John Schettler - 1943

“But not Orlov,” said Karpov. “Why is he an exception to the rule? I suppose it doesn’t surprise me on one level. Orlov was a loose cannon.”

“Yet he would get somewhere,” said Fedorov. “In fact, he should have reached the top of that stairway—the upper landing on the 2nd floor, but perhaps at a different time.”

“He hasn’t shown up since you arrived,” said Karpov. “I’ve had men posted there round the clock, and my brother has ringed that inn with three concentric circles of security. Speaking of him, there’s another little fly in your ointment. How could both my brother and I shift forward together? I’m willing to bet that was never considered by this Kamenski either.”

“I’m beginning to see your point,” said Fedorov, still thinking about Orlov. “What if he went much farther forward. We already know he can’t reach a time where he already exists, and he’s been here since the ship arrived in late July of 1941—the Second Coming.”

He remembered trying to explain that to Tyrenkov when he asked him to keep his ear to the ground for any sign of Orlov… this particular fissure through time has been very consistent. The connection it makes to 1908 has persisted over decades. Orlov was going up the stairs, and any movement in that direction has always produced a movement forward in time. Who knows where he may end up, but I think it will have to be a time after the arrival of our ship, and after the time we vanished over the hypocenter of Tunguska…

“And as I told you, Orlov remembers the first arrival as well. I asked Tyrenkov to use his intelligence network to look for him. Any luck with that?”

“Not yet,” said Karpov. “This argues that he’s ahead of us in the chronology, correct?”

“That would be my best guess,” said Fedorov. “But where? We won’t be able to discover anything about his whereabouts from here if that is the case. Everybody leaves an impression on history—everybody. The record glorifies some, deprecates others, but we all leave a mark somewhere. To search for evidence of his existence and whereabouts, we would have to reach a time beyond the one where he arrives. That is, at least, one more argument for moving forward now, and not remaining here.”

“Perhaps,” said Karpov. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Orlov just yet. As you say, he’ll blunder in sometime, and probably fall right into my security on that upper landing one of these days. Forget about him. We’ll eventually apprehend him, but that still won’t solve all our other problems, getting everyone else forward with us, including Ivan Volkov.”

“No… I suppose it won’t.”

“So you see, trying to run off on another wild bear hunt for Orlov is yesterday’s news, Fedorov. We’ve already done that, and trying to do it again won’t bag us Volkov. Frankly, the only way we’ll get to him will be in the here and now. He’s the real threat. Mark my words. Tyrenkov has already discovered that he is passing plans for advanced aircraft designs to the Japanese, including assistance for their Okha Rocket program. He knows the entire future, at least as it was once written. So he knows how and why Japan loses. What if he starts assisting other weapons programs? What if he tries to give Tojo, or God forbid, Adolph Hitler, the bomb?”

“I see your point,” said Fedorov. “We could still try to get to him by other means.”

“Ilanskiy? We’ve been over that. If we eliminate Volkov in 1908, assuming we could even find him there, then who knows what happens to this time line? With him gone, there’s no Orenburg Federation, and time would then have to reset everything here, millions of individual fate lines. It would bring everything down like the twin towers.”

“We visualize that as utter chaos and catastrophe,” said Fedorov, “but it might not happen that way. If Mother Time was kind enough to allow us to keep our heads full of the things we’ve done here, we might simply wake up one morning and find ourselves in a completely different world, a different meridian of time, a different war.”

“But not the one from your history books,” said Karpov. “We’re too far off course to ever get that back, particularly with Sergei Kirov doing what he did to Josef Stalin. You see, none of this matters. We can shuffle the deck any way we please here, have it any way you like it, and it will simply be a new arrangement of things, a different set of cards to play out—but play them out we must. You were so dead set on restoring things to accord with your history in the beginning, but that was just another poker hand, the same as this one.”

“But it was the original time line,” said Fedorov.

“Was it?” Karpov smiled. “A moment ago you told me that this Elena Fairchild was a member of the Watch, the group Admiral Tovey founded to look for us. Well now, that ship was right there in 2021, the same year and time line where we were when Kirov first sortied. In fact, it was headed for the Black Sea while I was in the Pacific fighting with Captain Tanner and the American 7th Fleet. So how could she be a member of the Watch, and getting predictions about 9/11? That group wasn’t founded until we shifted back.”

Fedorov raised both eyebrows this time. “Well by that time we had already shifted back, and then returned to Vladivostok. So our history was already influenced by the things we did in the past on that first loop. Yes, Tovey did establish the Watch, and that had to be one of the effects that migrated forward.”

“You’re saying that this Miss Fairchild was just minding her own business, herding her little oil tankers around for love and profit, and then one day she wakes up and realizes she is now a member of this nefarious group? She realizes that she is privy to everything we did in the past? That may be so, but I think otherwise. I’ll bet that if you asked her whether she was in this group on the day we sortied, she would affirm that. If so, that can mean only one thing: that meridian was already altered.”

“What? But how? Who could have caused it?”

“I don’t think our disappearance may have been the first instance of travel through time, it may be that we did all this before; perhaps many times before. Who can say?”

“Then why don’t we remember those instances. You and I remember the first loop, and here we are in the second. If there was anything prior, why wouldn’t we remember it?”

“Who knows, Fedorov? I could come up with many reasons. Perhaps the ship went back earlier, but did not survive. Dead men don’t have memories. It may be that someone else is responsible—someone else moving in time.”

“That’s a rather ominous assumption.”

“Possibly. All I’m saying is this. If the Watch existed before we first left Severomorsk, then it did so because that sortie was not the first. You can say that Fairchild just suddenly realizes she’s a Watchstander, but I think otherwise. So you see? If I’m correct, then the world we were living in wasn’t even the original history. All your books were already altered, even though you believed them to be the gospel truth. The deck had already been shuffled. That’s a little humbling, isn’t it? There we were, thinking we were the founding fathers for all these changes, and all the effort to set things right was for naught. What if that world was just one of many? What if this loop business has been going on for some time, and our recollection can only go back so far, perhaps one or two loops? After all, there’s only so much room in your head.”

Fedorov did not quite know what to make of that. His theory may have been correct, but Karpov made a good point. Taking his view, it really didn’t matter what they did here. Things would resolve one way or another. Yet something in him still resisted the very presence of the ship and crew here, displaced in time, aliens, weeds blown in to infest the Devil’s Garden. Seeing things the way Karpov did seemed to resolve one of any responsibility for that. Karpov simply saw himself as one more agent of change, just like the Demon Volcano, or Krakatoa, or any of the other key players on this stage.