“Okay,” the younger woman said, standing. Tears started to stream down her face more freely. Evelyn was perhaps the only person in the world who she would allow to see her this way. She looked up at her and saw her eyes were watering, as well.
“Look at us,” Evelyn said, and then they were laughing. Ekaterina bent down and hugged her. The old woman’s frail arms wrapped around her as tightly as she could make them, and they held onto the embrace for as long as they could before reminding themselves that it was time to part. She stood and stepped back from the bed. “Удачи,” Evelyn said. It was important to Ekaterina, because she felt she needed as much luck as possible.
Without another word, she nodded and left the room, shutting off the light and tossing the towel blocking the door onto the bathroom sink. She walked without abandon into the hallway, returning to the stairwell and making her way back to the laundry room. Under the cover of the sound of the dryers once again, she crept through the room and out the back door of the hospital. Once the chilly night air hit her face, the tears came again. As someone who had been pulled away from her family at such a young age, she’d had no possible means to predict how she would feel being in touch with someone so familiarly close to her. It was overwhelming, and she was seldom overwhelmed. Taking a moment to bask in the emotion – something she would not be afforded the time to do again – she sat on the ground against the side of the hospital and buried her face in her hands.
After about ten minutes, she stood and called a taxi from her cell phone to meet her in front of the hospital.
There was work to do.
CHAPTER NINE
September 17, 2015
While the nurse organized Evelyn’s lunch on the table against the wall of her room, Jeff flipped through another volume of her writings. He was astounded at the wealth of information she’d detailed in the last thirty years. She could’ve sold it as fiction, but as he read through it, it was incomprehensible to him that a thirty-year history of a nation could’ve come from someone’s imagination. It was simply too much, and in too vivid of detail.
The volume he had in front of him included Evelyn’s recollections from the mid-2000s – long after the Soviet Union should have fallen. According to her diary entries, accompanied by sketches when appropriate, these were considered “glory years” for Mother Russia. Interestingly, with the world continually at the precipice of nuclear war despite the fact that both sides insisted that they were destroying their own cache of nukes (he couldn’t help but notice the “spin” in Evelyn’s retelling of it), there was a distinct absence of the rise of the sectarian terrorism that in their reality had characterized the decade. There must not have been any need for it, from the extremists’ point-of-view. And though the Cold War seemed to stretch on and on, like the Cold War he was familiar with, not a shot was fired. According to her documents, though, one could have been fired, to cataclysmic results, at any time.
At the center of it all was this general, Belochkin, the leader of the country. As Dexter had mentioned the day before, Evelyn wrote that he’d been given the nickname “the Trigger Finger” for his unyielding willingness to keep America on the defensive by having his finger on “the button.” Reading her writings was not like reading a periodical. Evelyn editorialized from her perspective, and as he read her descriptions of what Belochkin was doing at the time, he began to surmise that the Russian people were starting to tire of the tension between the two countries. At least Evelyn had been.
She wrote that a group of students marched on the Kremlin in spring of 2006. Belochkin’s response was that to stop the uprising he would “light up the sky” over America’s East Coast. A shipping stand-off in the Suez between Soviet and American freighters the next year led to Belochkin’s threat that Russia would “eliminate its enemies in one fell swoop.” Late in 2007, a Russian defector was murdered in his home in Baltimore and Belochkin, despite his defection, set out to make the man a national hero, demanding retribution. (Evelyn pointed out that the man had gambling debts in the hundreds of thousands, so his death probably had nothing to do with the fact that he was Russian.) The rally worked, but when Belochkin threatened to unleash Russia’s full arsenal on “the Western murderers,” people lost interest.
That’s where it ended, though, for some reason. After that last threat, Belochkin’s name didn’t seem to be mentioned for the rest of the book. Jeff flipped through it a couple of times to see, but most everything Evelyn had written from 2008 forward was primarily about Russian industry.
He did notice that tucked into the back cover of the book was a business card – green lettering in Russian on a white background. It named Ekaterina Batrudinov on top. With Evelyn’s attention focused on her meal, he swiped the card and shoved it into his pocket, then closed the book.
“You’re wondering where Belochkin went?” she asked from her bed, causing him to look up. They were alone. The orderly had left.
“Yeah, he just dropped right out of the story. What, did he get sick like Castro?”
She shook her head slowly. “No, he went into seclusion.”
“Why?”
“Well, he was working on something.”
“Time travel,” Jeff said, realizing. “Did he still run the country?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, taking a forkful of what looked like meatloaf. She rubbed it in a pool of gravy on her plate and put it in her mouth. “He ran a pretty effective government from hiding. Actually, that’s wrong – to suggest he was hiding suggests some kind of fearfulness. He wasn’t hiding. He was... behind-the-scenes.”
“Working with you on perfecting time travel?”
The General Secretary wasn’t interested in perfecting time travel. He was interested in making it work. His plans were much loftier than scientific discovery.”
“What were they?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. I never had the opportunity to find out.”
Jeff set the book on the table and sat back in his chair. He could now smell the food she’d been served, and it made him a little hungry himself. “So then, what made you decide to sabotage your own work?”
She set her fork down. “I knew that he was planning something that was destructive. I didn’t know what, but his lines of questioning as we got closer and closer to the unveiling of our technology caused me to be nervous. He was going to use time travel to change history to suit his own purposes. As the creator of the technology that allowed time travel, I believed that I had a responsibility to ensure that anyone who used it did so responsibly. I’m sure you understand what I mean by that.”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. But I haven’t gotten anywhere near the point where someone could use it irresponsibly. Everything’s still in theory to me, for the most part.” She took another bite from her plate and chewed, so he continued, “But here’s my big question: you could’ve just ended the experiment. Or destroyed your device. Or gone back in time and steered yourself in a different direction. Instead, you decided to kill the guy. Which changed history more than you could’ve imagined, I’m sure. Why the overkill, so to speak?”
“Belochkin was going to do something devastating along the way somewhere. Everyone knew it – it was in his destiny. It might not have been my invention that was the source of the atrocity, but he would’ve found something somewhere. And I was proven correct. Look what the alternative was. Decades of peace. It’d be difficult to argue that I made the wrong decision.”
“From one point-of-view, yes. From a Soviet’s, maybe not.”
“Well, from this Soviet’s point-of-view, the answer is yes.”
Jeff smiled at the response, even as he admonished himself that this was taking too long. Jeff hadn’t actually come back to the hospital to get into a time travel debate with the old woman. There really wasn’t time for that – they’d made plans to leave for Russia in the morning. She’d called and asked for him to come one more time. Once he’d confirmed for her that he’d made contact with her younger self, it w
as Jeff – and not Ekaterina – that she’d wanted to touch base with before they left. She’d reiterated on the phone that she had reservations about seeing herself, and while she was fascinated with the scientific possibilities surrounding having a conversation with herself thirty years’ her junior, she felt there were bigger causes than her own self-awareness.
Jeff flipped through the pages again. “I’m astounded that you were able to do all this.”
“Oh, you could do it if you had to.”
“But what is this for?” he asked, closing the book again. “This is science, itself. Evidence of another reality. Evidence of man’s ability to travel through time.”
She waved her fork around the room. “Well, look how far it’s gotten me, Jeff. That book is merely a figment of someone’s imagination. It doesn’t matter what I say, or write down. I’ve come to the conclusion that the human brain cannot comprehend the notion that there could be another reality. We’re far too arrogant to accept that a reality other than our own is the true one.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” he said, his thoughts half-wandering to another reality that was of specific interest to him.
She chewed again. “Who would want to think of another reality where the circumstances of their life – or even their very existence – would be different? It’s terrifying. It’s one of those things that you can get lost in trying to process, so most people find that it’s simply best to leave it alone.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Jeff said, interrupting. He leaned forward in his chair. “Did they tell you how they connected you to me?” She shook her head. He sighed. “They found the time travel device I invented in the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was rusted from winters upon winters of abuse, but it had traces of radiation emanating from it.” Something had clicked in him that told him to trust her.
“Okay...”
“Problem is, I’ve never been to the Sierra Nevada mountains. Not in the present time; not in the past.” He paused, considering how much he should actually say, but decided to proceed. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve got a plan on paper to go there.”
“So you probably just haven’t gone yet.” The orderly poked his head back into the room to see if Evelyn had made progress on her meal. She waved him off. “They give me three minutes to eat my meal. How could anyone eat in that little time? Where was I?”
“We were talking about how my device got to California.”
“Yes, yes. Don’t you think it’s reasonable that at some point in the future you decide to make that trip?”
“But right now, that trip is in the ‘no’ column. Dexter – my colleague who was here yesterday – is nervous because... Well, I guess I have to tell you the whole plan. But I’m a little reluctant to. You seem to have very strong beliefs about what time travel should be used for. You might not approve of where I’m headed.”
She smiled and put down her fork, then sat back against her pillows. She spoke slowly. “Jeffrey, let me tell you something about me that’s important for you to know. I’ve made a request of you to go back in time and make a change that will impact world history. If you’re successful, when you get back to the present time, I won’t be here.”
“Well, yeah – if everything’s fixed, there won’t be any reason for you to check yourself into the hospital.” She stared at him without speaking, then he realized. “Ah, if I bring Ekaterina back to the present with me, you won’t live those thirty years again. There will only be one of you.”
She nodded. “Add that to the category of terrifying things about time travel – knowing that there is another version of you out there in the world. But with a twist. Same fingerprints. Same retina patterns for identification. Same DNA. Same everything you can use to physically identify someone. But a different upbringing. This woman I sent a letter to a few weeks back? She has different goals, different skills, and a different outlook than I had at her age. While we’re the same person, we’re actually very, very different.”
He held up a finger. “I’m going to let that blow my mind later,” he said. “But what does that have to do with me making a trip to California in the future?”
“It means that I’m pretty much the safest confidant you could come up with. When you leave this room, you’ll never see me again. And after tomorrow, no one will ever see me again. Tell me your sordid tale and it will disappear into the space between realities with me.”
She had a point, solemn as it was. So, he started. “I don’t have the head of our country backing my project, so I needed to find ways to finance it myself. As you know, I’m not exactly sanctioned to be delving into time travel. Not yet, at least. So with Dexter, we’ve devised a plan where we can go back in time to precise dates and locations where we know there will be treasure available, and then take it.”
“Take it?”
“Bring it back to the future.”
She laughed. “You’re right. The scientist in me would frown upon that.”
“Well, there is a degree of destiny that goes along with it, since every instance on our list has a negative scenario surrounding it. In many cases, it’s treasure that has already been stolen or is about to be stolen. So it’s not like we’re interrupting anyone’s hard-earned family fortune that should be passed down.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Well, no, we don’t. But we’ve hedged our bets, certainly.”
“And California is one of your destinations?”
He nodded. “A traveler named Joe Wilton was ambushed by bandits in a narrow pass in the Sierra Nevadas in 1849. We thought we could get in and take the gold that was ultimately stolen before the ambush.”
“And why is this in the ‘no’ category now?”
“Dexter’s worried about one of the pieces of the story. In Wilton’s diary, he writes that an angel came out of nowhere and urged him to set up camp in a different place than he was planning.”
“An angel?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Dexter’s very squeamish about tales of supernatural instances. He says they could indicate that the person we’re trusting to provide accurate information might not be truthful in his accounts.”
“That’s probably smart advice.”
“But how did I get around it? My device was planted in the exact spot we were looking.”
She slid her tray with her half-eaten meal on it away from her and reached down for a pillow that was near her feet. She couldn’t reach it, so Jeff got up from his chair and handed it to her. She placed it under her knees, resting her legs on it. Looking at her, Jeff realized that he didn’t know just how frail she was. Her hospital gown draped down from her knees and he could see her bones through its shadows. It was amazing that she’d made the walk to meet him the day before. Yet, he was finding it hard to believe that she’d be willing to just shut her own life down. Though she actually wasn’t. She was simply stepping aside so “her” life could be lived as intended. “I think you have to go,” she said. “To California.”
That was surprising. “Why do you say that?”
“For the very same reason I’m asking you to go to 1983. To avoid a paradox, you have to plant that device in the middle of the mountains in 1849.”
He sat back down. “Well, yeah, but there’s a couple things standing in the way. The concept of the angel-”
“I didn’t say you had to steal the gold,” she said, interrupting him. “I said you had to go back. That’s the beauty of this device you’ve created. You can go there and see what’s happening. You don’t have to affect a single thing. But you do need to make sure there’s a time travel device there.”
“I guess that makes sense. Especially since what’s really driving me now is wanting to know what the hell happened, not the gold. But now... here’s another question for you – if I left the time device there, how did I get back? How am I supposed to leave it there and get back to the present?”
She smiled. “You don’t have to.” It was such
a sweet smile that it made him momentarily forget that the world’s two foremost minds on time travel were having a discussion.
“It seems like I do.”
Shaking her head, she said, “There’s already a time device there. You just need to make sure it stays there – and maybe, if you put your trip together right, you can find out exactly how it got there.”
“Then, by that logic, wouldn’t the assassination of Belochkin already be ‘there,’ too?” Her thoughts seemed to be in conflict.
But she was shaking her head. “No, it’s different,” she said. “We know – because of me – that the stimulus for the murder of Belochkin came from a different reality. There’s no way for us to affect that decision. In your case, you just haven’t made the trip yet. The decision is still alive.”
He rubbed his forehead with his hands. “Oh, I’m going to need to draw this out on a piece of paper.” It made sense but it didn’t make sense. “You have a thirty-year head start on me thinking about this.”
She laughed. “What’s the other thing standing in the way?”
“I’m not in control of my time travel device anymore. The FBI is watching my every move and they’ve quarantined my lab.”
She sat staring at him, smiling again, for a long moment.
“You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?” he asked.
“I am certain that you can figure out a way to make it possible.”
Jeff sat back in his chair and sighed. This woman that he’d met only the day before had some tremendous influence over him already. She was smart, she was sharp, and she was strategic. He found himself trusting her implicitly, mainly because her mind worked the same way as his. Only faster. She was a source of wisdom for him. And he didn’t have her for long.
He didn’t know if he wanted to let her go.
CHAPTER TEN
Jeff held out his hand, offering Abby help as she stepped down from the gangplank onto the deck of the Serenity. An independent woman of the ‘10s, she refused his help and hopped down herself. He didn’t make a similar offer to Emeka or Dexter.
Fulfillment (Wilton's Gold #2) Page 8
