Edith hadn’t noticed. She had called up the first logged sequence on the monitor screen, and was looking thoughtfully at the frozen image.
‘Starting with Frame 3751,’ she said. ‘Here we go — man lighting cigar — man on right screen ditto — end on Frame 4432 — whole sequence forty-five seconds — what’s the client’s policy on cigars?’
‘Okay in case of historical necessity; remember the Churchill retrospective? No way we could pretend he didn’t smoke.’
Edith gave that short laugh, rather like a bark, that Donald now found more and more annoying.
‘I’ve never been able to imagine Winston without a cigar — and I must say he seemed to thrive on them. After all, he lived to ninety.’
‘He was lucky; look at poor Freud — years of agony before he asked his doctor to kill him. And toward the end, the wound stank so much that even his dog wouldn’t go near him.’
‘Then you don’t think a group of 1912 millionaires qualifies under ‘historical necessity’?’
‘Not unless it affects the story line — and it doesn’t. So I vote clean it up.’
‘Very well — Algorithm Six will do it, with a few subroutines.’
Edith’s fingers danced briefly over the keyboard as she entered the command. She had learned never to challenge her partner’s decisions in these matters; he was still too emotionally involved, though it was now almost twenty years since he had watched his father struggling for one more breath.
‘Frame 6093,’ said Edith. ‘Cardsharp fleecing his wealthy victims. Some on the left have cigars, but I don’t think many people would notice.’
‘Agreed,’ Donald answered, somewhat reluctantly. ‘If we can cut out that cloud of smoke on the right. Try one pass with the haze algorithm.’
It was strange, he thought, how one thing could lead to another, and another, and another — and finally to a goal which seemed to have no possible connection with the starting point. The apparently intractable problem of eliminating smoke, and restoring hidden pixels in partially obliterated images, had led Edith into the world of Chaos Theory, of discontinuous functions, and trans-Euclidean meta-geometries.
From that she had swiftly moved into fractals, which had dominated the mathematics of the Twentieth Century’s last decade. Donald had begun to worry about the time she now spent exploring weird and wonderful imaginary landscapes, of no practical value — in his opinion — to anyone.
‘Right,’ Edith continued. ‘We’ll see how Subroutine 55 handles it. Now Frame 9873 — just after they’ve hit. . . . This man’s playing with the pieces of ice on deck — but note those spectators at the left.’
‘Not worth bothering about. Next.’
‘Frame 21,397. No way we can save this sequence! Not only cigarettes, but those page boys smoking them can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen. Luckily, the scene isn’t important.’
‘Well, that’s easy; we’ll just cut it out. Anything else?’
‘No — except for the sound track at Frame 52,763 — in the lifeboat. Irate lady exclaims: ‘That man over there — he’s smoking a cigarette! I think it’s disgraceful, at a time like this!’ We don’t actually see him, though.’
Donald laughed.
‘Nice touch — especially in the circumstances. Leave it in.’
‘Agreed. But you realize what this means? The whole job will only take a couple of days — we’ve already made the analog-digital transfer.’
‘Yes — we mustn’t make it seem too easy! When does the client want it?’
‘For once, not last week. After all, it’s still only 2007. Five years to go before the centennial.’
‘That’s what puzzles me,’ said Donald thoughtfully. ‘Why so early?’
‘Haven’t you been watching the news, Donald? No one’s come out into the open yet, but people are making long-range plans — and trying to raise money. And they’ve got to do a lot of that — before they can bring up the Titanic.’
‘I’ve never taken those reports seriously. After all, she’s badly smashed up — and in two pieces.’
‘They say that will make it easier. And you can solve any engineering problem — if you throw enough cash at it.’
Donald was silent. He had scarcely heard Edith’s words, for one of the scenes he had just watched had suddenly replayed itself in his memory. It was as if he was watching it again on the screen; and now he knew why he had wept in the darkness.
‘Goodbye, my dear son,’ the aristocratic young Englishman had said, as the sleeping boy who would never see his father again was passed into the lifeboat.
And yet, before he had died in the icy Atlantic waters, that man had known and loved a son — and Donald Craig envied him. Even before they had started to drift apart, Edith had been implacable. She had given him a daughter; but Ada Craig would never have a brother.
7 THIRD LEADER
From the London Times (Hardcopy and NewsSat) 2007 April 15:
A Night to Forget?
Some artifacts have the power to drive men mad. Perhaps the most famous examples are Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and the hideous statues of Easter Island. Crackpot theories — even quasi-religious cults — have flourished around all three.
Now we have another example of this curious obsession with some relic of the past. In five years’ time, it will be exactly a century since the most famous of all maritime disasters, the sinking of the luxury liner Titanic on her maiden voyage in 1912. The tragedy inspired dozens of books and at least five films — as well as Thomas Hardy’s embarrassingly feeble poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain.’
For seventy-three years the great ship lay on the bed of the Atlantic, a monument to the 1,500 souls who were lost with her; she seemed forever beyond human ken. But in 1985, thanks to revolutionary advances in submarine technology, she was discovered, and hundreds of her pitiful relics brought back to the light of day. Even at the time, many considered this a kind of desecration.
Now, according to rumour, much more ambitious plans are afoot; various consortia — as yet unidentified — have been formed to raise the ship, despite her badly damaged condition.
Frankly, such a project seems completely absurd, and we trust that none of our readers will be induced to invest in it. Even if all the engineering problems can be overcome, just what would the salvors do with forty or fifty thousand tons of scrap iron? Marine archaeologists have known for years that metal objects — except, of course, gold — disintegrate rapidly when brought into contact with air after long submergence.
Protecting the Titanic might be even more expensive than salvaging her. It is not as if — like the Vasa or the Mary Rose — she is a ‘time capsule’ giving us a glimpse of a lost era. The twentieth century is adequately — sometimes all too adequately — documented. We can learn nothing that we do not already know from the debris four kilometres down off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
There is no need to revisit her to be reminded of the most important lesson the Titanic can teach — the dangers of over-confidence, of technological hubris. Chernobyl, Challenger, Lagrange 3 and Experimental Fusor One have shown us where that can lead.
Of course we should not forget the Titanic. But we should let her rest in peace.
8 PRIVATE VENTURE
Roy Emerson was bored, as usual — though this was a fact that he hated to admit, even to himself. There were times when he would wander through his superbly equipped workshop, with its gleaming machine tools and tangles of electronic gear, quite unable to decide which of his expensive toys he wished to play with next. Sometimes he would start on a project suggested by one of the countless network ‘magazines,’ and join a group of similarly inclined hobbyists scattered all over the world. He seldom knew their names — only their often facetious call signs — and he was careful not to give his. Since he had been listed as one of the hundred richest men in the United States, he had learned the value of anonymity.
After a few weeks, however, the latest project would lose its novelty, and he would pull the plug on his unseen playmates, changing his ident code so that they could no longer contact him. For a few days, he would drink too much, and waste time exploring the personal notice boards whose contents would have appalled the first pioneers of electronic communication.
Occasionally — after the long-suffering Joe Wickram had checked it out — he would answer some advertisement for ‘personal services’ that intrigued him. The results were seldom very satisfying, and did nothing to improve his self-respect. The news that Diana had just remarried hardly surprised him, but left him depressed for several days, even though he tried to embarrass her by a vulgarly expensive wedding present.
All play and no work was making Emerson a very dull Roy. Then, overnight, a call from Rupert Parkinson, aboard his racing trimaran in the South Pacific, abruptly changed his life.