John Schettler - Altered States

“Alright, sir. I’ll get to work at once.” Nikolin was up and to his station, back under his headset where he lived each day in the world of dots, dashes and radio waves.

“It’s a pity Admiral Tovey is in the Med,” said Volsky. “ I think that before we are discovered again it might be good to arrange another little meeting.”

“With Tovey, sir?”

“I think he is a man I can reason with.”

“Well, yes sir, but he will have no knowledge or recollection of us at all. You met him in 1942, years from now.”

“Yes, and that is a pity. We will have to begin all over here.”

“And there’s one other thing, Admiral. If we cannot use these control rods to shift again soon, I’m still worried about what happens to us a year from now when Kirov is supposed to arrive here for the first time.”

Kamenski raised his heavy grey brows at that. “Well, Mister Fedorov. This is now the first time, isn’t it? Something tells me this is not the same world you shifted into in July of 1941-certianly not with Russia divided as you believe. Something tells me that the mirror is already badly cracked, and the world we see reflected in it may be very different now, in spite of the near picture perfect replaying of the events concerning that convoy we stumbled upon.”

“Well, gentlemen, the world took a spin and here we are.” Volsky put his finger on the heart of the matter. “Now any suggestions on what we should do?”

The world was indeed not the same. Kamenski’s instinct had been correct. It had spun off its axis long ago, when Japan had decided to punish Russia for the losses they sustained in 1908 and invaded to seize all of Sakhalin Island and occupy Vladivostok. Karpov’s dream was dashed, and instead of inhibiting Imperial Japan, Kirov’s intervention only catalyzed the rise of that empire. Soon all of Manchukuo was re-occupied by Japanese troops, and all of Primorskiy and Amur province as well. Fedorov and Nikolin would now hear things on their radio that were quite shocking, and they all spent some time trying to determine what could have gone wrong.

Yet they knew in their hearts what the real reason was. Too many things had changed; too many transgressions and sins, repented or not. The fatal stroke, however, was not the work of the man named Karpov. It was not the heedless abandon with which he flung the might at his disposal against the world, shattering fate and time even as he broke and burned the armored hulls of so many ships he faced in combat. His bold appraisal, that he was the man Fate must bow to, was mere braggery, the boastful ambition of a broken soul.

Nor was it the work of Gennadi Orlov, who’s self-centered vendetta had ended the life of Commissar Molla, and in so doing gave life to thousands who might have died under Molla’s cruel regime, and tens of thousands more that would be born from those who escaped his malicious influence.

Men had died that might have lived, and other men stood alive who should be in their graves. Yet none among them, the living or the dead, had the power to really work the change either. They lived their humdrum lives, ate, played, married, worked and died, yet none had the power to shift the lever beneath the ponderous weight of history.

No, it was a quiet whisper on the upper landing of the back stairway at the railway inn of Ilanskiy. That was the final stroke, and it had been delivered by the a man who had set his mind and heart to the preservation of the past he had studied and so loved. There, in that wild, unexpected moment as he looked into Mironov’s eyes, Anton Fedorov succumbed to the folly of an inner desire for justice and good.

He had tried to set things right in the long journey west along the Trans-Siberian rail, though he knew his intervention there had been useless. He sparred with the NKVD, standing up to relieve the harsh conditions imposed on innocent men and women who had been rounded up for the work camps. They had done nothing to deserve the fate that had befallen them, or so Fedorov believed, and he did his part that day to ease their suffering and chastise Lieutenant Surinov in the process.

He could not make an evil man good, he realized. All he could do was stand against him, though the futility of what he accomplished that day had been made plain to him when Sergeant Troyak reminded him they could not place clean straw and fresh water in every train heading east to the camps. The war would go on-Stalin’s war-and there was little they could do to prevent that…until that quiet, desperate whisper that was powerful enough to change everything.

It came like thunder, heralding the storm, that fateful rumble in the night, an echo of the titanic explosion of a vagrant from the deeps of space. Then came that strange walk down those stairs and the encounter with Mironov. That interaction, and the curiosity of the man he knew to be Sergei Kirov, was the decisive moment of change.

It has been said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men to do nothing. In this case it was a good man who did something, for every good reason, and then the history he had so jealously thought to guard came tumbling down, brick by brick, hour by hour, day by day. When Anton Fedorov whispered his warning in Mironov’s ear, he did so in an impulsive moment of hope-the hope to save the life of one good man who might stand against Stalin even as Fedorov had stood against Lieutenant Surinov, and it worked.

It would not be Stalin’s war this time around. The world that Time built after that was altogether new, altered, a changeling doppelganger, a twisted image of the old history in the shattered image of time.

There, trapped in the reflection of that broken mirror, like a stone embedded in the glass, sat a ship, alone on a still and quiet sea. There sat Kirov , named for the man who listened to that whisper of fate, and took it upon himself to take the life of Josef Stalin on a cold dark night in the stony cell of Bayil prison in 1908. That one single act, the flexing of a finger in the night, would change the lives and fates of millions, redraw the borders of nations, and recast the entire political landscape of the world in decades to come. Was it born in Fedorov’s plaintive and desperate whisper, or given life by Mironov’s insatiable curiosity that day?

It did not matter. It was done. And by 1936 when another demon came to power in Germany, things were about to change yet again.

* * *

The Fuehrer looked at Admiral Raeder, his eyes dark and vacant, as if seeing visions of some apocalyptic future, compelling yet dreadful, an inner specter of chaos, war, and the triumph of his dream of Nazi supremacy.

“Yes, yes, yes, I know all about the cruisers, and the U-boats, and destroyers. The battleships, Raeder,” he said. “What about the battleships?”

Grossadmiral Erich Raeder never forgot those eyes. Every time he thought on this meeting they seemed to brand his soul again, haunting him. There was a darkness and a void in them, as if the Fuhrer was some satanic Golem, animated only by the hidden inner energy of his vision. The admiral cleared his throat, expecting this question, ready for it, yet still finding these waters turbulent and fraught with an element of danger. How could he satisfy the seemingly insatiable desires of this man’s blackened heart? He would offer him the moon, but the Fuhrer would reach for the stars.

“We have made considerable progress in our thinking on this issue, my Fuhrer.”

“Progress in your thinking? It is actions I want, Raeder. Not more thinking and planning. Not more talk. Where are the plans? Are the keels being laid? Show me.”

Raeder nodded, maintaining his professional composure in spite of the constant jabbing and almost adolescent urgency in the man before him. His perfect uniform gleamed with honors and decorations earned over a long and distinguished naval career-the Iron Cross, The Order of the Red Eagle, The Cross of Honor, the Order of the Rising Sun, and now the Knight’s Cross. He had worked and sailed his way through every rank in the service, from lowly SeeKadett in 1895, through Oberleutnent, Kapitanleutnant, Kapitan zur See in 1919, and on through every rank of Admiral until he assumed his current post as the Grand Admiral of the entire German fleet this very year. He was the first man to hold that rank since the great von Tirpitz himself. He had fought at Dogger Bank, and at Jutland. He had stood face to face with the best that the Royal Navy could sail, his ship’s guns blackened with the anger of their fire in the heat of battle.