Arthur Clarke: The Ghost from the Grand Banks

For my old friend Bill MacQuitty—who, as a boy, witnessed the launch of R.M.S. Titanic , and, forty-five years later, sank her for the second time.

Much has happened in the more than a decade since I wrote this book. There has been a dive to the wreck almost every year—one with paying passengers! And of course James Cameron’s magnificent movie has been seen all around the world. (Alas, the television series Michael Deakin and I wrote on my lunar version of a similar disaster, A Fall of Moondust , was turned down at the last moment.)

As everyone knows, the world survived the “Century Syndrome” (Chapter 4). Now we have plenty of time to prepare for Y3K.

Finally, I am indebted to Charlie Pellegrino for his latest book, Ghosts of the Titanic (William Morrow, 2000). This exhaustive coverage of the last hours of the ship, and the stories of its survivors, is packed with heartrending and often astonishing incidents. As Jim Cameron remarks on the jacket, Pellegrino brings the Titanic back to life.

Colombo, Sri Lanka

There must be better ways, Jason Bradley kept telling himself, of celebrating one’s twenty-first birthday than attending a mass funeral; but at least he had no emotional involvement. He wondered if Operation JENNIFER’s director, or his CIA sidekicks, even knew the names of the sixty-three Russian sailors they were now consigning to the deep.

The whole ceremony seemed utterly unreal, and the presence of the camera crew added yet another dimension of fantasy. Jason felt that he was an extra in a Hollywood movie, and that someone would shout “Action!” as the shrouded corpses slid into the sea. After all, it was quite possible—even likely—that Howard Hughes himself had been in the plane that had circled overhead a few hours before. If it was not the Old Man, it must have been some other top brass of the Summa Corporation; no one else knew what was happening in this lonely stretch of the Pacific, a thousand kilometers northwest of Hawaii.

For that matter, not even Glomar Explorer ’s operations team—carefully insulated from the rest of the ship’s crew—knew anything about the mission until they were already at sea. That they were attempting an unprecedented salvage job was obvious, and the smart money favored a lost reconnaissance satellite. No one dreamed that they were going to lift an entire Russian submarine from water two thousand fathoms deep—with its nuclear warheads, its codebooks, and its cryptographic equipment. And, of course, its crew…

Until this morning—yes, it had been quite a birthday!—Jason had never seen Death. Perhaps it was morbid curiosity that had prompted him to volunteer, when the medics had asked for help to bring the bodies up from the morgue. (The planners in Langley had thought of everything; they had provided refrigeration for exactly one hundred cadavers.) He had been astonished—and relieved—to find how well preserved most of the corpses were, after six years on the bed of the Pacific. The sailors who had been trapped in sealed compartments, where no predators could reach them, looked as if they were sleeping. Jason felt that, if he had known the Russian for “Wake up!” he would have had an irresistible urge to shout it.

There was certainly someone aboard who knew Russian, and spoke it beautifully, for the entire funeral service had been in that language; only now, at the very end, was English used as Explorer ’s chaplain came on line with the closing words for burial at sea.

There was a long silence after the last “Amen,” followed by a brief command to the Honor Guard. And then, as one by one the lost sailors slid gently over the side, came the music that would haunt Jason Bradley for the rest of his life.

It was sad, yet not like any funeral music that he had ever heard; in its slow, relentless beat was all the power and mystery of the sea. Jason was not a very imaginative young man, but he felt that he was listening to the sound of waves marching forever against some rocky shore. It would be many years before he learned how well this music had been chosen.

The bodies were heavily weighted, so that they entered the water feet first, with only the briefest of splashes. Then they vanished instantly; they would reach their final resting place intact, before the circling sharks could mutilate them.

Jason wondered if the rumor was true, and that in due course the film of this ceremony would be sent to Moscow. It would have been a civilized gesture—but a somewhat ambiguous one. And he doubted that Security would approve, however skillfully the editing was done.

As the list of the sailors returned to the sea, the haunting music ebbed into silence. The sense of doom that had hung over Explorer for so many days seemed to disperse, like a fog-bank blown away by the wind. There was a long moment of complete silence; then the single word “Dismiss” came from the PA system—not in the usual brusque manner, but so quietly that it was some time before the files of men standing at attention broke up and began to drift away.

And now, thought Jason, I can have a proper birthday party. He never dreamed that one day he would walk this deck again—in another sea, and another century.

Donald Craig hated these visits, but he knew that they would continue as long as they both lived; if not through love (had it ever really been there?), at least through compassion and a shared grief.

Because it is so hard to see the obvious, it had been months before he realized the true cause of his discomfort. The Torrington Clinic was more like a luxury hotel than a world-famous center for the treatment of psychological disorders. Nobody died here; trolleys never rolled from wards to operating theaters; there were no white-robed doctors making Pavlovian responses to their beepers; and even the attendants never wore uniforms. But it was still, essentially, a hospital ; and a hospital was where the fifteen-year-old Donald had watched his father gasping for breath, as he slowly died from the first of the two great plagues that had ravaged the twentieth century.

“How is she this morning, Dolores?” he asked the nurse after he had checked in at Reception.

“Quite cheerful, Mr. Craig. She asked me to take her shopping—she wants to buy a new hat.”

“Shopping! That’s the first time she’s even asked to go out!”

Donald should have been pleased, yet he felt a twinge of resentment. Edith would never speak to him; indeed, she seemed unaware of his presence, looking through him as if he did not even exist.

“What did Dr. Jafferjee say? Is it okay for her to leave the clinic?”

“I’m afraid not. But it’s a good sign: she’s starting to show interest in the world around her again.”

A new hat ? Thought Craig. That was a typically feminine reaction—but it was not at all typical of Edith. She had always dressed…well, sensibly rather than fashionably, and had been quite content to order her clothes in the usual fashion, by teleshopping. Somehow, he could not imagine her in some exclusive Mayfair shop, surrounded by hatboxes, tissue paper, and fawning assistants. But if she felt that way, so be it; anything to help her escape from the mathematical labyrinth which was, quite literally, infinite in extent.

And where was she now, in her endless explorations? As usual, she was sitting crouched in a swivel chair, while an image built up on the meter-wide screen that dominated one wall of her room. Craig could see that it was in hi-res mode—all two thousand lines—so even the supercomputer was going flat out to paint a pixel every few seconds. To a casual observer, it would have seemed that the image was frozen in a partly completed state; only close inspection would have shown that the end of the bottom line was creeping slowly across the screen.