John Schettler - Hammer of God

“1942-to a time after the stairway was rebuilt. That is where I must ultimately get myself. The years ahead are… problematic for me. I must find a way to avoid certain dates in the chronology-dates when I was already alive aboard my ship. But I see my experiment failed.”

“But you can get home, sir. The stairway leads all the way to your time!”

“I have always known that,” said Karpov quickly. “Otherwise how did Volkov get here? But I cannot get to any safe place there, Tyrenkov. I was in that world, fighting the Americans in the Pacific before I took the journey that eventually brought me here. So if I go up those steps, I must appear after I vanished from those years, and the war began in earnest at that time. I saw a glimpse of it, the utter destruction of Kansk, as I told you. Beyond that time I have also seen what happens to the world, and it is not pretty. It is no place to live. So you see, Tyrenkov, I am condemned to live out my days here in the past, if I want any semblance of a comfortable life, or if I ever hope to reap the harvest of what I know of days ahead. My only problem here are the days I already lived in the 1940s, like landmines on the road ahead for me if I ever do get back to that decade. That and the fact that I have enemies there-men like Volkov who know entirely too much.”

Now Tyrenkov smiled. “Sir,” he said. “I have some news you will be very interested to hear.”

“Oh? Out with it. What have you learned?”

“While I was at that window, I told you a train pulled into the station. I watched the passengers exit, and I saw a group of uniformed men, clearly military, and security personnel. I could tell it immediately from the way they moved and acted, the way they surveyed the surroundings, watchful, looking at all the passengers. It was immediately clear to me that they were searching for someone, and the odd thing is this-their uniforms looked very much like yours!”

“Like mine? You mean my service jacket?”

“Yes sir, the one you often talk to near the collar. A man appeared, tall, grey haired, clearly the officer in charge of this group, and he was doing the same thing-talking to his collar. So I immediately lunged for that stairway to get back here as quickly as I could. Don’t you see, sir? You told me that there were men searching for that associate of yours-the man named Fedorov. Isn’t that what Volkov told you?”

The light of shock and awareness was in Karpov’s eyes now.

“Volkov!” he said jubilantly. “You believe you saw Ivan Volkov and his security team arriving at Ilanskiy!”

“Yes sir,” Tyrenkov beamed.

“Why didn’t you stay to try and verify this?”

“That would have been very foolish. For one thing, I would be clearly out of place in that environment, and immediately suspect. But more importantly, I already knew that if that was Volkov and his security detail, then they were eventually going to search this inn. So I got back here as quickly as I could, to end my time line in that moment. Every second I spent there was a second I could not use when I go back.”

“When you go back?”

“Of course, sir. You see, we no longer have to waste days, weeks and months trying to find Volkov here in 1909, because now we know exactly where he is, and before he even traveled to the past! So I wanted every second possible available to me. I’ll need all the time there I can get, because next time I go up those steps, I can take a nice sniper rifle with me, and kill him-kill him right after he steps off that train, and from that very window!”

My god, thought Karpov. Tyrenkov is correct! If that is Volkov as he suspects, than we have the bastard-I’ve got him at my mercy now, at long last. Tyrenkov can do exactly that! He can go right back up those stairs and gun him down…

Yet even as he thought all this, his elation faded, replaced by that strange sense of impending doom again. Suppose I order Tyrenkov to do this. What then? What happens to the world they came from, the world where he spent those years from 1938 scratching his way into the position of power he now held in Siberia?

If I kill Volkov here, then he never goes back… He never outmaneuvers Denikin, and it is then very likely that Sergei Kirov prevails over the Whites, and the Orenburg Federation never arises. That may be a most desirable outcome, insofar as our homeland is concerned. But how does it all happen? How do all the chess pieces suddenly get to new squares in the middle of the game?

He thought, and thought. What should I do? How does this affect my own personal line of fate? Does Siberia remain independent, or does Kirov defeat Kolchak as well, and unite the entire country as the Soviet Union? If all else holds true, and I arrive at Vladivostok as I did in 1938, then what? I would have to do a great deal more there to achieve the position I have now, and I would have the tall shadow of Sergei Kirov looming over me the whole time.

A queasy feeling stirred in his stomach now. When he first arrived here in 1909, he realized he was perhaps the most powerful man alive on earth. Yes, Volkov was here, but still unknowing, perhaps still wandering about in a fog. Sergei Kirov was here, but still a young buck, and easily managed given all I know. Yes. He was the most powerful man alive, a demigod. He could shape the contours of the world from this day forward… He had come to the edge of a cliff in his mind, a precipice of doubt yawning beneath his feet. He had the power to change everything, but what to do?

Strangely, it was the words of an English poet that suddenly ran through his mind now, Alfred Lord Tennyson… “ Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change!”

He decided.