Paradox Hour (40 page)

“This is the Captain. Will Director Pavel Kamenski please report to the officer’s dining hall. I repeat. Director Kamenski—please report to the officer’s dining hall. That is all.”

He looked at Belov, still annoyed, and moved on.

Yet he would sit in the dining hall for the next half hour, picking at a slice of Natalka, a layered Russian cake he was fond of, and lucky enough to find available tonight for dessert. Kamenski never arrived.

“May I join you, sir?”

It was Nikolin, down from the bridge for his meal shift. “Please do,” said Fedorov. “Though I must say, I’m not in the best of moods, Mister Nikolin.”

“Me neither, sir. I’ve been feeling very strange of late.”

“We all have. These time shifts are very disconcerting. This latest event was uncontrolled, and I think more than the ship was bent and warped when we moved. But you look very glum, Nikolin. Why such a long face?”

“I can’t really say, sir. I was at my post an hour ago, and something very strange happened. It’s a bit of a riddle, literally.”

“What do you mean.”

“Well sir, I play with riddles… It has neither eyes nor ears, but it leads the blind. Things like that.”

Fedorov smiled. “What’s the answer? I thought of a seeing eye dog, but it clearly has both ears and eyes.”

“A walking stick,” said Nikolin, seeming a little more himself for a moment. Then a squall of what Fedorov might only interpret as sadness seemed to sweep over him, and his eyes had a distant look.

“I play riddles with anyone I can find,” he said. “And sometimes I will send them over the ship’s private text messaging system,” he confessed. “I was checking those file archives as part of the general diagnostic you ordered on all ship’s equipment… and I found something.”

“What Nikolin? You look upset.”

“I am, sir, but it feels like my roof has caved in—
Choknutyj.”
That was an untranslatable Russian word for crazy, and Fedorov could understand how anyone on the ship might feel that way just now. “When Karpov was here—during that last incident on the bridge,” said Nikolin, “I caught part of the radio transmission on a recording when the Admiral was ordering the Captain to stand down. I didn’t know what to do, but I had been sending riddles to someone on the text messaging system, and I used it to give warning of what was happening. I ran across the very message I sent in my system check, by chance I suppose. It was very upsetting. The station number was listed, and the crew member’s code comes right after that for message routing. I had been playing the game, sending riddles to that same code earlier that day, so I looked it up.” He gave Fedorov a puzzled look. “There’s no one assigned to that code sir. It was void—designated unused.”

“Perhaps you got the number wrong,” Fedorov suggested.

“No sir. The code was on numerous text messages I sent that day, always the same number, and these are permanent assignments, like a person’s email address. Yet when I queried the database the code was unassigned.”

“You are certain of this number?”

“001-C-12.” Nikolin rattled off the number from memory. “I know it as easily as my old street address. 001 is for main bridge stations. Sub-codes C-10 through C-12 are for personnel serving at the sonar station.”

“Velichko?

“No sir, his number is C-11. I double checked that.”

“I see… So you say you have messages in the archive sent to C-12, but no one has that number? Then you found a glitch in the system, Nikolin. Good for you! This could be a clue. We will have to give the electronics a deeper look. If this data was not stored properly, or perhaps written wrong by the system, then other things could be amiss as well. I discovered a problem with the Purser’s data just a little while ago.”

“I suppose so sir, but you don’t understand…” Nikolin had a tormented look on his face now. “When I saw that number, it was as though something broke inside me, and I remembered. 001-C-12. The number kept after me. I knew it meant something—someone, but I could not remember who it was. Then this feeling came over me that is hard to describe. I felt so sad, as though I had lost a brother—my best friend. That’s when it hit me, Captain.  My best friend! Yes, I knew who had that number now—I could see his face, hear his voice, remember. It all came back, and I remembered he had been taken ill—just a little while ago sir. So I went looking for him. I went down to sick bay and asked the Doctor about him, but he had no idea who I was talking about!”

“Well who
are
you talking about?”

“Alexi, sir. Alexi Tasarov! I can’t find him! I’ve looked all over the  ship!” There was a pleading look on his face now, very troubled and bothered.

“You can’t find him?” Now Fedorov realized he had been sitting there waiting for Director Kamenski for the last 45 minutes. Something about Nikolin’s travail suddenly struck him like a hammer.”

“You can’t find him? Have you gone to his quarters?” His mind offered up the next logical step in solving that simple puzzle, but even as he did so, he had the feeling that the missing piece meant something much, much more than it seemed on the surface. Nikolin was sitting there, telling him he’d lost his best friend—telling him he could not find this man Tasarov…

Fedorov knew every man that served in a main bridge station, with no exceptions, but he had no recollection of this name—Tasarov…

Until that very moment.

Something gurgled and bubbled up from deep within him, not the boiled stew and tomatoes he had for dinner an hour earlier, but from some deep inner place that seemed almost primal, an old, lost memory, emerging to the forefront of his consciousness.

Yes…
Tasarov!
Alexi Tasarov, the man with the best ears in the fleet! His eyes widened with the recollection, and he could see the man even now in his mind, sitting quietly in his chair, the big headphones like ear muffs on his head, sandy hair protruding from the round rim of his cap, lost in the sound field, or perhaps surreptitiously listening to music when the ship was in a situation where no undersea threats might be possible.

“Tasarov!” he exclaimed. “Lieutenant Alexi Tasarov!”

“You know him?” Nikolin beamed. “I thought I was going mad, Captain. Every time I asked about him, no one knew who I was talking about—not even the Admiral! I’ve looked everywhere, sir—all over the ship, but he’s missing.”

Missing… Now the P.A. system announcement Fedorov had made concerning Kamenski seemed to resonate in his mind, yet with a forlorn, hollow feeling.
Missing…
Like the eighth man on Mister Gagarin’s duty roster… He was up on his feet, with an energy that seemed to drive him with renewed urgency now. All the strangeness he had felt these last hours seemed to suddenly shatter like a glass. It wasn’t me, he thought. Something
is
amiss here!

“Mister Nikolin—Eat!” he pointed at the buffet station. “Then come right back to the bridge. I’m going to get to the bottom of this and find out what the hell is going on here.”

He rushed away, intending to go to the bridge, his thought being to report this to the Admiral at once. But another voice in his mind seemed to caution him, and he found himself heading back to the reserve officer’s cabin, letting himself in with a furtive glance down the hall.

He went immediately to the nightstand, relieve that it was still there where he had left it out of respect to Director Kamenski. Now he reached for it, with more than a little trepidation, and took it in his hand, somewhat tentatively at first. Then he closed his palm around it, and put his hand in his pocket.

Anton Fedorov was now a Keyholder.

Chapter 35

Fedorov’s
footsteps came hard on the deck as he hastened to the bridge. Behind him came Nikolin, forsaking his meal and instead struggling to keep up with the Captain, who now seemed driven by a tireless energy. They made their way up the final stairway, and in through the hatch, now permanently open, because the subtle warp in the metal would not allow it to close properly. His eye fell on the dimpled spot in the deck, and his boots were still there, as if glued to the metal deck plating, a reminder of how close he had come to suffering grievous harm. Another few feet, and he might have been standing right in the center of that warped deck zone. Who knows what would have happened to him?

The incident concerning Director Kamenski, and now this sudden revelation by Nikolin had jolted something loose in his own mind—he remembered! The thick, oppressive fog that surrounded the ship seemed to befuddle his mind as well as his senses, and now he could see that many other crew members had been affected this same way. He remembered those first hours after the displacement shift, as he walked the ship to survey possible damage. The crew had seemed listless, confused. Chiefs and Petty officers were growling to get the men moving and put them to some useful work. A few seemed dazed, even lost. He had run into one man, a junior
mishman
, who said he had been looking for the radar workshop, but ended up well forward, under the long  empty deck where the missile maintenance crews held forth. He was lost!

While the ship’s electronics all seemed unaffected, operating without a hitch, the only damage they had found had been to dead space areas, stretches of metal deck, bulkheads, gunwales and ladders. But now he saw that the men had been affected as well, and it had something to do with their memory.

That was why I could not recall who was on the other side of all those arcane discussions about quantum physics! Director Kamenski! I could not even remember the man’s name for a time, until that phrase turned over in my mind, leaping from the muddied pool of my recollection—the slippery fish. As soon as I said that to myself, it seemed to set off a chain reaction, and I started to remember. And by god! When Nikolin first started to spin out this tale about his riddle game, I had no idea who he was talking about—Tasarov! He’s clear in my mind now, but thirty minutes ago it was as if he never existed.

What was happening? Are we affected now, just as the equipment and radars seemed to be dazed and inoperable after a time displacement? Or was this something darker, more threatening, more final and absolute. He remembered those missing men when the ship had reached Vladivostok—the list of names coaxed out of Doctor Zolkin by that meddlesome intelligence Captain—Ivan Volkov. They were the names of all the men that had died in those first displacements, in battles we fought with the Royal Navy, the Italians, and the Japanese. Yet when he tried to look up their service records, nothing had been found. There was no record of them in any archive or database in the country. It was as if they had never existed.

Is this what is happening to us all now?

He was through the door, hearing the watchstander announce his coming, though he offered no salute, making straight for Admiral Volsky. Nikolin came up behind him, waiting nervously as Fedorov took a moment to catch his breath.

“Ah, Fedorov, I hope the meal did you some good. I did not expect you back so soon.”

“Admiral, I believe we have a serious problem.”

Volsky suppressed a laugh. “That is quite the understatement, Mister Fedorov. The KA-40 went up, and they simply could not get high enough to break through this fog. Can you believe that? The service ceiling on that helicopter is 5000 meters, but its grey as a whale’s back all the way up! Beyond that, they had a hell of a time finding the ship again on the way back down. We had to use lasers. Another equipment malfunction. They say they couldn’t see the ship on radar, and Mister Mikoyan there at the comm station was even beginning to lose our link with them. Thankfully, we got them back, but it was a very chancy landing.”

“Sir,” said Fedorov, not knowing where to begin. “I think we have more than the equipment and helicopter to worry about now. Nikolin says we have a man missing.”

“A man overboard? Who? When did it happen?”

“Not a man overboard, sir, its Tasarov. You remember? He was sent down to sick bay on a stretcher, about four hours ago, just before that system malfunction Kalinichev reported. Just before we lost contact with the
Invincible
.”

Volsky seemed to hesitate a bit. “The
Invincible
… Oh yes. Admiral Tovey’s ship. Who did you say this man was?”

“Tasarov sir, our number one sonar operator. The best ears in the fleet.”

At this Velichko looked over with a smile. He had been listening under his headphones and only caught the tail end of what Fedorov had said, recognizing the familiar phrase that people used with him.

Now Volsky was quiet, his head inclined to one side, eyes looking up, as if he was thinking to see something he was looking for on the overhead HD panel. “Tasarov?” he said. “I must be getting old, Fedorov, or you must be needing sleep. Velichko has been at that post since the morning shift.”

“No sir, that is not correct. Tasarov was assigned there this morning. We were discussing that sound he had been hearing. Chief Dobrynin too. We even called down to Doctor Zolkin in the sick bay to check on Dobrynin’s condition.”

“Chief who? Dobrynin? What department?”

Fedorov’s eyes widened with alarm. He went directly to the ship’s intercom and punched in the code for sick bay. “Doctor Zolkin,” he said. “This is the Captain.”

“Zolkin here.”

“Doctor… Please update me on the condition of Chief Engineer Dobrynin. Has he been released for normal duty, or is he still with you there?”

The interval of silence hit Fedorov with a sinking feeling. Then Zolkin came back.
“Chief Engineer? You mean Byko? He isn’t here, Fedorov. I haven’t seen him today.”

“No, Doctor, not Chief Byko. He’s Damage Control Chief. I’m speaking of Engineer Dobrynin—Chief of propulsion and reactor operations.”

“I’m sorry, Captain. I don’t know the man. He must be very healthy. Good for him!”
There was Zolkin’s inevitable humor, but Fedorov was not happy. My god, he thought. Another man that no one will have heard of, like Tasarov, like the missing man on Mister Gagarin’s duty roster, like Kamenski! It isn’t just the ship we must worry about now.
It’s Paradox Hour!