Lou had slowed the speed to a crawl by comparison now, and he was slowing even more, so quickly in fact that the sub shuddered in response, and a good thing he had done so as out of the gloom and darkness ahead came an unexpected dark mountainside they were about to slam into as Forbes from above shouted, “Hard-a-port, Lou!” shouted David for collision avoidance. “N-Now, Lou!”
They averted slamming headlong into the giant hull of Titanic and would have if not for Lou’s earlier slowing of the sub’s descent, which he now informed everyone was not his doing; that Forbes had taken control of the sub remotely from above to avert the danger, using the holotank and the holomap of Titanic’s remains and the position of the sub. Without sonar, they were indeed running blind except for Captain Forbes godlike eye on them even at these depths. Had he waited a moment longer, no warning system aboard Max would have kept them from slamming into Titanic’s hull at a dangerous rate of speed had come late.
“Everyone OK down there?” Forbes calmly asked, the calmness in his voice only adding to the terror everyone had just swallowed.
“I’d say we’re all palpitating, Captain,” Lou spoke for them all, “but then you guys can see that from our vitals. Thanks, Juris. Had we relied on my skills alone—without sonar—we know damn well that Max would’ve slammed into that mountainside which now in the light ahead of us reveals itself as Titanic’s hull.”
“From here, it appears you are staring right at her name,” replied Forbes.
“Her name, eh? Her name is covered over by huge rust worms, Captain.”
“Rust worms?”
“Looking like massive cave formations--stalagmites,” added Kelly Irvin. “The kind that are formed by microbial iron-eating life.”
“You should know, Dr. Irvin,” muttered Swigart. “You’re field.”
They all fell silent, everyone staring at rivers of rust that covered this side of the ship, some of it running the length of the exposed vertical hull plating and pouring out over the bottom sediment where it formed great thirty-foot wide pools that looked for all the world like the blood of Titanic.
The dive team felt Max rise now in controlled, slow motion up the ghostly wall of the port stern, running lights reflecting off the gold-red rust and the still unbroken glass of portholes—windows on outside berths. David half expected to see a ghostly face in one of these windows looking back at them, and his mind flooded with the possibility that indeed there must be bodies floating around inside the ship. They’d been warned there could be bodies perfectly preserved in areas cut off to sea life, in which case Ballard was right about Titanic being a place that perhaps the living should not desecrate. Theory had it that anyone dragged down with the ship on a mad, watery slide to the bottom would have had the unpleasant death of implosion so that nothing of significance would remain, and that items such as shoes with toes in the air, pants, blouses, dresses that might be found would have been items tumbling from staterooms and steamer trunks. But David wondered if there might have been those aboard who wound up in secure, sealed quarters aboard, in which case, he imagined the bodies would be intact.
Kelly gasped behind David, making him look over his shoulder. She said, “Check your downward-looking camera, everyone!”
A child’s doll, perfectly preserved had been unearthed from the seabed below where Max had disturbed the surface, and as they ascended alongside Titanic, the sub kicked up silt.
“Look, too, there!” said Mendenhall. “Slightly to eleven o’clock from the doll’s head.”
An eerie row of shoes—their toes sticking up from the silt. An even number by David’s count.
“Sand, silt, and sea life can’t do much with shoe leather,” said David, trying not to allow these sights to disturb him too deeply.
They had risen to come parallel to Titanic’s once gleaming upper railing – still largely intact. Reddish-brown and sienna stalactites of rust hung down as much as several feet—so many ugly long needle-like icicles that Bob Ballard had dubbed them as rusticles—a name that had stuck.
These formations were proven to be extremely fragile on earlier manned dives to Titanic; if touched by a robotic hand or a human hand, they would crinkle and crumple and became a cloud of smoke. If the Styrofoam-like outer crust was knocked away, the steel and brass railings and fittings beneath were in places near perfectly preserved, somewhat pitted in other areas, and so shimmering like new in other locations that the manufacturer’s stamp proved easily readable.
As they next lifted up and overtop of Titanic, four feet below they saw the expected destroyed wood decking that Ballard had discovered so long before. The whole of it was replaced by billions if not trillions of wood-boring mollusks. “Bloody worms’ve done more damage than either the corrosive seawater or the iceberg,” David said to no one in particular.
From topside, Captain Juris Forbes informed them. “We’re getting this!”
“Astonishing, isn’t it?” Lou shouted like a kid in a playpen.
Lou now brought the sub around to the other side where a huge debris field littered the ocean floor alongside the stern section of Titanic. The cameras continued sending video feed topside as well as to the sub.
The heaviest concentration of debris had settled around the stern section and just to the east of it according to maps created by Ballard on his previous visits to the site. This area included all the smaller single-ended boilers believed to have fallen out of the mid-section of the ship when it tore itself apart at essentially what was her mid-section seams. It’d been surmised that these heavy round objects had careened like giant bowling balls straight down to the bottom and right behind them were three telegraph sets completely intact—museum pieces awaiting the platform on its way down from Scorpio.
The plan was that the dive team here would direct cables and winch hooks and from above these artifacts of Titanic would be hoisted topside. But interior ‘archeological’ activity would go on first. A bird in hand did not apply to treasure hunters. Still among the lighter debris seen here included a space heater in near perfect condition, a cornucopia of dishware, wine bottles both with popped corks and some with corks intact alongside Champagne bottles, crates filled with them, second and third class cups with the White Star insignia on them, torn off yet still framed stained glass windows intact and unbroken, gym equipment lying upside down, spokes and bolts poking upward, countless floor tiles, and a long, huge, wide swath of coal overall looking like spilled India ink.
At this ‘destination’ depth, the total pressure on the crew compartment became—as everyone expected—seventy thousand tons per square inch. No lunar landing could be as dangerous as this. In times past, no human could have withstood these pressures as no airlock or dive suit could withstand it, but liquid air technology had changed the rules of the game if not natural law itself, and had in fact beat nature and the North Atlantic Ridge by in a sense sending evolved man back to the sea from which he came.