However, a second and far less dramatic possibility had to be considered. I was working from a variation of an old Arthur Conan Doyle theme—actually, the opposite of Doyle. I started out not by eliminating the most improbable or impossible explanations but by believing the following instead: “We must first eliminate the more mundane and more likely possibilities. Then, whatever does not fall away (rusticles flowering up through the floor?), no matter how strange or impossible it may appear to be, must be the truth.”
The most mundane explanation lay in the lamps hanging from the ceiling—some of them on wires that had pulled loose almost to the floor. I wondered if the “rust flowers” in the Turkish baths could be rusticle-colonized wires on ceiling lamps that after hanging down for several decades, unfurled and unwound and finally broke under rusticle activity, falling to the floor with their rusticle-stiffened wires standing up. The strands at the break point might have unfurled farther as they added new layers of rusticle growth. Cullimore, Johnston, and a new explorer named Anthony El-Khouri saw evidence of a more natural branching pattern in the rust flowers, and the video revealed no sign of a lamp beneath the thin drifts of rusticle dust that had descended through the ceiling—and from which the mysterious growths appeared to have sprouted. El-Khouri’s study of the video revealed three relevant trends:
1. When the robot camera panned toward the ceiling, a bronze lamp was filmed hanging down about a yard with its wiring exposed. The insulation appeared to be intact, and the wiring was entirely free of rusticles—this despite being surrounded by a little forest of unusually thin, long rusticles stretching down from the wooden beams around the lamp.
2. Another hanging wire, near a gilded wooden dome at one end of the room, was also rusticle-free, except for the very tip, where exposed metal (presumably copper) had sprouted a single rusticle orb. This indicated that the Titanic’s wire insulation was resilient (as in the cases of rusticle-free wires filmed throughout the Marconi shack and in Captain Smith’s quarters), which meant that in order for the rust flowers on the floor to actually be colonized wire, the insulation would have been required to decay in a manner inconsistent with wires located elsewhere in the ship and even in the same room.
3. The upwardly sprouting rust flower that Cameron had circled with his bot, illuminating it for maximum resolution, was far from alone. El-Khouri pointed to “what appears to be a rust flower growing up from the base of a wooden [lounge] chair. Very strange. In fact, anywhere a rust flower [was photographed] touching the ground, there was something wooden very much in its vicinity. It’s crazy, because you can just imagine the (albeit limited) dust on the floor acting like a soil full of ‘seeds’ of bacteria sprouting up literally like a garden of flowers. I think they’re trying to increase their surface area in that anoxic room—like intestinal villi in a chamber of limited nutrients, absent of currents.”
El-Khouri’s observations pointed Occam’s razor more toward a kinship with the growth patterns seen in the room of mailbags and bacterial “reeds” than with colonization of a preexisting wire skeleton. Cullimore provided another major piece of the puzzle: in at least one instance, a consortium he had seeded in a bed of rusticle dust and then fed with iron and organic nutrients grew upward from the bottom of an aquarium tank.
There was one means of settling the question once and for all time, in a matter of seconds, with nothing more than a magnifying glass.
“Is it possible,” I had asked Jim Cameron, “to bring out a small sample [from the baths] on the next go? Even a small sample, without wounding the little beasties too badly? We really can’t confirm unless we have one—only a centimeter-long sample should do the job. We can know immediately, just by looking at it, what we are dealing with.”
He was sorry to report that this was not possible. “Charlie, so far the only sample taken in the Turkish baths is the one the Titanic took from our fleet. Bot 3 now resides there, in luxury.”
In fifty million years, if paleontological minds should inherit the Earth after us, they would find the Titanic reduced to a thin band of fossilized materials in the same layers of sedimentary rock where windshield fragments, plastic dashboard dressing, and ceramic engine parts shall remain (along with bathroom tiles and toilets) as the most abundant indicator fossils of Homo sapiens. The paleontologists of remote futurity might also find (to their initial confusion) a twenty-first-century robot named Gilligan sandwiched between tiles from the Turkish baths.
Could Maude Slocomb or anyone else who entered the baths during that voyage have imagined that more than ninety years later, a tiny machine beyond anything Jules Verne had invented as fiction would enter this room and find it intact and perfectly familiar, nine-tenths of a league under the sea? Could anyone believe that on the decks above, and in this room, would emerge a bacterial wonderland, pregnant with mystery?
In 1996, Roy Cullimore had advised us all to remember that humans pulled iron ore out of the earth and fashioned it into the rivets, hull plates, and engine casings of the Titanic. Now the rusticle garden was dissolving the Titanic, cycling most of it back into the earth again as iron ore, sending some of it into the water column where it might even cycle into the fishes as hemoglobin. “What an amazing web,” he said.
The Zen theologian Thich Nhat Hanh had written, “If you are a poet, you will see that there is a cloud in this piece of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain. Without the rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper.”
The Titanic, and its final unfailing return to the earth, had a similar lesson to teach—one of its many lessons: interdependence. There were nearly eternal cycles of water and nutrients and metals between sunlight and the sunless abyss. Even the dyes in the dresses Edith Russell had been importing from the Paris fashion show would eventually find their way into biological systems, if they hadn’t already. In the deep, nothing really existed except the endless cycling of atoms. In the deep, there was the process of fossilization and eventually even the cycling of fossils by subduction into magma pools—tens of millions of years from now, in the case of the Titanic. But for now, there was only interdependence, And futurity. And the question of whether, as Darwin had put it, future humans would know how to keep alive.
In Masabumi Hosono’s generation, large stone tablets were erected in Japan, adding to previous generations’ stelae, marking the heights to which the 1923 and 1933 tsunamis had reached. Hundreds of similar tablets dating back as far as six centuries dotted the hills around coastal towns and cities, marking how far inland historic tsunamis had penetrated. Some of the markers described sea life washed far inland, leading occasionally to the naming of a town “Octopus Grounds.” Other markers left specific warnings: “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
As the generations passed and sea walls were designed to variously divert and even break the backs of tsunamis, the astonishing inertial power of advancing masses of water witnessed by past generations was forgotten, and many believed that modern engineering had advanced beyond the concerns of the warning stones. After complacency took root, the six Fukushima fission reactors were built below the level of tsunamis seen in Hosono’s time. Worst-case-scenario earthquakes were planned for. Six reactors and their spent fuel-rod pools were protected by careful compartmentalization into six entirely separate containment buildings. Backup diesel generators, and batteries to back up the backups, seemed capable of guaranteeing that the reactors and the pools could stand up to every imaginable disaster scenario. Yet history teaches us that once we think we have thought of everything, nature will think of something else.