The radio spectrum was silent, except for the hiss and crash of the cosmic background. There were none of the glittering networks which covered the nightlands of most technologically developed worlds. Nor, when it entered atmosphere, did the Seeker find the chemical traces of industrial development.
Automatically, it went into the standard search routine. It dissolved into a million components, which scattered over the face of the planet. Some would never return, but would merely send back information. No matter; the Seeker could always create others to replace them. Only its central core was indispensable — and there were backup copies of that, safely stored at right angles to all three dimensions of normal space.
Earth had orbited the Sun only a few times before the Seeker had gathered all the easily accessible information about the abandoned planet. It was little enough; megayears of winds and rains had wiped away all man’s cities, and the slow grinding of the tectonic plates had completely changed the patterns of land and sea. Continents had become oceans; seabeds had become plains, which had then been wrinkled into mountains. . . .
. . . The anomaly was the faintest of echoes on a neutrino scan, but it attracted immediate attention. Nature abhorred straight lines, right angles, repeated patterns — except on the scale of crystals and snowflakes. This was millions of times larger; indeed, it dwarfed the Seeker. It could only be the work of intelligence.
The object lay in the heart of a mountain, beneath kilometers of sedimentary rock. To reach it would require only seconds; to excavate it without doing any damage, and to learn all its secrets, might require months or years.
The scan was repeated, at higher resolution. Now it was observed that the object was made from ferrous alloys of an extremely simple type. No civilization that could build an interstellar probe would have used such crude materials. The Seeker almost felt disappointment. . . .
Yet, primitive though this object was, no other artifact of comparable size or complexity had been found. It might, after all, be worth the trouble of recovering.
The Seeker’s high-level systems considered the problem for many, many microseconds, analyzing all the possibilities that might arise. Presently the Master Correlator made its decision.
‘Let us begin.’
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RM.S. Titanic has haunted me all my life, as is amply demonstrated by this extract from Arthur C. Clarke’s Chronices of the Strange and Mysterious (Collins, 1987):
My very first attempt at a full-length science-fiction story (fortunately long since destroyed) concerned that typical disaster of the spaceways, the collision between an interplanetary liner and a large meteorite — or small comet, if you prefer. I was quite proud of the title, Icebergs of Space — never dreaming at the time that such things really existed. I have always been a little too fond of surprise endings. In the last line I revealed the name of the wrecked spaceship. It was — wait for it — Titanic.
More than four decades later, I returned to the subject in Imperial Earth (1976), bringing the wreck to New York to celebrate the 2276 Quincentennial. At the time of writing, of course, no one knew that the ship was in two badly damaged portions.
Meanwhile I had grown to know Bill MacQuitty, the Irish movie maker (and much else) to whom this book is dedicated. Following the success of his superb A Night to Remember (1958), Bill was determined to film my 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust; however, the Rank Organization refused to dabble in fantasy (men on the Moon, indeed!) and the project was turned down. I am happy to say that the novel is now being turned into a TV mini-series by another close friend, Michael Deakin. If you wonder how we manage to find seas of dust on the Moon, stay tuned.
I am also indebted to Bill MacQuitty for photographs, plans, drawings, and documents on R.M.S. Titanic — especially the menu reproduced in Chapter 36, ‘The Last Lunch.’ Bill’s beautiful book Irish Gardens (text by Edward Hyams; Macdonald, London, 1967) also provided much inspiration.
It is pleasant to record that Bill’s director of photography was Geoffrey Unsworth — who, a decade later, also filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can still remember Geoffrey wandering round the set with a slightly bemused expression, telling all and sundry: ‘I’ve been in this business for forty years — and Stanley’s just taught me something I didn’t know.’ Michael Crichton has reminded me that Superman was dedicated to Geoffrey, who died during its production, much mourned by all those who had worked with him.
This novel would not have been possible, of course, without inputs from the two classic books on the subject, Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember (Allen Lane, 1976) and Robert Ballard’s The Discovery of the Titanic (Madison Press Books, 1987), both of which are beyond praise. Two other books I have also found very valuable are Walter Lord’s recent ‘sequel’ The Night Lives On (William Morrow, 1986) and Charles Pellegrino’s Her Name, Titanic (Avon, 1990). I am also extremely grateful to Charlie (who appears in Chapter 43) for a vast amount of technical information about ‘Bringing up Baby’ — an enterprise which we both regard with very mixed feelings.
Martin Gardner’s book The Wreck of the Titanic Foretold? (Prometheus Books, 1986) reprints the extraordinary Morgan Robertson novel, The Wreck of the Titan (1898!), which Lord Aldiss refers to in Chapter 9. Martin makes a good case for intelligent anticipation on Robertson’s part; nevertheless, I cannot blame anyone who thinks there must have been some feedback from 1912. . . .
Since many of the events in this novel have already occurred — or are about to do so — it has often been necessary to refer to real individuals. I hope they will enjoy my occasional extrapolation of their activities.
‘The Century Syndrome’ (Chapter 4) already has many people worried, though we will have to wait until 1/1/00 to see whether matters are as bad as I suggest. While I was writing this book, my most long-standing American friend, Dr. Charles Fowler (GCA, 1942 — though neither of us can quite believe it), sent me an article from the Boston Globe entitled ‘Mainframes have a problem with the year 2000.’ According to this, the joke in the trade is that everyone will retire in 1999. We’ll see. . . .
This problem will not, of course, arise in 2099. By then, computers will be able to take care of themselves (as well as H. Sap., if he/she is still around).
I have not invented the unusually large mollusk in Chapter 12. Details (with photographs) of this awesome beast will be found in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (Collins, 1980). Octopus giganteus was first positively identified by F. G. Wood and Dr. Joseph Gennaro (Natural History, March 1971), both of whom I was happy to get on camera for my Mysterious World TV series.
The useful hint on octopus allergies (e.g., what to do if you find one in the toilet) comes from Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diole’s Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (Cassell, 1973).
And here I must put on record something that has mystified me for many years. In this book, Jacques asserts that though his divers have played with octopuses (very well: octopodes) hundreds of times, they have never once been bitten — and have never even heard of such an incident. Well . . . the only time I caught one, off the eastern coast of Australia, it bit me! (see The Coast of Coral, Harper & Row, 1956). I am quite unable to explain this total breakdown of the laws of probability.
According to Omni magazine, the question described in Chapter 13 was actually set in a high school intelligence test, and only one genius-type pupil spotted that the printed answer was wrong. I still find this amazing; skeptics may profitably spend a few minutes with scissors and cardboard. The even more incredible story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, mentioned passim in the same chapter, will be found in G. H. Hardy’s small classic, A Mathematician’s Apology, and more conveniently in Volume 1 of James Newman’s The World of Mathematics.
For a crash course in offshore oil drilling operations, I must thank my longtime Sri Lankan friend Cuthbert Charles and his colleagues Walter Jackson and Danny Stephens (all with Brown & Root Vickers Ltd.) and Brian Redden (Technical Services Division Manager, Wharton Williams). They prevented me from making (I hope) too many flagrant errors, and they are in no way responsible for my wilder extrapolations of their truly astonishing achievements — already comparable to much that we will be doing in space during the next century. I apologize for awarding their kindness by sabotaging so much of their handiwork.
The full story of 1974’s ‘Operation JENNIFER’ has never been told, and probably never will be. To my surprise, its director turned out to be an old acquaintance, and I am grateful to him for his evasive but not unhelpful replies to my queries. On the whole, I would prefer not to know too much about the events of that distant summer, so that I am not handicapped by mere facts.