“That is quite odd,” said Zolkin. “What does it mean, Mister Nikolin? Have you determined that?”
“Yes sir… Well… It was something the Chief said to me once. We were playing cards, not here, not recently, but I still remember it. We were playing cards and he won the final hand, and after that he gave me that big grin of his and said this, shaking his head the way he does, Nikolin, Nikolin, Nikolin… you lose. Well Doctor, I got that message—at least that’s what I remember now. It came over the radio in Morse, and when I decoded it, I realized it had to be from the Chief. I mean—who else could have said that, but… I’m all mixed up sir, I can’t remember receiving such a message recently, but look at the date. I should remember it. I do in one side of my head, but I don’t in the other.”
“I see,” said Zolkin. “You say you remember receiving that, but yet have no recollection of when it happened. It that it?”
“Something like that sir… It’s as if…”
“As if what?”
“As if I had two versions of events in my mind now, two lives. I have memories of two separate lives all jumbled up now, all together in the same head. I tried to explain one of them away—like you would shake off a bad dream that seemed so real that you could swear you actually lived it, a kind of waking dream. I tried to just dismiss it that way, as a bad dream, but it’s too real, too detailed. It isn’t just one memory, but a whole sequence of events, day, to day, to day. And this is from one of them.” He held out the paper, an anguished look on his face.
Now Zolkin was very quiet, thinking, nodding to Nikolin to give him some solace, but thinking, very deeply about something. “You say that came from one of these memories you have, but you cannot account for it.”
“That’s it, sir. But if this is real, then…”
“Then the memory is real.” Zolkin voiced the impossible conclusion that had brought the young officer to him. It would be easy enough to simply summon Chief Orlov, but he wasn’t on the ship. He had gone off with Fedorov on the KA-40, and they had not yet returned. Yet this incident affected him in a very odd way, for he had experienced something very much like this earlier, when he found that bloodied bandage in the special cabinet where he only put things that mattered, keepsakes, mementos, things of importance.
That bloodied bandage…. That was his message in a drawer, and it had picked at the edge of a memory that he could not quite recall, something dark and dangerous with in his mind, lurking, like a burglar that had broken into his home in the night, hidden, stalking, ready to do harm but as yet unseen in the dark.
“Mister Nikolin,” he said. “Something very much like this, happened to me. In fact, it happened to Fedorov as well. He came to me with a story just like this. I suggested it was Déjà vu at first. You know, the feeling that you are living an event you have already experienced. But it was more than that. And just like that message there you pulled from your private drawer, I found something here in my domain that I could not quite account for. So I went searching through my own medical logs, to see if I had made an entry about it, and found a good deal more…. May I ask you something? These memories you say you have in your head now, does one of them have the ship heading south through the Denmark Strait after we first arrived here, and not east to the Pacific?”
“Yes!” Nikolin’s eyes widened, a look of great relief on his face.
Fedorov had explained the anomaly to Zolkin, the list of names he had found, names of men that had all died in combat. It was a list, he told him, that Zolkin himself had compiled and filed away. The Doctor could not remember that, but Fedorov asserted it to be true, and he could recite, chapter and verse, exactly how every man on that list had died, even Lenkov… yes, that ghastly incident written into the record about Lenkov, even though the man was alive and well in the ship’s galley at that very moment. The list, said Fedorov, had been compiled by another version of himself, another Zolkin, from another ship, a phantom ship, yet one so real that it had changed all history.
Now Zolkin remembered that visit from Fedorov again, and the incredible revelations the Starpom had come out with. Fedorov claimed this exact same thing, that the ship had turned south, entering the Denmark Strait, and logged another history that was quite different from the journey they were on now. He could still hear Fedorov’s words… “I am the man who was at sea in the Atlantic, in May of 1941 when we made that final shift. I am not simply Fedorov, remembering things I once lived through. I’m the man who lived out each and every one of those moments, and up on the bridge, Karpov is the same.”
Then Fedorov came out with that word as he explained Karpov—doppelganger, double walker, another version of yourself at large in the world. Was Nikolin remembering things his own doppelganger had lived and experienced? Is that what had happened to Fedorov? He had believed Fedorov when he came to him with that impossible story, and largely because of the strange evidence he had uncovered, that bloodied bandage, that list of dead men’s names buried in his files. Those things were not the assertions or testimony of a man, which could be colored as he wished. They were real and tangible things, almost as if they were remnants from the world Fedorov claimed he lived through.
Now, here was Nikolin, a folded paper in hand, yet another remnant, just like that bloodied bandage. And here he came with a story that sounded exactly like the one Fedorov had told him. He asked another question.
“Mister Nikolin… Do you see that bandage there in the cabinet—the one with the blood stain? I have been trying to determine where that blood came from, as we’ve had no serious incidents, even with all the shooting that’s been going on here. But just when we were turning east, Mister Fedorov told me something about it—said that it was mine, with my blood on it. Might you remember anything about it?”
Nikolin swallowed. “Yes sir,” he began. “This will sound crazy to you, but I remember that you wore a bandage like that on your arm. You were wounded, sir.”
“Wounded?” Zolkin was fishing for more. He wanted Nikolin to come out with the same story Fedorov had shared with him. “How would that have happened?”
“Karpov…” Just one word from Nikolin sent Zolkin’s heart beating faster. “On the bridge, sir. It’s one of the things I remember. There was a battle on, and Rodenko was trying to get Karpov to stop. You were there, sir, and… well… I remember the Captain pulled out a pistol and shot you in the arm. It just grazed you, but your arm was bandaged up for a few weeks after. I know it sounds crazy sir, but I can remember it as clear as I remember shaving this morning. Only I can’t fit it into any of the days we’ve lived out here since we arrived. See what I mean now? Am I going crazy?”
Chapter 32
Zolkin just stared at him, eyes wide, a feeling of profound disquiet falling over him. Nikolin recounted the exact same incident that Fedorov had asserted. “Did Fedorov tell you this?” He asked the most obvious question.
“Sir? No. He has never spoken to me about that.”
“You’re certain?”
“He wouldn’t have to tell me that, sir. I was there when it happened. I saw what the Captain did—everyone saw it, Rodenko, all the other officers on the watch that day.”
“Only none of them have come in to tell me this,” said Zolkin. “None, except you and Fedorov.”
“Fedorov? He knew about it?”
“He told me this exact same thing, and I told him I believed him. But by god, if I was the man shot in the arm, why in God’s name can’t I remember it? I’ve got snatches of all this in my mind, fragments, but they won’t come out and face me.” He was talking to himself now more than Nikolin. Now he looked at the young officer. “How long have you known these things?”