The Ghost from the Grand Banks Read online

  The Ghost from the Grand Banks

  Arthur C. Clarke

  A hundred years after the sinking of the Titanic, two of the world’s most powerful corporations race to find a way to raise and preserve the doomed luxury liner. The quest to uncover the secrets of the wreck and reclaim her becomes an obsession… and for some, a fatal one.

  The Ghost from the Grand Banks

  by Arthur C. Clarke

  For my old friend Bill MacQuitty—who, as a boy, witnessed the launch of R.M.S. Titanic, and, forty-five years later, sank her for the second time.

  INTRODUCTION

  Much has happened in the more than a decade since I wrote this book. There has been a dive to the wreck almost every year—one with paying passengers! And of course James Cameron’s magnificent movie has been seen all around the world. (Alas, the television series Michael Deakin and I wrote on my lunar version of a similar disaster, A Fall of Moondust, was turned down at the last moment.)

  As everyone knows, the world survived the “Century Syndrome” (Chapter 4). Now we have plenty of time to prepare for Y3K.

  Finally, I am indebted to Charlie Pellegrino for his latest book, Ghosts of the Titanic (William Morrow, 2000). This exhaustive coverage of the last hours of the ship, and the stories of its survivors, is packed with heartrending and often astonishing incidents. As Jim Cameron remarks on the jacket, Pellegrino brings the Titanic back to life.

  Colombo, Sri Lanka

  PRELUDE

  1. SUMMER OF ’74

  There must be better ways, Jason Bradley kept telling himself, of celebrating one’s twenty-first birthday than attending a mass funeral; but at least he had no emotional involvement. He wondered if Operation JENNIFER’s director, or his CIA sidekicks, even knew the names of the sixty-three Russian sailors they were now consigning to the deep.

  The whole ceremony seemed utterly unreal, and the presence of the camera crew added yet another dimension of fantasy. Jason felt that he was an extra in a Hollywood movie, and that someone would shout “Action!” as the shrouded corpses slid into the sea. After all, it was quite possible—even likely—that Howard Hughes himself had been in the plane that had circled overhead a few hours before. If it was not the Old Man, it must have been some other top brass of the Summa Corporation; no one else knew what was happening in this lonely stretch of the Pacific, a thousand kilometers northwest of Hawaii.

  For that matter, not even Glomar Explorer’s operations team—carefully insulated from the rest of the ship’s crew—knew anything about the mission until they were already at sea. That they were attempting an unprecedented salvage job was obvious, and the smart money favored a lost reconnaissance satellite. No one dreamed that they were going to lift an entire Russian submarine from water two thousand fathoms deep—with its nuclear warheads, its codebooks, and its cryptographic equipment. And, of course, its crew…

  Until this morning—yes, it had been quite a birthday!—Jason had never seen Death. Perhaps it was morbid curiosity that had prompted him to volunteer, when the medics had asked for help to bring the bodies up from the morgue. (The planners in Langley had thought of everything; they had provided refrigeration for exactly one hundred cadavers.) He had been astonished—and relieved—to find how well preserved most of the corpses were, after six years on the bed of the Pacific. The sailors who had been trapped in sealed compartments, where no predators could reach them, looked as if they were sleeping. Jason felt that, if he had known the Russian for “Wake up!” he would have had an irresistible urge to shout it.

  There was certainly someone aboard who knew Russian, and spoke it beautifully, for the entire funeral service had been in that language; only now, at the very end, was English used as Explorer’s chaplain came on line with the closing words for burial at sea.

  There was a long silence after the last “Amen,” followed by a brief command to the Honor Guard. And then, as one by one the lost sailors slid gently over the side, came the music that would haunt Jason Bradley for the rest of his life.

  It was sad, yet not like any funeral music that he had ever heard; in its slow, relentless beat was all the power and mystery of the sea. Jason was not a very imaginative young man, but he felt that he was listening to the sound of waves marching forever against some rocky shore. It would be many years before he learned how well this music had been chosen.

  The bodies were heavily weighted, so that they entered the water feet first, with only the briefest of splashes. Then they vanished instantly; they would reach their final resting place intact, before the circling sharks could mutilate them.

  Jason wondered if the rumor was true, and that in due course the film of this ceremony would be sent to Moscow. It would have been a civilized gesture—but a somewhat ambiguous one. And he doubted that Security would approve, however skillfully the editing was done.

  As the list of the sailors returned to the sea, the haunting music ebbed into silence. The sense of doom that had hung over Explorer for so many days seemed to disperse, like a fog-bank blown away by the wind. There was a long moment of complete silence; then the single word “Dismiss” came from the PA system—not in the usual brusque manner, but so quietly that it was some time before the files of men standing at attention broke up and began to drift away.

  And now, thought Jason, I can have a proper birthday party. He never dreamed that one day he would walk this deck again—in another sea, and another century.

  2. THE COLORS OF INFINITY

  Donald Craig hated these visits, but he knew that they would continue as long as they both lived; if not through love (had it ever really been there?), at least through compassion and a shared grief.

  Because it is so hard to see the obvious, it had been months before he realized the true cause of his discomfort. The Torrington Clinic was more like a luxury hotel than a world-famous center for the treatment of psychological disorders. Nobody died here; trolleys never rolled from wards to operating theaters; there were no white-robed doctors making Pavlovian responses to their beepers; and even the attendants never wore uniforms. But it was still, essentially, a hospital; and a hospital was where the fifteen-year-old Donald had watched his father gasping for breath, as he slowly died from the first of the two great plagues that had ravaged the twentieth century.

  “How is she this morning, Dolores?” he asked the nurse after he had checked in at Reception.

  “Quite cheerful, Mr. Craig. She asked me to take her shopping—she wants to buy a new hat.”

  “Shopping! That’s the first time she’s even asked to go out!”

  Donald should have been pleased, yet he felt a twinge of resentment. Edith would never speak to him; indeed, she seemed unaware of his presence, looking through him as if he did not even exist.

  “What did Dr. Jafferjee say? Is it okay for her to leave the clinic?”

  “I’m afraid not. But it’s a good sign: she’s starting to show interest in the world around her again.”

  A new hat? Thought Craig. That was a typically feminine reaction—but it was not at all typical of Edith. She had always dressed…well, sensibly rather than fashionably, and had been quite content to order her clothes in the usual fashion, by teleshopping. Somehow, he could not imagine her in some exclusive Mayfair shop, surrounded by hatboxes, tissue paper, and fawning assistants. But if she felt that way, so be it; anything to help her escape from the mathematical labyrinth which was, quite literally, infinite in extent.

  And where was she now, in her endless explorations? As usual, she was sitting crouched in a swivel chair, while an image built up on the meter-wide screen that dominated one wall of her room. Craig could see that it was in hi-res mode—all two thousand lines—so even the
supercomputer was going flat out to paint a pixel every few seconds. To a casual observer, it would have seemed that the image was frozen in a partly completed state; only close inspection would have shown that the end of the bottom line was creeping slowly across the screen.

  “She started this run,” whispered Nurse Dolores, “early yesterday morning. Of course, she hasn’t been sitting here all the time. She’s sleeping well now, even without sedation.”

  The image flickered briefly, as one scan line was completed and a new one started creeping from left to right across the screen. More than ninety percent of the picture was now displayed; the lower portion still being generated would show little more of interest.

  Despite the dozens—no, hundreds—of times that Donald Craig had watched these images being created, they had never lost their fascination. Part of it came from the knowledge that he was looking at something that no human eye had ever seen before—or ever would see again, if its coordinates were not saved in the computer. Any random search for a lost image would be far more futile than seeking one particular grain of sand in all the deserts of the world.

  And where was Edith now, in her endless exploring? He glanced at the small display screen below the main monitor, and checked the magnitude of the enormous numbers that marched across it, digit after implacable digit. They were grouped in fives to make it easier for human eyes to grasp, though there was no way that the human mind could do so.

  …Six, seven, eight clusters—forty digits all told. That meant—

  He did a quick mental calculation—a neglected skill in this day and age, of which he was inordinately proud. The result impressed, but did not surprise him. On this scale, the original basic image would be much bigger than the Galaxy. And the computer could continue expanding it until it was larger than the Cosmos, though at that magnification, computing even a single image might take years.

  Donald could well understand why Georg Cantor, the discoverer (or was it inventor?) of the numbers beyond infinity, had spent his last years in a mental home. Edith had taken the first steps on that same endless road, aided by machinery beyond the dreams of any nineteenth-century mathematician. The computer generating these images was performing trillions of operations a second; in a few hours, it would manipulate more numbers than the entire human race had ever handled, since the first Cro-Magnon started counting pebbles on the floor of his cave.

  Though the unfolding patterns never exactly repeated themselves, they fell into a small number of easily recognized categories. There were multipointed stars of six-, eight-fold, and even higher degrees of symmetry; spirals that sometimes resembled the trunks of elephants, and at other times the tentacles of octopods; black amoebae linked by networks of contorted tendrils; faceted, compound insect eyes… Because there was absolutely no sense of scale, some of the figures being created on the screen could have been equally well interpreted as bizarre galaxies—or the microfauna in a drop of ditchwater.

  And ever and again, as the computer increased the degree of magnification and dived deeper into the geometric depths it was exploring, the original strange shape—looking like a fuzzy figure eight lying on its side—that contained all this controlled chaos would reappear. Then the endless cycle would begin again, though with variations so subtle that they eluded the eye.

  Surely, thought Donald, Edith must realize, in some part of her mind, that she is trapped in an endless loop. What had happened to the wonderful brain that had conceived and designed the ’99 Phage which, in the early hours of 1 January 2000, had briefly made her one of the most famous women in the world?

  “Edith,” he said softly, “this is Donald. Is there anything I can do?”

  Nurse Dolores was looking at him with an unfathomable expression. She had never been actually unfriendly, but her greetings always lacked warmth. Sometimes he wondered if she blamed him for Edith’s condition.

  That was a question he had asked himself every day, in the months since the tragedy.

  3. A BETTER MOUSETRAP

  Roy Emerson considered himself, accurately enough, to be reasonably good-natured, but there was one thing that could make him really angry. It had happened on what he swore would be his last TV appearance, when the interviewer on a Late, Late Show had asked, with malice aforethought: “Surely, the principle of the Wave Wiper is very straightforward. Why didn’t someone invent it earlier?” The host’s tone of voice made his real meaning perfectly clear: “Of course I could have thought of it myself, if I hadn’t more important things to do.”

  Emerson resisted the temptation of replying: “If you had the chance, I’m sure you’d ask Einstein, or Edison, or Newton, the same sort of question.” Instead, he answered mildly enough: “Well, someone had to be the first. I guess I was the lucky one.”

  “What gave you the idea? Did you suddenly jump out of the bathtub shouting ‘Eureka’?”

  Had it not been for the host’s cynical attitude, the question would have been fairly innocuous. Of course, Emerson had heard it a hundred times before. He switched to automatic mode and mentally pressed the PLAY button.

  “What gave me the idea—though I didn’t realize it at the time—was a ride in a high-speed Coast Guard patrol boat off Key West, back in ’03…”

  Though it had led him to fame and fortune, even now Emerson preferred not to recall certain aspects of that trip. It had seemed a good idea at the time—a short pleasure cruise through Hemingway’s old stomping grounds, at the invitation of a cousin in the Coast Guard. How amazed Ernest would have been at the target of their antismuggling activities—blocks of crystal, about the size of a matchbox, that had made their way from Hong Kong via Cuba. But these TIMs—Terabyte Interactive Microlibraries—had put so many U.S. publishers out of business that Congress had dusted off legislation that dated back to the heydays of Prohibition.

  Yes, it had sounded very attractive—while he was still on terra firma. What Emerson had forgotten (or his cousin had neglected to tell him) was that smugglers preferred to operate in the worst weather they could find, short of a Gulf hurricane.

  “It was a rough trip, and about the only thing I remembered afterwards was the gadget on the bridge that allowed the helmsman to see ahead, despite the torrents of rain and spray that were being dumped on us.

  “It was simply a disc of glass, spinning at high speed. No water could stay on it for more than a fraction of a second, so it was always perfectly transparent. I thought at the time it was far better than a car’s windshield wiper; and then I forgot all about it.”

  “For how long?”

  “I’m ashamed to say. Oh, maybe a couple of years. Then one day I was driving through a heavy rainstorm in the New Jersey countryside, and my wipers jammed; I had to pull off the road until the storm had passed. I was stuck for maybe half an hour; and at the end of that time, the whole thing was clear in my mind.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  “Plus every cent I could lay my hands on, and two years of fifteen-hour days and seven-day weeks in my garage.” (Emerson might have added “And my marriage,” but he suspected that his host already knew that. He was famed for his careful research.)

  “Spinning the windshield—or even part of it—obviously wasn’t practical. Vibrations had to be the answer; but what kind?

  “First I tried to drive the whole windshield like a loudspeaker cone. That certainly kept the rain off, but then there was the noise problem. So I went ultrasonic; it took kilowatts of power—and all the dogs in the neighborhood went crazy. Worse still, few windshields lasted more than a couple of hours before they turned into powdered glass.

  “So I tried subsonics. They worked better—but gave you a bad headache after a few minutes of driving. Even if you couldn’t hear them, you could feel them.

  “I was stuck for months, and almost gave up the whole idea, when I realized my mistake. I was trying to vibrate the whole massive sheet of multiplex safety glass—sometimes as much as ten kilograms of it. All I needed to keep dancing
was a thin layer on the outside; even if it was only a few microns thick, it would keep the rainwater off.

  “So I read all I could about surface waves, transducers, impedance matching—”

  “Whoa! Can we have that in words of one syllable?”

  “Frankly, no. All I can say is that I found a way of confining low-energy vibrations to a very thin surface layer, leaving the main bulk of the windshield unaffected. If you want details, I refer you to the basic patents.”

  “Happy to take your word for it, Mr. Emerson. Now, our next guest—”

  Possibly because the interview had taken place in London, where the works of the New England transcendentalist were not everyday reading, Emerson’s host had failed to make the connection with his famous namesake (no relation, as far as he knew). No American interviewer, of course, missed the opportunity of complimenting Roy on inventing the apocryphal Better Mousetrap. The automobile industry had indeed beaten a path to his door; within a few years, almost all the world’s millions of metronoming blades had been replaced by the Sonic Wave Windshield Wiper. Even more important, thousands of accidents had been averted, with the improvement of visibility in bad-weather driving.

  It was while testing the latest model of his invention that Roy Emerson made his next breakthrough—and, once again, he was very lucky that no one else had thought of it first.

  His ’04 Mercedes Hydro was cruising in benign silence down Park Avenue, living up to its celebrated slogan “You can drink your exhaust!” Midtown seemed to have been hit by a monsoon: conditions were perfect for testing the Mark V Wave Wiper. Emerson was sitting beside his chauffeur—he no longer drove himself, of course—quietly dictating notes as he adjusted the electronics.