“Then Fedorov’s Absolute Certainty proposition would be wrong,” said Karpov.
“Well it might not happen on the initial shift,” Volsky equivocated. “But it’s a real possibility that this would become a one-way trip—for us all, and for this ship and crew as well.”
“We’ll get somewhere,” said Karpov. “This isn’t magic. We’ve determined that Rod-25’s effects are physical, and in 1908, it should be at the height of its powers, because we’ll be very close to the Tunguska event. So we’ll get somewhere, mark my words, but I can also guarantee one more thing: if we do make a return shift, we’ll land in a completely new meridian of time, not this one. This world will be dead, over, kaput. Understand? So forget any notion that we’ll be fixing this meridian, or restoring it to what it once was. We’ll simply be destroying it, annihilating it completely, and then we will be building an entirely new meridian that logically arises from the action we take. If we do shift again, that’s where we will appear, and from there, the rest is done with mirrors.”
There was silence all around.
Where would they end up if they went to 1908, did all that they planned, and then initiated a shift again? That question had many possible answers, and they all seemed to rest on the choice of how they would attempt to go there.
“I still say the ship gives us power if we should ever need it. On the other hand, the back stairway at Ilanskiy has been quite reliable—old faithful. It always seems to reach that moment of the Tunguska event when we go down the steps from this time.”
“Yet coming back could incur the same risk the Admiral pointed out,” said Fedorov. “Don’t forget Orlov. He was right in front of me on those stairs, and then he simply vanished.”
“Ah, yes, Mister Orlov. He’s the man who jumped ship in the first looping of these events, and that set everything in motion. And now it seems he’s found a way to jump ship again! I wonder where he ended up? Was it in the future? Might he have shifted months or years ahead of the rest of your team? Or did he slip back further in time?”
“My guess is that he went forward,” said Fedorov. “No shift of any kind has ever reached a point earlier than July of 1908.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but Fedorov is to be forgiven for not knowing anything at all about the Duke of Elvington, or his rival Fortier.
“He’ll probably just appear on the upper landing one day down the road. Who knows, maybe he’ll appear in 1944.”
“Not if we do what we’re planning,” said Karpov. “Remember, this meridian gets destroyed if we tamper with things in 1908, so our good Mister Orlov will have no place to come home to. Perhaps he’ll be in that borscht that the Admiral mentioned. Frankly, he might be better off there than he would be blundering about on the new Meridian we create in any case. Orlov is a bit of a bull in a china closet.”
That he was….
Chapter 36
Orlov sneezed, his nose getting too much of a whiff of all that dust and soot in the darkness of that back stairway. Orlov sneezed, a reflex, an impulse, and his hand moved to his nose, as anyone’s might. In that fleeting instant, he lost contact with the man ahead of him on the stairs, and then it became very cold.
In that same awful moment, Orlov suddenly realized that he could no longer feel Fedorov’s hand on his own shoulder. He passed a moment of sickly uncertainty, as if he was suspended in mid-air. It immediately produced a feeling of great anxiety, and a sensation that he was falling. For some reason, he suddenly felt feather light, completely free, his being unfettered from the grip of gravity itself. He had not felt this way since that terrible moment when he had leapt from the helicopter over the Mediterranean, off the coast of Spain. Yes, he still had that memory in the back of his head, and he could follow the path it led him down, through the bars and brothels, onto the backs of old rusty ships, into the stony tunnels beneath the Rock of Gibraltar.
He had been interrogated, then put on a steamer heading for the Black Sea. There he was transferred to a trawler, operated by the NKVD, and he found that his knowledge of future events, all stored neatly in his computer jacket, gave him a most interesting peek at the events he was living out at that moment.
Eventually, he found the way to his Grandmother’s home in the Caucasus, but found that she, as a much younger woman, had already been hauled away by Beria’s men. A name came to him, that of a certain Commissar—Molla. He was the man responsible for his grandmother’s fate, and Orlov was determined to deal with him. He would still grin, inwardly, as he recalled the look on Molla’s face as he choked the breath and life out of the man. After that, in the midst of the battle on the Caspian coast, there was Zykov.
They had come back for him.
Fedorov had hatched the plan, always scheming, even as he always worried over everything they were doing in the past. But that world was long gone. It was as if it had never happened, for there were other memories in Orlov’s head, of Zeppelins and wild rides in sub-cloud cars—or bone numbing sound so deep that it reached inside you and pulled at every instinct in your body, with throbbing fear. There were raids, on this very place, Ilanskiy, and Orlov was a part of one. Then Fedorov had tapped him for this mission as well, another Zeppelin ride that ended up in a time none of them ever expected to reach aboard the Irkutsk.
When that happened, Orlov thought a long time about the great devastation he had seen from the Irkutsk. He sat there, in awe, staring at the Tunguska Event. Fedorov had wanted to go to 1908, and they he suddenly was. They found the man he went there to look for, just as Orlov finally found Commissar Molla, and there had been some ruckus in the dining hall between the two of them—Fedorov and Mironov. Then, they were simply ordered to gather up all their gear and get in a line to file up that back stairway. What in the world was that all about?
They filed in, one my one, and each man with his hand firmly on the shoulder of the man in front of him. Fedorov was right behind him, so close that he could hear him breathing. The sound of the heavy booted Marines was loud in the dark and narrow passage.
Then Orlov sneezed.
The dizzy sensation of falling subsided, and he could feel weight and substance returning to his heavy frame; feel his feet solidly planted on the wooden step. He had been in a strange fog, but it was dark again, the murky, dusty stillness now so thick that he felt he could not breathe. He groped forward for the man in front of him, feeling nothing.
Sookin Sim! Where’s that Marine gone? Then he realized there was no one behind him either. Fedorov was gone as well. He stood there, looking over his shoulder for a moment. Then he spoke.
“Fedorov? Son of a bitch…. Fedorov? Skatina, where have you run off to?” The other men must have gone on up the stairs, but where was Fedorov? He turned, peering into the inky darkness, and then went back the way he had come.
“If we do this,” said Volsky. “If we go back, by any means, then when will we arrive there?” He looked at Fedorov, as he had always been the one to sort these things out.
Fedorov cast a glance at Karpov, then spoke. “I’m going to assume that 1908 puts us back on the old Prime Meridian, because we think Tunguska was the source of all this time fracturing. That happened the morning of June 30, 1908. I was there that morning, via the back stairway at Ilanskiy. So I can’t get to that time because co-location is impossible.”