22
Terminal Velocity
SEPTEMBER 22, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION Titanic XIII
I told Jim Cameron about the tiny red octopus with the extraordinarily thin arms that stayed with me, outside my viewport, for what seemed a very long time. Jim said it sounded to him like a species described down here only once before. I added that when I bent down to write some notes and looked up again to discover that my “friend” was gone, I suddenly felt the most profound sensation of loneliness I have ever known.
“Every once in a while, the sea tosses you a gift,” Jim Cameron replied. “That was one of them.”
• • •
While gliding over the sea floor, near the starboard anchor, we saw a broken octagonal floor tile—then more flooring, identical to flooring fragments seen strewn along the boat deck and in the reception areas. This material appeared to have been dislodged by the down-blast as it pounded down through the vacant grand stairway shaft and surged outward along the boat deck and the promenade deck.
Our bot, Jake, continued to reveal surprises around every corner. Venturing beyond the influence of currents reaching down through the cargo hold's shaft, the bot illuminated an environment that clearly became more anoxic. Crabs, deep-ocean corals, and anemones were suddenly absent. Beds in the crew infirmary and adjacent rooms were intact, along with undecayed but mauled and broken wooden furniture, yet a bedspread and a pillow tucked under a sheet were somehow unmoved by the mayhem of April 14–15, 1912. Jake glided in for closer views of what appeared to be long white rusticle-like growths sprouting in spiral shapes. The bot's thrusters broke the feathery rusticle “cousins” into flying strands of bacterial biofilm. Along one corridor, a microbial fog hung in a distinct, sheetlike layer, about a quarter of a meter (less than a foot) above the deck.
The bot revealed powerful forces at work that treacherous night in some of the foremost crew areas. Deck-mounted, iron-framed tables were all blown down in the direction opposite the one we would have expected, emphasizing the many random processes that came into play during the first seconds of contact with the bottom. The combined effects of rupturing hull sections, the column collapse, and the down-blast were a little more complicated and varied than we had believed. Water had been jetted and blocked and must have rebounded in multiple directions at once. Down-blast and other inertial effects were not a simple affair. For all of the evidence of destructive force, seen in every direction, this time the Titanic was, for me, becoming a strangely peaceful place—at least, until we ended up inside it.
As with most crises, more than one normally orderly event was required to go wrong and converge; and in our case, only one needed to go right and save us. So it began, at 4:40 p.m., a little more than six hours after we had left the surface.
A careful examination of the number 1 cargo hatch's rim had confirmed that it survived the sinking without the slightest damage. This meant that the huge dent in the number 1 cargo hatch cover occurred after it left the rim and surged forward, most likely as it rocketed past the anchor crane on the prow.
The secret to providing floodlighting into the cargo hatch for Jake was for us to trim the Mir-2 a few degrees forward, because our lamps could not normally be aimed straight down. We pumped down to a slightly more negatively buoyant condition than usual and leaned partway into the shaft, during what could, at any moment, develop into a precarious balancing act on the rim. Pumping down to negative buoyancy consumed a fair percentage of battery power and required at least three minutes. Pumping up again consumed just as much time and power. When you were negative, you stayed that way for a while. This was not a time for mistakes.
Two decks below, we could see the little bot from the Mir-1 moving among the steel columns. Our pilot, Victor Nischeta, invited Lew Abernathy to move toward the large central viewport and shoot clear photos of Jake in the pit, and without warning I heard the whir of engines above our heads (normally, within this thick shell of metal, one hears nothing of the engines)—and, that quickly, we were tipping forward, and my view of Jake was improved enormously because he was moving up toward us. No—correction: we were moving down toward Jake.
Abernathy had just slipped against the forward throttle, punching it to full speed. We were at negative buoyancy and going in on a trajectory that could not be broken by pumping up to positive buoyancy. The Titanic seemed to have an affinity for victimhood by mathematics. This time it was geometry.
To appreciate the math, one had to imagine the Mir as a football, perfectly shaped to make a lengthwise “swish,” face-first, through a basketball hoop (the diameter of a circle equal to the width of the number 1 cargo hatch). The problem was that the football could never be backed out through the hoop, if it leveled out to any configuration other than pointy end first. If we crashed down near Jake, an uppercut punch from the deck below could level us out beneath the “basketball hoop” and preclude all thoughts of egress. The shape of the number 1 cargo hatch, combined with the worst possible angle and the full-ahead thrust, created the perfect mathematical combination for permanent residency on the Titanic.
Nischeta had seen incidents that required one Mir to pull the other Mir out of a tight corner—but nothing to compare with what happened during those first critical three seconds at the number 1 cargo hatch. The pilot knew that in this case, we would not be dealing with a crevasse in some frozen extrusion of lava trapping one of the helicopter-like landing skids. In this case, under the only cargo hatch rim that had been reinforced specifically to resist waves crashing over the bow, one submersible could easily get trapped trying to rescue the other—and, depending on our final location and angle, it might therefore be logical not to try.
As Jake and the inside of the Titanic loomed toward us—all of this unfolding within only three seconds—I glanced up toward the floodlights and realized that it might never come down to two days inside the Titanic, waiting for hypothermia to wear us down. Our light booms weren't going to make it inside. If one of the thick bulbs struck the rim of the cargo hatch at just the right angle, with just the right amount of blunt force, the bulb would implode at several times the speed of sound. The resulting shock wave would herald a chain reaction of lamps imploding along the girder until it reached into the crew compartment and the cells in our bodies were reduced at supersonic speed to individual organelles and broken protein chains.
Nischeta was a very reserved, very quiet engineer and pilot. I never knew he could scream at my seven-year-old's pitch.
I did not hear what Abernathy said at that moment. The only words I whispered, as I watched Jake and the deck below tilting toward me at an irrational angle, were “This is one of those things that's bad, right?”
Then followed one of the most amazing acts of piloting I had ever seen or likely would ever see. In one fluid motion, Nischeta seized the controls, and the whir of engine noise coming down through the hull grew even fiercer. The only way I can describe how we survived is to say that there seems to be a unity of feeling between submersible pilots and their machines, very reminiscent of the empathy between experienced riders and their horses. It was as though Nischeta could feel the outer hull of the submersible as an extension of his own skin—as though he sensed within an inch or two the distance from the Mir-2's skids and fiberglass skin to the nearest side of the number 1 cargo hatch rim and was therefore able to back us out, without hitting anything, in precisely the angle at which we had been going in. Full astern with some skilled maneuvering, and we were safe—once again on the rim, aiming our lamps down into the hold.
It occurred to me immediately that an action hauntingly similar to the one William Murdoch had called for (full astern) — an order argued by some historians to have hindered the Titanic's steering and guaranteed that she would be on the bed of the Atlantic for us to explore—had, in this case, saved us.
The only damage done appeared to be Abernathy's avalanche of rusticle debris—most of which fell down upon Jake as a plume of red dust.
Jim Cameron continued maneuvering Jake down the foremost cargo hold, where George Kemish's stowaway housekeepers had lived and died near William Carter's Renault Town Car. Jake glided over intact wooden crates that had been jumbled into piles from the tilt, the plunge, and the crash. One crate had broken open, spilling out a pile of books. In another corner, a large piece of cargo was still tied with rope to the floor, and brass fixtures gleamed in the red fog banks, but no one could make a determination whether the battered object was a car. The fog of rusticle dust was too thick.
Cameron, whose sub was more than fifteen meters (about fifty feet) away on the other side of the foremast, must have suspected something, for he called over to us, mentioning the rusticle dust storm and asking how we were. Abernathy instructed Nischeta exactly what to say: “We just adjusted our position a little while ago to give you better lighting. We are fine. How are you?”
“New rule,” I told Nischeta. “Every time Big Lew almost gets us killed, he owes each of us a beer.”