“Of course there’s only one ship,” Paul said flatly. “The last attempt they made to move forward created a real anomaly. They fell out of their displacement event prior to first arrival. Who knows why, but that caused a real nightmare, because the ship in the past cannot enter the same timeframe they occupied during first arrival, as I’ve just explained.”
“They were in 1941 for twelve days,” said Nordhausen. “Then they shifted out somewhere.”
“Right,” said Paul. Well those 12 days stand like a great stone wall, and the arrow of time is pushing the ship towards that wall from the past, yet it cannot enter that time—it’s Paradox Time, and therefore completely impregnable.”
“Do you think they know this?”
“We can’t say. Who knows, someone aboard may be trying to sort this out, but if they did, they are sure playing chicken here.”
“What do you mean?” asked Maeve.
“If they see the Paradox ahead, they should get the hell out of there before they reach that time.”
“Golems haven’t found any evidence of that attempt yet,” said Nordhausen. “But they’re still working, particularly Golem 7. It’s taking a real long time to process data sets now.”
“We need more computer power here,” said Kelly, “but for now we have to work with what we have.”
“So what if they don’t move, or can’t move again to avoid the Paradox?” asked Maeve.
“I think that would be impossible,” said Paul. “That’s the nature of Paradox. It draws a line and says it will not be possible for the ship to cross it, and it has considerable power to enforce that line—the power of annihilation.”
“You mean if the ship persists and does not displace prior to reaching the Paradox time, it could simply be destroyed? Annihilated?”
“That is very possible,” said Paul, “yet then we get a time loop. The ship arrives from the future as first cause dictates, and the whole mess repeats itself—with only one catch—the ship displacing from the future will reach a meridian in the past that has already been altered by the Heisenberg Wave that generated in 1908.”
“I see,” said Maeve. “Then the next loop is going to play out quite differently. The altered meridian the ship enters may not give rise to the same circumstances they dealt with the first time.”
“Correct,” said Paul, but the ship remains there in the past, and it has a momentum that is going to start this whole chain of events again.”
“You mean it must all play over again, their sortie to the Med, those battles with the Japanese?”
“We don’t know what may happen yet,” said Paul, “because the Golem modules can’t seem to reach a weight of opinion. I think the shadow from the Paradox is inhibiting their performance. Also, the Heisenberg Wave is at work here now, so all of that history may be rewritten, and may never occur. The initial events after first arrival may seem strangely similar to what happened the first time, but the longer this goes on, the more variation we will likely see. At this point, there is still no outcome that can be expressed with any real certainty. Yet I do know that ship cannot enter Paradox Time while approaching it from the past, any instance of Paradox Time, and now there are a good many locations on the continuum where those barriers had formed. I believe the next one will be in late 1942.”
“Right,” said Nordhausen, looking at his notes. “I have them in the Mediterranean in August of 1942. They got involved with the British Operation Pedestal.”
“But isn’t that on a different meridian?” asked Maeve.
“It’s being revised into a new prime meridian by the Heisenberg Wave,” said Paul. “That work will surely be complete for every day they live out between their initial point of entry and that next Paradox Time in August of 1942. But you say they only remained in 1941 for twelve days after the first shift.”
“Yes, then they turned up in the Med a year later, and twelve days later they vanished again and re-appeared in the Pacific off Australia, yet only a day later.”
“They won’t be able to pull that trick off again this time, because that’s Paradox Time as well. See what I mean? Their ability to move in time now is more restricted. They can’t displace to any timeframe they visited before.”
“Which means they can’t get back to 1908 and do whatever they did there to generate the Heisenberg Wave.”
“Correct, but there’s still too much haze around those events. We don’t know what they really did there, where the Pushpoint is that really caused the wave to form.”
“Interesting,” said Nordhausen. “This is going to be very interesting.” As I read it, the first series of time displacements saw the Russians mixing it up with the Royal Navy, but later they seemed to mend fences and sailed as allies.”
“Yes,” said Paul, “I suppose the initial hours and days after the ship arrives are going to be very… interesting, just as you say.”
“Is this a predetermined loop?” asked Nordhausen. “Are they fated to make the same choices and experience the same events as before?”
“Not likely,” said Paul. “It’s not even remotely probable. The historical milieu they are entering now is completely altered by the Heisenberg Wave. Some circumstances they encounter may be similar, but otherwise, things will be very different. And remember, nothing is ever certain when you get willful agents making choices. The ship is mechanical, but the officers and crew determine what they do with it. So we may not see them make the same time displacements as before.”
“Let’s hope they’re good little choir boys this time around,” said Nordhausen. “Maybe we should plan a mission to that ship, and we can tell them to behave themselves.”
Maeve rolled her eyes. “Not bloody likely,” she said.
“Yet the British in that milieu will soon detect the arrival of this ship, assuming Paul is correct,” Robert pressed on. “Won’t they assume everything is still chummy? Perhaps if things start off on a better footing at the outset, we can avoid some of the damage that was done in that first loop.”
“That’s the only ray of hope I see here,” said Paul. “Actions they take now could serve to revise and alter the history the Golems have been digging up. In fact, we’re already starting to see that in the Golem data. Those events from 1942 in the Mediterranean are starting to lose their certainty factors. They are falling below 40% probability now, and some may never occur.”
“You mean they already started re-writing their own history?” Maeve raised an eyebrow at that.
“Apparently,” said Paul. They got to 1940 somehow, and their actions there will bear on things they already did earlier when they visited 1942. Yet there will be some events that are like load bearing beams in a house. They form a chain of causality that got them there to 1940 in the first place. So while some things change, others may be much more stubborn.”
“Sounds encouraging,” said Nordhausen. “At least we know all of this damage hasn’t solidified yet.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” said Paul. “The backwash from the Heisenberg Wave striking Paradox Time will stir things up. In that environment, things may take longer to solidify into a new Prime Meridian. That’s probably why the wave is still stuck in the 1940s. Yet, as hopeful as that sounds, this whole situation is still very grave. There are other considerations in play here.”
He gave Maeve a furtive glance and she realized he was referring to their earlier private conversation. Other considerations… dual Heisenberg Waves, backwash, fragmentation and phasing issues, time loops, and then the possibility they may end up with a doppelganger somewhere in the mix, not to mention the grim prospect of a Grand Finality forming at the end.
“Backwash,” said Kelly. “I thought the Heisenberg Wave only moved forward, with the arrow of time.”
“This is an aberration,” said Paul. “But backward migration is a very real phenomenon in quantum physics. We have laboratory proof that quantum particles can alter their state and position in order to create a certain outcome fro
m their past. It’s referred to as backward causality, and it’s one of the conditions prevalent when we get a backwash event like this. The whole situation is very dangerous. I gave Maeve an earful on that a while ago, but I won’t go into it again now.”
“Well, here we go again,” said Maeve. “This ship has every potential to help us now, but it could still continue to ravage all this history. We can’t assume their next intervention will be benign. Like it or not, the Russians are Free Radicals, and the senior officers, the real decision makers, may even be regarded as Prime Movers now. This is going to be a very chancy thing.”
“And there are still several loose threads we haven’t uncovered yet,” said Paul. “I want to nail down how this Argos Fire displaced in time, and what these keys are all about. And if I can get some answers as to how Kirov is making these unassisted shifts, it would help us plan some kind of countermeasure as well.”
“Yes,” said Maeve. “We still aren’t seeing the whole picture. We have no clear chain of causality between Kirov the ship, and the man it was named for. In fact, we still don’t know why Stalin was assassinated, or who really did it.”
“I’m hoping to find that out on this mission,” said Paul. “And I’ve got a little coinage to trade for the information they might give me, like my idea about retrieving that key that went down with the battleship Rodney. Fairchild may be very interested in that. The British may also be very interested to learn the location of the door that particular key opens. Remember, I’ve deciphered the coordinates.”
“First things first,” said Maeve. “Let’s get you there and back again in one piece, and then we’ll see where we stand.”
“Yes,” said Paul. “Let me get this mission to the Azores under my belt. When I get back, we’ll be in a much better position here. Come on Kelly. You have good numbers?”
“Solid,” said Kelly adjusting the fit of his Giants baseball cap.”
“Then let’s get started.”
* * *
They wasted no time getting to the lab monitors. Kelly manned the shift module, as always. Nordhausen and Maeve took up work at the Golem module. Between the two of them, they would closely monitor the Golem fetch data stream during Paul’s mission to see if they could detect new variations. Paul was back in uniform and down through the long access corridor and elevator to the Arch. There he stood calmly in the pre-scan position, while Kelly took a double reading to generate and store his pattern signature. It was a bit like a quantum fingerprint, or DNA, describing who and what he should be when manifesting in the stream of infinite particles that defined the world.
The technology they had developed could only hold Paul safely in another time for a limited interval. Then he would have to be pulled back, though, basically, to get him to another time, the Arch was going to do something with the particles that formed his being. And to bring him back again, they simply had to cease that activity in as controlled a manner as possible. It was as Kamenski had described it to Fedorov, there were no ‘places’ in time, only activities and expressions of reality. To go anywhere in time, one had merely to learn how to dance with infinity. The Arch complex achieved that, though only Paul could really say how it worked, and he seldom ever tried. But it did work, and that was all that mattered.
After the tingling energy of the pattern signature capture, Paul heard Kelly’s voice in the intercom wishing him well. The power revved up, with the Arch suddenly coming alive with the scintillating energy that accompanied time displacement. He stared at the broad yellow line on the cold concrete floor. Stay on this side, and you remain a movement in the here and now. Take one step across that line, and you become a movement somewhere else.
The great anaconda of causality lay coiled at your feet, and through the Arch, you could walk along that serpent’s back, traversing the scales of ages past, and move to another time. The moment he took that first step, however, the only thing in the here and now that remembered him were the memories of the other team members, and that pattern signature stored safely in the massive data banks of the Arch facility computers.
As always, Paul closed his eyes to lessen the shock and disorientation of the shift, and he whispered a silent prayer that Kelly had all his numbers in order. They had experienced any number of mishaps in their many missions, and things were already critical enough without any further problems arising from their own equipment failures, or operator errors.
He reached up, straightened his naval officer’s cap, and then took a deep breath. Maeve had it so right, he thought. Here we go again. Then he took that one forward step, closing his eyes, and felt the cold chill of infinity closing in around him.
It was happening…
Part X
Loose Ends
“If you lack the humility to go back and tie up the loose ends in your past, then be prepared to forever be haunted by ghosts, all of whom will come into your present and your future— staining everything and everyone with their leftover emotional and mental garbage.”
- C. JoyBell C.
Chapter 28
Hornsrandir was a wild place that night. Situated on the northernmost cape of Iceland on the Denmark Strait in the Westfjord region, it was cold and cheerless, even in the summer when the light seldom faded. The winds were fierce on the exposed cape, moaning with sounds that seemed unearthly at times, like demons lamenting their fate in some unseen hell. Few people lived in the region, where only a scattering of old farm houses and hunting cottages dotted the landscape. It was a green desolate preserve, pristine in its simplicity, with emerald swards that swept up at near 45 degree angles to the edge of a jagged coastline that suddenly dropped off in sheer cliffs to the rocky shore and cold sea below.
There two men stood a bleak and lonesome watch, where even the stubborn sun, high in the sky, could not chase away the eerie green fire of the auroras that night. Fedorov had come up with the idea that they could set up a generator and Oko panel radar team in a small cottage, the Ice Watch, as they called it, to keep an eye on the Denmark Strait. A pair of radar technicians from the ship, and one local guide named Oleg held forth in the cottage, and Oleg was coming up to the place on the thin stony trail after a long day’s hike from the nearest settlement. He carried a small backpack with gifts for the men in the cottage, tea, fresh cheese and bread, and some good hard sausage, with two bottles of wine.
Bad out tonight, he said to himself, one hand tight on the strap to the rifle slung over his right shoulder. It wasn’t for protection from the Germans, and certainly no other Icelander would ever pose a threat to him, but these wild lands were said to be haunted by… other things. There was always a chance that he might find a hungry polar bear that had come up from the coast, or an occasional Arctic wolf on the prowl. Yet those were things he could deal with well enough. He would see a bear very easily in the open terrain, and so he felt reasonably secure… Until the ice fog came.
It rolled in from the coast like frosty smoke, the breath of Odin, hoary white. Soon his visibility dropped to just a very few yards, and he stopped, suddenly feeling a deep, bone chilling cold. High above, the impenetrable fog seemed to glow with milky green trails, and he knew it must be the auroras still dancing in the late summer skies. Some said the Huldufolk would creep out from their hidden rocks and glens to dance beneath the lights. The ancient reclusive elves, according to legend, might be celebrating a marriage, or the birth of a new child. Oleg was not a superstitious man, but he believed the tales, for he had seen too many strange and unaccountable footprints in these wild lands, and things he could never explain. Even in modern times, a survey of the population found that over half the people on the island believed in the Huldufolk, and he was one of them.
Oleg stopped, his eyes tight as he watched the green light color the hoarfrost all around him. He tightened his coat and pulled up his collar against the cold, and then the sound came, the dolorous moaning that was part wind, part wolf, and everything that spoke of death and foreboding. Fear struck him, an
d he slipped to one knee, huddling down near the ground as if to hide from some unseen demon in the mist. The sound became a roaring rumble, and he felt the earth quiver beneath his feet. Then all was still and silent, and the pale green lights slowly dissipated.
Soon a cold wind began to stir the ice fog around him, and curling eddies of frosty air swirled about the jagged edges of nearby rocks, which loomed like the dark stony shoulders of trolls as the landscape slowly cleared. Then the wind subsided, the deep cold abating, and there came only the mournful call of some wild thing on the distant bleak shore.
Shaken by the experience, now he wanted more than ever to reach the safety and warmth of the cottage, and the company of the two men there, manning their lonesome watch. He hastened along, skirting around the large boulder that lay on the broken ground beneath the stony rise that led up to the cottage. The sight of the thatched roof, and the thin stream of wood smoke from the chimney, gave him heart, and he hurried on. Soon he came tramping up to the outer porch, taking a deep breath, much relieved as he knocked firmly on the door.
He called out a greeting in Russian, one the men had taught him in their long hours at the post, but no one answered. Casting a wan look over his shoulder, he looked for any sign of recent activity out of doors. Then he tried the handle, finding the door unlocked, and nudged it open. The hinges creaked as he eased inside, thinking he might find the men dozing by the fire, or lost beneath those strange headsets they used when minding their equipment, yet, to his great surprise, there was no one there.
Why would they be out with the weather so unpredictable like this? Perhaps that sudden fog had fouled their radar set, and they went up to the cape to check on it. So this is what Oleg decided to do, yet his discomfiture only increased as he went back out and looked up the sloping rise to the high point where they had set up their devices. Nothing was there… He looked this way and that, thinking the men may have moved the equipment somewhere else. Could they have been recalled to their ship, he wondered? Did that strange whirlybird come just now, devouring them and taking them up into those fluorescent green skies? Was that what he had heard moaning through the ice fog, the deep growl of the engines on that flying contraption?
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