Paradox Hour (17 page)

That’s how he had been feeling—ill at ease. It was too quiet when he put the ear plugs in, and out of that silence there came a growing sense of dread. So he had taken to listening to music on his earbuds instead, and hoping that would lull him to sleep. He always started with an old favorite band, the song “Good Night” by the Beatles.
“Now it’s time to say goodnight, good night, sleep tight.”
But he had been unable to do so for the last several days.

It was probably the fatigue setting in from the long journey. He had seen an attempted mutiny right here on the bridge, defended the ship against numerous undersea threats, and even launched Vodopad torpedoes against enemy battleships. He had watched enemy planes blown from the sky; seen the awful carnage inflicted by the ships missiles, and the terrible fire of a nuclear warhead. Closer to home, he had seen Captain Karpov shoot the Doctor with a pistol, right in front of him, and that had been a very difficult moment. The stress had been building up for some time, and his good friend Nikolin had been away too often in his role as a translator for Volsky and Fedorov.

Maybe I’m losing my edge, he thought. At least now, with
Kazan
along, my job in being vigilant against enemy submarines was a little easier. It was always a relief to know that Gromyko was out there somewhere on patrol ahead of the ship, clearing the sea lanes of enemy U-boats. So why do I still feel so uneasy?

He settled in, headphones on, thinking he might go into that deep listening mode he was famous for, like a man sitting in meditation, eyes closed, ears sensitive to every nuance in the data stream. One of his favorite games was to try and hear
Kazan
, the fleet’s most stealthy sub. If he could do that, then he thought he was still sharp enough to find anything else in the sea. So he closed his eyes and listened, and it wasn’t long before he heard it again.

Not the submarine. Not
Kazan
. It was the sound again, the same deep, threatening sound that had been disturbing his sleep. It emerged from the unseen depths of the sea, like sound emerged from nothingness. What was it, a whale song the like of which he had never heard before? Was there some great behemoth down there plying the depths and moaning in this deep vibrato?

Yet it wasn’t that kind of sound…. It wasn’t a vibration, though he reacted to it as if it was exactly that—a thrumming sensation, deep, powerful, threatening. Something was growling from the depths of the ocean, and this time it was not the distant subterranean rumble of a volcano. He switched on his seismic processor, to see if he could find any known correlation to the sound in that database, but no match was found. It wasn’t an undersea landslide, or an earthquake. It wasn’t the gurgling of a hot spot on the mid-Atlantic ridge. It wasn’t
Kazan
…

He opened his eyes, taking off his headset for a moment to chase the strange chill the sound instilled in him, a feeling of dread and fear. To his great surprise, the feeling remained heavy on him, like a shroud. He closed his eyes, and even without his headset on, he could hear it, feel it, sense that dread.

“Samsonov…”

“What now, Tasarov. More Vranyo?”

“Not that… I’m hearing something.”

“Contact? Something on your board? Report it to Rodenko!”

The ship’s
Starpom
heard that exchange and Rodenko drifted over, curious. “Something to report, Mister Tasarov?”

“No sir. No formal contact. It’s just that… Well, I’m hearing something, but I can’t make out what it might be.”

“Nothing in the database?” asked Rodenko. “No there probably wouldn’t be any correlations here in 1941. Describe it.”

“Very deep. I’d say it is below the threshold of human hearing, but I can pick it up, sir. I can feel it.”

“And what does it feel like?”

Tasarov hesitated, not wanting to sound like a fool, but then he spoke his mind, just one word that seemed to sum the feeling up well enough. “Fear.”

Rodenko had been the ship’s radar operator before being promoted to his new post as Executive Officer under Fedorov. “Mister Kalinichev,” he said. “Anything on your screens?”

“No sir, all is clear.”

“Switch to phased array.”

“Aye sir. Initiating phased array feed now…. No contacts. My board is clear, except for the
Invincible
.”

So there was nothing in the sky, or on the surface of the sea within the range of their radars, but Rodenko knew Tasarov too well to dismiss what he was saying here lightly.

“When did you first pick this up, Tasarov?”

“Three days ago, sir.”

“And you didn’t report it?”

“Well sir, I was off duty at the time, trying to get some sleep in my quarters.”

“You heard this in your quarters?”

“And I heard the same thing again here, sir. Just now. I know it sounds silly, but I feel something is wrong.”

Rodenko crossed his arms. He had heard the rumors about Lenkov as well, though he had not been fully briefed on the incident. Whatever had happened to the man, it seemed to have a good many crewmen upset. But Tasarov was telling him he heard this three days ago. He might have a case of the jitters, he thought. Lord knows they all had frazzled nerves these days. But something in what Tasarov was saying touched one of those nerves in him as well. He could not quite put his finger on it himself, but it was an odd feeling of discontent, a strange, unaccountable disquiet that had come over him of late, and he could sense that others in the crew also felt this way. Now, for the first time, he had Tasarov telling him he was hearing something—a sound—something deeper than sound at the moment—and it was raising the sonar man’s hackles. He looked across the bridge to the weather deck where Orlov was taking in some air. Then he remembered something.

“Very well. Mister Tasarov, I want you to listen for this as you would any potential undersea contact. Let us classify it as Alpha One for the moment—One being an unclassified sound that cannot yet be reported as a contact. Report suspected contact on Alpha Three. Alpha Five is your threshold for confidence high, and Alpha Seven is your threshold of absolute certainty. Listen to this sound, whatever it is, and treat it like any other potential undersea threat. You are the best in the fleet, but I’ll get a message off to
Kazan
as well and tell them we may have hold of something. Their man Chernov can lend a hand, and he can send us data from beneath the thermocline.”

“Very good sir.” Tasarov felt better now that he had at least reported the matter. He always liked Rodenko. The
Starpom
was a sensor man at heart, and knew what it was like to ferret out certainty from the data cloud that was at times very fuzzy. He felt relieved, the situation was heard and handled as any ship’s business, and now he also had an ally out there on
Kazan
. He knew Chernov, and together they made perhaps the best sonar team in the world. In this world, that went without question, but even the Americans of 2021 would have a tough time standing up two men as skilled at the art of sonar as Tasarov and Chernov.

Now Rodenko was out through the hatch to the weather deck where Orlov was just finishing a smoke. The moon was finally rising, a thin crescent low over the sea, as they were now some hours west of Gibraltar after their successful run through the straits.

“Looks like nobody is getting any sleep tonight, Chief,” said Rodenko. “Aren’t you scheduled to go on leave soon?”

“Ten minutes,” said Orlov. “I always have a smoke on the weather deck just before I go below.”

“Tasarov is on to something.”

“Oh? Enemy U-boat?”

“He doesn’t think so. The signal is too undefined at the moment. Funny thing is this. He says he heard it three days ago in his quarters.”

“Off duty? I know he listens to his music on those head sets down there, but how could he hear anything unless he was processing it through our sonars?”

“Best ears in the fleet, Chief. You know that as well as I.”

“So what did he hear?

“He wasn’t sure—just a feeling, but it has him a bit rattled. He says it’s some kind of deep sound, and maybe below the threshold of hearing at this point. But he can feel it. Didn’t you report something like that on the mission to Ilanskiy?”

Orlov had been trying to live that down for some time. “So I got spooked down there on the taiga, what of it? Better men than me have gone mad down there. You know where we were?”

“The Stony Tunguska. Yes, I heard the story. Look Chief, I’m not riding you here. I just want to see if Tasarov might be hearing something like that sound you reported.”

“I see… well I wasn’t the only one. Ask Troyak, he heard it. The other Marines heard it too.”

“What was it like?”

The Chief took one last drag on his cigarette, and blew the smoke away, flicking the butt over the gunwale into the sea far below them. “It was just like that,” he said. “Like something was breathing you in, and out again, real slow, and then they threw your burned out soul off into oblivion. It was feeling like you were a doomed man, damned, and hell was finally right there beneath your feet. Oh, you couldn’t see anything, just the trees, the sky, and that weird cauldron in the clearing where we landed. You couldn’t really hear anything either. It was so still you could barely breathe. In fact, your breath was the one thing you could actually hear, that and your heart beating fast. You wanted to run, but could see no reason why. Ask Troyak, He has a name for it. Deep sound. That’s what he called it. He says they trained the Marines to listen up to that shit and take it like a man. Well, I never got the training. Whatever it was, it made me feel like I wanted to crap in my pants. Seriously!”

“Ever hear anything like that again?”

“Nope. Not since we got away from that damn place…. Wait a second. Now that you mention it, I found that object there, the thing I gave Fedorov. Troyak called it the Devil’s Teardrop. Well, I still had it in my pocket when we went out to the Libyan Desert with that Popski fellow. I was playing with it, just tossing it about from one hand to another, when I started to get that same odd feeling again, just like before. Next thing I knew the damn thing got hot as hell, and I dropped it right in the sand. It was glowing like those radar screens of yours, and the sky was all lit up. After that we ran into the Brits, and Fedorov says he thinks that Devil’s Teardrop had something to do with that. Who knows Rodenko? That thing is still on the ship here. Fedorov says he’s locked it away, but its right here on the ship. Maybe its acting up again. Tasarov feels upset? So do a lot of other people on this ship.”

Orlov looked at his watch, seeing his last ten minutes were up and he was now scheduled for leave. “That’s my shift, Rodenko. I’m off for a good meal and a good sleep, and I better not hear any of this Tasarov crap, or this Lenkov shit either. Can you believe that?”

“I heard the rumors. Sounds pretty strange. You going to check in on the galley? I hear Zolkin is still down there with the engineers.”

“No thanks. I eat in the officer’s mess again, like always. Have a good shift, Mister Starpom.” Orlov nodded as he left, leaving Rodenko alone on the weather deck..

Deep sound, he thought. Orlov is no pushover. If he was rattled by something like that, then maybe it does have something to do with that thing he found on the taiga. After all, Tasarov says he heard this sound in his quarters. He first heard it right here in the ship, not by listening to something in the sea. Yet now he hears it on his headset, if I understood his report. I’d better keep an ear on this one as well. Fedorov may want to know about it, and the next time I go below, I’ll run it by Troyak and see what he says. If he gave that thing a name, maybe the Sergeant knows more than he’s said about it.

As for this business with Lenkov… What in god’s name happened to that man? Stuck in the galley deck? Fedorov should be back soon. He’ll know something about it. But why do I have the feeling that something is starting to slip here. The ship seems fine. Engines are running smooth. Dobrynin has not reported anything unusual. Yet Tasarov had it right. Something is wrong.

I can feel it…

Chapter 15

“You
mean to say that Lenkov’s legs simply ceased to exist?” said Fedorov. “Why not the rest of him?”

“Who knows?” said Kamenski. “He was out of phase with the rest of things. Why? Who can say? It could have been mere happenstance, a local event that was confined to the space he inhabited at that moment.”

“Why did this happen to him and not anyone else?”

“Now you question the choices Death makes,” said Kamenski. “Yes, why not you; why not me? I’m an old man, with far fewer days ahead of me than those I left behind. Lenkov was young, with his whole life before him. Yet it was his process that fell out of sync with the rest of us, and through no failing of his own. Why do leaves fall in autumn, Fedorov? Who decides which ones go first?”

Fedorov knew the questions he was asking were those asked by millions before him. Why my son, my daughter, mother, father? One day we all realize the truth of what Kamenski was saying, that the solidity and apparent permanence of our lives, our minds, was a fragile and transitory thing. Yes, one day we realize we are verbs, and not nouns after all. But none of this was going to help him with the problem he struggled with now.

“But the galley table and chairs are all there,” he said. “Nothing seems disturbed or out of place. If this was a local event, wouldn’t it effect the table, or the chair he was sitting on?”

“Everything has a vibration, Fedorov. Those things may not have phased.”

“Phased?”

“Yes, we had a name for it, or at least the technicians and scientists did. They called it quantum phasing. It happens in the thermodynamic universe as temperatures change, like water changing to ice. In this case, it is something more. The phase change causes the object to fall out of sync with time. It falls behind, or moves ahead, and if the ship itself was also phasing, then when Lenkov settled down, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, quite literally. I have seen this before. We put an apple in a lead box during one test, and watched it disappear. Where they went, nobody knows, but the box reappeared some hours later. The apple, however, was gone.”