Permafrost(10)
We circled the perimeter. There were ships of all shapes and sizes. A small majority were obviously ex-military, but there were also cargo ships and some with cranes or heavy industrial equipment on their decks. A medium-sized cruise liner, a passenger ferry, a few tugs, even a submarine, only the upper part of it showing above the ice.
Cho pointed out the names of some of the ships. “That is the Vaymyr, where you will spend most of your time. That is the Nunivak, where we have our heavy workshops. That is the Wedell . . .”
By far the largest ship, though, was an aircraft carrier.
“That is the hub of our experiment,” Cho said. “The Admiral Nerva. Ex–Indian Navy, fully nuclear. It’s where we’ve gathered the time-probes, the devices we use to inject matter into the past. They’ve very sensitive to interference, so there are only ever a small number of technicians allowed on the Nerva.”
“These probes are time machines? Time machines that you’ve built, and actually got to work?”
“To a degree.”
“You said you’d done it.”
“We have—but not as well, or as reliably, as we’d wish.”
We picked up height to get over the cordon. There were no other helicopters flying around, although I did see another one parked on the back of one of the ships. All the ships were interconnected, strung together by cables and bridges, some of which were quite sturdy looking and others not much better than rope-ways. Since the decks were all at different levels, the bridges were either sloped or went into the sides of the hulls, through doors that must have been cut into them just for Permafrost. There were also doors down on the level of the ice, and some tracks in the ice marked by lanterns. I spotted a tractor labouring between two of the ships, dragging some huge, sheeted thing behind it on a sort of sledge.
We began to descend. There was a landing pad under us, on the back of a squat, upright-looking ship with a disproportionately tall superstructure.
“This is the Vaymyr,” Cho said. “One of our key vessels. It supplies a large fraction of our power budget, but it also serves as our main administrative centre. My offices are in the Vaymyr, as well as several laboratories, kitchens, recreational areas and your own personal quarters, which I hope will be to your satisfaction. You’ll meet the pilots very shortly, and I think you’ll get on very well with them. They’ll be grateful for your expertise.”
“Pilots?”
“I ought to say prospective pilots. They’ll be the ones who go into time, when the experiment’s problems are ironed out. But as yet none of them have gone back. We are close, though. There are no longer any fundamental obstacles. It’s largely the final question of paradox noise that’s causing us difficulties.”
“I think you may be expecting too much of me.”
“I doubt it very much,” Cho answered.
*
He asked me why I had been so quick to issue the abort phrase, just when we were getting somewhere.
“The young doctor was talking to her, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to respond properly.”
“Why was that an immediate difficulty?”
“She’s in hospital, and she’s just had something done to her head. If she starts not being able to speak properly, they may think something’s very wrong with her, and then order a follow-up test. I didn’t want to take that chance, in case they take her back to the radiology department.”
“We still don’t really know what happened, between your first and second episodes. Clearly there was no lasting damage.”
“Maybe they never put her in the scanner that time. There are other things in radiology departments besides MRI machines.”
“That’s possible,” allowed Abramik, who was sitting in on the interrogation/debrief. “An X-ray, for instance, or even a CT scan. But you have a name for us, at least.”
“Tatiana Dinova,” I answered.
Cho reached over desktop clutter to switch on his intercom again. “Brothers. Run a search on a possible host subject named Tatiana Dinova.” His eyes flicked to me. “Under forty at the time of the immersion?”
I thought of her hands, how young they’d looked compared to my own.
“Probably.”
“No unusual spelling?”
“I saw the surname written down, but only heard the doctor mention her given name. Dinova. D - I - N - O - V - A. You’d better try variant spellings of Tatiana, just in case.”
“We shall,” said Dmitri through the intercom speaker. “Does Miss Lidova have any other parameters that may be useful?”
“It was before the Scouring,” I said. “That much I’m sure of. A big hospital with about eight floors, with wings stretching out from a central block. It didn’t look like winter to me. I think we were farther south than Kogalym, but still in Russia.”
“Time-probe eighteen was only active at three locations before it came into Director Cho’s possession,” said Pavel, who had the highest-sounding voice of the Brothers. “One of these was a military institution in Poland, so that may be discarded on the basis of Miss Lidova’s testimony.”
“I was in Russia,” I affirmed. “The signs were in Russian, the doctor spoke Russian. What are the other two places?”
“Two institutions,” said Ivan, who had the deepest and slowest voice of the four. “Both west of the Ural Mountains. One is a private medical facility in Yaroslavl, about two hundred kilometres northeast of Moscow. However, the ground-plan and three-storey architecture of this facility does not correspond with Miss Lidova’s account. The second facility is more promising. This is the public hospital in Izhevsk, approximately one thousand kilometres east of Moscow.”