John Schettler - Tigers East

That man had been Fedorov himself, appearing there for the first time after he followed that curious rumbling sound during his hunt for Orlov. Following him up the stairs, Mironov had been apprehended by other soldiers, who took him to this Fedorov, as the man had called himself. While he was gone, to a place he only later came to know as the distant future of 1942, other things were happening at the railway inn.

Byrne, the reporter, had been sent there to cover the Great Race by the industrious owner of the Times of London, Alfred Harmsworth. A few days earlier he had interviewed the leading American team as it came through, and that day, the German team had been staying at that inn, making ready to move on west. Needless to say, the events of that day caused them to linger, but Byrne, hearing them near the front desk, believed they would soon depart. So he thanked his local interpreter with a hearty handshake, wanting to get up to his room on the second floor as soon as possible to gather his belongings.

He had seen Mironov go up the back stairs after that other strange man left them, the one who called himself Fedorov. Then Mironov appeared again, a troubled look of astonishment on his face. He said nothing, striding quickly across the dining hall and out the main entrance by the front desk.

Seeing the doorway still ajar in that nook near the hearth of the dining room, Byrne thought he would go that way to save time, but it was to be a most fateful decision. He started up the dark stairway, feeling very odd half way up, a prickly feeling sweeping over him, and with a sensation of slight nausea. He reckoned it was only the dark confined space, and sudden disorientation as he groped about in the shadows. When he finally reached the top, shuddering to feel the sticky brush of a cobweb on his brow, he heard voices. Trying the door, he found it locked, which was probably why Mironov had made such a hasty retreat, he thought. But rather than simply retreating back down those stairs as Mironov had, he decided to knock, and the sound of his knuckles on the door would reverberate through time like a great boom.

Mironov did not find the door locked on his journey up those stairs. Unbeknownst to him, it had taken him to 1942, where Fedorov and Troyak had collared him, questioning him briefly, before releasing him again. That whispered warning that had haunted Fedorov ever since had been made right there on that upper landing near the door where Byrne heard those voices, but 79 years earlier! For some unaccountable reason, Thomas Byrne’s journey up that stairway took him much farther forward in time, all the way to the year 2021. The voices he had heard were those of the modern day innkeeper and a very diligent Captain in the Russian Naval Intelligence Service, Ivan Volkov. He had been looking for Fedorov along the Trans-Siberian Rail in 2021, ordered to do so by Director Kamenski.

What happened next was a strange twist in the history, which never would have happened were it not for the presence of Thomas Byrne there that hour. Hearing that knock, and Byrne’s voice on the other side of the door, Volkov had forced the very edgy proprietor to unlock the door, seizing upon Byrne as a suspicious character. The pulse of history itself quickened in those moments, for Volkov thought he had found a hidden passage in the inn, and he forced Byrne back down those steps and back into the dining room, where his suspicions were confirmed by the sudden appearance of three men with guns.

These were the NKVD Colonel and another henchman, with Lieutenant Surinov, the officer Fedorov had berated for the poor treatment of prisoners heading east to one of Stalin’s gulags in 1942. Seeing Volkov and Byrne, they immediately apprehended them at gunpoint, and Surinov was asked if this was the man that had caused all his trouble. The uniform was similar, but Surinov was not certain. The violence that followed that interrogation stunned Byrne, with Volkov gunning down all three of his captors and then seizing Byrne again, determined that he was behind some nefarious plot here.

“You!” Volkov pointed his weapon at Byrne. “Come with me.”

The Captain prodded him, goading him up the main stairway to the second floor this time, until they reached the upper landing.

“Where is the room you were staying in?”

“There, sir… The second door on the right, I think.” Byrne was very confused, frightened, and could not imagine who this man was, though his garb looked much like the uniform worn by that other man they had encountered, the man named Fedorov.

His captor forced open the door to his room, easing in carefully before he pushed Byrne inside. “Russian Naval Intelligence!” he shouted, leaping in behind him, but the room was dark and silent. Byrne was very surprised to see that none of his things were there, and he immediately thought that he had pointed out the wrong room in his haste and fear. The bed was facing the wrong direction, the bed clothing all different, the curtains on the window gone, the oil lamp on the night stand missing. He was, in fact, standing in the correct room, number 214, but it would never enter his head that it was the year 1942 at that moment.

His captor’s eyes narrowed as he methodically scanned the nightstand, made up bed, and then he walked to inspect the closet and restroom to make certain no one was concealed there.

“Well it doesn’t seem that anyone has stayed in this room for some time.” The suspicion was obvious in his tone. “Very well, come with me. Let’s find that old proprietor and see what he has to say about things. What was your name again?”

“Thomas Byrne, sir. I’m a Reporter for the London Times—just here to cover the great race, sir.”

“Well, Mister Byrne, your name should be on the register of this inn, yes? You had better hope I find it there. Now move!”

They were out into the hall, very near the back stairwell, and the hard hand of the man on his shoulder steered Byrne towards the entrance.

“So you say you were meeting with friends in the dining hall, eh? Some associates? I trust you saw what happened to them when they presumed to trifle with me. Bear that in mind. Now get down those stairs!”

And so down they went, the first downward movement by Byrne, the second for Volkov. As Fedorov had theorized, Byrne would get unerringly right back to the year and time where he started, 1908, and all the while, Volkov’s hand was tight on his shoulder, his pistol jabbed in the hollow of his back. And so he would take Volkov back, right along with him, each of those 17 steps down marking off the years, 34 in all. That was how Volkov got back to 1908, not because Fedorov had whispered anything to Mironov, but because an enterprising Newspaper man named Harmsworth had sent Thomas Byrne to far off Siberia, to look for news that might boost his circulation.

If Thomas Byrne had not been there at the railway inn that day to cover the arrival of the German race team, Volkov would have never reached that fateful year. But how far back did the line of causality go? Where was the real Pushpoint on that event? Was it Byrne’s decision to hasten up those stairs to fetch his belongings, or should the fault be laid on the desk of Harmsworth? Then again, the history of that man’s life led even further back, into the lives of the parents that had given birth to Harmsworth. Was the Pushpoint there, hidden in the romance that had given birth to Harmsworth? Or was it the school master he encountered later in life, one J. V. Milne, where Harmsworth was educated at Henley House School in Kilburn, London? It was he who had encouraged the young Harmsworth to start the school newspaper, setting him on a career track that would later see him found the Times, and send Thomas Byrne off to Siberia.

Strangely, one of Harmsworth’s teachers there at that very same school was someone who would later do a good deal of speculating and writing on the arcane possibility of traveling through time—a man named H. G. Wells….