“I see…” Kirov thought for a moment, then leaned forward, lowering his voice to an almost conspiratorial tone. “I can see you hesitate to say more, Admiral. You must think that to do so would be too much for me to comprehend. Perhaps it would be so, but…” now he looked at Fedorov. “I am a very curious man, you see. So curious that I must tell you I took more than one trip up that stairway at Ilanskiy. Some of the things I saw and learned were quite shocking, and I think you know of what I am speaking.”
“You went back up those stairs?” Fedorov’s eyes registered surprise and just a touch of fear.
“I know you told me to get as far away from that place as I could, and never come up those stairs again, Fedorov, but that is one bit of advice that I’m afraid I did not take. It wasn’t until I did go back up that stairway that I finally realized what you meant with that other bit of advice you gave me, that whisper in my ear as we parted. Yes, I learned more than any man should ever have to know-the very day, time and moment of my death! But as you see, I have avoided that fate. You wanted that, did you not? Yes, you did. Well then let me shake your hand one more time, Fedorov, and give you my thanks. Because of you the man that would arrange that unfortunate business scheduled for December of 1934 was not in the world to do so.”
“Because of me?” Fedorov had a guilty look.
“Only in part,” said Mironov. “The rest was my hand writing in the ledger of fate. It was I who made an end of Josef Stalin. Having seen the world that resulted from his reign of terror, no sane man could do anything else. Yes, I went to Bayil when I found out the Okhrana had him there. It was risky, the most dangerous thing I ever did in my life. I gave myself even odds of living out that night, but I gave Stalin worse.”
Fedorov was shocked to hear this. “You killed Stalin?”
“I did. And thank god for that. Unfortunately I have not been as willing to cut off heads as he might have been, and so the effort to unify the country became mired in this endless civil war. I suppose I saved millions of lives by taking Stalin’s, but now we have this damnable war. On the one side we sit watching the Polish border for any sign of the German buildup there that is almost certain to come. On the other we remain locked in this perpetual civil war with the Whites-with Volkov’s Orenburg Federation as he has come to call it these days.”
“It appears Time and Fate have a way of balancing their books,” said Volsky.
“Very true, Admiral. I must ask you one thing now, though I believe I may already know the answer. When I met you in 1908, Fedorov, you were not born to that world. Am I correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“You came from the world at the top of those stairs? From the world we live in now?”
“No, sir.”
Mironov folded his arms, his brow registering some confusion. “No? Here I thought you waited all this time to arrange this meeting. You see, you look exactly as I remember you.”
Fedorov looked at the Admiral, and Volsky nodded, giving him quiet permission to explain himself. He cleared his throat, thinking what he might say and how he could elucidate that they were from another time altogether. Then the image of the stairway itself gave him some graspable way of explaining things.
“You lived on the first floor back then, sir, in the dining room of 1908. That was a very memorable day. I suppose you now may know what we were looking at to the northeast when the sky seemed to be on fire there. Well… when you came up that stairway after me, you know where you ended up. Suppose that inn had a third floor. That is the world I came from. How I came to be there in the year you met me is a very long story, but we-the Admiral and I-we live on the third floor sir, if that makes any sense.”
Sergie Kirov was quiet for a time, his eyes alive, thinking. “A third floor? Yes, I get what you are saying, Fedorov. Why not? Then you are telling me you came from years beyond that time?”
“We did, sir.”
“But why?” The question was obvious, burning, unanswered in the whole impossible saga they had lived through thus far.
“At that moment I was looking for a man, a member of our crew in fact. I was sent to find him by the Admiral here.”
“And how did you get to the place on that second floor where we spoke, Fedorov? How did you get back? Are there other stairways out there that wend their way through madness and time? Yes, I thought I was mad for a while, truly insane. But I got over it when I learned what was really going on at the top of those stairs.”
Fedorov was not quite sure what to say now. Kirov would have no comprehension of nuclear reactors, and control rods. How could he explain what happened when he barely understood it himself?
“Sir… We are not exactly certain. There was an accident-in our time-and we found ourselves adrift on the oceans of your world.”
“Just the two of you?”
“No, said Admiral Volsky. Now you have the explanation as to why you cannot seem to recall the construction of my ship.”
Kirov leaned back, quite shocked now. “You mean to say your entire ship moved in time? My god, how many are you?”
“Our crew? About seven hundred men. Our ship was christened Sergie Kirov, yes, in your honor.”
“When?” Kirov’s eyes held intense anticipation as he waited for the answer.
Volsky looked at Fedorov, then folded his arms. “Well I don’t suppose there is any harm in saying it now. The ship was originally laid down in the year 1974, launched three years later, and finally commissioned in 1980. It was later extensively re-designed, and re-commissioned again… in the year 2020. Since you, yourself, have been up and down those stairs, sir, you are aware that the stairway may continue on and on. We never know what lies beyond the floor we are born to, unless something very strange happens to us, but I think that stairway does go on into the future, and we are a small clique of men, fortunate or not, who have moved from one floor to the next.”
“2020? This is amazing! Unbelievable. Yet you are correct in what you say. If anyone might hear what you have just said and not think it wild vranyo, it is I, someone who has walked that back stairway, more times than I should have. But what are you doing here now?”
“Fedorov here is saying hello to an old acquaintance,” said Volsky. “Beyond that, it was our hope to make a new friend or two here. You see, General Secretary, as Fedorov said, we are not quite sure why we find ourselves here-but here we are and, at the moment, we seem to be marooned in this day and year. Believe me, I am as bewildered as you seem to be now about it all. I have spent hours wondering just who I really am now, in this world. You see, I am a little older than you are, Mironov, but I was born in the year 1957, and young Fedorov here… why, when were you born, Captain?”
“1994, sir.”
“Remarkable,” said Kirov. “This ship of yours… Why it must be very powerful.”
“That it is, the most powerful ship in the world, and we have been tested against many others who might like to make that claim. It was our hope to minimize any contact with the world we found ourselves in after we first went down the rabbit hole. Now we have come to realize that we have already made a very grave difference in the world. Our presence in the past has had a shattering effect. Your presence here, at this very moment, is one result. You see… you did die on that cold December night in Leningrad, in 1934, but here you are. Everything is different now, in more ways that we can possibly have time to explain. Fedorov here calls it a broken mirror, and when we look into it now we wonder who we are at times. We thought we could reverse the damage, preserve it, put things back the way they were. Finally we gave up trying, as it seems it is an impossible task. So here we are, Sergei Kirov, beggars at your doorstep-a place we once called home. We left this very harbor in the year 2021, and sailed out on a bright sunny day. The weather has been very stormy for us ever since, but now we are finally back… not quite home yet, but we are here at long last.”