Paradox Hour

by John Schettler

  “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 Se
rgeant 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.”

  Fedorov did not like the sound of that. Thus far all their time displacements had left the ship and crew remarkably intact—until Lenkov. These phase changes, as Kamenski described it, were only transitory effects on the edges of a shift. But here they were, with no Rod-25, no nuclear detonations, and yet the ship was phasing, pulsing, as he liked to think of it. And now Lenkov’s fate endowed that behavior with a peril he had not considered before.

  “Do you think this will happen again?”

  “You might ask Chief Dobrynin how the ship is doing,” said Kamenski. “You say this pulsing has happened before, then yes, it seems likely it will happen again. Lenkov’s fate was a new twist in that rope, a new consequence.”

  “I have wondered if it is an effect we experienced because we are approaching Paradox Hour,” said Fedorov. “I have come to believe that Paradox can exert the force of annihilation. That’s what I thought was happening when I first saw Lenkov. In fact, I was thinking we would be forcing time to do something about us if we lingered here, and Lenkov’s fate sends chills up my spine. Yet now you bring up this point about the ship itself. It shifted here safely, yet surely the metal in this hull was in the ground here somewhere, just as you say.”

  “But in another form,” said Kamenski. “Down on the atomic level, yes, the atoms were here. They have very long lives. Do you realize the atoms that make up your body this moment are ancient, perhaps billions of years old, all forged in the heart of stars eons ago? Yet there they are, all neatly arranged to give us the pleasure of your company. The same is true of me, though they might have worked in a few more for the hair on the top of my head.”

  Kamenski smiled, tamping down his pipe a bit. “All this talk, sounding like philosophy, is actually the reality of things. A billion years is a very long time, Mister Fedorov. Who knows what those atoms in your body were once part of, and what they have been doing in all that time? Might they have been a dinosaur once? Now they are a ship’s Captain, with a lot on his shoulders at the moment. Just remember, you are not responsible for the way fate and time chooses to play with all the particles of this universe. We won’t be here long, you and I. My flame is already guttering, though yours may have a while to burn before it is blown out. Yet all the time that remains to us both here is but the wink of an eye in this universe. It’s a pity that we will never know what time chooses to do with the stuff of these old bones down the road. Forgive me for running on like this. I realize this does little to console you or solve your immediate problem.”

  “I think of these things myself,” said Fedorov. “Yet now, facing the prospect of this Paradox, I reach for the answers with a little more urgency. Your point about the metal in the ship’s hull caught me off guard. How could the ship be here if the atoms that make it up were also here, no matter what form they were in? You just said they have a very long life span. They were here! Yet so is Kirov. I don’t understand.”

  “Quantum entanglement,” said Kamenski. “Do you know down on that level just about everything is a real slippery fish. Particles wink in and out of existence, like Lenkov’s legs. They are here, then not here, which is also true of particles that make up our bodies at this very moment. You see, we are really very insubstantial, speaking in quantum terms. Everything is inherently uncertain, according to a fellow named Heisenberg. You can’t even specify exactly where any of these little particles are. Particles arise in pairs where one partner seems to know what is going on or happening to its mate, even though that other partner may be millions of miles away… or millions of years. Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ He didn’t like it, but the theory put forward by Niels Bohr has subsequently been proven correct. Yes, things act that way. It’s as if you had an identical twin back in Vladivostok, and still living in the year 2021. Yet he seems to know what you had for breakfast this morning. Interesting, yes?”

  “Are you suggesting the atoms in the ship’s hull were paired with those in the ground? Entangled?”

  “That’s one possibility. If so, they would get on quite well together, like a pair of dance partners, no matter how far away they were from one another, or how close. Here’s another idea. In making this ship, we interacted with that material to a very significant degree. Interacting with quantum particles, even something as simple as observing them, can change them. We altered temperatures, blended the metals into alloys and with other synthetic materials, moved electrons around. Frankly, I think that interaction was sufficient to alter the state of the material on a quantum level, so when the ship displaced here, there was no conflict with the atoms that were already in the ground. They simply were not sharing the same quantum state any longer.”

  “Altered states,” said Fedorov slowly. “What you said a moment ago is very intriguing… quantum entanglement… Like Tovey!” Fedorov exclaimed. “Yes… A quantum pairing. Admiral Tovey seems to be able to recall experiences he had with us when we first met him in 1942, yet here he is in 1941, before any of that ever happened, and in a life line that will probably preclude those events from ever occurring here. Yet he knows about that other John Tovey. The word Geronimo struck through him like a bolt when he first heard it. He instinctively knew it referred to Kirov. How is this possible, Director? How could he know things he experienced in the future?”

  “Yes, it is very surprising, But it has been demonstrated that quantum particles can do some amazing things. Another physicist, Yakir Aharonov, was looking at
entangled particles, and trying to gain information about them without disturbing them or altering their state—taking a little peek at them without really looking. I suppose we’ve all done that when a pair of pretty legs goes by. Yes? It was determined that these little peeks, which he called weak measurements, might be added up to provide enough information about the particles to predict the state of one or another. Then it was shown that this activity also caused the particles to alter in the past! They were changing to make the information he was obtaining possible! Consider that for a moment. We easily grasp that things we do in the here and now might affect our future, but never our past. In this case, Aharonov showed that activity in the future can indeed affect the same particle in the past, because entangled particles seem to possess information or qualities from both temporal localities, past and future. This all gets very confusing, Fedorov. But there is your Admiral Tovey, here in 1941, and he is being obviously affected by experiences he had in 1942! I do not know if this theory is correct, but it at least gives us some way of trying to understand it. Think of it as backward causality.”

  “But how, sir? Are you saying that the future Tovey was in another world, another universe, yet remains entangled with the man sailing off our port side in this moment?”

  “Some people think of time like a tree, Mister Fedorov. Think of the trunk as the present. It grew from the roots of many possibilities in the past, which all joined to create this reality, and here we sit like a pair of squirrels clinging to the bark. Above us the tree again branches out into many possibilities—the future. As we climb, we have to choose which branch to jump on next. Maybe we choose a branch that eventually leads us to fruit, but suppose we end up on a dead branch instead, with withered foliage. That’s life at times, eh? Sadly, we never get to back-track, as the squirrel might, and choose another branch—until now… You were here before, Fedorov. You have seen that withered branch and returned to the 1940s, and now you make choices and decisions that continue to prune that tree and shape how it grows in the future.”