John Schettler - Tigers East

“No,” said Fedorov, “I didn’t make the mistake here, not in 1908 when I first met Mironov. Shocked as I was to see what was happening there, I had the presence of mind to reverse my path and go back up those stairs. The problem was, Mironov got curious, and he followed me.”

“Ah,” said Orlov.

“He came upstairs!” said Troyak, remembering that now, and not guessing about it. His eyes narrowed, for the rest had slipped away like a dream does when you awake in the morning.

Fedorov gave him a sudden look. “Yes, he came up the stairway after me, and I sent him back. But before I did that, I told him something, and that changed everything.”

“What was it?” Orlov was really curious now.

“I told him how he would die—not exactly—but I gave him a warning about Leningrad, about the day he would be assassinated.”

“Sookin Sym!” Orlov gave him a wide grin. “Good job, Fedorov. It looks like he took your advice, because he lived, and he’s a damn sight better than Stalin.”

Now Fedorov lowered his head, the shame heavy on him again. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I suppose he is.”

“So you want to make sure he gets the message,” Orlov guessed. “You want to speak with him again and leave nothing to chance. I Understand now. But Fedorov, how do we get back after this? Have you worked that out yet?”

Fedorov gave him an anguished look. Orlov thought he just wanted to make sure his hero lived. It would never once enter his mind that I had come here to achieve just the opposite—to kill Sergei Kirov with the pistol on my hip. He would never think that of me….

“Get back?” said Fedorov slowly. “Well, the stairway will be right there, won’t it? The last time I went up, it delivered me right back to the time I left—1942—the very same day, only a few hours later. The good Sergeant here said he had been looking for me for some time, though for me, it was only a matter of minutes that passed. I think that stairway works like that. You get right back to where you started, as if you were walking a circle. It always takes you back to where you began.”

“Only this time we didn’t come by the stairs. We got here on this damn airship,” said Orlov. “Will it still work?”

“We can try,” said Fedorov glumly. “We all go together, right up those stairs.”

“What about Symenko and his crew? He’s got 30 men aboard. We gonna all file up those stairs, nuts to butts, like a string of blind men, and then what? Do we all come out in 1942 on the second floor of that inn? Excuse me, party of 35 checking in, but we don’t have a reservation.”

Now that Orlov put it to him that way, Fedorov scratched his head, thinking. Yes, what to do about Symenko and his men? It had been easy enough when he thought it would just be his own small group, but Orlov had painted a fairly difficult picture just now. He was silent for a moment, thinking. Timely cruelty… He had come here to wield that sword, and he could have no scruples if he was actually going to do this. They were knee deep in the borscht now, and he knew he could leave no loose ends here—no dangling threads that would spoil the loom of time in the days ahead.

“I’ll… think of something,” he said, but those thoughts were very dark and troublesome for him.

“Well now,” said Orlov glibly. “This will be like shuffling the deck right in the middle of the goddamn poker game! And guess who is sitting across the table—with a fist full of high cards? That bastard, Karpov, and that ham fisted brute of his, Grilikov, he’s the dealer. What will happen when he catches us in his precious railway inn?”

Fedorov knew more than he could say just then. He hadn’t told Orlov the whole story. The Chief thought he was wanting to make certain Kirov lived, not that he had come there to murder him. The Chief thought Karpov’s security men would be waiting for them at the top of those stairs if they all filed up, and had no inkling that none of that was likely to ever take form and shape if he killed Kirov. If he did what he had come here to do, then the whole world would be different when they climbed those steps. Stalin would be back, the Orenburg Federation likely gone, and Volkov dead or in a gulag if he tried to buck the man of steel. If there was one man who could handle Volkov, it would be Josef Stalin.

So there wouldn’t be any Free Siberian State either, and it would not be likely that Karpov ever seized power there. These airships would have gone the way of many other old inventions of history, and so airship Captains like Symenko, and the Irkutsk itself, would have no place in Stalin’s world. The ship and its crew were here, and that thought caused him some trepidation. How would Time account for them if they did try to return to 1942? They might not have a place in the changed future they would be returning to, and now that he thought of it, the airship itself remained a huge unsolved problem. He certainly could not leave it here, with radio sets, rudimentary radar equipment, WWII era guns and engineering. It would simply have to be destroyed, and he made a mental note to have a talk with Troyak about how they might accomplish that.

There was so much on his list to now. Be careful what you wish for, he thought. I got my wish to get through to Ilanskiy and reach this very time. Well, here I am. Now what do I do?

Theblack rain was behind them now, but the sky was still alight with that strange astral light. It would be seen as far away as Moscow, where the night was illuminated to near daytime brightness. In Europe and England, people saw the horizon lit by a luminescent red glow, and some reported they could read a book by that light in the dead of night. The next hours saw Fedorov’s mind surrounded by so many questions.

He was reasonably sure of the time, believing this was late on the day after Tunguska, July 1, 1908. Now he struggled to remember the events that took place here earlier. Karpov told him they determined their arrival date when the met a clipper ship at sea. That was on July 10, so if he was correct, and they were back on the old Prime Meridian, then Karpov would appear here in a few days—in the Pacific. Then Fedorov appeared here a week later, shifting back with both Orlov, Troyak and others on the Anatoly Alexandrov . They determined that they arrived on 17 July, staying only briefly, and shifting forward again on 19 July to reach the year 2021.

That was when he hatched the plan to use Rod-25 on Kazan and try to return to 1908. It was a bumpy ride, taking them first to 1945, but they eventually shifted back, right on the eve of Karpov’s big showdown with Admiral Togo. That was July 25-26, 1908. So whatever I decide to do here now must be accomplished before Karpov arrives on 17 July. I have a little over two weeks here, and then I must be gone. Otherwise I could never arrive here on the Anatoly Alexandrov as I did. He realized the incredible danger he was in by arriving in this narrow window between his two appearances in 1908. The threat of Paradox loomed like a cold shadow in his mind.

Now his thoughts moved to Mironov. It was likely that he might still be at the railway inn. He told me he was traveling somewhere, but where? Ah, I remember now. He was traveling to visit relatives at Irkutsk. It was just blind chance that he found himself at the railway inn at Ilanskiy on the 30th of June. I researched that time after that encounter. That was right in the middle of the Great Race, the teams of men from various countries trying to race around the globe in a custom auto. In fact, the German team had just arrived at Ilanskiy, behind the Americans by a couple hundred miles. They were staying right there at the inn on the second floor. I bumped into them near the front desk before I retraced my steps up the back stairway. That was when I realized where I was. I saw the calendar at the front desk—1908!