John Schettler - Paradox Hour

Quietly, and with little fanfare, he set it on the nightstand, breathing deeply, and taking what might have been thought of as a last look around the quiet room, if anyone had been there to see him.

Fedorovtramped back to the officer’s mess, disappointed that he had not found the Director available to consult with him on the predicament they now found themselves in. Along the way, he stopped off at the ship’s Purser to see if other accommodations might have been made for Kamenski. There his evening took another turn for the worse.

“I’m sorry sir, who is the crewman you are enquiring about?”

“Not a crewman, Mister Belov, a special guest—Director Kamenski. He was quartered in the officer’s reserve cabin opposite Admiral Volsky, but he doesn’t seem to be there. Has he been relocated?”

Belov looked at his clipboard, then went over to his desk and keyed something on a computer. “Sorry Captain, I have no listing under that name. In fact. I’m showing the reserve cabin as presently unoccupied.”

“Unoccupied? Well I was just there the other day conferring with the man. He’s been quartered there for months!”

“Not according to my records, sir. We had the British Admiral Cunningham there for a night when we were in Alexandria, but no one has been assigned there since.”

Fedorov gave the man a stern look, frustrated. We can’t even keep the guest roster straight on this ship, he thought, somewhat annoyed. Clearly the Purser must have slipped in making this data entry. Then something occurred to him, and instead of pressing the matter here, he stepped out into the corridor, and found the nearest intercom station.

“This is the Captain. Will Director Pavel Kamenski please report to the officer’s dining hall. I repeat. Director Kamenski—please report to the officer’s dining hall. That is all.”

He looked at Belov, still annoyed, and moved on.

Yet he would sit in the dining hall for the next half hour, picking at a slice of Natalka, a layered Russian cake he was fond of, and lucky enough to find available tonight for dessert. Kamenski never arrived.

“May I join you, sir?”

It was Nikolin, down from the bridge for his meal shift. “Please do,” said Fedorov. “Though I must say, I’m not in the best of moods, Mister Nikolin.”

“Me neither, sir. I’ve been feeling very strange of late.”

“We all have. These time shifts are very disconcerting. This latest event was uncontrolled, and I think more than the ship was bent and warped when we moved. But you look very glum, Nikolin. Why such a long face?”

“I can’t really say, sir. I was at my post an hour ago, and something very strange happened. It’s a bit of a riddle, literally.”

“What do you mean.”

“Well sir, I play with riddles… It has neither eyes nor ears, but it leads the blind. Things like that.”

Fedorov smiled. “What’s the answer? I thought of a seeing eye dog, but it clearly has both ears and eyes.”

“A walking stick,” said Nikolin, seeming a little more himself for a moment. Then a squall of what Fedorov might only interpret as sadness seemed to sweep over him, and his eyes had a distant look.

“I play riddles with anyone I can find,” he said. “And sometimes I will send them over the ship’s private text messaging system,” he confessed. “I was checking those file archives as part of the general diagnostic you ordered on all ship’s equipment… and I found something.”

“What Nikolin? You look upset.”

“I am, sir, but it feels like my roof has caved in— Choknutyj.” That was an untranslatable Russian word for crazy, and Fedorov could understand how anyone on the ship might feel that way just now. “When Karpov was here—during that last incident on the bridge,” said Nikolin, “I caught part of the radio transmission on a recording when the Admiral was ordering the Captain to stand down. I didn’t know what to do, but I had been sending riddles to someone on the text messaging system, and I used it to give warning of what was happening. I ran across the very message I sent in my system check, by chance I suppose. It was very upsetting. The station number was listed, and the crew member’s code comes right after that for message routing. I had been playing the game, sending riddles to that same code earlier that day, so I looked it up.” He gave Fedorov a puzzled look. “There’s no one assigned to that code sir. It was void—designated unused.”

“Perhaps you got the number wrong,” Fedorov suggested.

“No sir. The code was on numerous text messages I sent that day, always the same number, and these are permanent assignments, like a person’s email address. Yet when I queried the database the code was unassigned.”

“You are certain of this number?”

“001-C-12.” Nikolin rattled off the number from memory. “I know it as easily as my old street address. 001 is for main bridge stations. Sub-codes C-10 through C-12 are for personnel serving at the sonar station.”

“Velichko?

“No sir, his number is C-11. I double checked that.”

“I see… So you say you have messages in the archive sent to C-12, but no one has that number? Then you found a glitch in the system, Nikolin. Good for you! This could be a clue. We will have to give the electronics a deeper look. If this data was not stored properly, or perhaps written wrong by the system, then other things could be amiss as well. I discovered a problem with the Purser’s data just a little while ago.”

“I suppose so sir, but you don’t understand…” Nikolin had a tormented look on his face now. “When I saw that number, it was as though something broke inside me, and I remembered. 001-C-12. The number kept after me. I knew it meant something—someone, but I could not remember who it was. Then this feeling came over me that is hard to describe. I felt so sad, as though I had lost a brother—my best friend. That’s when it hit me, Captain. My best friend! Yes, I knew who had that number now—I could see his face, hear his voice, remember. It all came back, and I remembered he had been taken ill—just a little while ago sir. So I went looking for him. I went down to sick bay and asked the Doctor about him, but he had no idea who I was talking about!”

“Well who are you talking about?”

“Alexi, sir. Alexi Tasarov! I can’t find him! I’ve looked all over the ship!” There was a pleading look on his face now, very troubled and bothered.

“You can’t find him?” Now Fedorov realized he had been sitting there waiting for Director Kamenski for the last 45 minutes. Something about Nikolin’s travail suddenly struck him like a hammer.”

“You can’t find him? Have you gone to his quarters?” His mind offered up the next logical step in solving that simple puzzle, but even as he did so, he had the feeling that the missing piece meant something much, much more than it seemed on the surface. Nikolin was sitting there, telling him he’d lost his best friend—telling him he could not find this man Tasarov…

Fedorov knew every man that served in a main bridge station, with no exceptions, but he had no recollection of this name—Tasarov…

Until that very moment.

Something gurgled and bubbled up from deep within him, not the boiled stew and tomatoes he had for dinner an hour earlier, but from some deep inner place that seemed almost primal, an old, lost memory, emerging to the forefront of his consciousness.

Yes… Tasarov! Alexi Tasarov, the man with the best ears in the fleet! His eyes widened with the recollection, and he could see the man even now in his mind, sitting quietly in his chair, the big headphones like ear muffs on his head, sandy hair protruding from the round rim of his cap, lost in the sound field, or perhaps surreptitiously listening to music when the ship was in a situation where no undersea threats might be possible.