John Schettler - Kirov III - Pacific Storm

“Yes, well I went out on a limb to bring you this material, Turing, because I believe exactly that. Now what do you make of it all?”

Turing looked at the photos in his hand again. “Unless I am completely mistaken as to my interpretation of these photos, then we are faced with yet another profound mystery here, sir.”

“ Could you be mistaken, Professor?”

Turing smiled. “Not today…”

“Of course. Then how does a ship move that distance in a single day? After I spoke with you at the Admiralty I gave considerable thought to what you were telling me about these wonder weapons used by this ship. Yes, they were at least graspable. We’ve known about rocketry and such for centuries. Yet both you and I know that the rockets we saw used in the North Atlantic and the Med were clearly a cut above anything we have in development now.”

“Clearly.”

“Yes…well the rockets I can live with, Professor. But a ship that can move about willy nilly and travel such distances is something else entirely—an impossibility I am not able to grasp in any wise.”

“I’ll agree with you on that, sir,” said Turing. “No ship could move that distance in space in a single day. No ship could vanish from the North Atlantic and appear in the Med a year later, only to vanish yet again. These things are all impossibilities, but if these photos are indeed Geronimo then it moved there some other way, sir, and there is only one explanation I can now offer you, strange as it may sound.”

“I’ve become more willing to entertain the impossible since all this business began, professor. Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Well sir, the ship would have to move in time . It’s the only thing that might account for this sudden disappearance and reappearance half a world away.” He stared at Tovey, the two men locking eyes for some time until it was clear to them both that they had hold of the same elephant now.

“You’ve held this view earlier, but said nothing about it.”

“I had my suspicions, sir,” said Turing, “but it didn’t seem as though I might have any luck conveying an idea like this to Admiral Pound.”

“You were trying to put me on to it, weren’t you—in that last conversation we had after the meeting at the Admiralty.”

“I was, sir. Without coming right out with it. You see they pay us to reach for certainty here, not fanciful speculation. They listen to us because they want facts, not imagination. I had very grave doubts about this ship from the moment I first set eyes on it. We’ve gone round and round on it, eliminating it from one navy after another. The conclusion I was coming to was not likely to be well received, and I must say, Admiral Tovey, that I am already shunned in many circles as it is. Somewhat of a dreamer, they say of me. Somewhat of a peculiar odd fool is perhaps what they really mean. Well they can say what they will. When they can crack the Enigma code on their own let them play me for a fool. Our own Sherlock Holmes would give me some comfort when he said that once you have eliminated every other possible option, what you are left with must be the truth, as impossible as it may seem. Things move in two ways, Admiral. They move in space and they move in time . Now, while we’re accustomed to moving there and back again in space, travel in time has been stubbornly in one direction—forward—until this ship appeared in the Norwegian Sea a year ago. Not a German ship, as we now know. Not an Italian or French ship, and now it’s half a world away fighting with the Japanese!”

“Moving in time? Well I have to say that the notion did cross my mind—one for the likes of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, eh? Yet how can I believe this, Turing? It’s astounding!”

“Can you explain it any other way, sir?”

At this Tovey frowned, clearly perplexed. “They hit us at Darwin,” he said, steering a new compass heading for the moment and hoping to find safer waters.

“Yes, sir. I did hear that as well.”

“Then let me share a little more, Professor,” Tovey smiled, hoping to give the young man the comfort of confederacy. “You see, I had the opportunity to have a little chat with the Admiral commanding this phantom ship, and it was most enlightening. First off, your suspicions expressed earlier were correct. The man was Russian. His crew was Russian, and I am led to believe that his ship was Russian built as well.”

“Another impossibility,” said Turing, “at least at present. The existing Soviet Union could not build anything like that ship.”

“Quite so, but no more confounding than what you have just suggested, Professor. A ship moving in time? Funny thing is this…The man disavowed any affiliation with Stalin and the Soviet Union. In fact he was quite pointed about it—claimed Stalin would not have the slightest inkling that his ship even existed. Yet he knew of Churchill’s meeting, at that very moment, in the Kremlin. That was most revealing. Very few people knew of that arrangement, even in the highest circles here, yet he spoke about it as if… well as if it were—”

“As if it were history,” Turing cut in, a gleam in his eye.

“Exactly!” Tovey had hold of the teacup now, and there was nothing more to do with it but drink. “In fact he spoke of the war, our ‘world war’ as he called it, as if it were history as well. When I pressed him with the fact that Russia was our ally and asked him to throw in with us, he said something very odd—that Russia was our ally for the moment . He told me things change, hinting that arrangement might not be stable. At first I took that as a warning that Stalin may be ready to switch sides and join Hitler. Perhaps this man and his ship were the vanguard of that decision. But Churchill has come to some very different conclusions after his meeting in Moscow.”

“I think we can safely keep Russia on our side of the fence for the time being,” said Turing. “But who knows how this war ends, sir? Who knows what the world will look like ten years from now, twenty years, fifty?”

“This man seemed to think he knew,” said Tovey. “I pressed him on his port of origin, yet he would say nothing, even suggesting the question was dangerous to ask. At one point he gestured to the fortifications above us on the cliff and asked me how I might explain my battle fleet to the Moors that built them. Then he said he could no more explain his presence here in a way I could comprehend, and that he was just trying to get his ship home again, wherever that was. Believe me, all I could think of at that point was this Captain Nemo.”

Turing smiled. “There was more to that than you might think, sir. Nemo may be a good image for this man, though it doesn’t sound as though he was vengeful.”

“Quite the contrary,” said Tovey, scratching the back of his head. “He seemed most accommodating, very sincere. I wanted to believe everything he told me. Well, that bit about the Moors… I thought about it for some time. It was as if the man was suggesting he had come from some far future.”

Turing sighed, greatly relieved. “That is, in point of fact, what I am now suggesting,” he said with confidence. “Consider it, Admiral. His ship is a marvel of engineering, highly advanced, so powerful that it held the whole Royal Navy at bay in the Atlantic, not to mention the American fleet as well. It sees us before we know it is even there, and it flings weapons at us we won’t be able to manufacture or deploy for decades—yes, decades . It used a working atomic weapon of enormous power, something we all know is in development, but not nearly ready for deployment. Yes, that’s very hush, hush, but things do get around in the circles I frequent. The real point is this: something like that would take the resources of a major power to design and build, and yet if any nation tried it, we would surely know about it. I was very pointed in telling you that earlier, hoping to jog your thinking along these very lines. You see… none of this made sense when we assumed this ship came from our world, from the here and now reality of this war. Yet it paints an entirely different picture when we make a different assumption—that this ship was built in the future —yes, built by the Russians I suppose, but not by any Russian engineer alive in 1942, that I can assure you.”