Fedorov now wondered if he had been wrong about the importance of those stairs. What had happened? How could the history here remain inviolate? Were the changes so subtle that they had not yet been noticed? He could not help but think that Troyak’s mission had created some great contradiction, and was again dogged by the feeling that it would be his fault if it did. Kamenski’s voice returned again.
“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.”
Time must have found a way, thought Fedorov. But how? If Sergei Kirov was still safely alive and in power in the Soviet Union, then he must have used that stairway as before, and in 1942. If Ivan Volkov was alive now then he must have also used it safely in 2021.
Then the answer struck him like a wet fish in the face, so obviously simple that he was surprised he had not considered it earlier. Troyak may have just destroyed the stairway, but he obviously did not destroy the time rift itself! So the only solution to his problem was that someone must have rebuilt those stairs. Could this be done?
This had to be the answer. The inn was restored, sometime between this moment and that date in 1942 when he first discovered the rift. Then the darker implications of what he had concluded struck him. Was the restoration done by someone who knew what they were about-someone who knew that rift in time existed? If so, who might that person be? He realized that any number of people might have inadvertently gone up or down those stairs, and now he wondered if that inn had a history of these events, the people who may have boarded there and unwittingly stumbled through that rift as he did. Some may have returned to their correct time, even as Fedorov returned when he retreated back up those stairs. Yet others may have been trapped in some other time, like Volkov.
Then he realized that there was a record of everyone who had ever boarded at that inn-the guest register! Boarders would sign in on a routine basis, and there might also be billing records. Did the innkeepers know about the strange effects on that stairway? Could they be the ones behind this restoration, or was it someone else?
That thought led him to one dark name that might be on the list of possible suspects, and one of the primary reasons he sent Troyak on that mission in the first place-Vladimir Karpov. The threat that stairway represented may have only been temporarily forestalled by Troyak’s mission. Yet there might be no way he would ever know who rebuilt the inn, or when they might do this, which would make any future operation difficult to plan.
Yes, Mother Time had found a way, and he could at least know that he was not responsible for creating another insoluble paradox with his mission plan. That thought gave him little solace.
“Admiral on the bridge!”
Fedorov turned to see that Volsky had returned to take up his post after a long eight hour shift below decks.
“Good day, sir,” he said, but Volsky took one look at his face and knew something was wrong.
“You do not look so happy today, Mister Fedorov. Is something troubling you?”
“No sir… I was just thinking how we will recover the mission team.” Fedorov did not want to burden the Admiral again with more talk of paradox and time theory that neither of them really understood in the first place.
“Ah,” said Volsky. “I have sent a message to Admiral Golovko on this while you were busy setting up the Ice Watch team. The Narva has safely returned to Murmansk, refueled, and is already on its way to rendezvous with us here. Along the way they can reconnoiter to see if the Germans are up to anything.”
“A very good idea, sir.”
“Yes, and how was the deployment of the Oko panel? Any problems?”
“No sir. We laid in a month’s supply of food, fuel and other items for the six man team there. They are on-line now and feeding data to our main radar display. Contacts will display on our navigation board in blue.”
“Is there adequate security? We must not allow this technology to fall into the wrong hands, which is why I hesitated to release it to the British unless necessary.”
“The Ice Watch is very isolated, sir, and the team would certainly see anything coming by air or sea in time to warn us. I’ve also given some thought to the risk of sharing technology. Perhaps we were too paranoid earlier with the fear that nothing must ever fall into enemy hands.”
“Oh? Why do you say this, Fedorov?”
“Well sir, there is simply no way any of our technology could be reverse engineered in this era. Think about it for a moment. Take the Oko panel radar set, for example. It uses a powerful 6m? radar antenna with 360° azimuthal coverage. The processing power in a single unit exceeds that of all computational devices that will be made on planet earth through the 1980s! It has integrated micro-circuitry, millions of transistors, and wafer thin digital circuits, exotic materials and other components that no power on earth could even begin to duplicate until the 1990s. The technology could be used by men from this era trained to do so, but there is no conceivable way it could ever be reverse engineered or duplicated. In many ways the same can be said of our missile technology. Our engineers could certainly improve existing models of rocketry here, but face it, you could gather the very best of the missile scientists of this era into one project, and they could not reproduce a functioning Moskit-II if they worked round the clock for ten years! It simply requires advances in too many technological areas. Our computer technology is quantum leaps above anything of this era, and it is an essential integrated component in all of our systems. Computers handle all radar and infrared detection, inertial navigation, guidance and targeting. Without them the missile is just a very efficient and deadly unguided bomb, and no power on earth could ever duplicate our computers in this era. It simply could not be done.”
“Now that you explain it this way, I must agree with you. In fact, one day the shoe may be on the other foot and we may wish these people could manufacture just a little more 30mm ammunition for our AR-62 close in defense guns.”
“That might be possible, but all our missiles and munitions benefit from decades of advanced metallurgy. We might get a 30mm round from them that we could fire, but certainly not with the performance of our own munitions.”
“Which is why we must be very stingy about using them,” Volsky admonished, though he knew Fedorov would be the last to use unwarranted force in battle.”
Nikolin interrupted them, saying he was receiving a radio message from Operations Chief Orlov on the Airship Narva. In the next few minutes they learned that the Germans had finally stirred again from their cold northern outposts on the Norwegian coast. The Narva was flying high, and could not recognize exactly what they were seeing, but they had spotted two large ships out from Narvik and on a course that might take them very near the Island of Jan Mayen.
“There’s one more thing, sir,” said Nikolin. “I’ve been monitoring long range signals traffic and pattern filtering. The volume has taken a sudden increase, and when I listened in I discovered those letter sets again.”
“Letter sets?”
“Yes sir. A stream of letters in sets of five, and quite of bit of that now.”
“Do you have any of it?”
“I printed out this latest message, but there’s a good deal more.” Nikolin handed Fedorov the message, and he noted the telltale letter sets that indicated this was a special message being sent in the German Naval Enigma code. NVXCO TYQUY BTURS OVWPD VPVKZ UPZGH, and on it went. Fedorov wasted no time getting to his pad device with the Enigma decoding application. Using that day’s date, he soon established that his rotor position should be set at IV–V-III, with a rotor start position KXU and the rings set at VQG. Ten letter pairs were also set on the plugboard, and when he decoded the message he soon had his answer. It read: ‘Activate Plan Fimbulwinter, Stage I, with Alfargruppe, effective immediately. Fleet commander to execute Stage II, with Jotnargruppe, at his discretion. Plan Felix to follow.” The Admiral was watching him closely, noting his intense concentration with some admiration.