Ada scooped up Lady with one hand, and hugged the puppy to her breast while she regarded Bradley with a look of frank curiosity.
‘Are you really going to help us raise the Titanic?’ she asked.
Bradley shifted uncomfortably and avoided returning that disconcerting stare.
‘I hope so,’ he said evasively. ‘But there are lots of things we have to talk over first.’ And this, he added silently, is neither the time nor the place. He would have to wait until they had joined Mrs. Craig, and he was not altogether looking forward to the encounter.
‘What were you reading in the boat, Ada?’ he asked lightly, trying to change the subject.
‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked. It was a perfectly polite question, with no hint of impertinence. Bradley was still struggling for a suitable reply when Donald Craig interjected hastily: ‘I’m afraid my daughter hasn’t much time for the social graces. She considers there are more important things in life. Like fractals and non-Euclidean geometry.’
Bradley pointed to the puppy. ‘That doesn’t look very geometric to me.’
To his surprise, Ada rewarded him with a charming smile. ‘You should see Lady when she’s been dried out after a bath, and her hair’s pointing in all directions. Then she makes a lovely three-D fractal.’
The joke was right over Bradley’s head, but he joined in the general laughter. Ada had the saving grace of a sense of humor; he could get to like her — as long as he remembered to treat her as someone twice her age.
Greatly daring, he ventured another question.
‘That number 1.999 painted on the boathouse,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s a reference to your mother’s famous end-of-century program.’
Donald Craig chuckled.
‘Nice try, Jason; that’s what most people guess. Let him have it gently, Ada.’
The formidable Ms. Craig deposited her puppy on the grass, and it scuttled away to investigate the base of the nearest cypress. Bradley had the uncomfortable impression that Ada was trying to calibrate his I.Q. before she replied.
‘If you look carefully, Mr. Bradley, you’ll see there’s a minus sign in front of the number, and a dot over the last nine.’
‘So?’
‘So it’s really minus 1.9999 . . . forever and ever.’
‘Amen,’ interjected Patrick.
‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to write minus two?’
‘Exactly what I said,’ Donald said with a chuckle. ‘But don’t tell that to a real mathematician.’
‘I thought you were a pretty good one.’
‘God, no — I’m just a hairy-knuckled byte-basher, compared to Edith.’
‘And this young lady here, I suspect. You know, I’m beginning to feel out of my depth. And in my profession, that’s not a good idea.’
Ada’s laugh helped to lift the curious sense of unease that Bradley had felt for the last few minutes. There was something depressing about this place — something ominous that hovered just beyond the horizon of consciousness. It was no use trying to focus upon it by a deliberate act of will — the fugitive wisp of memory scuttled away as soon as he attempted to pin it down. He would have to wait; it would emerge when it was ready.
‘You asked me what book I was reading, Mr. Bradley — ‘
‘ — please call me Jason — ‘
‘ — so here it is.’
‘I might have guessed. He was a mathematician too, wasn’t he? But I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read Alice. The nearest American equivalent is The Wizard of Oz.’
‘I’ve read that too, but Dodgson — Carroll — is much better. How he would have loved this!’
Ada waved toward the curiously shaped lakes, and the little boathouse with its enigmatic inscription.
‘You see, Mr. Brad — Mr. Jason — that’s the Utter West. Minus two is infinity for the M-Set — there’s absolutely nothing beyond that. What we’re walking along now is the Spike — and this little pond is the very last of the mini-sets on the negative side. One day we’ll plant a border of flowers — won’t we, Pat? — that will give some idea of the fantastic detail around the main lobes. And over there in the east — that cusp where the two bigger lakes meet — that’s Seahorse Valley, at minus .745. The origin — zero, zero, of course — is in the middle of the biggest lake. The set doesn’t extend so far to the east; the cusp at Elephant Crossing — over there, right in front of the castle — is around plus .273.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Bradley answered, completely overwhelmed. ‘You know perfectly well I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
That was not perfectly true: it was obvious enough that the Craigs had used their wealth to carve this landscape into the shape of some bizarre mathematical function. It seemed a harmless enough obsession; there were many worse ways of spending money, and it must have provided a great deal of employment for the locals.
‘I think that’s enough, Ada,’ said Donald, with much more firmness than he had shown hitherto. ‘Let’s give Mr. Jason some lunch — before we throw him head-over-heels into the M-Set.’
They were leaving the tree-lined avenue, at the point where the narrow canal opened out into the smallest of the lakes, when Bradley’s brain unlocked its memory. Of course — the still expanse of water, the boat, the cypresses — all the key elements of Boecklin’s painting! Incredible that he hadn’t realized it before. . . .
Rachmaninoff’s haunting music welled up from the depths of his mind — soothing, familiar, reassuring. Now that he had identified the cause of his faint disquiet, the shadow lifted from his spirit.
Even later, he never really believed it had been a premonition.
19 ‘RAISE THE TITANIC!’
Slowly, reluctantly, the thousands of tons of metal began to stir, like some marine monster awakening from its sleep. The explosive charges that were attempting to jolt it off the seabed blasted up great clouds of silt, which concealed the wreck in a swirling mist.
The decades-long grip of the mud began to yield; the enormous propellers lifted from the ocean floor. Titanic began the ascent to the world she had left, a long lifetime ago.
On the surface, the sea was already boiling from the disturbance far below. Out of the maelstrom of foam, a slender mast emerged — still carrying the crow’s nest from which Frederick Fleet had once telephoned the fatal words, ‘Iceberg right ahead.’
And now the prow came knifing up — the ruined superstructure — the whole vast expanse of decking — the giant anchors which had taken a twenty-horse team to move — the three towering funnels, and the stump of the fourth — the great cliff of steel, studded with portholes — and, at last:
TITANIC
LIVERPOOL
The monitor screen went blank; there was a momentary silence in the studio, induced by a mixture of awe, reverence, and sheer admiration for the movie’s special effects.
Then Rupert Parkinson, never long at a loss for words, said ruefully: ‘I’m afraid it won’t be quite as dramatic as that. Of course, when that movie was made, they didn’t know she was in two pieces. Or that all the funnels had gone — though that should have been obvious.’
‘Is it true,’ asked Channel Ten’s host Marcus Kilford — ‘Mucus’ or ‘Killjoy’ to his enemies, who were legion — ‘that the model they used in the movie cost more than the original ship?’
‘I’ve heard that story — could be true, allowing for inflation.’
‘And the joke — ‘
‘ — that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic? Believe me, I’m tired of hearing that one!’
‘Then I won’t mention it, of course,’ said Kilford, twirling the notorious monocle that was his trademark. It was widely believed that this ostentatious antique served only to hypnotize his guests, and had no optical properties whatsoever. The Physics Department of King’s College, London, had even run a computer analysis of the images reflected when it caught the studio lights, and claimed to have established this with ninety-five percent certainty. The matter would only be settled when someone actually captured the thing, but all attempts had so far failed. It appeared to be immovably attached to Marcus, and he had warned would-be hijackers that it was equipped with a miniaturized self-destruct device. If this was activated, he would not be responsible for the consequences. Of course, no one believed him.
‘In the film,’ continued Kilford, ‘they talked glibly about pumping foam into the hull to lift the wreck. Would that have worked?’
‘Depends on how it was done. The pressure is so great — four hundred times atmospheric! — that all ordinary foams would collapse instantly. But we obtain essentially the same result with our microspheres — each holds its little bubble of air.’
‘They’re strong enough to resist that enormous pressure?’
‘Yes — just try and smash one!’