His rate of descent dropped, almost to zero. But not quite; he was still sinking, very slowly, toward the seabed.
Bradley sat in silence for a few minutes. Then, despite himself, he began to laugh. He was in no immediate danger, and it really was quite funny.
‘Explorer,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’ve just been hit by an iceberg.’
41 FREE ASCENT
Even now, Bradley did not consider himself to be in real jeopardy; he was more annoyed than alarmed. Yet on the face of it, the situation seemed dramatic enough. He was stranded on the seabed, his buoyancy lost. The glancing blow from the ascending mini-iceberg must have sheared away some of Deep Jeep’s flotation modules. And as if that were not enough, the biggest underwater avalanche ever recorded was bearing down upon him, and now due to arrive in ten or fifteen minutes. He could not help feeling like a character in an old Steven Spielberg movie.
First step, he thought: see if Deep Jeep’s propulsion system can provide enough lift to get me out of this. . . .
The submarine stirred briefly, and blasted up a cloud of mud which filled the surrounding water with a dazzling cloud of reflected light. Deep Jeep rose a few meters, then settled back. The batteries would be flat long before he could reach the surface.
I hate to do this, he told himself. A couple of million bucks down the drain — or at least on the seabed. But maybe we can salvage the rest of Deep Jeep when this is all over — just as they did with good old Alvin, long ago.
Bradley reached for the ‘chicken switch,’ and unlatched the protective cover.
‘Deep Jeep calling Explorer. I’ve got to make a free ascent; you won’t hear from me until I reach the surface. Keep a good sonar lookout — I’ll be coming up fast. Get your thrusters started, in case you have to sidestep me.’
Calculations had shown — and tests had confirmed — that shorn of its surrounding equipment Deep Jeep’s buoyant life-support sphere would hit forty klicks, and jump high enough out of the water to land on the deck of any ship that was too close. Or, of course, hole it below the water line, if it was unlucky enough to score a direct hit.
‘We’re ready, Jason. Good luck.’
He turned the little red key, and the lights flickered once as the heavy current pulsed through the detonators.
There are some engineering systems which can never be fully checked out, before the time when they are needed. Deep Jeep had been well designed, but testing the escape mechanism at four hundred atmospheres pressure would have required most of ISA’s budget.
The twin explosive charges separated the buoyant life-support sphere from the rest of the vehicle, exactly as planned.
But, as Jason had often said, the sea could always think of something else. The titanium hull was already stressed to its maximum safe value; and the shock waves, relatively feeble though they were, converged and met at the same spot.
It was too late for fear or regret; in the fraction of a second that was left to him before the sphere imploded, Jason Bradley had time for only a single thought: This is a good place to die.
42 THE VILLA, AT SUNSET
As he drove his hired car past the elaborate iron gates, the beautifully manicured trees and flowerbeds triggered a momentary flashback. With a deliberate effort of will, Donald Craig forced down the upwelling memories of Conroy Castle. He would never see it again; that chapter of his life was over.
The sadness was still there, and part of it would always be with him. And yet he also felt a sense of liberation; it was not too late — what was Milton’s most misquoted phrase? — to seek fresh woods and pastures new. I’m trying to reprogram myself, Donald thought wryly. Open a new file. . . .
There was a parking space waiting for him a few meters from the elegant Georgian house; he locked the hired car, and walked to the front door. There was a very new brass plate at eye level, just above the bell push and speaker grill. Though Donald could not see any camera lens, he did not doubt that one was observing him.
The plate carried a single line, in bold lettering:
Dr. Evelyn Merrick, Ph.D. (Psych)
Donald looked at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then smiled and reached for the bell push. But the door anticipated him.
There was a faint click as it swung open; then Dame Eva said, in that probing yet sympathetic voice that would often remind him of Dr. Jafferjee: ‘Welcome aboard, Mr. Craig. Any friend of Jason’s is a friend of mine.’
43 EXORCISM
2012 April 15, 2:00 A.M.
It was a bad time for the media networks — too early for the Americas, not late enough for the evening Euronews. In any case, it was a story that had peaked; few were now interested in a race that had been so well and truly lost.
Every year, for a century now, the U.S. Coast Guard had dropped a wreath at this same spot. But this centennial was a very special one: the focus of so many vanished hopes and dreams — and fortunes.
Glomar Explorer had been swung into the wind, so that her forward deckhouse gave her distinguished guests some protection from the icy gusts from the north. Yet it was not as cold as it had been on that immaculate night a hundred years ago, when the whole North Atlantic had lain all Danaë to the stars.
There was no one aboard who had been present the last time Explorer had paid its tribute to the dead, but many must have recalled that secret ceremony on the other side of the world, in a bloodstained century that now seemed to belong to another age. The human race had matured a little, but still had far to go before it could claim to be civilized.
The slow movement of Elgar’s Second Symphony ebbed into silence. No music could have been more appropriate than this haunting farewell to the Edwardian Era, composed during the very years that Titanic grew in the Belfast shipyard.
All eyes were on the tall, gray-haired man who picked up the single wreath and dropped it gently over the side. For a long time he stood in silence; though all his companions on the windswept deck could share his emotions, for some they were especially poignant. They had been with him aboard the Knorr, when the TV monitor had shown the first wreckage on the morning of 1 September 1985. And there was one whose dead wife’s wedding ring had been cast into these same waters, a quarter of a century ago.
This time, Titanic was lost forever to the race that had conceived and built her; no human eyes would look upon her scattered fragments again.
More than a few men were free at last, from the obsessions of a lifetime.
44 EPILOGUE: THE DEEPS OF TIME
The star once called the Sun had changed little since the far-off days when men had worshiped it.
Two planets had gone — one by design, one by accident — and Saturn’s rings had lost much of their glory. But on the whole, the Solar System had not been badly damaged during its brief occupancy by a space-faring species.
Indeed, some regions still showed signs of past improvements. The Martian oceans had dwindled to a few shallow lakes, but the great forests of mutated pines still survived along the equatorial belt. For ages to come, they would maintain and protect the ecology they had been designed to create.
Venus — once called New Eden — had reverted to its former Hell. And of Mercury, nothing remained. The System’s mother lode of heavy metals had been whittled away through millennia of astroengineering. The last remnant of the core — with its unexpected and providential bonus of magnetic monopoles — had been used to build the worldships of the Exodus Fleet.
And Pluto, of course, had been swallowed by the fearsome singularity which the best scientists of the human race were still vainly struggling to comprehend, even as they fled in search of safer suns. There was no trace of this ancient tragedy, when the Seeker fell earthward out of deep space, following an invisible trail.
The interstellar probe that Man had launched toward the Galactic core had reconnoitered a dozen stars before its signals had been intercepted by another civilization. The Seeker knew, to within a few dozen light-years, the origin of the primitive machine whose trajectory it was retracing. It had explored almost a hundred solar systems, and had discovered much. The planet it was approaching now was little different from many others it had inspected; there was no cause for excitement, even if the Seeker had been capable of such an emotion.