Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

Here, in a small plaza between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, they said good-bye to the horses and miniphants. Duncan’s mount gently collapsed in slow motion, so that its riders could step off onto terra firma; then, with equal solemnity, it rose to its feet, gravely saluted them with upraised trunk, and headed back toward its home in the Central Park Zoo. The ride had been an enjoyable experience, and Duncan could imagine few nicer ways of sightseeing, in perfect weather such as this. Nevertheless, he was glad to be back on his own feet again. That gentle swaying had been growing a little monotonous. And although he had been in no real danger, he now knew what the first intimations of seasickness must be like.

They were now only a few hundred meters from the elevated ribbon of the West Side Highway and the impressive expanse of the Hudson River, blue and flat in the morning sunlight. Never before had Duncan seen so large a body of water at such close quarters. Though it looked calm and peaceful, he found it slightly ominous—even menacing. He was more familiar with the ocean of space than the realm of water, with all its mysteries and monsters; and because of that ignorance, he felt fear.

There were numerous small villas and cafés and shops along the riverfront, as well as dozens of little docks containing pleasure boats. Although marine transport had been virtually extinct for more than two centuries, water still had an irresistible fascination for a large part of the human race. Even now, a garishly painted paddleboat, loaded with sightseers, was skirting the New Jersey shore. Duncan wondered if it was a genuine antique, or a modern reconstruction.

The three-masted man-of-war with the gilded figurehead could not possibly be the real thing—it was much too new and had obviously never gone to sea. But moored at a dock close to it was the scarred yet still beautifully streamlined hull of a sailing ship which, Duncan guessed, might have been launched in the early twentieth century. He looked at it with awe, savoring the knowledge that it had already finished its career before the first ships of space lifted from Earth.

Boss did not give them an opportunity to linger over these relics; he was heading toward an enormous, translucent half-cylinder lying along more than three hundred meters of the shoreline. It appeared to be a makeshift, temporary structure, quite out of keeping—in scale and appearance—with the careful good taste of everything around it.

And now, as they approached this peculiar building, Duncan became aware of a sudden change in the behavior of his companions. All the way from the park they had been chattering and laughing, completely relaxed and enjoying themselves on this beautiful summer day. Quite abruptly, it seemed as if a cloud had passed across the face of the sun; all laughter, and almost all talking, had suddenly ceased. Very obviously, they knew something that he did not, yet he was reluctant to disturb the mood of solemn silence by asking naïve questions.

They entered a small auxiliary building, so much like an airlock that it was easy to imagine that they were going into space. Indeed, it was a kind of airlock, holding rows of protective clothing: oilskins, rubber boots, and—at last!—the hard hats that had been exercising Bill van Hyatt’s imagination. Still in that curious expectant hush, with only a few fleeting smile at each other’s transformed appearance, they passed through the inner airlock.

Duncan had expected to see a ship. In this, at least, he was not surprised. But he was completely taken aback by its sheer size; it almost filled the huge structure that surrounded it. He knew that, toward the end, oil tankers had become gigantic—but he had no idea that passenger liners had ever grown so huge. And it was obvious from its many portholes and decks that this ship had been build to transport people, not bulk cargo.

The viewing platform on which they stood was level with the main deck and just ahead of the bridge. To his right, Duncan could see one huge but truncated mast and a businesslike maze of cranes, winches, ventilators, and hatches, all the way up to the prow. Stretching away on the left, toward the ship’s hidden stern, was an apparently endless wall of steel, punctuated by hundreds of portholes. Looming high above everything were three huge funnels, almost touching the curved roof of the enclosure. From their spacing, it was obvious that a fourth one was now missing.

There were many other signs of damage. Windows were shattered, parts of the decking had been torn up, and when he looked down toward the keel, Duncan could see an enormous metal patch, at least a hundred meters long, running just below the waterline.

Only then did all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Now he understood the awed silence of his companions, and was able to share their emotions of wonder and pity.

On that day, he had been a boy on a distant world; but he could still remember when, after her three-hundred-and-fifty-year maiden voyage, the Titanic had at last reached New York.

“They never built another one like her; she marked the end of an age—an age of wealth and elegance which was swept away, only two years later, by the first of the World Wars. Oh, they built faster and bigger, in the half century before air travel closed that chapter for all time. But no ship ever again matched the luxury you see around you now. It broke too many hearts when she was lost.”

Duncan could not believe it; he was still in a dream. The magnificent Grand Saloon, with its vast mirrors, gilded columns, and ankle-deep carpet, was opulent beyond anything he had ever imagined, and the sofa into which he was sinking made him almost forget the gravity of Earth. Yet the most incredible fact of all was that everything he saw and touched had been lying for three and a half centuries on the bed of the Atlantic.

He had not realized that the deep sea was almost as timeless as space. “All the damage,” the speaker had explained, “was done on that first morning. When she sake, two and a half hours after the spur of ice ripped open the starboard hull, she went down bow first, almost vertically. Everything loose tumbled forward until it was either stopped by the bulkheads, or else smashed through them. By miraculous good luck—and this tells you how superbly she was built—all three engines remained in place. If they had gone, the hull would have been so badly damaged that we could never have salvaged her...”

“But once she reached the bottom, three kilometers down, she was safe for centuries. The water there is only two degrees above freezing point; the combination of cold and pressure quenches all decay, inhibits all rust. We’ve found meat in the refrigerators as fresh as when it left Southampton on April 10, 1912, and everything that was canned or bottled is still in perfect condition.”

“When we’d patched her up—a straightforward job, though it took a year to plug all the holes and reinforce the weak spots—we blasted out the water with the zero-thrust cold rockets the deep-sea salvage people have developed. Naturally, weather conditions were critical; by good luck, there was an ideal forecast for April 15, 2262, so she broke surface three hundred and fifty years to the very day after she sank. Conditions were identical—dead calm, freezing temperature—and you won’t believe this, but we had to avoid an iceberg when we started towing!”

“So we brought her to New York, pumped her full of nitrogen to stop rusting, and slowly dried her out. No problems here—the underwater archaeologists have preserved ships ten times older than Titanic . It’s the sheer scale of the job that’s taken us fourteen years, and will take us at least ten more. Thousands of pieces of smashed furniture had to be sorted out, hundreds of tons of coal to be moved—almost every lump by hand.”