province, and he thinks the loss of that port, and Russia’s entire position as a Pacific power, must have led to the early collapse of the Czar.”
“He’s got data on that?”
“No. It’s just speculation, but what we do have is one major Prime going down—Josef Stalin. His assassination seems to be the key lever on events in my mind, but neither Nordhausen, nor I, can link that to anything the Russian battlecruiser did. It could have been happenstance.”
“The death of a Prime Mover like Stalin would not come off that easily,” said Maeve. “Time is stubborn, and she protects Primes like her own children. Remember those assassination attempts against Napoleon from our mission to Egypt to look at the Rosetta Stone? Someone took a pot shot at him, several men in fact, and each and every one had their muskets misfire.”
“Yes,” said Paul, “historians attributed that to the muggy climate right near Suez affecting the powder, but it did seem rather strange.”
“Just like this little blip Nordhausen found about Marshall Ney—another assassination attempt that went bad,” said Maeve.
“Well, Stalin didn’t fare so well, and the result was that Sergei Kirov eventually took over the Bolshevik movement. That struggle, particularly with this new figure, Ivan Volkov, led to the complete fracturing of the Russian state. Yet I just can’t connect the dots. We have to be missing something, so as dangerous as this is, I’ve got to go back. Perhaps this Fairchild woman can shed some light on all of this.”
“It should be an easy shift,” said Maeve. “The Azores isn’t under threat for this date.”
“It’s not that,” said Paul. “It’s the Heisenberg Wave. It’s clear it is already swept forward from the assassination of Stalin to affect all the history between 1909 and 1941. In fact, there may still be a lot of residual energy there. Kelly says he’s detected something odd for this time period centered on late July. I think I know what it is.”
“Paradox,” said Maeve darkly.
“Correct. July 28 1941 was the point of initial divergence according to the Golem flags. Somehow, with all these time displacements, the damn ship ended up in 1940, a year before it first arrived, which means it’s approaching its own point of entry into the time continuum, but from the past.”
“Not very tidy,” said Maeve.
Paul took a deep breath. “Well it’s going to cause a problem. That event is sitting there like a rock in the stream. The Heisenberg Wave is hitting it right now, yet Paradox Time is completely immune to Heisenberg variations. Ever see a big wave break on a shoreline rock? All that quantum energy is going to be like a storm front at high tide meeting an impregnable rock. Sea spray everywhere—quantum foam, and a hell of a lot of variation risk, because the wave is going to be split as soon as it reaches that Paradox.”
“What will happen?”
“You’ve seen wave dispersal patterns. A single tsunami set that encounters an island at sea could split and form two dispersal wave sets. The Heisenberg Wave might do the same thing, and then we get into a real witching hour—very odd effects, and very unpredictable.”
“How so?”
“Two Heisenberg Wave patterns will form, and they’ll also overlap and influence one another. A kind of temporal moiré will form on the other side of the Paradox time, a zone of chaos where we could see very strange events, and that is dangerous.”
“I’m not following you, though I’ll grant you the physics has some reason for this.”
“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” said Paul. “The Heisenberg Wave is trying to re-order the continuum to account for the variations introduced in 1908. That’s what it generated from. Now it encounters Paradox, splits into a dual wave set, and then all hell breaks loose. Anything could happen as both wave sets attempt to migrate forward from the Paradox Hour. Each one could act independently. They will no longer be in sync, and the altered states they give rise to could conflict with one another. It could manifest in any number of ways, something small, or something very big.”
“Example?” Maeve crossed her arms, waiting.
“If this Paradox is really solid, it generates a new Heisenberg Wave as well, which then influences and alters the waves migrating forward from 1908. It could also reflect a good deal of that initial Heisenberg Wave backwards at the point of contact. Then we get backwash, a wave flowing in reverse order, and against the arrow of time. That causes more variation,