Tovey could almost see all this in his mind’s eye as Admiral Volsky described it, feel the anxiety of the chase, the impact of a rocket against the armor of his flagship.
“Then we were enemies?”
“Sadly true,” said Volsky. “We made our way to the Mediterranean Sea, and even fought a duel with your own battleships there… What were their names, Mister Fedorov?”
“ Nelson and Rodney, sir”
“Yes. I was indisposed at the time, because the photograph of one of your planes strafing this ship was real, Admiral, and I was seriously injured during that attack. Mister Fedorov here was in command at the time. And so you see, all the material you presented to me ashore was very surprising for us to see, for we knew it was authentic, moments we have fought and lived through, at great cost to both sides. Yes, men died on this ship in action against your fleet, and I am afraid a good many more died on your ships. I could spend hours talking about it, but in an effort to return to our own day, we tried a procedure with our propulsion system, and were able to move again in time. Unfortunately, the end of that journey now finds us here, where we appeared just weeks ago very near one of your convoys south of Iceland. Mister Fedorov?”
“Convoy HX-49, sir, just off Cape Farewell.”
Tovey sat in stunned silence, his mind laboring to protest this lunacy, but muted now by the awful weight of the feeling he had carried that all this was true. Finally he spoke… “I have read my Dickens as well, Admiral Tovey. Are you saying you now appear to me like the Ghost of Christmas yet to come? That all these engagements you say we have fought are fated to re-occur?”
“No. That need not be the case. Quite frankly, the world as it now stands does not seem to be the one we left. This will also be difficult for you to grasp, but the history we knew did not see our homeland divided in civil war as it is. The Soviet Union was exactly that, a strong union of all the states that now make up what was once Imperial Russia under the Romanov dynasty. No… We now believe the actions we took in the events documented in that box of yours are responsible for the radical changes to the history we have learned about since our arrival here-in 1940. We tried, many times, to clean up the mess we had made and set things right, but you have a nursery rhyme about a fat egg man that falls off a wall, do you not?”
“Humpty Dumpty?”
“That is the one. Well, we, too, learned that all the King’s horses, and all the King’s men could not put the world back together again as it was. We are living in an altered reality now-a world we helped to shape with our own damnable incompetence and short-sightedness. So this time when we appeared here I realized it was no good trying to mend things again, but a man my age will not easily make the same mistake twice. You and I were adversaries in that other world. This time I decided things differently. Yes, Admiral, we did meet once before, and we found reason and good will could trump our enmity. We made peace, you and I. This time I wanted to make a friend of the Royal Navy, and not have to relive the events we had already experienced. So here we are.” He smiled, holding up his glass and taking a long sip of much needed wine. “Here we are at dinner with the Admiral of the British Home Fleet!”
Now Fedorov spoke, wanting to voice a matter he had puzzled over since Tovey first handed them those photographs. “If I may, Admiral, we find ourselves equally bemused by all of this. As you may have seen, we were quite shocked to see the photographs in that envelope you handed us, and I cannot think of how that material, this box you say you have, ever came into your possession at all! It stands as a deep mystery, for those are images from the world we came from-not this world.”
“They certainly could not have been taken in the world I know,” Tovey agreed as Nikolin quickly translated.
“Yes, you yourself know that you have only two ships ready in the King George V class now, yet that photo you handed me clearly showed four. That photo is a remnant from another time, and it images an event that now may never occur. The thought that photograph could even exist now is most disturbing; completely inexplicable. So you see, while we tell you now the seemingly impossible truth concerning our own displacement in time, we must confess that we are no masters of that. Our control over what happened to us is very limited, and the existence of these photographs, and things like that report you mentioned to us regarding the meeting Admiral Volsky had with you in 1942, well they are quite troubling, maddeningly unsettling to us, even as this outrageous tale must prey upon your own mind. How could images of events we lived through in 1941 and 1942 be here, a year before any of that ever happened, in the year 1940? Unless-and this is the only possibility we could grasp at-unless they were brought here, from some future year, and by someone we have yet to identify who is also capable of moving in time.”
“Like our Mister Wells,” said Tovey, his eyes narrowing. “Yes, just like old H. G. Wells with his Time Machine.”
Even as Tovey said that he realized how stupid and foolish it sounded, but this man was suggesting it as a real possibility. If the material Turing had dredged up in that box was authentic, then it had to come from somewhere. These men had just told him that was so. The next question was obvious to them all.
“Brought here, you say?” said Tovey. “By who? For what reason? Was it meant as a warning of some kind? As you have just confessed, we were apparently at each other’s throats the first time around this merry-go-round.”
“We have not had time to think this through,” said Volsky. “I am sure Mister Fedorov here will have a bit of a sleepless night over this matter.”
“That is an understatement,” said Tovey. “I’ve been sitting here pinching myself, gentlemen, thinking I should wake up from a nightmare and find myself back in Scapa Flow with nothing to worry about but the Hindenburg.”
Fedorov smiled. “You may be surprised to know that ship was never built by Germany in the history we knew-nor was your own ship anchored just a few hundred yards from us this evening, HMS Invincible.”
“Never built?”
“No sir. The history we know records that the G3 class battlecruisers were cancelled due to the limitations imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty. That ship does displace somewhat over 35,000 tons, does it not? All four planned ships were cancelled, so imagine my surprise when we arrived here and I laid eyes on your ship. This world has things in it that amaze us as well.”
“Astounding…” It was all Tovey could say. It was all simply astounding. Then something occurred to him that struck him like a thunderclap. “Then you know,” he said. “You know everything-the history, the war, how it all ends.” He looked at them, his eyes open wide with the possibilities hidden within his question.
“Yes, we know how it turned out… once upon a time. But, as the existence of your own ship testifies, this world is a new reality. Everything is different here now, at least to us. It could all turn out quite differently as well.”
Tovey was silent, lost in the deep gravity of all this, yet pulled by the irresistible urge to know more. “Did I know this in the time where we last met?”
“We were never sure what you knew, though I had my suspicions that you were slowly realizing something was terribly amiss in regards to our ship.”