would think your characters would have the good manners to forget the old file—the way things were before you made all those changes and additions to the story—but it seems they don’t, at least in my case. I’m a file that has been saved and replaced a good many times, but I remember each version of the story I lived in before. Yes, each and every one.”
And that was the genesis of Kamenski’s plan. Gromyko had been told to put out to sea, run his control rod procedure, and leave things to time. Once he got back to the 1940s—if he did get back at all—he was to try and find either Fedorov or Volsky. The first thing he did was call on the secure channel Fedorov had given him, and lo and behold, there was Fedorov. He said he was in an airship, and arranged to meet with him, but he never made that rendezvous, and that seems to have changed everything—yet again.
Now Gromyko finally understood what Kamenski had been trying to tell him with his metaphors about teacups and editing books. He knew it in the most direct way possible, because it had happened to him. The Captain had clear memories of leaving Severomorsk, running his procedure, shifting safely back and having that nice little chat with Fedorov. Then he turned in, eager for the bunk after a long day’s operations, and when he woke up to assume his shift in the command sail, everything was different.
The boat was in a different position, the crew a bit confused, and they soon learned that the time had shifted on them as well. It was as if they had slipped again, some strange after effect from the magic worked by that control rod.
Even his head was different, for in it now was a completely different version of his transit to this place! As he thought about it, he realized it must have been spawned by that errant remark made by Kamenski about having a perfectly good Admiral Volsky at hand. Now he recalled that plan in clear detail. Kamenski had put Volsky aboard in Severomorsk, confident at last that if he did send that version of the Admiral along, Time would sort all the rest out.
“He’ll either get there, or he won’t,” Kamenski had told him. “If he turns up missing after you shift, it will most likely be because there is already another version of him there where you have arrived. Time won’t permit the two of them to cohabit that same milieu like that, and so the Admiral you take on board will simply not arrive with you when you shift.”