The Ghost From the Grand Banks and the Deep Range Page 3

  In the mid-90s, the movie and TV studios had suddenly realized that they were facing a crisis that no one had ever anticipated, although it should have been obvious years in advance. Many of the classics of the cinema—the capital assets of the enormous entertainment industry—were becoming worthless, because fewer and fewer people could bear to watch them. Millions of viewers would switch off in disgust at a western, a James Bond thriller, a Neil Simon comedy, a courtroom drama, for a reason which would have been inconceivable only a generation before. They showed people smoking.

  The AIDS epidemic of the ’90s had been partly responsible for this revolution in human behavior. The twentieth century’s Second Plague was appalling enough, but it killed only a few percent of those who died, equally horribly, from the innumerable diseases triggered by tobacco. Donald’s father had been among them, and there was poetic justice in the fact that his son had made several fortunes by “sanitizing” classic movies so that they could be presented to the new public.

  Though some were so wreathed in smoke that they were beyond redemption, in a surprising number of cases skillful computer processing could remove offending cylinders from actors’ hands or mouths, and banish ashtrays from tabletops. The techniques that had seamlessly welded real and imaginary worlds in such landmark movies as Who Framed Roger Rabbit had countless other applications—not all of them legal. However, unlike the video blackmailers, Donald Craig could claim to be performing a useful social function.

  He had met Edith at a screening of his sanitized Casablanca, and she had at once pointed out how it could have been improved. Although the trade joked that he had married Edith for her algorithms, the match had been a success on both the personal and professional levels. For the first few years, at least . . .

  • • •

  “. . . This will be a very simple job,” said Edith Craig when the last credits rolled off the monitor. “There are only four scenes in the whole movie that present problems. And what a joy to work in good old black and white!”

  Donald was still silent. The film had shaken him more than he cared to admit, and his cheeks were still moist with tears. What is it, he asked himself, that moves me so much? The fact that this really happened, and that the names of all the hundreds of people he had seen die—even if in a studio reenactment—were still on record? No, it had to be something more than that, because he was not the sort of man who cried easily. . . .

  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.

  “What’s your phone cipher?” was Rupert’s unexpected opening remark.

  “Why . . . normally I don’t bother. But I can switch to NSA 2 if it’s really important. Only problem, it tends to chop speech on long-distance circuits. So don’t talk too fast, and don’t overdo that Oxford accent.”

  “Cambridge, please—and Harvard. Here we go.”

  There was a five-second pause, filled with strange beepings and twitterings. Then Rupert Parkinson, still recognizable though subtly distorted, was back on the line.

  “Can you hear me? Fine. Now, you remember that last board meeting, and the item about the glass microspheres?”

  “Of course,” Emerson answered, a little nervously; he wondered again if he had made a fool of himself. “You were going to look into it. Was my guess correct?”

  “Bang on, old man—to coin an expression. Our lawyers had some expensive lunches with their lawyers, and we did a few sums together. They never told us who the client was, but we found out easily enough. A British video network—doesn’t matter which—thought it would make a splendid series—in real time, culminating with the actual raising. But they lost interest when they found what it would cost, and the deal’s off.”

  “Pity. What would it cost?”

  “Just to manufacture enough spheres to lift fifty kilotons, at least twenty million dollars. But that would be merely the beginning. You’ve got to get them down there, properly distributed. You can’t just squirt them into the hull; even if they’d stay put, they’d soon tear the ship apart. And I’m only talking about the forward section, of course—the smashed-up stern’s another problem.

  “Then you’ve got to get it unstuck from the seabed—it’s half buried in mud. That will mean a lot of work by submersibles, and there aren’t many that can operate four klicks down. I don’t think you could do the job for less than a hundred million. It might even be several times as much.”

  “So the deal’s off. Then why are you calling me?”

  “Never thought you’d ask. I’ve been doing a little private venturing of my own; after all, we Parkinsons have a vested interest. Great-Granddad’s down there—or at least his baggage, in suite three, starboard.”

  “A hundred megabucks worth?”

  “Quite possibly—but that’s unimportant; some things are beyond price. Have you ever heard of Andrea Bellini?”

  “Sounds like a baseball player.”

  “He was the greatest craftsman in glass that Venice ever produced. To this day, we don’t know how he made some of his—Anyway, back in the eighteen-seventies we managed to buy the cream of the Glass Museum’s collection; in its way it was as big a prize as the Elgin Marbles. For years, the Smithsonian had been begging us to arrange a loan, but we always refused—too risky to send such a priceless cargo across the Atlantic. Until, of course, someone built an unsinkable ship. Then we had no excuse.”

  “Fascinating—and now you’ve mentioned him, I remember seeing some of Bellini’s work the last time I was in Venice. But wouldn’t it all be smashed to pieces?”

  “Almost certainly not: it was expertly packed, as you can imagine. And anyway, masses of the ship’s crockery survived even though it was completely unprotected. Remember that White Star dining set they auctioned at Sotheby’s a couple of years ago?”

  “Okay—I’ll grant you that. But it seems a little extravagant to raise the whole ship, just for a few crates.”

  “Of course it is. But it’s one major reason why we Parkinsons should get involved.”

  “And the others?”

  “You’ve been on the board long enough to know that a little publicity doesn’t do any harm. The whole world would know whose product did the lifting.”

  Still not good enough, Emerson said to himself. Parkinson’s was doing very nicely—and by no means all of the publicity would be favorable. To many people, the wreck was almost sacred; they branded those who tampered with it as graverobbers.

  But he knew that men often concealed—even failed to recognize—their true motives. Since he had joined the board, he had grown to know and like Rupert, though he would hardly call him a close friend; it was not easy for an outsider to get close to the Parkinsons.

  Rupert had his own account to settle with the sea. Five years ago, it had taken his beautiful twenty-five-meter yacht Aurora, when she had been dismasted by a freak squall off the Scillies, and smashed to pieces on the cruel rocks that had claimed so many victims through the centuries. By pure chance, he had not been aboard; it had been a routine trip—a “bus run”—from Cowes to Bristol for a refit. All the crew had been lost—including the skipper. Rupert Parkinson had never quite recovered; at the same time he had lost both his ship and, as was well known, his lover. The playboy image he now wore in se
lf-defense was only skin deep.

  “All very interesting, Rupert. But exactly what do you have in mind? Surely you don’t expect me to get involved!”

  “Yes and no. At the moment, it’s a—what do they call it?—thought experiment. I’d like to get a feasibility study done, and I’m prepared to finance that myself. Then, if the project makes any sense at all, I’ll present it to the board.”

  “But a hundred million! There’s no way the company would risk that much. The shareholders would have us behind bars in no time. Whether in a jail or a lunatic asylum, I’m not sure.”

  “It might cost more—but I’m not expecting Parkinson’s to put up all the capital. Maybe twenty or thirty M. I have some friends who’ll be able to match that.”

  “Still not enough.”

  “Exactly.”

  There was a long silence, broken only by faintly querulous bleeps from the real-time decoding system as it searched in vain for something to unscramble.

  “Very well,” said Emerson at last. “I’ll go fifty-fifty with you—on the feasibility report, at any rate. Who’s your expert? Will I know him?”

  “I think so. Jason Bradley.”

  “Oh—the giant octopus man.”

  “That was just a sideshow. But look what it did to his public image.”

  “And his fee, I’m sure. Have you sounded him out? Is he interested?”

  “Very—but then, so is every ocean engineering firm in the business. I’m sure some of them will be prepared to put up their own money—or at least work on a no-profit basis, just for the P.R.”

  “Okay—go ahead. But frankly, I think it’s a waste of money; we’ll just end up with some very expensive reading matter, when Mr. Bradley delivers his report. Anyway, I don’t see what you’ll do with fifty thousand tons, or whatever it is, of rusty scrap iron.”