‘Looks a mess, doesn’t it?’ said Kato cheerfully. ‘But watch.’
A shark swam leisurely past, suddenly noticed the imaginary camera, and departed in alarm. A nice touch, thought Donald, silently saluting the animators.
Now time speeded up. Numbers indicating days flickered on the right of the picture, twenty-four hours passing in every second. Slim girders descended from the liquid sky, and assembled themselves into an open framework surrounding the wreckage. Thick cables snaked into the shattered hulk.
Day Four Hundred — more than a year had passed. Now the water, hitherto quite invisible, was becoming milky. First the upper portion of the wreck, then the twisted plating of the hull, then everything down to the seabed itself, slowly disappeared into a huge block of glistening whiteness.
‘Day Six Hundred,’ said Kato proudly. ‘Biggest ice cube in the world — except that it isn’t quite cube-shaped. Think of all the refrigerators that’s going to sell.’
Maybe in Asia, thought Donald. But not in the U.K. — especially in Belfast. . . . Already there had been protests, cries of ‘sacrilege!’ and even threats to boycott everything Japanese. Well, that was Kato’s problem, and he was certainly well aware of it.
‘Day Six Hundred Fifty. By this time, the seabed will also have consolidated, right down to several meters below the triple screws. Everything will be sealed tight in one solid block. All we have to do is lift it up to the surface. The ice will only provide a fraction of the buoyancy we need. So . . .’
‘. . . so you’ll ask Parky to sell you a few billion microspheres.’
‘Believe it or not, Donald, we had thought of making our own. But to copy Western technology? Perish the thought!’
‘Then what have you invented instead?’
‘Something very simple; we’ll use a really hi-tech approach.
‘Don’t tell anyone yet — but we’re going to bring the Titanic up with rockets.’
25 JASON JUNIOR
There were times when the International Seabed Authority’s deputy director (Atlantic) had no official duties, because both halves of the Titanic operation were proceeding smoothly. But Jason Bradley was not the sort of man who enjoyed inaction.
Because he did not have to worry about tenure — the income on his investments was several times his ISA salary — he regarded himself as very much a free agent. Others might be trapped in their little boxes on the authority’s organization chart; Jason Bradley roved at will, visiting any departments that looked interesting. Sometimes he informed the D.G., sometimes not. And usually he was welcomed, because his fame had spread before him, and other department heads regarded him more as an exotic visitor than a rival.
The other four deputy directors (Pacific, Indian, Antarctic, Arctic) all seemed willing enough to show him what was happening in their respective ocean empires. They were, of course, now united against a common enemy — the global rise in the sea level. After more than a decade of often acrimonious argument, it was now agreed that this rise was between one and two centimeters a year.
Bluepeace and other environmental groups put the blame on man; the scientists were not so sure. It was true that the billions of tons of CO2 from thermal power plants and automobiles made some contribution to the notorious ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ but Mother Nature might still be the principal culprit; mankind’s most heroic efforts could not match the pollution produced by one large volcano. All these arguments sounded very academic to peoples whose homes might cease to exist within their own lifetimes.
ISA chief scientist Franz Zwicker was widely regarded as the world’s leading oceanographer — an opinion he made little effort to discourage. The first item most visitors noticed when entering his office was the Time magazine cover, with its caption ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea.’ And no visitor escaped without a lecture, or at least a commercial, for Operation NEPTUNE.
‘It’s a scandal,’ Zwicker was fond of saying. ‘We have photo coverage of the Moon and Mars showing everything down to the size of a small house — but most of our planet is still completely unknown! They’re spending billions to map the human genome, in the hope of triggering advances in medicine — someday. I don’t doubt it; but mapping the seabed down to one-meter resolution would pay off immediately. Why, with camera and magnetometer we’d locate all the wrecks that have ever happened, since men started to build ships!’
To those who accused him of being a monomaniac, he was fond of giving Edward Teller’s famous reply: ‘That’s simply not true. I have several monomanias.’
There was no doubt, however, that Operation NEPTUNE was the dominant one, and after some months’ exposure to Zwicker, Bradley had begun to share it — at least when he was not preoccupied with Titanic.
The result, after months of brainstorming and gigabytes of CADCAMing, was Experimental Long-Range Autonomous Surveyor Mark I. The official acronym ELRAS survived only about a week; then, overnight, it was superseded. . . .
‘He doesn’t look much like his father,’ said Roy Emerson.
Bradley was getting rather tired of the joke, though for reasons which none of his colleagues — except the director-general — could have known. But he usually managed a sickly grin when displaying the lab’s latest wonder to VVIPs. Mere VIPs were handled by the deputy director, Public Relations.
‘No one will believe he’s not named after me, but it’s true. By pure coincidence, the U.S. Navy robot that made the first reconnaissance inside Titanic was called Jason Junior. So I’m afraid the name’s stuck.
‘But ISA’s J.J. is very much more sophisticated — and completely independent. It can operate by itself, for days — or weeks — without any human intervention. Not like the first J.J., which was controlled through a cable; someone described it as a puppy on a leash. Well, we’ve slipped the leash; this J.J. can go hunting over all the world’s ocean beds, sniffing at anything that looks interesting.’
Jason Junior was not much larger than a man, and was shaped like a fat torpedo, with forward- and downward-viewing cameras. Main propulsion was provided by a single multibladed fan, and several small swivel jets gave attitude control. There were various streamlined bulges housing instruments, but none of the external manipulators found on most ROVs.
‘What, no hands?’ said Emerson.
‘Doesn’t need them — so we have a much cleaner design, with more speed and range. J.J.’s purely a surveyor; we can always go back later and look at anything interesting he finds on the seabed. Or under it, with his magnetometer and sonar.’
Emerson was impressed; this was the sort of machine that appealed to his gadgeteering instincts. The short-lived fame that the Wave Wiper had brought him had long ago evaporated — though not, fortunately, the wealth that came with it.
He was, it seemed, a one-idea man; later inventions had all proved failures, and his well-publicized experiment to drop microspheres down to the Titanic in a hollow, air-filled tube had been an embarrassing debacle. Emerson’s ‘hole in the sea’ stubbornly refused to stay open; the descending spheres clogged it halfway, unless the flow was so small as to be useless.
The Parkinsons were quite upset, and had made poor Emerson feel uncomfortable at the last board meetings in ways that the English upper class had long perfected; for a few weeks, even his good friend Rupert had been distinctly cool.
But much worse was to come. A satirical Washington cartoonist had created a crazy ‘Thomas Alva Emerson’ whose zany inventions would have put Rube Goldberg to shame. They had begun with the motorized zipper and proceeded via the digital toothbrush to the solar-powered pacemaker. By the time it had reached Braille speedometers for blind motorists, Roy Emerson had consulted his lawyer.
‘Winning a libel action against a network,’ said Joe Wickram, ‘is about as easy as writing the Lord’s Prayer on a rice grain with a felt pen. The defendant will plead fair comment, public interest, and quote at great length from the Bill of Rights. Of course,’ he added hopefully, ‘I’ll be very happy to have a crack at it. I’ve always wanted to argue a case before the Supreme Court.’
Very sensibly, Emerson had declined the offer, and at least something good had come out of the attack. The Parkinsons, to a man — and woman — felt it was unfair, and had rallied around him. Though they no longer took his engineering suggestions very seriously, they encouraged him to go on fact-finding missions like this one.
The authority’s modest research and development center in Jamaica had no secrets, and was open to everybody. It was — in theory, at least — an impartial advisor to all who had dealings with the sea. The Parkinson and Nippon-Turner groups were now far and away the most publicly visible of these, and paid frequent visits to get advice on their own operations — and if possible, to check on the competition. They were careful to avoid scheduling conflicts, but sometimes there were slip-ups and polite ‘Fancy meeting you here!’ exchanges. If Roy Emerson was not mistaken, he had noticed one of Kato’s people in the departure lounge of Kingston Airport, just as he was arriving.