“You mean he’ll just vanish?”
“Something like that.”
“Where will he go?”
“Elsewhere. Never mind about that now Captain. Just worry about your mission. If he remains with you, all the better. Use the good Admiral to get close to Fedorov and that ship. If he vanishes, then look to find him at large somewhere in the world. Find him, or get to Fedorov. That’s the key.”
But there was Volsky that morning, right on his boat, and in Gromyko’s head he could now remember two versions of this mission, one where he left Severomorsk on his own, and a second where Kamenski put Admiral Volsky aboard. Apparently, something had happened, like a train being switched to a new track, and now he was sailing on the meridian where Volsky had boarded Kazan at the very beginning, and all the new memories of that were now in his head. But how? It must have been that little bump we took on landing here, he thought. The shift was not complete. We appeared, then vanished again, only to reappear with Volsky aboard. Very strange.
Gromyko didn’t know it yet, but something had indeed happened. Fedorov was behind it all. Instead of making his planned rendezvous with Gromyko, Fedorov’s airship overflew a hole in time, and he found himself back in 1908, right where he had intended to go in the first place. There he had the fate of all these meridians in his hand. The choice he made in that fateful encounter with Mironov, would cement the meridian that went forward from that moment. Time would allow many threads in her loom, but one day she must weave them all into one strand again and create the new Prime Meridian. Fedorov’s choice to spare Mironov, to spare Sergei Kirov, had decided the matter, and at that moment, a Heisenberg wave was generated that migrated forward, all the way to its real point of origin in the year 2021.
This tiny outlier of change was very small, just the first ripple in a series of waves that would eventually sweep forward like a tsunami. Only one man was even aware of the change—more tea in his cup, or perhaps just one more chapter in his inner book—Pavel Kamenski. It was like a song that had begun on one of those old record players the Director was still fond of, and then the needle skipped, encountering a flaw, and was bumped back. That brief segment of the song played again, and only Kamenski knew why. So he realized that his plan to send Admiral Volsky might actually work now, because things had changed again. Fedorov’s mercy had changed them, though he did not know that at the time.
So he sent the Admiral along, though it seemed that it would take some time for Volsky to wake up and have his own tired head filled with past lives—other versions of himself that had also taken this journey. To make sure that would happen, Kamenski slipped something into his pocket before he boarded Kazan—a small key. “Keep that safe for me, will you?” he had said with a smile.
And Volsky woke up as well, and he remembered—remembered everything, all the events that had been lived and experienced by any version of his own self that was entangled with the meridian in which he now found himself after Kazan shifted—the new Prime Meridian, the line of fate and causality that Fedorov had assured by failing to kill Sergei Kirov.
Now Gromyko had the whole thing tossed into his lap—the decision concerning the fate of another Kirov—not the man, but the ship. Kamenski had riveted that home….
“For now,” he told him, “we’ll start with the things we have control over—the men, the ship. We start with Kirov.”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
“Go back and get them out,” said Kamenski with a smile.
“Director, haven’t we tried that once already? Look what happened!”
“Yes, that’s a point well taken. We still have to try, because if we don’t…” Kamenski stopped, set his pipe down, and rubbed his eyes. “If we don’t, Mister Gromyko, then this is all going to unravel, this entire present moment I’ve called home for so long. It all depends on things that happened in the 1940s. Don’t you see? Well, they aren’t happening—at least not as they were supposed to. Things are changing, and we’re responsible. Never mind about trying to stop the war that is still on our doorstep here. Now it’s about something much more. If we don’t get back there and put a stop to all this, then everything, and I mean everything, is going to come flying apart. How did that poet put it? Yes… Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!”
He looked at Gromyko now, and in his eyes there was a profound sadness, and a vast silence of finality. “That’s what caused it, the second coming of that ship to 1941. It created a loop, and if that doesn’t resolve properly there, if anything should happen to displace that ship to a moment prior to the time of its first arrival, then we face down Paradox yet again. Do this once, and you court a good deal of trouble, just as we experienced it. Do it twice… Desolation, Mister Gromyko, that is what we are facing now, complete and utter annihilation. The cold frost of infinity is out there, and it’s a savage end, a futile end to the whole damn world. And do you know why? The second coming, that’s why. Kirov went back, and now it’s gone back a second time. Understand? If that happens again, and again, and again… See what I mean? The changes are already starting to ripple forward in time. We don’t notice them yet, but I can tell. They may seem insignificant—different missiles for your submarine and all. That doesn’t seem all that earth shaking, but I assure you, it is only the beginning.”
“You mean if we don’t get them back here safely…”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The whole damn loop will spin out again, and each time it does, the changes become more and more catastrophic. Try getting a future like this one sorted out under those circumstances. Don’t you see? Normally it takes… time for the variations to ripple forward to the future. But soon the changes will become so pronounced that they will reach this time, even before events have concluded in the past. That’s Mother Time’s problem now, and it’s also our problem. We started it, and so we’ll simply have to finish it.”
“But wait a moment… Didn’t you say this was, well, a different world, a different meridian of time here. Is Kirov’s intervention in your history recorded here? Could I read about it in a history book in your library?”
“Very astute,” said Kamenski. “The answer to your last question is no—there is no mention of any of those events in the history of this timeline. But that hardly matters. You see, this isn’t the Prime Meridian. It’s just one of many possible alternative Meridians that could arise from events happening in the Prime Meridian. That’s where Kirov is now, but the Prime is badly warped, bent out of shape, contaminated by all those missiles, and yes, nuclear bombs as well. It will change things, Mister Gromyko, and rather dramatically. It will change the fate of each and every possible meridian arising from those events—including this one. Understand? Kirov sits on the trunk of the tree, this is just one of the branches. But if you cut through that trunk, they all go down together. That’s what Kirov is doing—cutting through the Prime Meridian like a buzz saw. So we have to go back, get them out, and that failing….”