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unrelated to the possibility of Paradox?
    Two ships… one arriving from the future, another arriving from the past, and both wanting domain over a single moment in time, but not in the same location in space…
    Now he found his thinking falling through to yet another level. Were there really two ships? Wasn’t this the ship that arrived from the future? It’s already here… and if we haven’t moved elsewhere, it will still be here come July 28, 1941. It isn’t arriving at that moment from the future this time. Now it is arriving from the past.
    All these thoughts swirled through his mind, like a great spiraling whirlpool of possibility, and he felt like a swimmer adrift in that maelstrom, and desperately struggling to keep his head above water. Quite literally, only time would tell which of these conflicting theories would hold true. There were only three possible outcomes. The first was that the ship he was now standing on would vanish, as it seemingly had, and its place in 1941 would be claimed by the ship arriving from the future. This was the chilling reality he feared they were now facing. They had vanished, and pieces of the puzzle that had once been Kirov in 1941 were now obviously missing.
    The second possibility was that the other ship would be prevented from arriving from the future, and for a number of reasons. The most obvious was that the long chain of causality could never replicate itself to produce the circumstances that sent Kirov back through time.
    Now his thinking about that stack of plates and teacups returned. All the events from 1941 to 2021 extended out like a stack of fragile china, eighty years high. Wouldn’t these changes they were making to the history cause catastrophic changes in the future? This was what the butterfly effect argued. It held that something as simple and insignificant as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could cause just enough of a perturbation in the air to prevent the formation of a hurricane in the future. Small things now have big effects much later, and the changes they had caused in the history were not small things—they were huge.
    In their first displacement they had altered the entry date of the US in the war, and by so doing, changed the entire course of the war in the Pacific. There was no way he could see the design and building of Kirov after what they had done, let alone the assignment of all the exact same crew members, and the same exact decisions and events being taken to eventually result in the ship being displaced in time as it happened. How could that future moment repeat? How could it arise now from this terribly convoluted past?
    That was logic enough, he thought, and there is one more reason the future Kirov cannot arrive here— because the ship was already here. If this were so, there was no real threat, even though they were now suffering all these ill effects. Something else could have caused the oddities that were occurring—our instability in time—the pulsing I have observed many times before. Perhaps Orlov and the others were still here with them, but strangely out of phase? Yet if that were so, why did so many seem oblivious to the fact they ever existed? Why was there no physical evidence they were ever here, their possessions, ship’s records?
    So in these first two options, the chess game example holds true—only one piece can occupy a given square, and it would be left up to fate and time to decide which would prevail.
    Then there was yet one more possible outcome— both ships could arrive on July 28, 1941, one from the future and also the one he was on now, arriving from an earlier moment in time, arriving from the past. He had first thought this co-location would be impossible, and become the root of the Paradox, but if his thinking about spacetime was correct, then this was now a real possibility. They could both be in the same time, as long as they did not occupy the same space, and he knew that could never happen.
    For