The same thing had happened to Orlov earlier, though Nikolin did not know that. The Chief at least had the guiding and reassuring presence of Anton Fedorov when his memory was restored, but for Nikolin, it was a shuddering and frightening experience. Everything he recalled was now so real in his mind, and yet he could also trace back the chronology of his life as lived from childhood, through the university, to Naval School, and then his career in the Navy itself, and all the time he had spent since he was first posted to Kirov. Nowhere, in any of those sequenced events, could any of these memories find a place to live. They were interlopers, imposters, and now intruders on the normal calm and sane progression of his days. They were impossible.
Until he found the message….
Sitting there, he saw himself staring at a message he had decoded in one of those phantom images flooding into his mind. Then, as if determined to test the reality of that recollection in defense of his own sanity, he reached for the special drawer where he put all non-official radio traffic signals transcripts. It was just a habit he had developed over the years, like a man who might sort his sales receipts, putting some into a box for safekeeping, others into a file to be officially registered in his expense log. Some might have been personal items, other things bought for work.
He did that with his message transcripts, and now, if the recollection he was holding in his mind were in any way real, then there should be a transcript of it, and right there in his special drawer. He opened it with some trepidation, afraid of what he might find. On the surface, he was moving with the urgency of a detective, trying to find that scrap of evidence to prove his case in an otherwise overlooked pile of documents. On the other hand, he was chiding himself, berating himself as his unsteady finders flipped through the stacked papers. Then the internal argument stopped. He found what he was looking for, and his hand was literally shaking as he pulled it from the drawer, staring at the words, unbelieving: Nikolin, Nikolin, Nikolin… you lose!
He closed his eyes, thinking he might again open them and find the message gone, or simply saying something else, but when he looked again those five stubborn words were still there, taunting him, a transcript of a memory he could simply not fit anywhere in the chronology of his life. And yet, as the awareness increased, he began to see that this phantom message had its own place in another sequence of events, that there were memories before it, and others that came after, and that they all conspired to present an alternate chronology of lived events, one, by one, by one….
Now he looked at the date on the transcript, again seeing there the impossible. It was the message sent by Orlov, tapped out in Morse one night after he broke into a telegraph station while drunk in Cartagena. He had jumped ship on the KA-226, and was at large in Spain, and that errant signal had been a vital moving event, a Pushpoint, a trigger setting events in motion that ended up changing everything, the entire world, every lived event.
Yet the longer he stared at it, the more that other life in his head solidified. Now there were two Nikolins, two versions of himself, a schizophrenic duality in his mind that made him queasy at first. He put the message in his pocket, needing to hold onto it, in spite of the impulse to simply throw it away, run from it, deny it ever existed at all. That would be the easy course to steer, throw it away, destroy it, and with it the reality of all those other recollections. Denial was a reflexive defense mechanism, a guardian at the door of his mind, there to preserve the calm order and inner decorum that he could call his sanity. If he simply threw the message away, then he wouldn’t have to face this dilemma any longer. He could return to his old self, send another riddle to Tasarov, plan how he might wheedle a second cinnamon roll from the ship’s galley, return to the history novel he had been reading in his quarters. He could forget this ever happened.
No, he could not forget. The memories were too strong, their numbers too great, like an army that had surrounded the keep of his mind. It had been out there all along, he realized now, digging trenches in a quiet siege, building its engines to break down the walls. Now the gate of the castle was beaten down, and the horde was storming in.
The message was dated August of 1942, another impossibility, but one he had to pardon. He had come to accept the impossible as everyday reality. The ship was here, in that very year, as astounding as that still seemed to him when he actually thought about it. Life aboard Kirov seemed the same here as it might have if the ship were on a standard deployment out of Severomorsk. He could look out at the ocean, and it looked like the same ocean they had been sailing in in 2021. There was nothing but the sea, in every direction, nothing but the sea and sky.
The date on that message was very recent, and try as he might, he could not remember ever recording it, or ever slipping it into that drawer—at least not in the mind he had been living in before those barbarian memories stormed his castle. It was all so very strange and disconcerting. As soon as his shift ended, he found himself hastening below decks, and his feet unerringly led him to the one place of refuge he had often sought when things went wrong. He knocked on the door of the sick bay, grateful that there was no line outside.
“Come,” came the familiar voice of Doctor Zolkin, and he took a deep breath, entering through the hatch.
“Ah, Mister Nikolin,” said Zolkin. “Come in. What is it today? Another headache?”
It was so much more than that, thought Nikolin, but how could he explain any of this to the Doctor? “No sir… I’m not quite sure. It’s very confusing.”
“What is confusing?”
“My… My mind, sir. I’m all mixed up.”
That got Zolkin’s attention, and he put down some instruments he had been ready to sterilize and turned, his studied eye on the young officer. “Suppose you sit down and tell me about it,” he said, his voice calm and reassuring. Zolkin had that way with the men. He was one part Physician, one part Psychologist, and a kind of grandfather figure to them all in one.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Nikolin. He did not know where to begin. Then he just came out with it. “Doctor, I was at my station just now, when I suddenly remembered something, not just one thing, but a torrent of things, as if I had suddenly remembered a whole other life that I had completely forgotten!”
“A torrent of things? You mean memories?”
“Exactly, sir—memories of things that I just can’t understand… I mean, I remember things, but then I can’t fit them into my life here at all. Its very confusing.”
“What kind of things?”
“Events, sir, just memories that you might have of anything, only some of these memories are fairly intense. The only thing is, I don’t see where or when they could have happened.”
“I see,” said Zolkin, paying more attention now. “Can you give me an example?”
Nikolin reached right into his pocket and pulled out the message, explaining what it was to Zolkin, and how he had stowed it away in that special drawer. “But sir,” he concluded. “This is dated just last month, but I never got such a message. It’s from Chief Orlov, and he was right here on the ship at that time. So how could he be sending me something like this on the radio when he was right here? It makes no sense.”