HMS Invincible was gone, and all around the ship, a thick grey haze began to fall like a shroud.
“The ship vanished,” said Karpov. “It might have been that thing Orlov found, Fedorov. You saw what it did to your hand.”
“That may be so, but I came to feel that it was inevitable. We had foolishly allowed ourselves to remain in a time before our first regression to the past, and each tick of the clock was bringing us closer and closer to an insoluble problem for time—Paradox. There could only be one ship and crew in that time. They simply could not co-exist like you managed with your brother-self. We were all gone, removed from the time Meridian to make way for the Second Coming, which was really just our first regression to the past. That simply had to happen. Otherwise, how could we be there, sinking Graf Zeppelin and doing all the other things we did in that damn war?”
“Where did you go? You must have told me this, but so much has happened since.”
“We appeared on the sea,” said Fedorov. “I could feel the waves and swell of the ocean, but we were in that heavy fog I spoke of. We had clearly phased, and shifted again, because my boots were stuck in the deck.”
“Yes, you told me about all that.”
“There were other problems—hatches that would not seat or shut properly, warped ladders, an odd outward bulge in the hull. All I could think of was that we might have systems down all over the ship. Think of all the electronics aboard! If they were affected, the micro circuitry altered in any way, we could have failures in vital ship’s systems, but everything checked out fine. I reasoned that something about the energy, or perhaps the magnetic field surrounding the equipment, served to shield it from the odd effects being reported elsewhere. There was no other way to explain it.”
“Sounds reasonable,” said Karpov.
“So now I had both Tasarov and Dobrynin down, and a line of queasy men at Zolkin’s door.”
“Dobrynin too?”
“Yes, and Volsky was reporting dizziness, though he waved it off as normal. I made ship’s rounds to check on things, and that’s when Sub Lieutenant Gagarin informed me he thought he had a man missing—Kornalev’s shift mate, but it was odd, Karpov. He couldn’t remember who the other man was.”
“The man who went missing?”
“Exactly. Things settled down, but I had no idea where we were. We clearly shifted, but where? We still had those reserve control rods aboard, and Volsky and I considered using one to try and initiate another shift, but then decided to leave the poor ship in peace for a while. So I went to Kamenski—he was aboard when this all happened—but when I got there….”
“Ah,” said Karpov, “I know this part. Kamenski was gone, vanished, but not his key.”
Fedorov nodded. “We searched the whole ship, but the ship’s Purser, Belov, didn’t even remember that Kamenski was ever aboard! Of course he would have logged Kamenski aboard, but he had no record of that either. I went to the officer’s dining room, and that was where Nikolin came to me, looking very upset.
“What Nikolin? You look upset.”
“I am, sir, but it feels like my roof has caved in—Choknutyj.” That was an untranslatable Russian word for crazy, and Fedorov could understand how anyone on the ship might feel that way just now. “When Karpov was here—during that last incident on the bridge,” said Nikolin, “I caught part of the radio transmission on a recording when the Admiral was ordering the Captain to stand down. I didn’t know what to do, but I had been sending riddles to someone on the text messaging system, and I used it to give warning of what was happening. I ran across the very message I sent in my system check, by chance I suppose. It was very upsetting. The station number was listed, and the crew member’s code comes right after that for message routing. I had been playing the game, sending riddles to that same code earlier that day, so I looked it up.” He gave Fedorov a puzzled look. “There’s no one assigned to that code sir. It was void—designated unused.”
“Perhaps you got the number wrong,” Fedorov suggested.
“No sir. The code was on numerous text messages I sent that day, always the same number, and these are permanent assignments, like a person’s email address. Yet when I queried the database the code was unassigned.”
“You are certain of this number?”
“001-C-12.” Nikolin rattled off the number from memory. “I know it as easily as my old street address. 001 is for main bridge stations. Sub-codes C-10 through C-12 are for personnel serving at the sonar station.”
“Velichko?
“No sir, his number is C-11. I double checked that.”
“I see… So you say you have messages in the archive sent to C-12, but no one has that number? Then you found a glitch in the system, Nikolin. Good for you! This could be a clue. We will have to give the electronics a deeper look. If this data was not stored properly, or perhaps written wrong by the system, then other things could be amiss as well. I discovered a problem with the Purser’s data just a little while ago.”
“I suppose so, sir, but you don’t understand…” Nikolin had a tormented look on his face now. “When I saw that number, it was as though something broke inside me, and I remembered. 001-C-12. The number kept after me. I knew it meant something—someone, but I could not remember who it was. Then this feeling came over me that is hard to describe. I felt so sad, as though I had lost a brother—my best friend. That’s when it hit me, Captain. My best friend! Yes, I knew who had that number now—I could see his face, hear his voice, remember. It all came back, and I remembered he had been taken ill—just a little while ago, sir. So I went looking for him. I went down to sick bay and asked the Doctor about him, but he had no idea who I was talking about!”
“Well who are you talking about?”
“Alexi, sir. Alexi Tasarov! I can’t find him! I’ve looked all over the ship!” There was a pleading look on his face now, very troubled and bothered.
“You can’t find him?” Now Fedorov realized he had been sitting there waiting for Director Kamenski for the last 45 minutes. Something about Nikolin’s travail suddenly struck him like a hammer.
“You can’t find him? Have you gone to his quarters?” His mind offered up the next logical step in solving that simple puzzle, but even as he did so, he had the feeling that the missing piece meant something much, much more than it seemed on the surface. Nikolin was sitting there, telling him he’d lost his best friend—telling him he could not find this man Tasarov…
Fedorov knew every man that served in a main bridge station, with no exceptions, but he had no recollection of this name—Tasarov…
Until that very moment.
Karpov was silent, thinking deeply of what Fedorov had said. Men were vanishing, just like the ship, just like Fedorov’s hand, and no one even remembered they were ever there. They say that a person’s soul never dies, until every other soul that ever knew them also died, and there was no one left alive who remembered them.
“I took this to Volsky, but he did not remember Tasarov either, or Dobrynin. Thank God Nikolin remembered, and he jogged the memory in me. I eventually nudged something loose in Volsky, and he finally remembered Kamenski, Dobrynin, and Tasarov. If you could get to someone who knew these men soon enough—after they vanished—then you could shake loose those memories again. I eventually came to the notion that when we first arrived in the past, it was like a stone falling on a still pool of water. Ripples went out in all directions, forward in time, and also into the past. They were stronger close to the point when we appeared, gradually weakening as they progressed outward—a metaphor, but I think it’s true—Heisenberg Waves.”