“Geronimo…” Tovey had a distant look in his eye now, as if he were seeing ghostly, vaporous images of a past life, always present in the hidden recesses of his mind, yet ever fleeing from the powerful light of his conscious attention, like fitful shadows. “We called your ship Geronimo. I don’t know how I know that, but I would swear that is so.”
Fedorov looked at Volsky, not knowing what to say. This was all so completely confounding that he had no way to grasp it. Photos here before the things they imaged ever had a chance to be lived, and from another reality. And here was a man who seemed to sense the truth of all this, as though the imprint of those experiences remained branded on his soul, a remnant or shadow from that other world, like a man remembering a past life. It was an anomaly of profound importance. How could this John Tovey have any recollection of events he had never lived in this time line?
Now Admiral Volsky said the one thing that seemed to make some sense. “We struggled for some time over whether or not any of this should ever be revealed, to you or anyone else from this time. It is said that the truth eventually emerges no matter how long we struggle to hide it.”
“Yes,” said Tovey with a smile. “Our own Mister Churchill has said that ‘men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.’ Well this is a revelation that I will have to sit with for a very long while, more than a stumble, gentlemen.”
“Seeing those photographs was a blow to my soul as well,” said Volsky. “In some ways I hope what we do here now will make certain none of them can ever come into being. Yes, we know how things once were, but something tells me the changes to the history of these momentous events are only just beginning, even as this war is only just beginning. I spoke to give you hope that things might turn out favorably, but I must also tell you that this war will not be the last, Admiral Tovey, and the next great war leads us to the edge of complete annihilation.” He let that sit there as Nikolin translated slowly.
“Can we avoid that future?” Volsky continued. “This is what we wonder now, but there is no way for us to know this for certain. The only way we will know how it all turns out is to live it all through, one day at a time.”
Part II
“Brinkmanship is the art of bringing a situation to the edge of the abyss.”
Chapter 4
After his harrowing experience on that stairway at Ilanskiy, Karpov had plenty of time to think things over. Now he knew he must have been seeing events from his home world, the year 2021. It was the great war, he thought, the last great war. We wondered how long we had until the missiles would fly, and it seems they have. So that stairway must be some kind of passage in time! How was that possible? Was it only because of the nearby nuclear detonation he had witnessed? Volkov said nothing about this, so he must have gone down those steps well before the missiles were fired. How could he have moved in time-and all the way to 1908?
No, he thought. He did not get that far. He came here, to the 1940s. What was all this talk about meeting men who claimed they were NKVD? If that was so then he must have gone down those stairs a second time if he ended up in 1908. And why would that passage in time lead there? Rod-25 had done the same thing. It moved the ship from 2021 to 1941, and took us on that journey forward and back again many times. Then, for some reason, a hole in time had opened to the year 1908. He could not yet understand why this was, or even how Fedorov had managed to move from 1942 to find him in 1908, and on two occasions. What was so special about that year?
He thought about that for some time, until he revisited what had happened when that Demon Volcano had erupted in 2021. Large explosive events… yes, something about the shattering power of these events was affecting the integrity of time. That volcano blasted the ship into the 1940s, and then his own use of nuclear weapons had sent Kirov even farther back in time.
Why not Orlan, he thought? That ship was steaming just a few thousand meters ahead of me, even closer to the source of the detonation, did it move in time as well? It certainly did not move to 1908. Could it have gone somewhere else? None of the American ships or planes were affected either, as least as far as I know. We thought it was something unique to Kirov — Rod-25-but could it have been something more, something in the ship’s reactor core that Rod-25 was only catalyzing? And what did any of that have to do with that stairway at Ilanskiy? There were no nuclear reactors or detonations of any kind there. He could make no sense of it, but then again his life had been one impossibility after another since Kirov first disappeared in the Norwegian Sea. He had come to accept the impossible as commonplace now. Yet there had to be an answer to all of this, something he was not seeing. Fedorov was trying to figure all this out long ago. I must do the same, he thought.
Why did the ship move to 1908? It was also the year where Volkov appeared when he went down those stairs. And Fedorov was able to get there using Rod-25 on both the Anatoly Alexandrov and Kazan. Why that year? Was it mere coincidence? The ship seemed to move in and out of the 1940s numerous times. First we arrive in 1941, then move to 1942 on two separate occasions. He said it was as if our position in time was unstable, like a rock skipping on a pond, and we always moved forward-until that last shift from 1945 to 1908. Was that a random event or was there something significant about that year?
He thought about that, reaching for a volume of the history of the Siberian State, and scouring information for the year 1908 to see if he could turn up any clues. Here I am sitting like Fedorov with my nose in the history books, he realized. Then he saw a reference to the strange event in late June of 1908. Yes! That must be it! Tunguska! June 30, 1908.
He read the account of an eye witness named Semedec:
“… I was sitting in the porch of the house at the trading station of Vadecara at breakfast time… when suddenly in the north… the sky was split in two and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared to be covered with fire. At that moment I felt great heat as if my shirt had caught fire; this heat came from the north side. I wanted to pull off my shirt and throw it away, but at that moment there was a bang in the sky, and a mighty crash was heard. I was thrown to the ground…”
A large explosive event-Tunguska! There he saw the map of the presumed location of the event, and a report in the Irkutsk newspaper dated July 2, 1908, published two days after the explosion. What if that event had somehow caused this rift in time, a permanent effect, instead of the transient effects they had experienced aboard Kirov? The fact that this phenomenon persisted even to the year 2021 was very telling. The impact of the Tunguska event must have been so severe that it opened this permanent hole in time, and it must have been so aligned in space as to run right along that stairway. What other explanation was possible?
He did not yet know why this happened, only that it did happen. Facts were facts. There it was, a gateway, a bridge between three separate eras. Why it seemed to involve the 1940s was as yet a mystery he could not answer. But I don’t need to know why it happens just now, he thought. Knowing that it does happen is quite enough! Now I must set my mind on how to best use it. Going back up those stairs from here is fruitless. A visit to the naval arsenal at Kansk might have allowed me to pick some nice cherries off the tree, but not any longer. The arsenal, and probably Kansk itself, has been obliterated in 2021. Yet what about going down that stairway? Yes, that was the real threat now.