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with much said there without words.
     
     
     
     

 
 
 
Part II
 
The Final Shift
 
“The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”
 
― Joyce Carol Oates
     

 
    Chapter 4
     
    Fedorov was also facing down the cruel whims of time that night. The dilemma they now found themselves in was confounding, and he could not determine what was happening to the ship and crew. Were these strange effects the result of impending Paradox? The fate of Lenkov, the threatening sounds reported, and now the disappearance of key members of the crew, all convinced him that this was so. Yet what was really happening?
    Have we so altered the course of history with our actions here that it has had fatal effects on the life lines of the missing men? We searched the ship’s records, both digital and analog, and found no evidence that these men had ever existed. There would have been hundreds of data points to prove the existence of a man like Orlov on this ship, he thought. He would have signed off on all the section chief crew assignments, but we find nothing, not a single trace that he was ever here. Orlov exists only in our memories now, and that can only be said of a select group on the ship.
    He remembered Orlov clearly enough, and all the other missing men as well. Yet the Admiral and other senior officers seemed foggy when he first asserted Tasarov was missing. Indeed, he realized that he had also been oblivious of Tasarov until Nikolin came to him and insisted his friend had gone missing. Once the looking glass of his memory was dusted off, however, he could suddenly recall everything. And he had been able to jog the memory of Admiral Volsky and the other senior officers on the bridge at that critical moment. Now they were among the knowing few on the ship, but as he made his rounds, he soon discovered that most other crewmen knew nothing of Orlov, while others remembered him clearly enough.
    Sergeant Troyak was a perfect example. He clearly recalled Orlov being assigned to his Marine detail after he was busted, and the details of his mission to Ilanskiy on the Narva were also clear in his mind. In fact, most of the Marines remembered him with no problem, but other crewmen, even those who might have had daily interaction with the Chief, seemed oblivious.
    His first thought was that this was an effect that resulted from their sudden shift. Every other time displacement they had made, left the ship and crew remarkably intact, but not this one. The more he thought about this, the more he came to believe his worst fears were now slowly being realized.
    Paradox… It wasn’t just a seeming contradiction, or a thorny puzzle to challenge the logic of one’s thinking. No. It was a real force, and one capable of reordering the physical reality of the universe, changing and altering everything. It was the force of annihilation, the cruel imperative in any equation that demanded a zero sum—and it was killing them. The missing men, the missing data, were all evidence of the deadly hand of Paradox.
    Now that the ship had phased, shifted again in time, he still had no real idea what their position was on the continuum. Was it still May of 1941, or had they moved to some other time? Did they shift forward, or slip deeper into the past? If the disappearance of these men was the result of Paradox, then he was inclined to think the ship might have moved forward again, to a point in time where they were now suffering the consequences of their many interventions. They had changed the course of events to a point where the life lines of Tasarov and the others were fatally compromised. This was all he could deduce at that moment.
    The only thing he was relatively certain of was that Paradox was somehow involved. As the ship had sailed closer and closer to a moment in