interviewed Yolkin’s closest friends, found out his birth date and went so far as to look for this man’s birth certificate. There are lots of Yolkins, of course, but not this one. He’s vanished, just like Markov, but it’s as if he never even existed…”
That statement surprised Volsky, and lent considerable weight to Fedorov’s argument. “Never existed? Are you telling me the incident with Markov caused this man’s life history to be changed to a point where he was never even born?”
“All I can say for certain is that there is now no record of his existence, no birth certificate, school records, medical records, tax or credit information. Yolkin has been completely erased from the ledger of life. It could have been a side effect from the Markov incident, but he died within minutes of his appearance in Vladivostok of 1942. I found the police report in the wartime archives. They found his wallet, of course, and when they saw his identification they probably assumed it was a fraudulent ID, though I’m willing to bet that if he had any Rubles in there it would have raised an eyebrow or two. It’s hard to make any connection between Markov and Yolkin’s disappearance, other than the fact that they both vanished the same day, which could have been coincidental.”
“Then how, Fedorov? How do you explain this?”
“I wish I could tell you, Admiral. More time and research might lead me to a more definitive answer, but there is one other possibility-Orlov.”
“Orlov? He would have died long ago. How could he be responsible?”
“This is what I first believed, Admiral-that Orlov’s life and fate had been sealed, and that the world we returned to here was therefore the final result of any change he may have worked on the history. It was easy to think he may have had something to do with this imminent war we are facing, but I discarded that. There are too many thumbs in that pie to blame it all on Orlov. Then I discovered something in my research on the man.” He reached into his coat pocket and handed the letter he had shared with Karpov to the Admiral, who read it with a silent sadness shrouding his features.
Volsky read the last few lines aloud: “ Be heroes, be valiant men of war so that history will remember you as defenders of the Rodina. Should you ever find this, and learn my fate, I hope that you, courageous Russian sailors, will avenge my death.” He folded the letter slowly, setting it in the desk.
“Very sad,” he said. “Avenge him? We do not yet know how he died, or at who’s hands. Kizlyar…Yes there was an NKVD division operating there once. Strange that you should find it, but I do not understand how that changes anything here, or causes a man like Yolkin to simply disappear.”
“This is what I told him,” said Karpov. “He suggested we attempt to go find Orlov and bring him home, but there is a little more on our plate to deal with now.”
“Go and find him? What do you mean, Fedorov?”
The young Captain explained what he had suggested, and then admitted that Karpov had convinced him that such a mission would not be feasible with the ship given their present circumstances. “But there is one thing I wish to bring up, sir,” he pressed on.
“It has to do with that letter, and yes, also with these crazy ideas I have in my head now about bringing Orlov home. I was doing some reading on all this-theoretical papers on the idea of movement through time. Believe it or not, there are serious minds who have contemplated this possibility. Well, I found a paper published by an American physicist-a man named Paul Dorland. His ideas were very radical, and he posited a complete theory of time travel and how it might be possible through the creation of a controlled micro black hole. I was trying to discover some reason for the odd effects caused by Rod-25, but it wasn’t the physics in his paper that caught my attention, it was this amazing glossary of terms he had dreamt up to define how time travel would work, and what the consequences would be should it ever occur. He put forward an idea, a term that he called a Nexus Point. The essence of it was that once a willful agent with the power to act determined to do something to alter the past, time seems to be suddenly held in abeyance. The outcomes and possibilities resulting from this person’s decisions and actions seem to have an effect on what actually happens, and the power to physically change events-just like that book changed or like Yolkin vanished, or like Voloshin when he discovered his wife and apartment were missing and killed himself.”
“I don’t understand,” said Volsky. “Nexus Point?”
“The way he explained it was that time flowed like a river. So then think of a whirlpool in that stream. This is the Nexus Point, the place where different streams of time merge and flow together and then resolve to some new direction. In that whirlpool anything might happen. Imagine a leaf caught up in it, swirling about. When it finally returns to the river it might have moved to a different place, taken a different course. Kirov was a leaf in the stream of time sir, but I don’t think our journey is over yet. I think we are still caught up in the maelstrom. We still have Rod-25, and the power to use it and, as long as we do, then nothing is decided and we cannot return to the normal flow of the river.”
“You are saying that our possession of Rod-25 is the problem?”
“Both the problem and the solution, sir. Rod-25 caused this dilemma, but it is also the only means we have of redressing it. With it we have the power to change the order of events again-to change the flow of time and all the history from 1942 to the present. We can rewrite the headlines we read in that newspaper. We have already edited the story, but now we can make it new.”
Karpov’s eyes were alight as he listened, for he had heard that same Siren song and been tempted by time and fate long ago. “Yes, we do have that power,” he said in a low voice. “This Rod-25 business. It worked it’s magic at the test bed facility just as it did aboard Kirov.”
“Exactly,” said Fedorov. “As long as Rod-25 remains viable, it enables time displacement. Rig it up in a low power twelve rod reactor as Dobrynin did at the test center and we get missing magazines, teacups, chairs, and Markov. Put it back on the ship with its twin 24 rod reactors and we get a battlecruiser making visits to the high seas of 1942!”
Volsky raised his eyebrows with astonishment. “You never cease to amaze me, Fedorov. You bring this insanity into the room and actually make it sound rational. What you are saying is that your discovery of that letter makes it possible for us to do something about Orlov, yes?”
“Correct, sir. We now know exactly where he is on a given time and place. We have the equivalent of his GPS coordinates in the history, and we have the means of going there ourselves, finding him, and bringing him back. We have the power.”
“But only if we use the ship…” Volsky frowned. “This is correct what I say, yes? If we use the test bed facility we have a one way street. There is no reactor at the other end with Rod-25 to send us home.”
“Right, sir. That facility does not seem to have the power to move anything but loose objects within a limited range of the core. Yet as we have seen in a more powerful reactor setting Rod-25 can move an entire ship! We then have options. We have helicopters, men like Sergeant Troyak and his Marines.”
“Men of war,” said Volsky, remembering Orlov’s last plaintive letter. “So what you are suggesting is that fate is waiting on us? That until this possibility no longer exists, the world will never rest at ease and settle down again?”
“Something like that, sir.”
“And if we were to do such a thing as you suggest, undertake a kind of rescue operation, what then?”
“Then we will have at least packed out our trash,” said Karpov. “Forgive my speaking of Orlov in those terms, but we will have recovered the man and his damn Computer Jacket and cleaned up the last of the mess we created.”
Fedorov seized on that point. “After all, sir, didn’t you find it strange that we appeared here at the precise moment necessary to either kill or spare the Key West? It’s as if time was forcing us to make that choice so she could get on with her business. Now we have this letter, and yes, more unfinished business. Don’t you feel it? The moment seems breathless. Things are building and building to some climax, but time is waiting-waiting for us to make another choice.”
Volsky, took a long breath, settling into his chair, thinking. “Then we have two options that I can see. One is to get this Rod-25 back aboard Kirov, and hope that perhaps we might do something one day, presuming this strange displacement ever happens again. And the other choice is to utterly destroy that control rod and close the matter here and now, and then we live with what comes next, and forfeit the power to change it ever again, except by means of blood and steel in the here and now.” He had a distant look in his eyes, as if seeing the days past or perhaps peering into some unknown future and seeing it as a real place and time in his imagination.
