The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (2 page)

This afternoon I ordered a complete inventory, a good way to keep our company busy. Before floating away from the disaster site, we salvaged about a third of the buoyant containers Mr Latimer’s stewards had tossed into the sea: wine casks, beer barrels, cheese crates, bread boxes, foot-lockers, duffel bags, toilet kits. Had there been a moon on Sunday night, we might have recovered this jetsam
in toto.
Of course, had there been a moon, we might not have hit the iceberg in the first place.

The tally is heartening. Assuming that frugality rules aboard the
Ada -
and it will, so help me God - she probably has enough food and water to sustain her population, all 2,187 of us, for at least ten days. We have two functioning compasses, three brass sextants, four thermometers, one barometer, one anemometer, fishing tackle, sewing supplies, baling wire, and twenty tarpaulins, not to mention the wood-fuelled Franklin stove Mr Lightoller managed to knock together from odd bits of metal.

Yesterday’s attempt to rig a sail was a fiasco, but this afternoon we had better luck, improvising a gracefully curving thirty-foot mast from the banister of the grand staircase, then fitting it with a patchwork of velvet curtains, throw rugs, signal flags, men’s dinner jackets, and ladies’ skirts. My mind is clear, my strategy is certain, my course is set. We shall tack towards warmer waters, lest we lose more souls to the demonic cold. If I never see another ice floe or North Atlantic growler in my life, it will be too soon.

* * * *

18 April 1912

Lat. 37°11’N, Long. 52°11’ W

Whilst everything is still vivid in my mind, I must set down the story of how the
Ada
came into being, starting with the collision. I felt the tremor about 11.40 p.m., and by midnight Mr Lightoller was in my cabin, telling me that the berg had sliced through at least five adjacent watertight compartments, possibly six. To the best of his knowledge, the ship was in the last extremity, fated to go down at the head in a matter of hours.

After assigning Mr Moody to the bridge - one might as well put a sixth officer in charge, since the worst had already happened - Captain Smith sent word that the rest of us should gather post-haste in the chartroom. By the time I arrived, at perhaps five minutes past midnight, Mr Andrews, who’d designed the
Titanic,
was already seated at the table, along with Mr Bell, the chief engineer, Mr Hutchinson, the ship’s carpenter, and Dr O’Loughlin, our surgeon. Taking my place beside Mr Murdoch, who had not yet reconciled himself to the fact that my last-minute posting as chief officer had bumped him down to first mate, I immediately apprehended that the ship was lost, so palpable was Captain Smith’s anxiety.

“Even as we speak, Phillips and Bride are on the job in the wireless shack, trying to raise the
Californian
, which can’t be more than an hour away,” the Old Man said. “I am sorry to report that her Marconi operator has evidently shut off his rig for the night. However, we have every reason to believe that Captain Rostron of the
Carpathia
will be here within four hours. If this were the tropics, we would simply put the entire company in life-belts, lower them over the side, and let them bob about waiting to be rescued. But this is the North Atlantic, and the water is twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”

“After a brief interval in that ghastly gazpacho, the average mortal will succumb to hypothermia,” said Mr Murdoch, who liked to lord it over us Scousers with fancy words such as
succumb
and
gazpacho.
“Am I correct, Dr O’Loughlin?”

“A castaway who remains motionless in the water risks dying immediately of cardiac arrest,” the surgeon replied, nodding. “Alas, even the most robust athlete won’t generate enough body heat to prevent his core temperature from plunging. Keep swimming, and you might last twenty minutes, probably no more than thirty.”

“Now I shall tell you the good news,” the Old Man said. “Mr Andrews has a plan, bold but feasible. Listen closely. Time is of the essence. The
Titanic
has at best one hundred and fifty minutes to live.”

“The solution to this crisis is not to fill the life-boats to capacity and send them off in hopes of encountering the
Carpathia,
for that would leave over a thousand people stranded on a sinking ship,” Mr Andrews insisted. “The solution, rather, is to keep every last soul out of the water until Captain Rostron arrives.”

“Mr Andrews has stated the central truth of our predicament,” Captain Smith said. “On this terrible night our enemy is not the ocean depths, for owing to the life-belts no one - or almost no one - will drown. Nor is the local fauna our enemy, for sharks and rays rarely visit the middle of the North Atlantic in early spring. No, our enemy tonight is the temperature of the water, pure and simple, full stop.”

“And how do you propose to obviate that implacable fact?” Mr Murdoch inquired. The next time he used the word
obviate,
I intended to sock him in the chops.

“We’re going to build an immense platform,” said Mr Andrews, unfurling a sheet of drafting paper on which he’d hastily sketched an object labelled
Raft of the Titanic.
He secured the blueprint with ashtrays and, leaning across the table, squeezed the chief engineer’s knotted shoulder. “I designed it in collaboration with the estimable Mr Bell” - he flashed our carpenter an amiable wink - “and the capable Mr Hutchinson.”

“Instead of loading anyone into our fourteen standard thirty-foot life-boats, we shall set aside one dozen, leave their tarps in place, and treat them as pontoons,” Mr Bell said. “From an engineering perspective, this is a viable scheme, for each lifeboat is outfitted with copper buoyancy tanks.”

Mr Andrews set his open palms atop the blueprint, his eyes dancing with a peculiar fusion of desperation and ecstasy. “We shall deploy the twelve pontoons in a three-by-four grid, each linked to its neighbours via horizontal stanchions spliced together from available wood. Our masts are useless - mostly steel - but we’re hauling tons of oak, teak, mahogany and spruce.”

“With any luck, we can affix a twenty-five-foot stanchion between the stern of pontoon A and the bow of pontoon B,” Mr Hutchinson said, “another such bridge between the amidships oarlock of A and the amidships oarlock of E, another between the stern of B and the bow of C, and so on.”

“Next we’ll cover the entire matrix with jettisoned lumber, securing the planks with nails and rope,” Mr Bell said. “The resulting raft will measure roughly one hundred feet by two hundred, which technically allows each of our two thousand plus souls almost nine square feet, though in reality everyone will have to share accommodations with foodstuffs, water casks, and survival gear, not to mention the dogs.”

“As you’ve doubtless noticed,” Mr Andrews said, “at this moment the North Atlantic is smooth as glass, a circumstance that contributed to our predicament - no wave broke against the iceberg, so the lookouts spotted the bloody thing too late. I am proposing that we now turn this same placid sea to our advantage. My machine could never be assembled in high swells, but tonight we’re working under conditions only slightly less ideal than those that obtain back at the Harland and Wolff shipyard.”

Captain Smith’s moustache and beard parted company, a great gulping inhalation, whereupon he delivered what was surely the most momentous speech of his career.

“Step one is for Mr Wilde and Mr Lightoller to muster the deck crew and have them launch all fourteen standard life-boats - forget the collapsibles and the cutters - each craft to be rowed by two able-bodied seamen assisted where feasible by a quartermaster, boatswain, lookout, or master-at-arms. Through this operation we get our twelve pontoons in the water, along with two roving assembly craft. The AB’s will forthwith moor the pontoons to the
Titanic’
s hull using davit ropes, keeping the lines in place until the raft is finished or the ship sinks, whichever comes first. Understood?”

I nodded in assent, as did Mr Lightoller, even though I’d never heard a more demented idea in my life. Next the Old Man waved a scrap of paper at Mr Murdoch, the overeducated genius whose navigational brilliance had torn a three-hundred-foot gash in our hull.

“A list from Purser McElroy identifying twenty carpenters, joiners, fitters, bricklayers, and blacksmiths - nine from the second-cabin decks, eleven from steerage,” Captain Smith explained. “Your job is to muster these skilled workers on the boat deck, each man equipped with a mallet and nails from either his own baggage or Mr Hutchinson’s shop. For those who don’t speak English, get Father Montvila and Father Peruschitz to act as interpreters. Lower the workers to the construction site using the electric cranes. Mr Andrews and Mr Hutchinson will be building the machine on the leeward side.”

The Old Man rose and, shuffling to the far end of the table, rested an avuncular hand on his third officer’s epaulet.

“Mr Pitman, I am charging you with provisioning the raft. You will work with Mr Latimer in organizing his three hundred stewards into a special detail. Have them scour the ship for every commodity a man might need were he to find himself stranded in the middle of the North Atlantic: water, wine, beer, cheese, meat, bread, coal, tools, sextants, compasses, small arms. The stewards will load these items into buoyant coffers, setting them afloat near the construction site for later retrieval.”

Captain Smith continued to circumnavigate the table, pausing to clasp the shoulders of his fourth and fifth officers.

“Mr Boxhall and Mr Lowe, you will organize two teams of second-cabin volunteers, supplying each man with an appropriate wrecking or cutting implement. There are at least twenty emergency fire-axes mounted in the companionways. You should also grab all the saws and sledges from the shop, plus hatchets, knives and cleavers from the galleys. Team A, under Mr Boxhall, will chop down every last column, pillar, post and beam for the stanchions, tossing them to the construction crew, along with every bit of rope they can find, yards and yards of it, wire rope, Manila hemp, clothesline, whatever you can steal from the winches, cranes, ladders, bells, laundry rooms and children’s swings. Meanwhile, Team B, commanded by Mr Lowe, will lay hold of twenty thousand square feet of planking for the platform of the raft. Towards this end, Mr Lowe’s volunteers will pillage the promenade decks, dismantle the grand staircase, ravage the panels, and gather together every last door, table and piano lid on board.”

Captain Smith resumed his circuit, stopping behind the chief engineer.

“Mr Bell, your assignment is at once the simplest and the most difficult. For as long as humanly possible, you will keep the steam flowing and the turbines spinning, so our crew and passengers will enjoy heat and electricity whilst assembling Mr Andrews’s ark. Any questions, gentlemen?”

We had dozens of questions, of course, such as, “Have you taken leave of your senses, Captain?” and “Why the bloody hell did you drive us through an ice-field at twenty-two knots?” and “What makes you imagine we can build this preposterous device in only two hours?” But these mysteries were irrelevant to the present crisis, so we kept silent, fired off crisp salutes and set about our duties.

* * * *

19 April 1912

Lat. 36°18 ‘N, Long. 52°48’ W

Still no sign of the
Carpathia,
but the mast holds true, the spar remains strong and the sail stays fat. Somehow, through no particular virtue of my own, I’ve managed to get us out of iceberg country. The mercury hovers a full five degrees above freezing.

Yesterday Colonel Astor and Mr Guggenheim convinced Mr Andrews to relocate the Franklin stove from amidships to the forward section. Right now our first-cabin castaways are toasty enough, though by this time tomorrow our coal supply will be exhausted. That said, I’m reasonably confident we’ll see no more deaths from hypothermia, not even in steerage. Optimism prevails aboard the
Ada.
A cautious optimism, to be sure, optimism guarded by Cerberus himself and a cherub with a flaming sword, but optimism all the same.

I was right about Mr Futrelle knowing the source of “The sea is calm tonight.” It’s from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. Futrelle has the whole thing memorized. Lord, what a depressing poem. “For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Tomorrow I may issue an order banning public poetry recitations aboard the
Ada.

When the great ship
Titanic
went down, the world was neither various and beautiful, nor joyless and violent, but merely very busy. By forty minutes after midnight, against all odds, the twelve pontoons were in the water and lashed to the davits. Mr Boxhall’s second-cabin volunteers forthwith delivered the first load of stanchions, even as Mr Lowe’s group supplied the initial batch of decking material. For the next eighty minutes, the frigid air rang with the din of pounding hammers, the clang of furious axes, the whine of frantic saws and the squeal of ropes locking planks to pontoons, the whole mad chorus interspersed with the rhythmic thumps of lumber being lowered to the construction team, the steady splash, splash, splash of provisions going into the sea, and shouts affirming the logic of our labours: “Stay out of the drink!” “Only the cold can kill us!” “Twenty-eight degrees!”
“Carpathia
is on the way!” It was all very British, though occasionally the Americans pitched in, and the emigrants proved reasonably diligent as well. I must admit, I can’t imagine any but the English-speaking races constructing and equipping the
Ada
so efficiently. Possibly the Germans, an admirable people, though I fear their war-mongering Kaiser.