Gromyko put a hand to his head, as if rubbing away a headache.
“I know, I know,” said Kamenski. “It’s a lot to take in all at once like this. Then again, you’ve sailed the waters of the 1940s, so this should be a good deal easier to swallow. Speaking of that… You’re going back. I have another mission for you.”
“Another mission?”
“I’m afraid so. You see, that ship that did go missing, Kirov, did so in a most interesting way. I never knew how in the beginning, but I do now. It was that nice little control rod, number 25, I believe.”
“Yes,” said Gromyko. “It’s still aboard Kazan, but we can’t use it. The Chief Engineer says it’s been damaged.”
“Worn out,” said Kamenski. “Well, don’t worry about that. Now that I know where it was made, and how, it will be easy enough to replace. In fact, it has brothers too, other rods that came from the same manufacturing lot. I’ll get one for you, and then we can get started.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of this,” said Gromyko.
“Neither do I,” said Kamenski. “It will be very dangerous.”
“You mean to say you want me to go back to the 1940s?”
“If we can get there. I’m banking a lot on getting an assist from Mother Time. That’s where her problem is just now, and our problem as well. We created this mess, and now we have to clean it up.”
“But sir… What about the men? They were looking forward to seeing their families, going home. They thought that would never happen again, and then we finally break through and make it home, or at least that’s what they think now.”
“Yes I know. It will be very hard on them, but given the state of affairs here, ‘home’ may not be here for them very much longer. You don’t think we can just muddle about in the history without consequences, do you? Not at all! In this case, the muddling about has become quite a bit more. Do you realize that they’re all back there, fighting for one side or another in that damn war?”
“They couldn’t get home,” said Gromyko. “Fedorov said the control rod they were using wasn’t reliable. It moved them in both space and time the first time they used it, and he wasn’t going to take a risk that the ship might disappear and then end up in the Alps.”
“I see… so the second son wasn’t reliable, but the risk Fedorov points out pales before the consequences we now face at this end of things. That’s the first thing you must communicate to them when you get back there.”
“What? Back to that damn war again? What for?”
“To get them out of there, of course. What else? We certainly can’t leave them there, not the men, nor their ship.”
“You want to try and bring Kirov home again? “
“Anywhere but there. World War Two is a vast pane of broken glass. The cracks are everywhere. Push on one and things change—rather dramatically. They change there in the beginning, with the history starting to do things that never happened before. Those events have consequences. Do you realize the Germans have taken Moscow back there? Burned half the city, and little wonder why. Stalin is long dead and Russia is fragmented into three warring states, one of them led by a renegade ex-naval intelligence officer! You can bet I’m keeping a close eye on him here now, very discretely.”
“You mean Ivan Volkov? So I heard, but I was just a little busy in the Atlantic with the Germans, getting some payback.”
“Gneisenau? For Moscow? Mister Gromyko, we will have to do a damn sight better than that. Let me tell you what’s going on now—things I’ve been carrying up in this stogy old head of mine for some time. In the time line where Kirov now resides, the Germans took Moscow, and we just barely stopped them in the winter of 1941. Well, I know how the rest goes soon. We stopped them, but they aren’t done with us yet. They’re going to strike south now, in the summer offensive of 1942. They want Stalingrad, Volgograd back there, and they want to push right over the Don and Volga to shake hands with Ivan Volkov. He’s another problem, and I haven’t quite figured out what to do about him just yet beyond keeping him under close surveillance here. For now, however, we’ll start with the things we have control over—the men, the ship. We start with Kirov.”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
“Go back and get them out,” said Kamenski with a smile.
“Director, haven’t we tried that once already? Look what happened!”
“Yes, that’s a point well taken. Well, we still have to try, because if we don’t…” Kamenski stopped, set his pipe down, and rubbed his eyes. “If we don’t, Mister Gromyko, than this is all going to unravel, this entire present moment I’ve called home for so long. It all depends on things that happened in the 1940s. Don’t you see? Well, they aren’t happening—at least not as they were supposed to. Things are changing, and we’re responsible. Never mind about trying to stop the war that is still on our doorstep here. Now it’s about something much more. If we don’t get back there and put a stop to all this, then everything, and I mean everything, is going to come flying apart. How did that poet put it? Yes… things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!”
He looked at Gromyko now, and in his eyes there was a profound sadness, and a vast silence of finality. “That’s what caused it, the second coming of that ship to 1941. It created a loop, and if that doesn’t resolve properly there, if anything should happen to displace that ship to a moment prior to the time of its first arrival, then we face down Paradox yet again. Do this once, and you court a good deal of trouble, just as we experienced it.. Do it twice… Desolation, Mister Gromyko, that is what we are facing now, complete and utter annihilation. The cold frost of infinity is out there, and it’s a savage end, a futile end to the whole damn world. And do you know why? The second coming, that’s why. Kirov went back, and now it’s gone back a second time. Understand? If that happens again, and again, and again… See what I mean? The changes are already starting to ripple forward in time. We don’t notice them yet, but I can tell. They may seem insignificant—different missiles for your submarine and all. That doesn’t seem all that earth shaking, but I assure you, it is only the beginning.”
“You mean if we don’t get them back here safely…”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The whole damn loop will spin out again, and each time it does, the changes become more and more catastrophic. Try getting a future like this one sorted out under those circumstances. Don’t you see? Normally it takes… time for the variations to ripple forward to the future. But soon the changes will become so pronounced that they will reach this time, even before events have concluded in the past. That’s Mother Time’s problem now, and it’s also our problem. We started it, and so we’ll simply have to finish it.”