Arthur Clarke - The Ghost from the Grand Banks

“Bluepeace. They’ve lodged another protest with ISA—and this time I’m afraid they’ve got a case.”

“I thought we’d settled all this.”

“So did we; heads are rolling in our legal department. We can do everything we’d planned—except actually raise the wreck.”

“It’s a little late in the day to discover that, isn’t it? And you’ve never told me how you intended to get the extra lift. Of course, I never took that crack about rockets seriously.”

“Sorry about that—we’d been negotiating with Du Pont and Thiokol and Union Carbide and half a dozen others—didn’t want to talk until we were certain of our supplier.”

“Of what?”

“Hydrazine. Rocket monopropellant. So I wasn’t economizing too greatly with the truth.”

“Hydrazine? Now where—Of course! That’s how Cussler brought her up, in Raise the Titanic!”

“Yes, and it’s quite a good idea—it decomposes into pure nitrogen and hydrogen, plus lots of heat. But Cussler didn’t have to cope with Bluepeace. They got wind of what we were doing—wish I knew how—and claim that hydrazine is a dangerous poison, and some is bound to be spilled, however carefully we handle it, and so on and so forth.”

“ Is it a poison?”

“Well, I’d hate to drink it. Smells like concentrated ammonia, and probably tastes worse.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Fight, of course. And think of alternatives. Parky will be laughing his head off.”

The three-man deep-sea submersible Marvin had been intended as the successor of the famous Alvin , which had played such a key role in the first exploration of the wreck. Alvin , however, showed no intention of retiring, though almost every one of its original components had long since been replaced.

Marvin was also much more comfortable than its progenitor, and had greater reserves of power. No longer was it necessary to spend a boring two and a half hours in free-fall to the seabed; with the help of its motors, Marvin could reach the Titanic in less than an hour. And in an emergency, by jettisoning all external equipment, the titanium sphere holding the crew could get back to the surface in minutes—an incompressible air bubble ascending from the depths.

For Bradley, this was a double first. He had never yet seen the Titanic with his own eyes, and though he had handled Marvin on test and training runs down to a few hundred meters, he had never taken it right down to the bottom. Needless to say, he was carefully watched by the submersible’s usual pilot, who was doing his best not to be a backseat driver.

“Altitude two hundred meters. Wreck bearing one two zero.”

Altitude! That was a word that sounded strangely in a diver’s ear. But here inside Marvin ’s life-support sphere, depth was almost irrelevant. What really concerned Bradley was his elevation above the seabed, and keeping enough clearance to avoid obstacles. He felt that he was piloting not a submarine but a low-flying aircraft—one searching for landmarks in a thick fog…

“Searching,” however, was hardly the right word, for he knew exactly where his target was. The brilliant echo on the sonar display was dead ahead, and now only a hundred meters away. In a moment the TV camera would pick it up, but Bradley wanted to use his own eyes. He was not a child of the video age, to whom nothing was quite real until it had appeared on a screen.

And there was the knife edge of the prow, looming up in the glare of Marvin ’s lights. Bradley cut the motor, and let his little craft drift slowly toward the converging cliffs of steel.

Now he was separated from the Titanic by only a few centimeters of adamantine crystal, bearing a pressure that it was not wise to dwell upon. He was confronting the ghost that had haunted the Atlantic sea lanes for almost a century; it still seemed to be driving ahead under its own power, as if on a voyage that, even now, had only just begun.

The enormous anchor, half hidden by its drapery of weeds, was still patiently waiting to be lowered. It almost dwarfed Marvin , and its dangling tons of mass appeared so ominous that Bradley gave it a wide berth as he cruised slowly down the line of portholes, staring blankly into nothingness like the empty eye sockets of a skull.

He had almost forgotten the purpose of his mission, when the voice from the world above jolted him back to reality.

“ Explorer to Marvin . We’re waiting.”

“Sorry—just admiring the view. She is impressive—cameras don’t do her justice. You’ve got to see her for yourself.”

This was an old argument, which as far as Bradley was concerned had been settled long ago. Though robots and their electronic sensors were invaluable—indeed, absolutely essential—both for reconnaissance and actual operations, they could never give the whole picture. “Telepresence” was marvelous, but it could sometimes be a dangerous illusion. You might believe you were experiencing a hundred percent of some remote reality but it was only ninety-five percent—and that remaining five percent could be vital: men had died because there was still no good way of transmitting those warning signals that only the sense of smell could detect. Although he had seen thousands of stills and videos of the wreck, only now did Bradley feel that he was beginning to understand it.

He was reluctant to tear himself away, and realized how frustrated Robert Ballard must have been when he had only seconds for his first sighting of the wreck. Then he actuated the bow thrusters, swung Marvin away from the towering metal cliff, and headed toward his real target.

The Mole was resting on a cradle about twenty meters from Titanic , pointing downward at a forty-five-degree angle. It looked rather like a spaceship headed in the wrong direction, and there had been many deplorable ethnic jokes about launchpads built by the engineers of certain small European countries.

The conical drilling head was already deeply buried in the sediment, and a few meters of the broad metal tape that was the Mole’s “payload” lay stretched out on the seabed behind it. Bradley moved Marvin into position to get a good view, and switched the video recorders to high speed.

“We’re ready,” he reported to topside. “Start the countdown.”

“We’re holding at T minus ten seconds. Inertial guidance running… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… liftoff! Sorry—I mean, dig in!”

The drill had started to spin, and almost at once the Mole was hidden by clouds of silt. However, Bradley could see that it was disappearing with surprising speed; in only a matter of seconds it had vanished into the seabed.

“You’ve cleared the tower,” he reported, keeping the spirit of the occasion. “Can’t see anything—the launchpad’s hidden by smoke. Well, mud…

“Now it’s settling. The Mole’s vanished. Just a little crater, slowly filling in. We’ll head around the other side to meet it.”

“Take your time. Quickest estimate is thirty minutes. Longest is fifty. Quite a few bets riding on this baby.”

And quite a few million dollars as well, thought Bradley, as he piloted Marvin toward Titanic ’s prow. If the Mole gets stuck before it can complete its mission, Parky and company will have to go back to the drawing board.

He was waiting on the port side when the Mole resurfaced after forty-five minutes. It was not attempting any speed records; its maiden voyage had been a complete success.

Now the first of the planned thirty belts, each capable of lifting a thousand tons, had been safely emplaced. When the operation had been completed, Titanic could be lifted off the ocean floor, like a melon in a string bag.