9

Stalking the Nightmare

AUGUST 23, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII

John-David Cameron, Jim Cameron's brother, was one of those Marines whose unit followed the old Greek philosophy of developing, to the men's maximum potential, both the mind and the body. One requirement of his unit had been IQ scores that belonged up in lights on a movie marquee. Naturally, John-David was one of the men who understood our new generation of bot probes down to the smallest fiber-optic spool and plastic clip. In his spare time, while watching the deep scattering layer come up to the Keldysh's fantail after sunset, he liked to kick back with beers rigged to either freeze in the bottle or foam all over a friend's hand, arguing about where theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking might have gone wrong with the idea that information could never pass through the cosmic singularity (the Big Bounce) and where Stephen Jay Gould appeared to be taking the Butterfly Effect (an idea in chaos theory) and contingency theory (a behavioral theory) too seriously.

“And of course,” he'd be glad to tell you, “[physicist Werner] Heisenberg might have been here.”

John-David Cameron's Internet link to the expedition (a predecessor of YouTube) and the Cameron brothers' bot company were not given names like Earthship and Dark Matter, respectively, for nothing.

With historian Don Lynch, we had been reviewing Walter Lord's careful matching of the Titanic's passengers and crew members with their staterooms. Because many prospective passengers (including Lord William Pirrie and his friends) canceled their plans for the maiden voyage, there had been many opportunities for passengers to change and upgrade their rooms once they boarded—which, in fact, many wrote of having done. Thanks to Walter Lord's decades of correspondence with survivors and his analysis of their family memoirs, when our bots ventured into a stateroom, we now had a very good idea whose room we were visiting.

Lynch would eventually become heir to Lord as the historian who knew more about the Titanic's passengers than anyone alive. In the years leading up to our expedition, Lynch and I had disagreed often about the details of the ship's last voyage. Now that Lord had allowed me to produce multiple copies of his entire history of correspondence, Lynch and I still disagreed on many points, but at least he finally understood the firsthand eyewitness accounts from which some of those disagreements had originated.

More often than not, the side-by-side addition of Lynch's documents and his recollections of conversations with survivors revealed that his interpretations were correct. More and more, we came to appreciate the old cliché of how three witnesses to an accident could give three entirely different accounts of what happened. The paradox was multiplied when the memories were told and retold over many years. Memories kept bottled up inside and not spoken about for several decades tended, when finally spoken or written about for the first time, to more closely match the British and American inquiry testimonies. Memories repeated over and over by survivors from the very beginning tended to pick up mutations along the way.

As an example, Lynch pointed out to me how the little black bulldog spoken about so eloquently by passenger Eva Hart in later years did not exist in her earlier accounts; nor did many other details she gave, some of which became self-contradictory as the decades passed. It seemed that constant replay through numerous retellings could be damaging to memory and to historical reality.

We began to wonder what percentage of our collective human history might be illusion, brought about quite innocently by the mutation of memory. Aboard the Titanic alone, some famous examples were emerging. In her May 31, 1964, interview with Lord, Renee Harris recalled different details about her last card games aboard the Titanic from those she had written in an earlier family memoir. By 1964, she had begun relating clear recollections of being invited to a poker game in one of the two B-deck suites with its own private promenade sundeck.

Lynch did not think this possible, for Harris was identifying the Cardeza suite (B-51, B-53, and B-56—which, along with parts of Titanic owner Bruce Ismay's suite, was replicated as the Cal Suite in Jim Cameron's film, Titanic). Lynch strongly suspected that the game of poker recalled by Harris fifty-two years later must actually have taken place on another private promenade, on another ship, probably years after the disaster—having subsequently been composited into Harris's memory of that last Sunday afternoon aboard the Titanic.

Lynch's reason for such suspicion was that the Cardezas were, to put it as politely as he could, “rather snobbish.” During an era in which racial prejudice, including anti-Semitism, was perfectly acceptable—war correspondent Edith Russell had been required to Anglicize her Jewish-sounding name (Rosenbaum) in order to be successfully published—the Cardezas were fashionably prejudiced against Jews and would have shunned the Harrises, who were also Jewish.

Most of the individuals aboard the microcosm called the Titanic simply behaved as people trapped by their time. The norms of the time were such that Fifth Officer Harold Lowe could be perfectly open, without fear of rebuke, about having attempted to keep nonwhites out of boat 14. He was remembered more for bringing the boat into the midst of survivors and floating wreckage after the Titanic had sunk and rescuing nearly thirty people. Lynch was quick to point out that there would have been one fewer in boat 14 had a child and a woman working the oars not dissuaded Lowe from abandoning a survivor he found clinging to a wooden door, after the fifth officer saw that the man was not white.

Lynch personally knew one of the young women who stayed aboard boat 14 at least up to the point at which Lowe off-loaded most of the passengers onto other lifeboats so he could return to the site of the sinking in search of anyone who might still be alive. The woman told Lynch that the one horror from which the lifeboat passengers could never fully recover was hearing the call of a familiar voice here and there in the dark, then rowing toward the caller only to hear the voice weaken and die out before they arrived. Lynch said this happened to them repeatedly. Like the emerging picture of often inhumane treatment aboard the Titanic, which had once been called the “ship of dreams,” Lynch's oral history of the silenced voices was traumatic, and the trauma tended to reassert itself in surprising ways.

During a free hour in our mission, Lori Johnston, Bill Paxton, and Big Lew Abernathy invited me to go out through a gangway door with them aboard the Zodiac to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime event: swimming in water two and a half miles deep. Before I could step through the door, it occurred to me that the missing boatswain and his team must have opened the Titanic's shell door when a similarly quiet sea was similarly close to their feet. Distracted, I lost my footing and my glasses fell off overboard.

“Zodiac transfers to and from the ship are a good way to break an arm,” John-David Cameron warned, while my spare set of glasses headed down to Medusa and the Mirs.

“Gee, thanks,” I said, and asked, “Can you tell me of any other good ways to break an arm?”

“You want to stop and think about this,” said the Marine. “You've waited fifteen years for a chance to get down to the stern. If you break an arm, you can't dive.”

Nothing more needed to be said. I stayed aboard at the shell door and watched my friends swim in water that during the past few hours had become dead calm (what we had come to call “Titanic calm”). Suddenly I could think only about the freezing water of that April night eighty-nine years before—and the people in the water, with the Titanic gone.

As the others prepared to come back aboard, Abernathy asked Paxton if he had ever played hide-and-seek in a graveyard. Paxton said no—and Abernathy told him, “Look around.”

Paxton said later that his mind was taken instantly back in time to Lynch's story about the women with Fifth Officer Lowe, trying to find those voices in the dark. He very quickly came back aboard. They all came back, shivering—and certainly not from swimming in the North Atlantic on a summer afternoon.

AUGUST 24, 2001

Late at night, after Johnston and I discovered the cyclic (and possibly annual) layer of tree ring–like growth bands in our first and second sets of rusticle samples brought up by the Mir-2, I went to bed with a copy of Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. It had been a full day of new discoveries, including clear indications that some of the microbes in the rusticle consortium came from hundreds of miles away in the east, at the volcanic vent zones. Microbial cysts must have been drifting along the bottom for centuries until one by one they washed up against a friendly substrate named the Titanic. Sooner or later, we would have to journey to the vents themselves, looking for the origin of the Titanic's rusticle reef.

Alienness—that's what the rusticles were: glimpses of how multicellular, tissue-based life might have gotten its start on Earth, or perhaps also as far away as the subsurface seas of Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede or Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan. Alienness; utter alienness.

The questions answered this day, each answer springing open the door to ten new questions, left us in a wonderful state of information overload—and tired.

I did not get far beyond the top of page 2 in Clarke's Rama adventure before I dozed off. And at the very top of that page, Clarke had written about the approach of a dazzling fireball: “At 0946 GMT on the morning of September 11 … ”

• • •

Coincidence. All is coincidence. Or so we scientists like to say.

More often than not, the idea that a coincidence was an omen or of some other prophetic significance existed in the eye of the beholder only and not in reality. Attributing foresight through hindsight was a way of meddling, and meddling usually turned out to be a way of causing trouble.

During this final week of August, as a sample of iron from boat 8's railing came up and the rusticle roots revealed a shared yet poorly understood circulatory system, Abernathy marveled over the latest live images from the Medusa showing rusticles hanging from walls of riveted steel like stalactites, and exclaimed, “There must be millions of them!” Johnston corrected him, “Not them, Lew. It. They're all one organism.” A consortial life-form, new to science, was converting the 460-foot length of the Titanic's bow into one of the largest “creatures” on Earth.

A second source of iron substrate with its roots intact came up in the form of a davit bitt, also recovered from the approximate location of boat 8, near the place where Violet Jessop's old friend Jock Hume had joined his fellow band members, trying to calm the crowds with music.

These two rusticle bases were the only samples raised from the Titanic for study this year, with the understanding that after the organisms were removed for dissection and preservation, the davit bitt and the rail section were to be returned to the Titanic's portside boat deck.

The rusticles were, in their own right, fascinating enough to create their own field of study. Whatever cycles (annual or otherwise) were involved in the rusticles' growth rings, the rings themselves had more than doubled in thickness during the past seven cycles, which was consistent with the unusually rapid growth rate of Georgyj Vinogradov's gorgon and the apparently explosive increase in the rusticle-based deterioration of the Titanic. The recent identification of rusticlelike fossils in Australia, dating back approximately 2.5 billion years, added spicier seasonings to our bio-archaeological dreams, turning them into an analogy of what the multicellular origins of plants and animals might have looked like and turning our quest into the sincerest form of ancestor worship. Science was telling us that we might have begun as clay and iron-oxide–rich mud around the bacteria-smeared hydrothermal springs of the sea, much as the biblical book of Genesis said we were: born of mud and dust.

Although we were by now thinking a little more kindly about mud and bacterial slimes, Johnston and I did not mention Genesis to the Russians; we presumed that they must have been as troubled as American atheists by the Apollo 8 crew's reading from Genesis thirty-three years earlier. Yet something else happened with our rusticle samples—which, with the aid of such meddling as the calculation of odds against coincidence, could be bound in the meddlings of hindsight and (rightly or wrongly) interpreted as echoing Clarke's fire in the sky.

The davit bitt had pieces of rope still dangling from it. The railing, when Abernathy first brought it out of the sample basket, had broken into the shape of a cross. Someone had gasped at this, as though it were a kind of omen. The rail was merely crosshatched metal; “so, naturally it could break into the shape of a cross,” I wrote later. I'd have been impressed if the metal had broken into the far less probable shape of a fish or a Star of David. The davit bitt, when viewed from a certain angle, was also cross-shaped, and the length of rope draped over both arms of it had brought an even louder and more unexpected gasp—this time from one of the Russian scientists.

She said, “Two were hung on their crosses with rope … on that hill, that day. Three were crucified on that hill. A third cross is coming. And it will be big. Terrible big.”

“Imagine no religion,” John Lennon had sung. I mentioned to Ken Marschall that the Russians had tried that experiment, and what the Russian scientist just said seemed to me the strangest of observations, coming as it did from a person from a country in which the entire population had been raised atheist.

Marschall told me to walk with him to the top decks and to look at something I had seen many times, then to look again and really see it for the first time. At the top of what we sometimes called the Keldysh's grand stairway, couches and armchairs were set about a meeting table. On one wall was mounted a stained-glass window, an abstract splash of color not very different from many similar examples of 1970s and 1980s architectural perks. It blended practically undetected into the background—and, according to Marschall, that might have been the whole point. He ran his finger down one line of colored curves and shapes and asked, “What do you see?”

“My God,” I said.

“That's exactly what the artist must have been trying to say,” Ken said.

Hidden on a ship once commanded by the KGB—hidden in open view, for those who had eyes to see—were the Madonna and child.

“Who would have thought it?” I said to Abernathy. “Glass cutting as a subversive activity.”

Abernathy, who was a restaurateur as well as a deep-ocean explorer, spent many of his free moments in the ship's galley with the Russians. “As the wise man goeth the fool,” he told me. “You have been out here for weeks with the Russians, and still you have no idea what it means to be Russian.”

SEPTEMBER 1, 2001

Paxton was convinced he would never have any idea what sort of creature left a big puff of swirling mud behind as it fled ahead of the Mir-1's floodlights during its approach to boiler room number 2. His initial suspicion of a large octopus left him thoroughly “creeped out.”

“I felt a presence,” he said, “as [though] it were still lurking somewhere along the starboard hull, beyond the range of our lights.”

“Don't worry,” I said, and I told him about one of my mentors, Ed Coher, who had conducted a histological analysis on a large octopus body part that washed up on a Florida beach. Though the results remained inconclusive, some size estimates for the full creature outclassed the largest squid pieces found in the stomachs of sperm whales. “What you're afraid of, Bill, I wouldn't worry about meeting it on your next dive,” I assured him. “The occi that Doc Coher described is probably not hiding in or around the Titanic, because the Titanic just isn't a big enough playground.”

In a log entry, I wrote, “Out here we [are] coming up with a lot of ‘I-don't-knows.' What kind of animal is a flashing Milk Dud, really? What was that large, poly-nose-like thing flying like a bat out of hell from behind the Titanic's boilers? We're never afraid of not having answers; it's running out of questions [that] we should fear most. Being confused (‘What the hell is that?') means some explorer is having a good day.”

The “flashing Milk Duds” and the presence of large-eyed fish near the wreck were powerful indicators that there existed bottom-dwelling creatures who used bioluminescent organs as defensive and/or predatory stun weapons. Video of cruises through the Titanic's debris field often revealed the puff trails of animals fleeing ahead of the submersibles' lamps or a tripod fish sitting light-stunned on its stiltlike fins.

I had a picture in my mind of creatures never seen before, swimming away from us the moment our lights began shining over the rim of a mound or a dune. I told Anatoly Sagalevich that one thing I really wanted to try was to move along the bottom with our lights completely off, then turn them on with our cameras running “and see who is around.”

The Russian word nyet is designed to somehow mean much more than “no.” Sagalevich explained that here and there, new boulders were appearing on the bottom, boulders not on the previous year's maps of the debris, because these boulders were being dropped randomly by icebergs each winter and spring.

“It's easy to get killed by an iceberg down here,” Sagalevich said sternly. One did not even have to crash the ports of the crew compartment into a boulder directly. Any part capable of imploding—an external camera, a lamp—would do the killing. At the Titanic's depth, and at six thousand pounds per square inch, a crushed lamp would implode faster than the speed of sound, creating a shock wave that could implode the other lamps, the cameras, and the crew compartment—all within less time than was required for a shout to travel the length of a New York City bus.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2001

The new questions seemed endless. We always knew that opal, like amber, was an organic gemstone. Some of the finest opals were actually found on, in, or even as fossils. They usually formed in bacterially generated fossil beds. Some of the rusticles from the boat 8 davit bitt had formed thin layers of interior opal, absorbing silica either from seawater or from slowly dissolving pieces of the Titanic's glass, or from some combination of both.

Inside the bow section, our robots were revealing that much more wood survived than anyone had anticipated—especially in the wake of Robert Ballard's fifteen-year-old theory that the same wood-boring mollusks and bacterial mats that were responsible for the disappearance of the Titanic's deck wood had also devoured the entire grand stairway. But the decorative carved wood of the reception areas surrounding the stairway was still standing—a little eroded and in need of repair, but otherwise remarkably intact. The oak arches were still there, and furniture—broken but still identifiable—lay everywhere, half buried in rusticle dust.

The delicate wood trim above the D-deck passenger-entrance gangways looked almost new, and so did the stacks of plates in a fractured sideboard that had crashed to the floor near an entrance vestibule.

Although wooden doors and ornate vestibules that once bracketed the grand stairway were intact, the stairway itself—which once descended from the boat deck all the way down to where Violet Jessop had last seen her friend Stan—had disappeared without leaving behind any trace of its brass and iron railings. Had the wood been eaten, the railings should have been piled at the bottom of the landing, nearly a full deck high. The eaten stairway scenario was also contradicted by the discovery of a great many structures surrounding the stairwell and made from the same type of oak, which had somehow escaped uneaten.

Instead of being piled at the bottom of the great hole where the grand stairway and the crystal dome had once stood, the brass and wrought-iron stairway railings appeared to have started their journey to the bottom, up to a third of a mile behind the bow section's final landing place. Fixtures consistent with the heavy stairway decorations were found scattered throughout the field of debris that surrounded the severed stern's crash site. It looked as though the multideck tower of solid oak had broken free and floated out through the crystal dome, pulling apart as the bow section disappeared beneath it, dropping bits of railing the way a melting and crumbling iceberg drops pebbles and boulders.

Inside the bow section, the bot probes continued to find surviving wooden structures from the periphery of the stairwell all the way forward to Edith Russell's stateroom, where wood still framed her unbroken mirror. Walter Lord had said that his friend Edith kept filling her water glass with whiskey before she left her room for the last time. As the room filled with water, Russell's drinking glass never floated out of the little rack to the right of her mirror. The glass was undoubtedly weighted down with its last fill-up of whiskey. In the end, though, according to Russell's diary, she had proceeded to pack most of her belongings neatly into the closets and drawers before she abandoned ship (just as they can be seen today). Something must have compelled her to give up this activity and to hurry away so abruptly that she left her last drink forgotten.

In the direction that Russell fled, the mahogany of the first-class reception room was now home to a snakelike white and lavender “worm” with phosphorescent “portholes” along its sides. Worm hardly describes the mysterious beast. It had dug a complex network of burrows, weaving in and out of mahogany flowerpot frames and decorative mahogany baseboards and up the main supports of the stained-glass windows. Vinogradov saw features that reminded us both of echinoderms (sea cucumbers), yet the “worms” were at the same time unlike an echinoderm. We could not even fit the animal into a phylum; we did not know of a creature that somehow made its home in mahogany, a substance that until April 1912 did not even exist in the deep-ocean environment in which it had evolved.

Perplexed, Vinogradov and I began calling D deck's stained-glass reception area “the lair of the white worm.”