be on the monitors at all times during any part of a core maintenance procedure, and he shook his head, looking at the monitors with relief when he saw no warning lights.
Stupid Markov, he thought. He’ll get himself into some real trouble if I tell the Chief he left his station. What’s he doing with the chairs? Then he reached up and toggled the switches to initiate a full system shutdown, concluding the test. Another set of twelve more rods would descend into the reactor vessel, stilling down the fission to a very low level prior to final shutdown.
The wall intercom buzzed, and he walked over to it and thumbed the call button. “Reactor Testing Room, Mishman Garin speaking.”
“Garin? Have Markov come in here with his clipboard before he takes his meal break.” It was Chief Dobrynin.
Garin looked around…the clipboard was also gone. “Sir,” he began. “Markov is no longer here, and the clipboard is missing. He must have taken it with him.” He hated to be a snitch, but it had to be said. “He was not here when I arrived to relieve him, Chief.”
“Not there? I’ll fry him in oil! Where is he, that good for nothing… Never mind, Garin. Just complete the shutdown sequence. I’ll be there in a few minutes. If I find him in the head I’ll flush his own stupid head down the toilet!”
“One more thing, sir…” Garin bit the bullet and made his report. “The chairs are missing. Both of them, sir.” He felt stupid as well, but what else could he say?
“The chairs are missing?”
The chairs were missing, the clipboard was gone. Garin’s jacket was no longer on the wall rack, the book and magazine were gone, and Markov’s tea was missing too. Markov was missing, and it would be the last that any man alive on earth that day would ever see of him.
Part IV
“What if tomorrow vanished in the storm? What if time stood still? And yesterday-if once we lost our way, blundered in the storm-would we find yesterday again ahead of us, where we had thought tomorrow's sun would rise?”
Chapter 10
Doctor Zolkin was the first senior officer on the scene, arriving behind the two Seamen and a 2nd Class Petty Officer. There were a cluster of three or four other sailors outside the hatch, and he quickly shooed them away. Peering into the cabin, he saw the men ready to lift another man from the cot, and stepped quickly inside, closing the hatch behind him.
“Leave him there, please,” he said, stepping to the side of the cot and seeing the man’s limp body. One look told him he was not merely asleep or unconscious. He opened an eyelid, saw the dark weal and purple bruise marks on the man’s neck, checked for a pulse there and noted the stain on his pants in the groin area. It was Voloshin, the man who had come to him a few weeks earlier with nightmare visions of a Japanese plane flying right through him. Zolkin had prescribed a good meal and bed rest, with a couple of aspirin infused with a mild tranquilizer, and sent the man to this very room on the officer’s deck for some peace and quiet. That was weeks ago, but Voloshin had come back. An orderly had been cleaning the empty rooms and found it difficult to enter here. Forcing the hatch open he saw Voloshin hanging from a high welded metal hook on the wall. He was stone cold dead.
“When did you find him?”
“Just ten minutes ago, sir. He was there.” The Petty officer pointed to the hook, and Zolkin nodded gravely.
“Very well, fetch a stretcher and take him down to the sick bay. I’ll have to do an autopsy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I think it would be best if you do not dwell on this in the ranks,” the Doctor admonished. “We have all had a hard ride of late, and the men are worn out.”
“It wasn’t only that, sir.”
“Oh?”
“Voloshin got some bad news today.”
“What news?”
“His wife, sir. He called home, but no one answered. The second time there was another man on the phone. He asked for her, but the man said there was no one by that name there.”
“I see…” Zolkin picked up his emergency medical kit. “And you think Voloshin believed his wife was seeing this other man?”
The two matros seamen shifted uncomfortably now and the other man continued. “It’s not that, sir. Voloshin moved his family here to Vladivostok two weeks before we made our farewell voyage from Severomorsk. He had a small apartment right here in Vladivostok-in the Leninskiy District. We went there with him yesterday but…”
“But what?”
“There was no apartment there, Doctor. He had building number twenty, but the numbers were all wrong: nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-three.”
“You were on the right side of the street?”
“Of course, sir. But there were no even numbers, not anywhere on the street. It was very strange, sir. We looked up the address for his phone number, and it was way over on the other side of town, number 20 Partisanskiy Prospekt. But his apartment building was on Nevel’skogo Street. He was very upset about it, sir.”
“I can imagine he was.”
Zolkin wanted to think that the men had simply gone to the wrong address. After all, Voloshin had just moved to a new town thousands of miles from the cold north of Severomorsk. It may have been easy to become confused in the unfamiliar streets and neighborhoods of the city here. Yet, the more he thought about it the more he realized that the man would not likely forget the place of his new home, and the new life he hoped to start here.
“Very well, gentlemen. I’ll look into this. See that he is taken to sick bay at once.” He went to the linen cabinet and took out a clean sheet, covering Voloshin’s body with an air of solemnity. He was reaching for his medical bag again when someone stepped through the hatch, a tall officer in a gray overcoat with silver buttons and Captain’s stripes on his cuff. The man took a quick look at the scene and fixed his attention on the Doctor, knowing he would be the senior man present.
“What happened here?”
Zolkin gave him a quick glance. He did not know the man and so he stood formally and introduced himself. “Doctor Dmitri Zolkin, Ship’s Physician.”
“This man is ill?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but who might I be speaking to?”
The other man seemed annoyed, his eyes narrowed and a haughty air about him. “Volkov,” he said dryly. “ Captain Volkov, Naval Intelligence.”
“Yes, well it’s Captain Zolkin here as well.” The Doctor smiled, extending a hand, which Volkov shook
