The Titanic Enigma (6 page)

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

They stepped through the opening into a wide passageway. Directly opposite, a fire-hose reel was hooked to the wall. A metal sign above it hung by one corner. It said: ‘Emergency Use
Only’.

This was one of the corridors linking First Class cabins. Seeing it now, it was almost impossible to imagine how it would have once appeared when some of the wealthiest and most celebrated
people of the early twentieth century had walked this way.

The metal shell of the corridor was still there, but it had been horribly disfigured. There were a dozen doors, six to a side. A single chandelier remained suspended from the ceiling; another
had crashed to the floor, a tangle of brass, a carpet of crystals and glass scattered on the rusted steel. A sumptuous red carpet had once run the length of the corridor. Now almost every strand
and fibre had been consumed by microbes.

They headed towards the stern. Their helmet beams lit up a wasteland of tangled metal, buckled hull sections and caved-in door frames. Twisted and rusted furniture lay in the corridor –
the frame of a deckchair, half a round steel table. In the middle of the corridor they found a pile of plates and cups and beside this a row of twenty or so bowls. They were almost completely
untouched and gleaming white. Each item carried the White Star Line emblem – a red flag with a white star in the centre and the company name written on a folded banner beneath the flag.

Kate, Lou and Derham stood transfixed, silent, each trying to take in the immensity of the ruin. Lou crouched down and picked up one of the bowls, turning it in his hands. ‘As perfect as
the day it was manufactured,’ he said, placing it back carefully.

‘Where now?’ Kate asked.

‘According to the ship schematic, C16 should be just beyond the First Class Grand Staircase and one more level down. This way.’ Derham turned to their left, his helmet light scouring
the corridor ahead.

The passage curved away left then turned back on itself. Thirty yards along, they came to a sharp right turn. Derham took two steps forward and stopped abruptly. The sonar device in his hand was
beeping loudly in their helmet headsets. They looked down and saw that the floor had dropped away to nothing.

‘Goddammit!’ Derham exclaimed.

‘Ah!’ Lou commented.

‘Yes, “ah”. OK, back we go.’ Derham glanced at his chronometer. They had been gone twenty-two minutes. He squeezed past Lou and Kate and took it slowly, concentrating on
the sonar screen and watching the floor at the same time.

They retraced their steps back to the last junction and took a right. ‘It’s a longer way round, but it should take us back to a point beyond the chasm,’ Derham said. ‘If
there’s a problem with this route, it’s over.’

This corridor seemed to be less severely corroded. The walls were streaked with green slime and the tears and rips in the metal were smaller. ‘The wildlife is just getting tucked in
here,’ Kate observed. ‘Give them a few years and it’ll be as decayed as the last corridor.’

‘Let’s hope the critters haven’t been too hungry,’ Lou said.

Ahead, the corridor twisted to the left and then stretched straight for some sixty yards. It was strewn with a miscellany of objects. They saw a woman’s hairbrush and a shattered mirror.
Against the wall leaned a rusted grille – ornate swirls of brass and steel interlinking to form the shapes of flowers and birds. About halfway along they saw what they thought was a section
of bulkhead that had been thrust out into the corridor, but as they drew close they realized it was actually a large metal box about two yards square attached to the wall by clamps. The lid was
heavily corroded, and as they approached chunks of rust fell away. On the floor, they could see a few tiny fragments of rope, an axe head, the wood of the handle gone entirely. Next to this, a hose
reel lay on its side. Some of it had been paid out and long sections had crumbled to dust.

‘An emergency equipment station,’ Kate remarked. ‘This stuff must have fallen from the base of the box.’

Lou noticed a crumpled metal cylinder lying against the wall. ‘A fire extinguisher,’ he said, excitement in his voice. ‘One of the classic copper ones. It was beautiful . . .
once. It must have leaked and then the pressure crushed it.’

There came a crackling sound from the box on the wall. Its corroded bottom edge gave way, and with a rush a white object slithered out of the container, fell through the water and landed on the
floor with a dull thud.

Kate was the closest to the object, realized what it was and screamed.

‘Christ!’ Lou hissed and took a step forward, saw what had fallen from the box, and recoiled.

On the floor lay a heap of bleached bones. The legs had broken at the knees, but the spine was largely intact. The skull lay on its side. They could see one hollow eye socket. The jaw lay slack
where the lower joint had fragmented. They could just make out, around the neck of the skeleton, a silver chain and a crucifix.

Lou crouched down to get a closer look. ‘This is amazing,’ he said.

‘How’ve the bones survived?’ Kate asked.

The box must have been sealed and only recently corroded so badly the water got inside.’

‘What were they doing in there, for God’s sake?’

Lou stood up and shrugged his shoulders. ‘No idea. Well, actually, one. They must have locked themselves in the box thinking they would be rescued.’

‘But that’s ridiculous!’

‘People do ridiculous things in extreme peril,’ Derham said.

‘Where were you?’ Lou said, half to himself as he stared at the figure of Christ on the silver cross.

They turned away and carried on along the corridor. The floor was surprisingly solid; some of the metal was clear of silt and slime. The corridor opened out and the walls fell away to reveal an
astonishing sight. They had reached the remains of the Grand Staircase.

It looked like a cave, a gaping hole that fell into the abject darkness of the ship’s interior. The roof was supported by eight steel columns. These were covered with rust. Great
stalactites hung from the ceiling. The floor sloped perilously towards the massive hole where once the magnificent staircase had stood. The view up the staircase had been considered one of the most
spectacular aboard the ship. Now, nothing was left but a dark, slime-covered pit.

They edged as close as they dared to the opening, the light from their helmets swallowed up entirely in the chasm that fell away at least thirty yards into darkness.

Looking up, Lou let out a whistle. The other two followed his gaze and they could see a vast crystal chandelier hanging directly over the centre of the hole. It was mangled and twisted and at
least a third of the original crystal had broken away from the structure. It looked like a postmodern sculpture awaiting the day the microbes and simple chemistry would overwhelm the metal holding
it aloft. On that day, it would plunge through the total darkness unobserved, unlamented and shatter into a thousand pieces deep in the belly of the ship.

‘This way,’ Derham said, breaking the reverie of the two scientists. They could see another wide corridor stretching away towards the stern. ‘By my calculations, it’s not
too far along here,’ he added. ‘We need to find a way down one deck.’

Lou and Kate pulled themselves away from the remains of the stairwell. The captain weaved a route left then right to avoid frail sections of floor. About twenty yards along the passage, they
found a doorway to the left. Derham scanned the area to check its integrity and then signalled the others to follow close behind.

Through a doorway so encrusted with rust it had shrunk to half its original width, they emerged into a much narrower corridor. This was once another service causeway running parallel to the main
passage.

Directly ahead, they found exactly what they wanted – a metal ladder bolted to the wall and descending into an opening in the floor. They took it slowly.

‘JV1,’
Jerry Derham said into his radio. ‘Come in.’

They could hear a fragmented voice, but the signal was so degraded they caught only a few words: ‘Captain . . . lost comm . . .’ And then static.

Derham turned to Lou and Kate. ‘I think we’re on our own for a while. He glanced at the screen on his sleeve.‘No wonder! Radiation levels have doubled again. Let’s
go.’

Two doors along on the left, they came level with a brass sign that said ‘C15’. The ‘5’ had broken free from its fitting and dangled down beneath the ‘C1’
like an ‘S’. A few more paces and they reached C16. The door was missing but a steel beam two yards long lay diagonally across the opening.

‘Fantastic!’ Lou said.

Derham glanced at his chronometer. They had been away for twenty-five minutes. ‘OK, let’s get this sucker out the way. Gotta move fast.’

Lou and the captain leaned down and grabbed the base of the metal column. It shifted a few inches and snapped in two. Kate tumbled forward and the men jerked back. She rolled to her right as the
sections of beam dropped down into the corridor, just missing Lou and Derham.

‘Thank Christ everything moves through water one hell of a lot slower than it does through the air!’ Lou exclaimed, picking himself up.

Kate and Derham moved to the doorway in a second.

It was an elegantly proportioned room but, like the rest of the ship, it was extremely hard to imagine how it looked a century ago. The porthole had been blown out. What had once offered a
fantastic view of the ocean was now a ragged gash in the wall. The bed was still there – the frame of it at least; the mattress, pillows, blankets were all long gone; so too the other
furniture.

Derham took the lead again, and checked the screen on his suit. ‘Radiation levels are almost off the scale,’ he said and pointed to a box on the floor. It was about six inches to a
side and looked to be in remarkably good condition except for a tiny patch of corrosion at one corner. ‘That is definitely the source,’ Derham said. ‘See where it has finally been
breached? It survived for a hundred years, but the elements got to it in the end. The split looks less than a quarter of an inch long, but it’s enough.’

Lou was right behind him. ‘Unreal!’ he exclaimed.

Derham didn’t waste a second. From his backpack, he removed a small metal contraption – a spindly steel framework. He pushed a button on its base. ‘We had no idea what to
expect,’ he said. ‘But reasoned the source of the radiation was something pretty small – how else could it have been brought onto the ship in the first place?’ He flicked a
glance at the box. ‘Thankfully, we were right.’

He leaned forward, opened the metal framework and slipped it over the box. Flicking a switch on the side, the ensemble started to glow red. ‘This is another thing we have to thank the
eggheads for,’ he added, and tapped a button on the side of the device. ‘A radiation containment frame. It’s more than a million times more efficient than a lead container of the
same size. It’ll keep the radiation levels manageable until we can get it up to the
Armstrong
and then back ashore.’

‘Another product of DARPA?’ Kate asked.

Jerry nodded and noticed Lou poking around inside a metal framework – a rectangle about two feet high and eight long.

‘I think this must be what’s left of the wardrobe,’ Lou said. ‘There would have been timber panels and doors attached to this metal structure.’ He shifted some
debris with his gloved hand. ‘Looks like there’s another metal box.’

In the helmet beams they could all see a steel container the shape and size of a large attaché case. It had corroded along one edge.

‘What is it?’ Kate asked.

‘Not sure. It says “EF” on the side.’

Derham glanced at his chronometer again. ‘Gotta go, people.’ He placed a hand on Lou’s shoulder.

‘Sure . . . I’m taking this back, though.’

The captain nodded and the three of them headed for the door.

University of Manchester, England. January 1912.

It was absolutely freezing in the lab, both day and night. As he prepared this, the fourteenth attempt at the experiment, Fortescue happened to notice the
mercury had dipped to minus three degrees inside, and it was already nine o’clock. At that moment, with his long thin fingers numb as prosthetic digits and his thoughts hazy from sleep
deprivation, he felt he could just give up and return to the experiments after a good rest at home. He pulled his scarf tight about his slender neck and rubbed his hands together in an effort to
get the blood flowing again.

Leaning across a bench, Fortescue helped his boss, Ernest Rutherford, set up the final pieces of apparatus ready for the next test. The lab was a bit of a jumble, but it was a jumble
he and Rutherford could navigate with consummate ease. To any outsider, it would have looked as though the large, high-ceilinged room was nothing but a dumping ground for a menagerie of equipment,
but every machine, every wire, every truss rod and metal lever had its place and its purpose.

Fortescue and Rutherford had spent four months putting the apparatus together. A long wooden bench took up the centre of the room. Over this had been built a steel gantry which held
much of the heavier equipment clasped in strong metal brackets. To vary the many parameters of the experiment, they could move the apparatus along rails built under the arches of the
gantry.

By eleven o’clock, they were almost ready. Fortescue went off for a few minutes and came back with two cups of freshly brewed tea and the pair of them gave the equipment one
final inspection. At one end of the bench stood a mahogany box about afoot square. On the front of the box was a circular metal plate some quarter of an inch thick. This was called the receptor
plate. At the other end of the bench, on the far side of the room, thirty-five feet from the box, stood a device that lay at the heart of this complex array of apparatus – a neutron emitter.
The design of this alone had taken them almost two years to complete, and Fortescue was very proud of it.