Yes, I’ll move forward… but I may just end up doing that the old-fashioned way, one day at a time. But I must be very cautious here at the outset. Beginnings are very delicate times. New alliances can be very fragile. They will be suspicious, and I must allay their fears and seem the perfect co-conspirator. Kazan is a very dangerous adversary. That said, if I cozy up to Volsky and Gromyko now, and pretend we’re all one happy little family again, then I’ll have every opportunity to put a torpedo into that sub and rid myself of that threat—but not before I squeeze as much juice out of that orange as I can.
Yes, Kazan has missiles, and maybe I can talk Gromyko out of a few. At the very least, perhaps I can get him to take out Takami for me. That way I won’t have to expend any of my own missiles. Then I need to seriously consider my plan to fetch more ordnance from the future. That would be very dangerous. I suppose I could reinforce the stairway at Ilanskiy here with steel and concrete, and make it sturdy enough to allow for the movement of a missile weighing six tons. But I’d have to rig out a crane to lift them in the future, and then some kind of sled to move them down the stairs here. Even if I do reinforce it here, would that persist into the future? Could I reinforce it there? Would I have the time if the world there is on fire, as we both have already seen. It’s just too uncertain. I have no way of knowing what happens between this moment and 2021, or what will be underway when my team reaches that year.
In fact, I have no way of knowing whether I could successfully get men there at all by using those stairs. My own security forces would have no point of origin in that future pulling them forward, so I would have to use members of the crew—perhaps something for Troyak and his Marines to do. I might even have to send a control rod forward with them to move a ship with munitions back here. It’s either that or I would have to find a working control rod in 2021. I already know they were manufactured in lots, so Rod-25 may have a doppelganger as well. If I could find one there, get it to that ship…. That’s where Volsky could be useful. I’ll certainly have to butter that man’s bread for a while, even if it means saluting and calling him ‘sir.’
Well, I digress. First I have to make certain I have this situation with Volsky and Gromyko under control. Only then might I have the luxury of working out these other plans. Perhaps I’ll even give some more thought to my Omega Plan.
He smiled again. Yes, Kirov was the Alpha, but I will be the Omega. Interesting that Fedorov hasn’t thought of this yet. He’s all worried about those men from the future going silent. This is all the great mysterious cloud hanging over everything—this talk of a Grand Finality. Doesn’t he realize what I have in my power now? I don’t have to use Kirov to move in time. I have Tunguska, I have that vortex that Fedorov was kind enough to discover for me, and I have Ilanskiy. There are risks and uncertainties in all three, but Ilanskiy has been very consistent—old faithful.
This business about the keys is very intriguing. Clearly they were made in the future. Where else? That would be the only place where they would have had the time to discover the location of all these time rifts and then secure them. Well, Mister Fedorov, I have the means of solving that little riddle for you, and perhaps one day it will dawn on you—my Omega Plan.
Ilanskiy… Yes, that stairway goes both directions. I’ve already gone up once, and was so shocked by what I saw with that nuke over Kansk that I beat a hasty retreat and never went back. Suppose I tried that again, and then found some way to get to the main stairway once I got there. The second floor was damaged, probably from the shock wave when that nuke went off at Kansk, but I might be able to get over to the main stairway.
If I do, I just go down and then the real fun starts. I go right back into the dining room to the base of the back stairway. From there, it’s only seventeen steps up to that dark future everyone is so worried about. Yes… I could go see what has silenced the lips of those men from the future—the key makers, as Fedorov believes.
How very interesting….
* * *
They were gathered around the ‘Thread Module,’ as Kelly was calling it now, and to all of them it seemed like the ‘Threat’ module would be a better name. It used to be called the Meridian Track, a large ultrawide flat panel display where the line of the continuum through history was displayed in a long horizontal bar that could be scrolled left or right. Colors indicated the integrity of that track to the history recorded and permanently stored in the Touchstone RAM Database. That was data that had been recorded and securely stored before the team ever attempted their first move in time, a record of the world as it was before anyone ever had the chance to tamper with the past.
The Golem module constantly monitored the Internet, sifting through millions of records, like a hundred thousand Google search bots. What they were looking for were changes and variations, anything that might indicate that something was amiss. If something was wrong, a change in the past significant enough to affect the history as it moved forward, those changes would ripple out, and the tiny outliers of that tsunami would be easily detected.
It might be something as simple as a birth or death record. Mrs. Smith was supposed to have given birth to three children, and now she had four. The Meridian Team called those uninvited guests ‘Zombies,’ the real walking dead, people who were recorded as being alive when they shouldn’t be; when they were never even born. Or John Doe’s record of birth goes missing, and no other evidence of his existence could be found—no driver’s license, social security, credit files, job, marriage or medical records. In that instance, the team called those missing souls “Wraiths.”
It wasn’t just people, though their individual fate lines could be very potent Pushpoints on the course of events. It was also the recorded history, as reported in every newspaper article, news item, or book stored in the data base, and it had damn near everything that had even been published, even scans of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian tablets dating back millennia. If something were found that contradicted an existing record in the Touchstone Database, sometimes simply called the RAM Bank, it would be flagged by the system and the historical point on the continuum would change color.
Yellow would indicate a minor variation that invited investigation to verify the find before being accepted. Amber was a more significant change that had turned up multiple references in discord with the RAM Bank, and that color deepened to burnt orange and then eventually went red as the violations and variations increased. When that line went black, the contradiction was so severe that it heralded chaos, a radical transformation of the meridian capable of altering all the history beyond that point.
But they had never seen this before.
There, as Nordhausen swiped at the touch screen to scroll the line left or right, they could clearly see what had happened. The first event recorded in this alert had occurred in 1908, and zooming in to that year, on June 30th, the most significant event in the recorded history was the fall over the Stony Tunguska River, where something mysterious exploded in a massive fireball that shook seismographs thousands of miles away, and lit the night skies with an eerie glow for days after.
There, in a long vertical column below that date, were links to every other event of any significance in the database. One could scroll down and down for hours on end, reading headlines of major news stories of the day, or finding something as trivial as the recorded news in the Salida Mail, Volume XXIX, Number 8, one of Colorado’s oldest news journals. You could learn that Miss Cornelia Gregg and Miss Isla Harris drove down from Buena Vista last Sunday morning and spent the day visiting with their friends. Alas, Mr. Ned Paquette, while riding his horse to Poncha Springs to attend the ball game received injuries from his horse falling through a bridge, though he escaped death.
Such seemingly insignificant bits of trivia were not always found at the focus point of major changes on the continuum. The fate of Ned Paquette might not matter one wit to the world, then again, it might have mattered a very great deal, had he died in that little mishap when he was
supposed to have survived it. Had that variation been found, Ned would have become a Wraith, and his name entered in to a special list that immediately triggered a genealogical search to determine who else was now missing on the branching tree of his offspring. Imagine Adolf Hitler’s mother having such an accident before she gave birth to the man, and the point of this analysis becomes clear.
So it started at Tunguska, something as simple as a change in the arrival time of one of the teams participating in the Great Race; something as simple as a strange name in the guest register that wasn’t there before. Fedorov and others had surmised this was the origin of the disaster without the use of this elaborate tracking and reporting system. It started right there in Siberia, the mysterious impact striking the history like a stone hitting a mirror, and that very instant, a small crack appeared, aligned right along the back stairway at Ilanskiy.
Anton Fedorov heard the crack, for he was right there when it happened, albeit in 1942, some 34 years in the future. But he should not have been there at all. No. That sound should not have turned his head, a deep, ominous rumble that led him towards the upper landing of that staircase. No one should have heard it, or seen the odd glow emanating from the shadows of that stairwell. No one should have been curious enough to walk down those stairs that day.
The rest was history—an altered history of the world that never should have been written. But now the Meridian Team realized what had happened. The man who was there to hear that crack had come off a ship—Kirov—and that ship had slipped through another hole in time because of an arcane conspiracy between a nuclear reactor, a nuclear detonation, and a control rod containing exotic particles that had been mined from sites along the Stony Tunguska River. It was as if the event itself, the thing that came from the depths of space that day, was now trying to call home all the disparate particles it had shed with that terrible impact.
There at Ilanskiy, in that tumultuous hour, a man walked down those stairs to meet the man that christened his ship, and everything changed—everything.
Now the Meridian Team members hunched over the graphic display of those changes, awed by what they were seeing. It was something Dorland had predicted and provided for in the code that ran the display, but not something he ever thought he would see. The Meridian had split, not once, but twice, branching off to create new possible courses in the flow of time. The events caused by the coming of Kirov had been so catastrophic that time itself could not yet choose which of the three lines of fate it might rely on to become the Prime Meridian again, for there could only be one continuum in the end. Zooming and scrolling through the display, the team members found the ship, the officers and crewmen who sailed in it, and witnessed their exploits with utter dismay.
“My God,” said Paul. “Here we thought we had trouble sinking the Bismarck as it was supposed to happen. Will you look at the carnage this ship has caused?”
“I don’t see any way we can get a handle on this,” said Maeve. “Look at that splintering! We’ve got three threads now. The Gamma thread is the one closest to the original in terms of overall integrity, but look, it’s already beginning to receive contamination from the other two. Beta thread is almost completely unrecognizable now, at least insofar as WWII is concerned. There is no way we could intervene to try and reverse all the changes there. How do we stop Germany from taking Gibraltar, or reaching Moscow as they did in that history? It’s impossible.”
“There might be Pushpoints out there somewhere,” said Paul, and he was very correct. Given enough time and research, they might have discovered the seemingly insignificant life of one Juan Alphonso, the engineer who stopped the leaky roof in a train car on the eve of a very important meeting. It was his little piece of cheesecloth that handed the Rock to Germany, though none of them knew that at that moment.
“You’re right, Maeve,” said Paul. “If it were just one variation, one battle or sinking like the Bismarck, then we might have a chance to correct it. But WWII is a maze of consequence. There must be thousands of Pushpoints driving these events. We’d never find and correct them all in a lifetime.”
“So we’ve got to ignore the history of the war,” said Nordhausen. “We’ve got to go further back—to the source—Tunguska.”
“How do you stop that?” said Kelly. “Isn’t that an imperative, an act of nature that we can do nothing about.”
“I once thought that,” said Paul, but look here in 1942 on the Beta thread—Krakatoa blew up!”
“Right,” said Nordhausen. “Scroll back to August 26, 1883 when it was supposed to erupt. There’s no sign of that event now—at least not on the Beta thread.”
“Damn amazing,” said Paul. “How do we get variations like this that change historical imperatives? I can see how the weather might change, but volcanic activity? That tells me that whatever happened to alter that meridian was so profound that it literally changed everything, even the pressure and buildup of the magma chamber beneath Krakatoa.”
“That’s damn odd,” said Maeve. “1883 predates the Tunguska Event in 1908. How could the latter affect the former in any way, shape or form?”
“Right,” said Nordhausen. “How could a suspected cause follow an effect?”
“Admittedly, its confounding in the classical physics of the macro world,” said Paul, “but not on the quantum level of things. Causality is the notion that events happening now in the present are caused by events in the past, the domino theory. Caslav Brukner’s team at the University of Vienna has already published research claiming that it is possible that a single event could be both a cause and an effect insofar as quantum mechanics is concerned. They call it ‘Quantum violation of causal order.’ We won’t get into it here, but it can happen. Bottom line: causal order might not be a mandatory property of nature, so that means my concept of an imperative event like that eruption is suspect.”
“I still don’t see how Tunguska in 1908 prevents Krakatoa from erupting in 1883,” said Nordhausen, “but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, because it clearly happened, at least in the Beta thread.”
“But not in the Alpha or Gamma threads,” said Maeve. “That’s our clue. I think nature is a completely random force. It’s like a coin toss. Yes, Krakatoa was going to blow, and on two tosses, it does so right on schedule in the Alpha and Gamma threads, but on the Beta thread it holds off another 59 years until 1942.”
“That’s really a blip in geologic time,” said Kelly.
“The two events may not even be related,” said Maeve. “It could just be random, as I have it. The only reason we notice it is because we have three threads now, and it doesn’t happen on our thread.”
“That could be,” said Paul, “but I’m not so sure. Was there anything prior to 1883 we need to look at—any variation of consequence?”
“We have some yellow around 1815—in Brussels.”
“What month?” asked Paul.
“June.”
“Waterloo.” Paul rubbed his chin, his eyes narrowing. “That’s one hell of a pivotal event. We’d better have a look at it. Anything else?”
“Something further back here,” said Nordhausen, swiping the screen to move into the 1600s. “September of 1687. That was General Morosini’s Army of Vienna attacking the Turks in Greece. It wasn’t there yesterday, but it is today.”
“What? You mean to say this just appeared?”
“Yup.”
“Damn,” said Paul. “That means we have backwash. The damage is migrating backwards as well as forwards on the continuum.”
“It could be more than that,” said Nordhausen. “Look at these other variation seeds. It could be a deliberate intervention, not just random backwash. I found another incident in 1802 off Greece; and another a little earlier in 1799—Egypt.”
“Very strange,” said Paul. “Did you research those?”
“You know me better than that,” said Nordhausen. “The incident in 1802 was most curious. It involved the Elgin Marbles; the sinking of the
ship they were being loaded on—the Mentor. There was a diary page from a local that was different. Strangely, that relates directly to this incident I just picked up yesterday in 1687.”
That got Maeve’s attention, and she turned, very interested now. “How?” she said, her eyes narrowing.
“In 1687, General Morosini fought his battle with the Turks in Athens, at the Acropolis in fact, which was fortified by the Turks and used as a depot for their gunpowder. They didn’t think their enemy would attack it, because of its obvious historical significance, but they were wrong. Morosini had his cannon and mortars shell it for four days, and on that fourth day—con fortunato colpo! They got a lucky hit. It ignited the Turkish gunpowder, and blew the Parthenon to hell.”
“The Parthenon,” said Maeve…. “That was where the Selene Horse was before Lord Elgin pilfered it!”
“Quite correct—in 1802…. But there’s more. I can now connect all these pre-Tunguska variation warnings, all of them, the one in 1687, 1799, 1802, and finally that blip we picked up in 1815. I found a name associated with every last one of them. No one goes anywhere or does anything without leaving a mark on the history for someone like me to find.”
“Why didn’t you bring this up earlier?” Maeve gave him a wide-eyed look.
“Well you were all hot and bothered over this volcano business, so I waited that out, but look here—the name is Ames, Sir Rodger Ames. I find references to it at all those dates. In fact, such a man was aboard an English crewed Pinco at Athens and helped transport the Turkish Garrison to Smyrna after it finally surrendered to General Morosini.”
“Pinco?”
“A Genovese ship design, flat bottomed, about 300 tons; three masts with lateen sails, and very fast and maneuverable.”
“Quite strange,” said Maeve. “It obviously can’t be the same person. Those dates span 128 years.”
1943 (Kirov Series Book 27) Page 32