The Ghost from the Grand Banks

1. SUMMER OF ’74

There must be better ways, Jason Bradley kept telling himself, of celebrating one’s twenty-first birthday than attending a mass funeral; but at least he had no emotional involvement. He wondered if Operation JENNIFER’s director, or his CIA sidekicks, even knew the names of the sixty-three Russian sailors they were now consigning to the deep.

The whole ceremony seemed utterly unreal, and the presence of the camera crew added yet another dimension of fantasy. Jason felt that he was an extra in a Hollywood movie, and that someone would shout “Action!” as the shrouded corpses slid into the sea. After all, it was quite possible—even likely—that Howard Hughes himself had been in the plane that had circled overhead a few hours before. If it was not the Old Man, it must have been some other top brass of the Summa Corporation; no one else knew what was happening in this lonely stretch of the Pacific, a thousand kilometers northwest of Hawaii.

For that matter, not even Glomar Explorer’s operations team—carefully insulated from the rest of the ship’s crew—knew anything about the mission until they were already at sea. That they were attempting an unprecedented salvage job was obvious, and the smart money favored a lost reconnaissance satellite. No one dreamed that they were going to lift an entire Russian submarine from water two thousand fathoms deep—with its nuclear warheads, its codebooks, and its cryptographic equipment. And, of course, its crew…

Until this morning—yes, it had been quite a birthday!—Jason had never seen Death. Perhaps it was morbid curiosity that had prompted him to volunteer, when the medics had asked for help to bring the bodies up from the morgue. (The planners in Langley had thought of everything; they had provided refrigeration for exactly one hundred cadavers.) He had been astonished—and relieved—to find how well preserved most of the corpses were, after six years on the bed of the Pacific. The sailors who had been trapped in sealed compartments, where no predators could reach them, looked as if they were sleeping. Jason felt that, if he had known the Russian for “Wake up!” he would have had an irresistible urge to shout it.

There was certainly someone aboard who knew Russian, and spoke it beautifully, for the entire funeral service had been in that language; only now, at the very end, was English used as Explorer’s chaplain came on line with the closing words for burial at sea.

There was a long silence after the last “Amen,” followed by a brief command to the Honor Guard. And then, as one by one the lost sailors slid gently over the side, came the music that would haunt Jason Bradley for the rest of his life.

It was sad, yet not like any funeral music that he had ever heard; in its slow, relentless beat was all the power and mystery of the sea. Jason was not a very imaginative young man, but he felt that he was listening to the sound of waves marching forever against some rocky shore. It would be many years before he learned how well this music had been chosen.

The bodies were heavily weighted, so that they entered the water feet first, with only the briefest of splashes. Then they vanished instantly; they would reach their final resting place intact, before the circling sharks could mutilate them.

Jason wondered if the rumor was true, and that in due course the film of this ceremony would be sent to Moscow. It would have been a civilized gesture—but a somewhat ambiguous one. And he doubted that Security would approve, however skillfully the editing was done.

As the list of the sailors returned to the sea, the haunting music ebbed into silence. The sense of doom that had hung over Explorer for so many days seemed to disperse, like a fog-bank blown away by the wind. There was a long moment of complete silence; then the single word “Dismiss” came from the PA system—not in the usual brusque manner, but so quietly that it was some time before the files of men standing at attention broke up and began to drift away.

And now, thought Jason, I can have a proper birthday party. He never dreamed that one day he would walk this deck again—in another sea, and another century.

2. THE COLORS OF INFINITY

Donald Craig hated these visits, but he knew that they would continue as long as they both lived; if not through love (had it ever really been there?), at least through compassion and a shared grief.

Because it is so hard to see the obvious, it had been months before he realized the true cause of his discomfort. The Torrington Clinic was more like a luxury hotel than a world-famous center for the treatment of psychological disorders. Nobody died here; trolleys never rolled from wards to operating theaters; there were no white-robed doctors making Pavlovian responses to their beepers; and even the attendants never wore uniforms. But it was still, essentially, a hospital; and a hospital was where the fifteen-year-old Donald had watched his father gasping for breath, as he slowly died from the first of the two great plagues that had ravaged the twentieth century.

“How is she this morning, Dolores?” he asked the nurse after he had checked in at Reception.

“Quite cheerful, Mr. Craig. She asked me to take her shopping—she wants to buy a new hat.”

“Shopping! That’s the first time she’s even asked to go out!”

Donald should have been pleased, yet he felt a twinge of resentment. Edith would never speak to him; indeed, she seemed unaware of his presence, looking through him as if he did not even exist.

“What did Dr. Jafferjee say? Is it okay for her to leave the clinic?”

“I’m afraid not. But it’s a good sign: she’s starting to show interest in the world around her again.”

A new hat? Thought Craig. That was a typically feminine reaction—but it was not at all typical of Edith. She had always dressed…well, sensibly rather than fashionably, and had been quite content to order her clothes in the usual fashion, by teleshopping. Somehow, he could not imagine her in some exclusive Mayfair shop, surrounded by hatboxes, tissue paper, and fawning assistants. But if she felt that way, so be it; anything to help her escape from the mathematical labyrinth which was, quite literally, infinite in extent.

And where was she now, in her endless explorations? As usual, she was sitting crouched in a swivel chair, while an image built up on the meter-wide screen that dominated one wall of her room. Craig could see that it was in hi-res mode—all two thousand lines—so even the supercomputer was going flat out to paint a pixel every few seconds. To a casual observer, it would have seemed that the image was frozen in a partly completed state; only close inspection would have shown that the end of the bottom line was creeping slowly across the screen.

“She started this run,” whispered Nurse Dolores, “early yesterday morning. Of course, she hasn’t been sitting here all the time. She’s sleeping well now, even without sedation.”

The image flickered briefly, as one scan line was completed and a new one started creeping from left to right across the screen. More than ninety percent of the picture was now displayed; the lower portion still being generated would show little more of interest.

Despite the dozens—no, hundreds—of times that Donald Craig had watched these images being created, they had never lost their fascination. Part of it came from the knowledge that he was looking at something that no human eye had ever seen before—or ever would see again, if its coordinates were not saved in the computer. Any random search for a lost image would be far more futile than seeking one particular grain of sand in all the deserts of the world.

And where was Edith now, in her endless exploring? He glanced at the small display screen below the main monitor, and checked the magnitude of the enormous numbers that marched across it, digit after implacable digit. They were grouped in fives to make it easier for human eyes to grasp, though there was no way that the human mind could do so.

…Six, seven, eight clusters—forty digits all told. That meant—

He did a quick mental calculation—a neglected skill in this day and age, of which he was inordinately proud. The result impressed, but did not surprise him. On this scale, the original basic image would be much bigger than the Galaxy. And the computer could continue expanding it until it was larger than the Cosmos, though at that magnification, computing even a single image might take years.

Donald could well understand why Georg Cantor, the discoverer (or was it inventor?) of the numbers beyond infinity, had spent his last years in a mental home. Edith had taken the first steps on that same endless road, aided by machinery beyond the dreams of any nineteenth-century mathematician. The computer generating these images was performing trillions of operations a second; in a few hours, it would manipulate more numbers than the entire human race had ever handled, since the first Cro-Magnon started counting pebbles on the floor of his cave.

Though the unfolding patterns never exactly repeated themselves, they fell into a small number of easily recognized categories. There were multipointed stars of six-, eight-fold, and even higher degrees of symmetry; spirals that sometimes resembled the trunks of elephants, and at other times the tentacles of octopods; black amoebae linked by networks of contorted tendrils; faceted, compound insect eyes… Because there was absolutely no sense of scale, some of the figures being created on the screen could have been equally well interpreted as bizarre galaxies—or the microfauna in a drop of ditchwater.

And ever and again, as the computer increased the degree of magnification and dived deeper into the geometric depths it was exploring, the original strange shape—looking like a fuzzy figure eight lying on its side—that contained all this controlled chaos would reappear. Then the endless cycle would begin again, though with variations so subtle that they eluded the eye.

Surely, thought Donald, Edith must realize, in some part of her mind, that she is trapped in an endless loop. What had happened to the wonderful brain that had conceived and designed the ’99 Phage which, in the early hours of 1 January 2000, had briefly made her one of the most famous women in the world?

“Edith,” he said softly, “this is Donald. Is there anything I can do?”

Nurse Dolores was looking at him with an unfathomable expression. She had never been actually unfriendly, but her greetings always lacked warmth. Sometimes he wondered if she blamed him for Edith’s condition.

That was a question he had asked himself every day, in the months since the tragedy.

3. A BETTER MOUSETRAP

Roy Emerson considered himself, accurately enough, to be reasonably good-natured, but there was one thing that could make him really angry. It had happened on what he swore would be his last TV appearance, when the interviewer on a Late, Late Show had asked, with malice aforethought: “Surely, the principle of the Wave Wiper is very straightforward. Why didn’t someone invent it earlier?” The host’s tone of voice made his real meaning perfectly clear: “Of course I could have thought of it myself, if I hadn’t more important things to do.”

Emerson resisted the temptation of replying: “If you had the chance, I’m sure you’d ask Einstein, or Edison, or Newton, the same sort of question.” Instead, he answered mildly enough: “Well, someone had to be the first. I guess I was the lucky one.”

“What gave you the idea? Did you suddenly jump out of the bathtub shouting ‘Eureka’?”

Had it not been for the host’s cynical attitude, the question would have been fairly innocuous. Of course, Emerson had heard it a hundred times before. He switched to automatic mode and mentally pressed the PLAY button.

“What gave me the idea—though I didn’t realize it at the time—was a ride in a high-speed Coast Guard patrol boat off Key West, back in ’03…”

Though it had led him to fame and fortune, even now Emerson preferred not to recall certain aspects of that trip. It had seemed a good idea at the time—a short pleasure cruise through Hemingway’s old stomping grounds, at the invitation of a cousin in the Coast Guard. How amazed Ernest would have been at the target of their antismuggling activities—blocks of crystal, about the size of a matchbox, that had made their way from Hong Kong via Cuba. But these TIMs—Terabyte Interactive Microlibraries—had put so many U.S. publishers out of business that Congress had dusted off legislation that dated back to the heydays of Prohibition.

Yes, it had sounded very attractive—while he was still on terra firma. What Emerson had forgotten (or his cousin had neglected to tell him) was that smugglers preferred to operate in the worst weather they could find, short of a Gulf hurricane.

“It was a rough trip, and about the only thing I remembered afterwards was the gadget on the bridge that allowed the helmsman to see ahead, despite the torrents of rain and spray that were being dumped on us.

“It was simply a disc of glass, spinning at high speed. No water could stay on it for more than a fraction of a second, so it was always perfectly transparent. I thought at the time it was far better than a car’s windshield wiper; and then I forgot all about it.”

“For how long?”

“I’m ashamed to say. Oh, maybe a couple of years. Then one day I was driving through a heavy rainstorm in the New Jersey countryside, and my wipers jammed; I had to pull off the road until the storm had passed. I was stuck for maybe half an hour; and at the end of that time, the whole thing was clear in my mind.”

“That’s all it took?”

“Plus every cent I could lay my hands on, and two years of fifteen-hour days and seven-day weeks in my garage.” (Emerson might have added “And my marriage,” but he suspected that his host already knew that. He was famed for his careful research.)

“Spinning the windshield—or even part of it—obviously wasn’t practical. Vibrations had to be the answer; but what kind?

“First I tried to drive the whole windshield like a loudspeaker cone. That certainly kept the rain off, but then there was the noise problem. So I went ultrasonic; it took kilowatts of power—and all the dogs in the neighborhood went crazy. Worse still, few windshields lasted more than a couple of hours before they turned into powdered glass.

“So I tried subsonics. They worked better—but gave you a bad headache after a few minutes of driving. Even if you couldn’t hear them, you could feel them.

“I was stuck for months, and almost gave up the whole idea, when I realized my mistake. I was trying to vibrate the whole massive sheet of multiplex safety glass—sometimes as much as ten kilograms of it. All I needed to keep dancing was a thin layer on the outside; even if it was only a few microns thick, it would keep the rainwater off.

“So I read all I could about surface waves, transducers, impedance matching—”

“Whoa! Can we have that in words of one syllable?”

“Frankly, no. All I can say is that I found a way of confining low-energy vibrations to a very thin surface layer, leaving the main bulk of the windshield unaffected. If you want details, I refer you to the basic patents.”

“Happy to take your word for it, Mr. Emerson. Now, our next guest—”

Possibly because the interview had taken place in London, where the works of the New England transcendentalist were not everyday reading, Emerson’s host had failed to make the connection with his famous namesake (no relation, as far as he knew). No American interviewer, of course, missed the opportunity of complimenting Roy on inventing the apocryphal Better Mousetrap. The automobile industry had indeed beaten a path to his door; within a few years, almost all the world’s millions of metronoming blades had been replaced by the Sonic Wave Windshield Wiper. Even more important, thousands of accidents had been averted, with the improvement of visibility in bad-weather driving.

It was while testing the latest model of his invention that Roy Emerson made his next breakthrough—and, once again, he was very lucky that no one else had thought of it first.

His ’04 Mercedes Hydro was cruising in benign silence down Park Avenue, living up to its celebrated slogan “You can drink your exhaust!” Midtown seemed to have been hit by a monsoon: conditions were perfect for testing the Mark V Wave Wiper. Emerson was sitting beside his chauffeur—he no longer drove himself, of course—quietly dictating notes as he adjusted the electronics.

The car seemed to be sliding between the rain-washed walls of a glass canyon. Emerson had driven this way a hundred times before, but only now did the blindingly obvious hit him with paralyzing force.

Then he recovered his breath, and said to the carcom: “Get me Joe Wickram.”

His lawyer, sunning himself on a yacht off the Great Barrier Reef, was a little surprised by the call.

“This is going to cost you, Roy. I was just about to gaff a marlin.”

Emerson was in no mood for such trivialities.

“Tell me, Joe—does the patent cover all applications—not just car windshields?”

Joe was hurt at the implied criticism.

“Of course. That’s why I put in the clause about adaptive circuits, so it could automatically adjust to any shape and size. Thinking of a new line in sunglasses?”

“Why not? But I’ve got something slightly bigger in mind. Remember that the Wave Wiper doesn’t merely keep off water—it shakes off any dirt that’s already there. Do you remember when you last saw a car with a really dirty windshield?”

“Not now you mention it.”

“Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know. Good luck with the fishing.”

Roy Emerson leaned back in his seat and did some mental calculation. He wondered if all the windshields of all the cars in the city of New York could match the area of glass in the single building he was now driving past.

He was about to destroy an entire profession; armies of window cleaners would soon be looking for other jobs.

Until now, Roy Emerson had been merely a millionaire. Soon he would be rich.

And bored…

4. THE CENTURY SYNDROME

When the clocks struck midnight on Friday, 31 December 1999, there could have been few educated people who did not realize that the twenty-first century would not begin for another year. For weeks, all the media had been explaining that because the Western calendar started with Year 1, not Year 0, the twentieth century still had twelve months to go.

It made no difference; the psychological effect of those three zeros was too powerful, the fin de siècle ambience too overwhelming. This was the weekend that counted; 1 January 2001 would be an anticlimax, except to a few movie buffs.

There was also a very practical reason why 1 January 2000 was the date that really mattered, and it was a reason that would never have occurred to anyone a mere forty years earlier. Since the 1960s, more and more of the world’s accounting had been taken over by computers, and the process was now essentially complete. Millions of optical and electronic memories held in their stores trillions of transactions—virtually all the business of the planet.

And, of course, most of these entries bore a date. As the last decade of the century opened, something like a shock wave passed through the financial world. It was suddenly, and belatedly, realized that most of those dates lacked a vital component.

The human bank clerks and accountants who did what was still called “bookkeeping” had very seldom bothered to write in the “19” before the two digits they had entered. These were taken for granted; it was a matter of common sense. And common sense, unfortunately, was what computers so conspicuously lacked. Come the first dawn of ’00, myriads of electronic morons would say to themselves ’00 is smaller than 99. Therefore today is earlier than yesterday—by exactly 99 years. Recalculate all mortgages, overdrafts, interest-bearing accounts on this basis…” The results would be international chaos on a scale never witnessed before; it would eclipse all earlier achievements of artificial stupidity—even Black Monday, 5 June 1995, when a faulty chip in Zurich had set the bank rate at 150 percent instead of 15 percent.

There were not enough programmers in the world to check all the billions of financial statements that existed, and to add the magic “19” prefix wherever necessary. The only solution was to design special software that could perform the task, by being injected—like a benign virus—into all the programs involved.

During the closing years of the century, most of the world’s star-class programmers were engaged in the race to develop a “Vaccine ’99”; it had become a kind of Holy Grail. Several faulty versions were issued as early as 1997—and wiped out any purchasers who hastened to test them before making adequate backups. The lawyers did very well out of the ensuing suits and countersuits.

Edith Craig belonged to the small pantheon of famous women programmers that began with Byron’s tragic daughter Ada, Lady Lovelace, continued through Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, and culminated with Dr. Susan Calvin. With the help of only a dozen assistants and one SuperCray, she had designed the quarter million lines of code of the DOUBLEZERO program that would prepare any well-organized financial system to face the twenty-first century. It could even deal with badly organized ones, inserting the computer equivalent of red flags at danger points where human intervention might still be necessary.

It was just as well that 1 January 2000 was a Saturday; most of the world had a full weekend to recover from its hangover—and to prepare for the moment of truth on Monday morning.

The following week saw a record number of bankruptcies among firms whose accounts receivable had been turned into instant garbage. Those who had been wise enough to invest in DOUBLEZERO survived, and Edith Craig was rich, famous… and happy.

Only the wealth and the fame would last.

5. EMPIRE OF GLASS

Roy Emerson had never expected to be rich, so he was not adequately prepared for the ordeal. At first he had naively imagined that he could hire experts to look after his rapidly accumulating wealth, leaving him to do exactly what he pleased with his time. He had soon discovered that this was only partly true: money could provide freedom, but it also brought responsibility. There were countless decisions that he alone could make, and a depressing number of hours had to be spent with lawyers and accountants.

Halfway to his first billion, he found himself chairman of the board. The company had only five directors—his mother, his older brother, his younger sister, Joe Wickram, and himself.

“Why not Diana?” he had asked Joe.

Emerson’s attorney looked at him over the spectacles which, he fondly believed, gave him an air of distinction in this age of ten-minute corrective eye surgery.

“Parents and siblings are forever,” he said. “Wives come and go—you should know that. Not, of course, that I’m suggesting…”

Joe was right; Diana had indeed gone, like Gladys before her. It had been a fairly amicable, though expensive, departure, and when the last documents had been signed, Emerson disappeared into his workshop for several months. When he emerged (without any new inventions, because he had been too engrossed in discovering how to operate his wonderful new equipment to actually use it) Joe was waiting for him with a new surprise.

“It won’t take much of your time,” he said, “and it’s a great honor: Parkinson’s are one of the most distinguished firms in England, established over two hundred years ago. And it’s the first time they’ve ever taken a director from outside the family—let alone a foreigner.”

“Ha! I suppose they need more capital.”

“Of course. But it’s to your mutual interest—and they really respect you. You know what you’ve done to the glass business, worldwide.”

“Will I have to wear a top hat and—what do they call them—spats?”

“Only if you want to be presented at court, which they could easily arrange.”

To his considerable surprise, Roy Emerson had found the experience not only enjoyable, but stimulating. Until he joined the board of Parkinson’s and attended its bimonthly meetings in the City of London, he thought he knew something about glass. He very quickly discovered his mistake.

Even ordinary plate glass, which he had taken for granted all his life—and which contributed to most of his fortune—had a history which astonished him. Emerson had never asked himself how it was made, assuming that it was squeezed out of the molten raw material between giant rollers.

So indeed it had been, until the middle of the twentieth century—and the resulting rough sheets had required hours of expensive polishing. Then a crazy Englishman had said: Why not let gravity and surface tension do all the work? Let the glass float on a river of molten metal: that will automatically give a perfectly smooth surface…

After a few years, and a few million pounds, his colleagues suddenly stopped laughing. Overnight, “float glass” made all other methods of manufacturing obsolete.

Emerson was much impressed by this piece of technological history, recognizing its parallel with his own breakthrough. And he was honest enough to admit that it had required far more courage and commitment than his own modest invention. It exemplified the difference between genius and talent.

He was also fascinated by the ancient art of the glassblower, who had not been wholly replaced by technology and probably never would be. He even paid a visit to Venice, now cowering nervously behind its Dutch-built dikes, and goggled at the intricate marvels in the Glass Museum. Not only was it impossible to imagine how some of them had been manufactured, it was incredible that they had even been moved intact from their place of origin. There seemed no limit to the things that could be done with glass, and new uses were still being discovered after two thousand years.

On one particularly dull board meeting Emerson had been frankly daydreaming, admiring the nearby dome of St. Paul’s from one of the few vantage points that had survived commercial greed and architectural vandalism. Two more items on the agenda and they’d be at Any Other Business; then they could all go to the excellent lunch that was waiting in the Penthouse Suite.

The words “four hundred atmospheres pressure” made him look up. Sir Roger Parkinson was reading from a letter which he was holding as if it were some species of hitherto unknown insect. Emerson quickly riffled through the thick folder of his agenda and found his own copy.

It was on impressive stationery, but the usual polynomial legal name meant nothing to him; he noted approvingly, however, that the address was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At the bottom of the sheet, like a modest cough, were the words “Est. 1803,” in letters barely visible to the naked eye.

“They don’t give the name of their client,” said young (thirty-five if he was a day) George Parkinson. “Interesting.”

“Whoever he is,” interjected William Parkinson-Smith—the family’s secretly admired black sheep, much beloved by the gossip channels for his frequent domestic upheavals—’he doesn’t seem to know what he wants. Why should he ask for quotes on such a range of sizes? From a millimeter, for heaven’s sake, up to a half-meter radius.”

“The larger size,” said Rupert Parkinson, famous racing yachtsman, “reminds me of those Japanese fishing floats that get washed up all over the Pacific. Make splendid ornaments.”

“I can think of only one use for the smallest size,” said George portentously. “Fusion power.”

“Nonsense, Uncle,” interjected Gloria Windsor-Parkinson (100 Meters Silver, 2004 Olympics). “Laser-zapping was given up years ago—and the microspheres for that were tiny. Even a millimeter would be far too big—unless you wanted a housebroken H-bomb.”

“Besides, look at the quantities required,” said Arnold Parkinson (world authority on Pre-Raphaelite art). “Enough to fill the Albert Hall.”

“Wasn’t that the title of a Beatles song?” asked William. There was a thoughtful silence, then a quick scrabbling at keyboards. Gloria, as usual, got there first.

“Nice try, Uncle Bill. It’s from Sergeant Pepper—‘A Day in the Life.” I had no idea you were fond of classical music.”

Sir Roger let the free-association process go its way unchecked. He could bring the board to an instant full stop by lifting an eyebrow, but we was too wise to do so—yet. He knew how often these brainstorming sessions led to vital conclusions—even decisions—that mere logic would never have discovered. And even when they fizzled out, they helped the members of his worldwide family to know each other better.

But it was Roy Emerson (token Yank) who was to amaze the massed Parkinsons with his inspired guess. For the last few minutes, an idea had been forming in the back of his mind. Rupert’s reference to the Japanese fishing floats had provided the first vague hint, but it would never have come to anything without one of those extraordinary coincidences that no self-respecting novelist would allow in a work of fiction.

Emerson was sitting almost facing the portrait of Basil Parkinson, 1874–1912. And everyone knew where he had died, though the exact circumstances were still the stuff of legend—and at least one libel action.

There were some who said that he had tried to disguise himself as a woman, so that he could get into one of the last boats to leave. Others had seen him in animated conversation with Chief Designer Andrews, completely ignoring the icy water rising around his ankles. This version was considered—at least by the family—to be far more probable. The two brilliant engineers would have enjoyed each other’s company, during the last minutes of their lives.

Emerson cleared his throat, a little nervously. He might be making a fool of himself…

“Sir Roger,” he said. “I’ve just had a crazy idea. You’ve all seen the publicity and speculations about the centennial, now that it’s only five years to 2012. A few million bubbles of toughened glass would be just right for the job everyone’s talking about.

“I think our mystery customer is after the Titanic.”

6. “A NIGHT TO REMEMBER”

Although most of the human race had seen his handiwork, Donald Craig would never be as famous as his wife. Yet his programming skills had made him equally rich, and their meeting was inevitable, for they had both used supercomputers to solve a problem unique to the last decade of the twentieth century.

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:

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 self-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.”

“Leave that to me—I’ve a few more ideas, but I don’t want to talk about them yet. If some of them work out, the project would pay for itself—eventually. You might even make a profit.”

Emerson doubted if that “you” was a slip of the tongue. Rupert was a very smooth operator, and knew exactly what he was doing. And he certainly knew that his listener could easily underwrite the whole operation—if he wished.

“Just one other thing,” Parkinson continued. “Until I give the okay—which won’t be until I get Bradley’s report—not a word to anyone. Especially Sir Roger—he’ll think we’re crazy.”

“You mean to say,” Emerson retorted, “that there could be the slightest possible doubt?”

9. PROPHETS WITH SOME HONOR

10. “THE ISLE OF THE DEAD”

Every trade has its acknowledged leaders, whose fame seldom extends beyond the boundaries of their profession. At any given time, few could name the world’s top accountant, dentist, sanitary engineer, insurance broker, mortician… to mention only a handful of unglamorous but essential occupations.

There are some ways of making a living, however, which have such high visibility that their practitioners become household names. First, of course, are the performing arts, in which anyone who becomes a star may be instantly recognizable to a large fraction of the human race. Sports and politics are close behind; and so, a cynic might argue, is crime.

Jason Bradley fit into none of these categories, and had never expected to be famous. The Glomar Explorer episode was more than three decades in the past, and even if it had not been shrouded in secrecy, his role had been far too obscure to be noteworthy. Although he had been approached several times by writers hoping to get a new angle on Operation JENNIFER, nothing had ever come of their efforts.

It seemed likely that, even at this date, the CIA felt that the single book on the subject was one too many, and had taken steps to discourage other authors. For several years after 1974, Bradley had been visited by anonymous but polite gentlemen who had reminded him of the documents he signed when he was discharged. They always came in pairs, and sometimes they offered him employment of an unspecified nature. Though they assured him that it would be “interesting and well paid,” he was then earning very good money on North Sea oil rigs, and was not tempted. It was now more than a decade since the last visitation, but he did not doubt that the Company still had him carefully stockpiled in its vast data banks at Langley—or wherever they were these days.

He was in his office on the forty-sixth floor of the Teague Tower—now dwarfed by Houston’s later skyscrapers—when he received the assignment that was to make him famous. The date happened to be April 2nd, and at first Bradley thought that his occasional client Jeff Rawlings had got it a day late. Despite his awesome responsibilities as operations manager on the Hibernia Platform, Jeff was noted for his sense of humor. This time, he wasn’t joking; yet it was quite a while before Jason could take his problem seriously.

“Do you expect me to believe,” he said, “that your million-ton rig has been shut down… by an octopus?”

“Not the whole operation, of course—but Manifold 1—our best producer. Forty thou barrels a day. Five flowlines running into it, all going full blast. Until yesterday.”

The Hibernia project, it suddenly occurred to Jason, had the same general design as an octopus. Tentacles—or pipelines—ran out along the seabed from the central body to the dozen wells that had been drilled three thousand meters through the oil-rich sandstone. Before they reached the main platform, the flowlines from several individual wells were combined at a production manifold—also on the seabed, nearly a hundred meters down.

Each manifold was an automated industrial complex the size of a large apartment building, containing all the specialized equipment needed to handle the high-pressure mixture of gas, oil, and water erupting from the reservoirs far below. Tens of millions of years ago, nature had created and stored this hidden treasure; it was no simple matter to wrest it from her grasp.

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“This circuit secure?”

“Of course.”

“Three days ago we started getting erratic instrument readings. The flow was perfectly normal, so we weren’t too worried. But then there was a sudden data cutoff; we lost all monitoring facilities. It was obvious that the main fiber-optic trunk had been broken, and of course the automatics shut everything down.”

“No surge problems?”

“No; slug-catcher worked perfectly—for once.”

“And then?”

“S.O.P.—we sent down a camera—Eyeball Mark 5. Guess what?”

“The batteries died.”

“Nope. The umbilical got snagged in the external scaffolding, before we could even go inside to look around.”

“What happened to the driver?”

“Well, the kitchen isn’t completely mechanized, and Chef Dubois can always use some unskilled labor.”

“So you lost the camera. What happened next?”

“We haven’t lost it—we know exactly where it is—but all it shows are lots of fish. So we sent down a diver to untangle things—and to see what he could find.”

“Why not an ROV?”

There were always several underwater robots—Remotely Operated Vehicles—on any offshore oilfield. The old days when human divers did all the work were long since past.

There was an embarrassed silence at the other end of the line.

“Afraid you’d ask me that. We’ve had a couple of accidents—two ROVs are being rebuilt—and the rest can’t be spared from an emergency job on the Avalon platform.”

“Not your lucky day, is it? So that’s why you’ve called the Bradley Corporation—‘No job too deep.” Tell me more.”

“Spare me that beat-up slogan. Since the depth’s only ninety meters, we sent down a diver, in standard heliox gear. Well—ever heard a man screaming in helium? Not a very nice noise…

“When we got him up and he was able to talk again, he said the entire rig was covered by an octopus. He swore it was a hundred meters across. That’s ridiculous, of course—but there’s no doubt it’s a monster.”

“However big it is, a small charge of dynamite should encourage it to move.”

“Much too risky. You know the layout down there—after all, you helped install it!”

“If the camera’s still working, doesn’t it show the beast?”

“We did get a glimpse of a tentacle—but no way of judging its size. We think it’s gone back inside—we’re worried that it might rip out more cables.”

“You don’t suppose it’s fallen in love with the plumbing?”

“Very funny. My guess is that it’s found a free lunch. You know—the bloody Oasis Effect that Publicity’s always boasting about.”

Bradley did indeed. Far from being damaging to the environment, virtually all underwater artifacts were irresistibly attractive to marine life, and often became a target for fishing boats and a paradise for anglers. He sometimes wondered how fish had managed to survive, before mankind generously provided them with condominiums by scattering wrecks across the seabeds of the world.

“Perhaps a cattle prod would do the trick—or a heavy dose of subsonics.”

“We don’t care how it’s done—as long as there’s no damage to the equipment. Anyway, it looked like a job for you—and Jim, of course. Is he ready?”

“He’s always ready.”

“How soon can you get to St. John’s? There’s a Chevron jet at Dallas—it can pick you up in an hour. What does Jim weigh?”

“One point five tons.”

“No problem. When can you be at the airport?”

“Give me three hours. This isn’t my normal line of business—I’ll have to do some research.”

“Usual terms?”

“Yes—hundred K plus expenses.”

“And no cure, no pay?”

Bradley smiled. The centuries-old salvage formula had probably never been invoked in a case like this, but it seemed applicable. And it would be an easy job. A hundred meters, indeed! What nonsense…

“Of course. Call you back in one hour to confirm. Meanwhile please fax the manifold plans, so I can refresh my memory.”

“Right—and I’ll see what else I can find out, while I’m waiting for your call.”

There was no need to waste time packing; Bradley always had two bags ready—one for the tropics, one for the Arctic. The first was very little used; most of his jobs, it seemed, were in unpleasant parts of the world, and this one would be no exception. The North Atlantic at this time of year would be cold, and probably rough; not that it would matter much, a hundred meters down.

Those who thought of Jason Bradley as a tough, no-nonsense roughneck would have been surprised at his next action. He pressed a button on his desk console, lay back in his partially reclining chair, and closed his eyes. To all outward appearances, he was asleep.

It had been years before he discovered the identity of the haunting music that had ebbed and flowed across Glomar Explorer’s deck, almost half a lifetime ago. Even then, he had known it must have been inspired by the sea; the slow rhythm of the waves was unmistakable. And how appropriate that the composer was Russian—the most underrated of his country’s three titans, seldom mentioned in the same breath as Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky…

As Sergey Rachmaninoff himself had done long ago, Jason Bradley had stood transfixed before Arnold Boecklin’s “Isle of the Dead,” and now he was seeing it again in his mind’s eye. Sometimes he identified himself with the mysterious, shrouded figure standing in the boat; sometimes he was the oarsman (Charon?); and sometimes he was the sinister cargo, being carried to its last resting place beneath the cypresses.

It was a secret ritual that had somehow evolved over the years, and which he believed had saved his life more than once. For while he was engrossed in the music, his subconscious mind—which apparently had no interest in such trivialities—was very busy indeed, analyzing the job that lay ahead, and foreseeing problems that might arise. At least that was Bradley’s more-than-half-seriously-held theory, which he never intended to disprove by too close an examination.

Presently he sat up, switched off the music module, and swung his seat around to one of his half-dozen keyboards. The NeXT Mark 4 which stored most of his files and information was hardly the last word in computers, but Bradley’s business had grown up with it and he had resisted all updates, on the sound principle “If it works, don’t fix it.”

“I thought so,” he muttered, as he scanned the encyclopedia entry “Octopus.” “Maximum size when fully extended may be as much as ten meters. Weight fifty to one hundred kilograms.”

Bradley had never seen an octopus even approaching this size, and like most divers he knew considered them charming and inoffensive creatures. That they could be aggressive, much less dangerous, was an idea he had never taken seriously.

“See also entry on ‘Sports, Underwater.’ ”

He blinked twice at this last reference, instantly accessed it, and read it with a mixture of amusement and surprise. Although he had often tried his hand at sports diving, he had the typical professional’s disdain for amateur scubanauts. Too many of them had approached him looking for jobs, blissfully unaware of the fact that most of his work was in water too deep for unprotected humans, often with zero light and even zero visibility.

But he had to admire the intrepid divers of Puget Sound, who wrestled with opponents heavier than themselves and with four times as many arms—and brought them back to the surface without injuring them. (That, it seemed, was one of the rules of the game; if you hurt your octopus before you put it back in the sea, you were disqualified.)

The encyclopedia’s brief video sequence was the stuff of nightmares: Bradley wondered how well the Puget Sounders slept. But it gave him one vital piece of information.

How did these crazy sportsmen—and sportswomen, there were plenty of them as well—persuade a peaceable mollusk to emerge from its lair and indulge in hand-to-tentacle combat? He could hardly believe that the answer was so simple.

Pausing only to place a couple of unusual orders with his regular supplier, he grabbed his travel kit and headed for the airport.

“Easiest hundred K I ever earned,” Jason Bradley told himself.

11. ADA

A child with two brilliant parents has a double handicap, and the Craigs had made life even more difficult for their daughter by naming her Ada. This well-advertised tribute to the world’s first computer theorist perfectly summed up their ambitions for the child’s future; it would, they devoutly hoped, be happier than that of Lord Byron’s tragic daughter: Ada, Lady Lovelace.

It was a great disappointment, therefore, when Ada showed no particular talent for mathematics. By the age of six, the Craigs” friends had joked, “She should at least have discovered the binomial theorem.” As it was, she used her computer without showing any real interest in its operation; it was just another of the household gadgets, like vidphones, remote controllers, voice-operated systems, wall TV, colorfax…

Ada even seemed to have difficulty with simple logic, finding AND, NOR, and NAND gates quite baffling. She took an instant dislike to Boolean operators, and had been known to burst into tears at the sight of an IF/THEN statement.

“Give her time,” Donald pleaded to the often impatient Edith. “There’s nothing wrong with her intelligence. I was at least ten before I understood recursive loops. Maybe she’s going to be an artist. Her last report gave her straight A’s in painting, clay modeling—”

“And a D in arithmetic. What’s worse, she doesn’t seem to care! That’s what I find so disturbing.”

Donald did not agree, but he knew that it would only start another fight if he said so. He loved Ada too much to see any faults in her; as long as she was happy, and did reasonably well at school, that was all that mattered to him now. Sometimes he wished that they had not saddled her with that evocative name, but Edith still seemed determined to have a genius-type daughter. That was now the least of their disagreements. Indeed, if it had not been for Ada, they would have separated long ago.

“What are we going to do about the puppy?” he asked, eager to change the subject. “It’s only three weeks to her birthday—and we promised.”

“Well,” said Edith, softening for a moment, “she still hasn’t made up her mind. I only hope she doesn’t choose something enormous—like a Great Dane. Anyway, it wasn’t a promise. We told her it would depend on her next school test.”

You told her, Donald thought. Whatever the result, Ada’s going to get that puppy. Even if she wants an Irish wolfhound—which, after all, would be the appropriate dog for this huge estate.

Donald was still not sure if it was a good idea, but they could easily afford it, and he had long since given up arguing with Edith once she had made up her mind. She had been born and reared in Ireland, and she was determined that Ada should have the same advantage.

Conroy Castle had been neglected for over half a century, and some portions were now almost in ruins. But what was left was more than ample for a modern family, and the stables were in particularly good shape, having been maintained by a local riding school. After vigorous scrubbing and extensive chemical warfare, they provided excellent accommodation for computers and communications equipment. The local residents thought it was a very poor exchange.

On the whole, however, the locals were friendly enough. After all, Edith was an Irish girl who had made good, even if she had married an Englishman. And they heartily approved of the Craigs” efforts to restore the famous gardens to at least some vestige of their nineteenth-century glory.

One of Donald’s first moves, after they had made the west-wing ground floor livable, was to repair the camera obscura whose dome was a late-Victorian afterthought (some said excrescence) on the castle battlements. It had been installed by Lord Francis Conroy, a keen amateur astronomer and telescope maker, during the last decade of his life; when he was paralyzed, but too proud to be pushed around the estate in a wheelchair, he had spent hours surveying his empire from this vantage point—and issuing instructions to his army of gardeners by semaphore.

The century-old optics were still in surprisingly good condition, and threw a brilliant image of the outside world on to the horizontal viewing table. Ada was fascinated by the instrument and the sense of power it gave her as she scanned the castle grounds. It was, she declared, much better than TV—or the boring old movies her parents were always screening.

And up here on the battlements, she could not hear the sound of their angry voices.

12. A MOLLUSK OF UNUSUAL SIZE

The first bad news came soon after Bradley had settled down to his belated lunch. Chevron Canada fed its VIPs well, and Jason knew that as soon as he hit St. John’s he’d have little time for leisurely, regular meals.

“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Bradley,” said the steward, “but there’s an urgent call from Head Office.”

“Can’t I take it from here?”

“I’m afraid not—there’s video as well. You’ll have to go back.”

“Damn,” said Bradley, taking one quick mouthful of a splendid piece of Texas steak. He reluctantly pushed his plate aside, and walked to the communications booth at the rear of the jet. The video was only one way, so he had no compunction about continuing to chew as Rawlings gave his report.

“We’ve been doing some research, Jason, about octopus sizes—the people out on the platform weren’t very happy when you laughed at their estimate.”

“Too bad. I’ve checked with my encyclopedia. The very largest octopus is under ten meters across.”

“Then you’d better look at this.”

Though the image that flashed on the screen was obviously a very old photograph, it was of excellent quality. It showed a group of men on a beach, surrounding a shapeless mass about the size of an elephant. Several other photos followed in quick succession; they were all equally clear, but of what it was impossible to say.

“If I had to put any money on it,” said Bradley, “my guess would be a badly decomposed whale. I’ve seen—and smelled—several. They look just like that; unless you’re a marine biologist, you could never identify it. That’s how sea serpents get born.”

“Nice try, Jason. That’s exactly what most of the experts said at the time—which, by the way, was 1896. And the place was Florida—Saint Augustine Beach, to be precise.”

“My steak is getting cold, and this isn’t exactly helping my appetite.”

“I won’t take much longer. That little morsel weighed about five tons; luckily, a piece was preserved in the Smithsonian, so that fifty years later scientists were able to reexamine it. There’s no doubt that it was an octopus; and it must have had a span of almost seventy meters. So our diver’s guess of a hundred may not have been all that far out.”

Bradley was silent for a few moments, processing this very unexpected—and unwelcome—piece of information.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said, “though I’m not sure that I want to.”

“By the way,” said Rawlings, “you haven’t mentioned this to anyone?”

“Of course not,” snapped Jason, annoyed at the very suggestion.

“Well, the media have got hold of it somehow; the newsfax headlines are already calling it Oscar.”

“Good publicity; what are you worried about?”

“We’d hoped you could get rid of the beast without everyone looking over your shoulder. Now we’ve got to be careful; mustn’t hurt dear little Oscar. The World Wildlife people are watching. Not to mention Bluepeace.”

“Those crazies!”

“Maybe. But WW has to be taken seriously; remember who they have as president. We don’t want to upset the palace.”

“I’ll do my best to be gentle. Definitely no nukes—not even a small one.”

The first bite of his now tepid steak triggered a wry memory. Several times, Bradley recalled, he had eaten octopus—and quite enjoyed it.

He hoped he could avoid the reverse scenario.

13. PYRAMID POWER

When the sobbing Ada had been sent to her room, Edith and Donald Craig stared at each other in mutual disbelief.

“I don’t understand it,” said Edith at last. “She’s never been disobedient before; in fact, she always got on very well with Miss Ives.”

“And this is just the sort of test she’s usually very good at—no equations, only multiple choices and pretty pictures. Let me read that note again…”

Edith handed it over, while continuing to study the examination paper that had caused all the trouble.

“It almost looks,” said Donald, “as if she was deliberately trying to fail.”

Edith shook her head. “I don’t think so. Even with this mistake, she’d have got a good pass.”

Donald stared at the little set of brightly colored geometrical figures that had caused all the trouble.

“There’s only one thing to do,” he said. “You go and talk to her and calm her down. Give me ten minutes with a scissors and some stiff paper—then I’ll settle it once and for all, so there can’t be any further argument.”

“I’m afraid that will only be tackling the symptoms, not the disease. We want to know why she kept insisting she was right. That’s almost pathological. We may have to send her to a psychiatrist.”

The thought had already occurred to Donald, but he had instantly rejected it. In later years, he would often remember the irony of this moment.

While Edith was consoling Ada, he quickly measured out the necessary triangle with pencil and ruler, cut them from the paper, and joined up the edges until he had made three examples of the two simplest possible solid figures—two tetrahedrons, one pyramid, all with equal sides. It seemed a childish exercise, but it was the least he could do for his beloved and troubled daughter.

It was such a simple thought experiment that any child should be able to do it. Since two of the eight sides were swallowed up in the resulting diamond-shaped solid, the answer was obviously six. At least Ada had got that right…

Holding it between thumb and first finger, Donald spun the little cardboard diamond a few times, then dropped it on his desk with a sigh. It split apart at once into the two components.

“Seven, of course,” Donald muttered, since two of the original nine will be lost inside the new solid…

Idly, he tilted the little cardboard shapes until a pair of triangles merged.

Then he blinked.

Then his jaw dropped.

He sat in silence for a moment, checking the evidence of his own eyes. A slow smile spread across his face, and he said quietly into the housecom: “Edith—Ada—I’ve got something to show you.”

The moment Ada entered, red-eyed and still sniffling, he reached out and took her in his arms.

“Ada,” he whispered, stroking her hair gently, “I’m very proud of you.” The astonishment on Edith’s face delighted him more than it should have.

“I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. “The answer was so obvious that the people who set the paper never bothered to check it. Look…”

He took the five-sided pyramid and stuck the four-sided tetrahedron on one face.

The new shape had only five sides—not the “obvious” seven…

“Even though I’ve found the answer,” Donald continued—and there was something like awe in his voice as he looked at his now smiling daughter—’I can’t visualize it mentally. How did you know that the other sides lined up like this?”

Ada looked puzzled.

“What else could they do?” she answered.

There was a long silence while Donald and Edith absorbed this reply, and almost simultaneously came to the same conclusion.

Ada might have little comprehension of logic or analysis—but her feeling for space—her geometrical intuition—was altogether extraordinary. At the age of nine, it was certainly far superior to that of her parents. Not to mention those who had set the examination paper…

The tension in the room slowly drained away. Edith began to laugh, and presently all three of them embraced with almost childlike joy.

“Poor Miss Ives!” chortled Donald. “Wait until we tell her that she’s got the Ramanujan of geometry in her class!”

It was one of the last happy moments of their married life; they would often cling to its memory in the bitter years to come.

14. CALLING ON OSCAR

Why are these things always called Jim?” said the reporter who had intercepted Bradley at St. John’s Airport. He was surprised there was only one, considering the excitement his mission seemed to be generating. One, of course, was often more than enough; but at least there was no Bluepeace demonstration to contend with.

“After the first diver who wore an armored suit, when they salvaged the Lusitania’s gold back in the thirties. Of course, they’ve been enormously improved since then…”

“How?”

“Well, they’re self-propelled, and I could live in Jim for fifty hours, two kilometers down—though it wouldn’t be much fun. Even with servo-assisted limbs, four hours is maximum efficient working time.”

“You wouldn’t get me into one of those things,” said the reporter, as the fifteen hundred kilos of titanium and plastic that had accompanied Bradley from Houston was being carefully hoisted into a Chevron helicopter. “Just looking at it gives me claustrophobia. Especially when you remember—”

Bradley knew what was coming, and escaped by waving goodbye and walking toward the chopper. The question had been put to him, in one form or another, by at least a dozen interviewers hoping to get some reaction. They had all been disappointed, and had been forced to concoct such imaginative headlines as THE IRON MAN IN THE TITANIUM SUIT.

“Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?” he had been asked—even by other divers. They were the only people he had answered seriously.

“Why should I be?” he had always replied. “Ted Collier was my best friend; God alone knows how many drinks we shared.” (’And girls,” he might have added.) “Ted would have been delighted; no other way I could have afforded Jim back in those days—got him for a quarter of what he’d cost to build. State of the art, too—never had a mechanical failure. Sheer bad luck Ted was trapped before they could get him out from that collapsed rig. And you know… Jim kept him alive three hours longer than the guarantee. Someday I may need those three hours myself.”

But not, he hoped, on this job—if his secret ingredient worked. It was much too late to pull out now; he could only trust that his encyclopedia, which seemed to have let him down badly in one important detail, had been accurate in other matters.

As always, Jason was impressed by the sheer size of the Hibernia platform, even though only a fraction of it was visible above sea level. The million-ton concrete island looked like a fortress, its jagged outline giving a field of fire in all directions. And indeed it was designed to ward off an implacable, though nonhuman, enemy—the great bergs that came drifting down from their Arctic nursery. The engineers claimed that the structure could withstand the maximum possible impact. Not everyone believed them.

There was a slight delay as the helicopter approached the landing platform on the roof of the multistoried topside building; it was already occupied by an RAF chopper, which had to be rolled aside before they could touch down. Bradley took one glance at its insignia, and groaned silently. How did they know so quickly? he wondered.

The president of World Wildlife was waiting for him as soon as he stepped out onto the windswept platform, and the big rotors came slowly to rest.

“Mr. Bradley? I know your reputation, of course—I’m delighted to meet you.”

“Er—thank you, Your Highness.”

“This octopus—is it really as big as they say?”

“That’s what I intend to find out.”

“Better you than me. And how do you propose to deal with it?”

“Ah—that’s a trade secret.”

“Nothing violent, I hope.”

“I’ve already promised not to use nukes… sir.”

The Prince gave a fleeting smile, then pointed to the somewhat battered fire extinguisher which Bradley was carefully nursing.

“You must be the first diver to carry one of those things underwater. Are you going to use it like a hypodermic syringe? Suppose the patient objects?”

Not a bad guess, thought Bradley; give him six out of ten. And I’m not a British citizen; he can’t send me to the Tower for refusing to answer questions.

“Something like that, Your Highness. And it won’t do any permanent harm.”

I hope, he added silently. There were other possibilities; Oscar might be completely indifferent—or he might get annoyed. Bradley was confident that he would be perfectly safe inside Jim’s metal armor, but it would be uncomfortable to be rattled around like a pea in a pod.

The Prince still seemed worried, and Bradley felt quite certain that his concern was not for the human protagonist in the coming encounter. His Royal Highness’s words quickly confirmed that suspicion.

“Please remember, Mr. Bradley, that this creature is unique—this is the first time anybody has ever seen one alive. And it’s probably the largest animal in the world. Perhaps the largest that’s ever existed. Oh, some dinosaurs certainly weighed more—but they didn’t cover as much territory.”

Bradley kept thinking of those words as he sank slowly toward the seabed, and the pale North Atlantic sunlight faded to complete blackness. They exhilarated rather than alarmed him; he would not have been in this business if he scared easily. And he felt that he was not alone; two benign ghosts were riding with him into the deep.

One was the first man ever to experience this world—his boyhood hero William Beebe, who had skirted the edge of the abyss in his primitive bathysphere, back in the 1930s. And the other was Ted Collier, who had died in the very space that Bradley was occupying now—quietly, and without fuss, because there was nothing else to do.

“Bottom coming up; visibility about twenty meters—can’t see the installation yet.”

Topside, everyone would be watching him on sonar and—as soon as he reached it—through the snagged camera.

“Target at thirty meters, bearing two two zero.”

“I see it; current must have been stronger than I thought. Hitting the deck now.”

For a few seconds everything was hidden in a cloud of silt, and—as he always did at such moments—he recalled Apollo 11’s “Kicking up a little dust.” The current swiftly cleared the obscuring haze, and he was able to survey the massive engineering complex now looming up in the twin beams from Jim’s external lights.

It seemed that a fair-sized chemical factory had been dumped on the seabed, to become a rendezvous for myriads of fish. Bradley could see less than a quarter of the whole installation, as most of it was hidden in distance and darkness. But he knew the layout intimately, for he had spent a good deal of expensive, frustrating, and occasionally dangerous time in almost identical rigs.

A massive framework of steel tubes, thicker than a man, formed an open cage around an assembly of valves, pipes, and pressure vessels, threaded with cables and miscellaneous minor plumbing. It looked as if it had been thrown together without rhyme or reason, but Bradley knew that every item had been carefully planned to deal with the immense forces slumbering far below.

Jim had no legs—underwater, as in space, they were often more of a nuisance than they were worth—and his movements could be controlled with exquisite precision by low-powered jets. It had been more than a year since Bradley had worn his mobile armor, and at first he overcorrected, but old skills quickly reasserted themselves.

He let himself drift gently toward his objective, hovering a few centimeters above the seabed to avoid stirring up silt. This was a situation where good visibility was important, and he was glad that Jim’s hemispheric dome gave him an all-around view.

Remembering the fate of the camera—it lay a few meters away in a tangle of pencil-thin cabling—Bradley paused just outside the framework of the manifold, considering the best way of getting inside. His first objective was to find the break in the fiber-optic monitor link; he knew its exact routing, so this should not present any problems.

His second was to evict Oscar; that might not be quite so easy.

“Here we go,” he reported to topside. “Coming in through the tradesman’s entrance—Access Tunnel B… not much room to maneuver, but no problem…”

He scraped once, very gently, against the metal walls of the circular corridor, and as he did so became aware of a steady, low-frequency thump, thump, thump… coming from somewhere in the labyrinth of tanks and tubes around him. Presumably some piece of equipment was still functioning; it must have been very much noisier around here when everything was running full blast…

The thought triggered a long-forgotten memory. He recalled how, as a small boy, he had silenced the speakers of a local fairground’s PA system with well-aimed shots from his father’s rifle—and had then lived for weeks in fear of being found out. Maybe Oscar had also been offended by this noisy intruder into his domain, and had taken similar direct action to restore peace and quiet.

But where was Oscar?

“I’m puzzled—I’m right inside now, and can see the whole layout. Plenty of hiding places—but none of them big enough to conceal anything larger than a man. Certainly nothing as big as an elephant! Ah—this is what you’re looking for!”

“What have you found?”

“Main cable trunk—looks like a plate of spaghetti that’s been dropped by a careless waiter. Must have taken some strength to rip it open; you’ll have to replace the whole section.”

“What could have done it? Hungry shark?”

“Or angry moray eel. But no teeth marks—I’d expect some. And teeth, for that matter. An occi’s still the best bet. But whoever did it isn’t at home.”

Taking his time, Bradley made a careful survey of the installation, and could find no other sign of damage. With any luck, the unit should be operational within a couple of days—unless the secret saboteur struck again. Meanwhile, there was nothing more that he could do; he began to jet his way delicately back the way he had come, steering Jim in and out of the maze of girders and pipes. Once he disturbed a small, pulpy mass that was indeed an octopus—perhaps as much as a meter across.

“Cross you off my list of suspects,” he muttered to himself.

He was almost through the outer framework of massive tubes and girders when he realized that the scenery had changed.

Many years ago, he had been a reluctant small boy on a school tour of a famous botanical garden in southern Georgia. He remembered practically nothing of the visit, but there was one item that, for some reason, had impressed him greatly. He had never heard of the banyan, and was amazed to discover that there was a tree that could have not one trunk, but dozens—each a separate pillar serving to support its widespread canopy of branches.

In the present case, of course, there were exactly eight, though he did not bother to count them. He was staring into the huge, jet-black eyes, like fathomless pools of ink, that were regarding him dispassionately.

Bradley had often been asked “Have you ever been frightened?” and had always given the same answer: “God, yes—many times. But always when it was over—that’s why I’m still around.” Though no one would ever believe it, he was not in the least frightened now—only awed, as any man might be by some unexpected wonder. Indeed, his first reaction was: “I owe an apology to that diver.” His second was: “Let’s see if this works.”

The cylinder of the fire extinguisher was already grasped by Jim’s left external manipulator, and Bradley servoed it up toward the aiming position. Simultaneously, he moved the right limb so that its mechanical fingers could work the trigger. The whole operation took only seconds; but Oscar reacted first.

He seemed to be mimicking Bradley’s actions, aiming a tube of flesh toward him—almost as if imitating his hastily modified fire extinguisher. Is he going to squirt something at me? Bradley wondered…

He would never have believed that anything so big could move so quickly. Even inside his armor, Bradley felt the impact of the jet-stream, as Oscar switched to emergency drive; this was no time for walking along the seabed like an eight-legged table. Then everything disappeared in a cloud of ink so dense that Jim’s high-intensity lights were completely useless.

On his leisurely way back to the surface, Bradley whispered softly to his dead friend: “Well, Ted, we did it again—but I don’t think we can take much credit.”

Judging by the manner of his going, he did not believe that Oscar would return. He could see the animal’s point of view—even sympathize with it.

There the peaceable mollusk was, quietly going about his business of preventing the North Atlantic from becoming a solid mass of cod. Suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared a monstrous apparition blazing with lights and waving ominous appendages. Oscar had done what any intelligent octopus would do. He had recognized that there was a creature in the sea much more ferocious than himself.

“My congratulations, Mr. Bradley,” said H.R.H. as Jason slowly emerged from his armor. This was always a difficult and undignified operation, but it kept him in good shape. If he put on another couple of centimeters, he would never be able to squeeze through the O-ring of the helmet seal.

“Thank you, sir,” he replied. “All part of the day’s work.”

The Prince chuckled.

“I thought we British had a monopoly on understatement. And I don’t suppose you’re prepared to reveal your secret ingredient?”

Jason smiled and shook his head.

“One day I may need to use it again.”

“Whatever it was,” said Rawlings with a grin, “it cost us a pretty penny. When we tracked him on sonar—amazing what a feeble echo he gives—Oscar was certainly moving fast toward deep water. But suppose he comes back when he gets hungry again? There’s nowhere else in the North Atlantic where the fishing’s so good.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Jason answered, pointing to his battered cylinder. “If he does, I’ll rush you my magic bullet—and you can send down your own man to deal with him. It won’t cost you a cent.”

“There’s a catch somewhere,” said Rawlings. “It can’t be that easy.”

Jason smiled, but did not answer. Though he was playing strictly by the rules, he felt a slight—very slight—twinge of conscience. The “No cure, no pay” slogan also implied that you got paid when you effected a cure, no questions asked. He had earned his hundred K bucks, and if anyone ever asked him how it was done, he would answer: “Didn’t you know? An octopus is easy to hypnotize.”

There was only one mild cause for dissatisfaction. He wished he’d had a chance of checking the household hint in the old Jacques Cousteau book that his encyclopedia had providentially quoted. It would be interesting to know if Octopus giganteus had the same aversion to concentrated copper sulphate as his midget ten-meter cousin, Octopus vulgaris.

15. CONROY CASTLE

“Are we paying for the dog, or the pedigree?” Donald Craig had asked in mock indignation when the impressive sheet of parchment had arrived. “She’s even got a coat of arms, for heaven’s sake!”

It had been love at first sight between Lady Fiona McDonald of Glen Abercrombie—a fluffy half-kilogram of Cairn terrier—and the nine-year-old girl. To the surprise and disappointment of the neighbors, Ada had shown no interest in ponies. “Nasty, smelly things,” she told Patrick O’Brian, the head gardener, “with a bite at one end and a kick at the other.” The old man had been shocked at so unnatural a reaction from a young lady, especially one who was half Irish at that.

Nor was he altogether happy with some of the new owners” projects for the estate on which his family had worked for five generations. Of course, it was wonderful to have real money flowing into Conroy Castle again, after decades of poverty—but converting the stables into computer rooms! It was enough to drive a man to drink, if he wasn’t there already.

Patrick had managed to derail some of the Craigs” more eccentric ideas by a policy of constructive sabotage, but they—or rather Miz Edith—had been adamant about the remodeling of the lake. After it had been dredged and some hundreds of tons of water hyacinth removed, she had presented Patrick with an extraordinary map.

“This is what I want the lake to look like,” she said, in a tone that Patrick had now come to recognize all too well.

“What’s it supposed to be?” he asked, with obvious distaste. “Some kind of bug?”

“You could call it that,” Donald had answered, in his don’t-blame-me-it’s-all-Edith’s-idea voice. “The Mandelbug. Get Ada to explain it to you someday.”

A few months earlier, O’Brian would have resented that remark as patronizing, but now he knew better. Ada was a strange child, but she was some kind of genius. Patrick sensed that both her brilliant parents regarded her as much with awe as with admiration. And he liked Donald considerably more than Edith; for an Englishman, he wasn’t too bad.

“The lake’s no problem. But moving all those grown cypress trees—I was only a boy when they were planted! It may kill them. I’ll have to talk it over with the Forestry Department in Dublin.”

“How long will it take?” asked Edith, totally ignoring his objections.

“Do you want it quick, cheap, or good? I can give you any two.”

This was now an old joke between Patrick and Donald, and the answer was the one they both expected.

“Fairly quick—and very good. The mathematician who discovered this is in his eighties, and we’d like him to see it as soon as possible.”

“Nothing I’d be proud of discovering.”

Donald laughed. “This is only a crude first approximation. Wait until Ada shows you the real thing on the computer; you’ll be surprised.”

I very much doubt it, thought Patrick.

The shrewd old Irishman was not often wrong. This was one of the rare occasions.

16. THE KIPLING SUITE

Jason Bradley and Roy Emerson had a good deal in common, thought Rupert Parkinson. They were both members of an endangered, if not dying, species—the self-made American entrepreneur who had created a new industry or become the leader of an old one. He admired, but did not envy them; he was quite content, as he often put it, to have been “born in the business.”

His choice of the Kipling Suite at Brown’s for this meeting had been quite deliberate, though he had no idea how much, or how little, his guests knew about the writer. In any event, both Emerson and Bradley seemed impressed by the ambience of the room, with the historic photographs around the wall, and the very desk on which the great man had once worked.

“I never cared much for T. S. Eliot,” began Parkinson, “until I came across his Choice of Kipling’s Verse. I remember telling my Eng. Lit. tutor that a poet who liked Kipling couldn’t be all bad. He wasn’t amused.”

“I’m afraid,” said Bradley, “I’ve never read much poetry. Only thing of Kipling’s I know is ‘If—’ ”

“Pity: he’s just the man for you—the poet of the sea, and of engineering. You really must read ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’; even though its technology’s a hundred years obsolete, no one’s ever matched its tribute to machines. And he wrote a poem about the deep sea cables that you’ll appreciate. It goes:

“I like it,” said Bradley. “But he was wrong about ‘no echo of sound.’ The sea’s a very noisy place—if you have the right listening gear.”

“Well, he could hardly have known that, back in the nineteenth century. He’d have been absolutely fascinated by our project—especially as he wrote a novel about the Grand Banks.”

“He did?” both Emerson and Bradley exclaimed simultaneously.

“Not a very good one—nowhere near Kim—but what is? Captains Courageous is about the Newfoundland fishermen and their hard lives; Hemingway did a much better job, half a century later and twenty degrees further south…”

“I’ve read that,” said Emerson proudly. “The Old Man and the Sea.”

“Top of the class, Roy. I’ve always thought it a tragedy that Kipling never wrote an epic poem about Titanic. Maybe he intended to, but Hardy beat him to it.”

“Hardy?”

“Never mind. Please excuse us, Rudyard, while we get down to business…”

Three flat display panels (and how they would have fascinated Kipling!) flipped up simultaneously. Glancing at his, Rupert Parkinson began: “We have your report dated thirtieth April. I assume that you’ve no further inputs since then?”

“Nothing important. My staff has rechecked all the figures. We think we could improve on them—but we prefer to be conservative. I’ve never known a major underwater operation that didn’t have some surprises.”

“Even your famous encounter with Oscar?”

“Biggest surprise of all. Went even better than I’d expected.”

“What about the status of Explorer?”

“No change, Rupe. She’s still mothballed in Suisun Bay.”

Parkinson flinched slightly at the “Rupe.” At least it was better than “Parky”—permitted only to intimate friends.

“It’s hard to believe,” said Emerson, “that such a valuable—such a unique—ship has only been used once.”

“She’s too big to run economically, for any normal commercial project. Only the CIA could afford her—and it got its wrist slapped by Congress.”

“I believe they once tried to hire her to the Russians.”

Bradley looked at Parkinson, and grinned. “So you know about that?”

“Of course. We did a lot of research before we came to you.”

“I’m lost,” said Emerson. “Fill me in, please.”

“Well, back in 1989 one of their newest Russian submarines—”

“Only Mike class they ever built.”

“—sank in the North Sea, and some bright chappie in the Pentagon said: “Hey—perhaps we can get some of our money back!” But nothing ever came of it. Or did it, Jason?”

“Well, it wasn’t the Pentagon’s idea; no one there with that much imagination. But I can tell you that I spent a pleasant week in Geneva with the deputy director of the CIA and three admirals—one of ours, two of theirs. That was… ah, in the spring of 1990. Just when the Reformation was starting, so everyone lost interest. Igor and Alexei resigned to go into the export-import business; I still get Xmas cards every year from their office in Lenin—I mean Saint Pete. As you said, nothing ever came of the idea; but we all put on about ten kilos and took weeks to get back into shape.”

“I know those Geneva restaurants. If you had to get Explorer shipshape, how long would it take?”

“If I can pick the men, three to four months. That’s the only time estimate I can be sure of. Getting down to the wreck, checking its integrity, building any additional structural supports, getting your billions of glass balloons down to it—frankly, even those maximum figures I’ve put in brackets are only guesstimates. But I’ll be able to refine them after the initial survey.”

“That seems very reasonable: I appreciate your frankness. At this stage, all we really want to know is whether the project is even feasible—in the time frame.”

“Timewise—yes. Costwise—who knows? What’s your ceiling, anyway?”

Rupert Parkinson pretended to wince at the bluntness of the question.

“We’re still doing our sums—aren’t we, Roy?”

Some signal passed between them that Bradley could not interpret, but Emerson gave a clue with his reply.

“I’m still prepared to match anything the board puts up, Rupert. If the operation succeeds, I’ll get it all back on Plan B.”

“And what, may I ask, is Plan B?” said Bradley. “For that matter, what’s Plan A? You still haven’t told me what you intend to do with the hull, when you’ve towed it to New York. Do a Vasa?”

Parkinson threw up his hands in mock dismay. “He’s guessed Plan C,” he said with a groan. “Yes, we had thought of putting her on display, after we’d brought her into Manhattan—a hundred years behind schedule. But you know what happens to an iron ship when it’s brought to the surface after a few decades underwater—preserving a wooden one is bad enough. Pickling Titanic in the right chemicals would take decades—and probably cost more than raising her.”

“So you’ll leave her in shallow water. Which means you’ll be taking her to Florida, just as that TV show suggested.”

“Look, Jason—we’re still exploring all options: Disney World is only one of them. We won’t even be disappointed if we have to leave her on the bottom—as long as we can salvage what’s in Great-Grandfather’s suite. It’s lucky he refused to let all those chests be carried as cargo; his very last marconigram complained that he had no space for entertaining.”

“And you’re confident that all that fragile glass will still be intact?”

“Ninety percent of it. The Chinese discovered centuries ago that their wares could travel safely the length of the Silk Road—if they were packed in tea leaves. No one found anything better until polystyrene foam came along; and of course you can sell the tea, and make a nice profit on that as well.”

“I doubt it, for this particular consignment.”

“Afraid you’re right. Pity—it was a personal gift from Sir Thomas Lipton—the very best from his Ceylon estates.”

“You’re quite sure it would have absorbed the impact?”

“Easily. The ship plowed into soft mud at an angle, doing about thirty knots. Average deceleration two gee—maximum five.”

Rupert Parkinson folded down the display panel and clicked shut the miracle of electronic intelligence which was now as casually accepted as the telephone had been a lifetime earlier.

“We’ll call you again before the end of the week, Jason,” continued Parkinson. “There’s a board meeting tomorrow, and I hope it will settle matters. Again, many thanks for your report; if we decide to go ahead, can we count on you?”

“In what way?”

“As O.i.C. operations, of course.”

There was a long pause; a little too long, Parkinson thought.

“I’m flattered, Rupe. I’d have to think it over—see how I could fit it into my schedule.”

“Really, Jason—you wouldn’t have any ‘schedule’ if this goes ahead. It’s the biggest job you’ll ever be offered.” He almost added “Perhaps it’s too big,” but then thought better of it. Jason Bradley was not the sort of man one cared to annoy, especially if one hoped to do business with him.

“I quite agree,” Bradley said, “and I’d like to take it on. Not just for the cash—which I’m sure will be okay—but the challenge. Win or lose. Very nice meeting you both—gotta run.”

“Aren’t you seeing anything of London? I can get you tickets to the new Andrew Lloyd Webber-Stephen King show. There aren’t many people who can make that claim.”

Bradley laughed. “Love to go—but they’ve managed to total a slugcatcher in the Orkneys field, and I’ve promised to be in Aberdeen by this afternoon.”

“Very well. We’ll keep in touch…”

“What do you think, Roy?” Parkinson asked, when the room was quiet again.

“Tough little guy, isn’t he? Do you suppose he’s holding out for the highest bidder?”

“That’s just what I was wondering. If he is, he’ll be out of luck.”

“Oh—our legal eagles have done their thing?”

“Almost; there are still some loose ends. Remember when I took you to Lloyd’s?”

“I certainly do.”

It had indeed been a memorable occasion for an out-of-town visitor; even in this twenty-first century, the “new” Lloyd’s building still looked positively futuristic. But what had most impressed Emerson had been the Casualty Book—the register of wrecks. That series of massive volumes recorded all the most dramatic moments in maritime history. Their guide had shown them the page for 15 April 1912, and the copperplate handwriting encapsulating the news that had just stunned the world.

Heart-stopping though it was to read those words, they had less impact on Roy Emerson than an awesome triviality he noticed when skimming through the earlier volumes.

All the entries, spanning a period of more than two hundred years, seemed to be in the same handwriting. It was an example of tradition and continuity that would be very hard to beat.

“Well, Dad’s been a member of Lloyd’s for ages, so we have—ah—a certain influence there.”

“That I can well believe.”

“Thank you. Anyway, the board’s had some discussions with the International Seabed Authority. There are dozens of conflicting claims, and the lawyers are doing rather well. They’re the only ones who can’t lose—whatever happens.”

Roy Emerson sometimes found Rupert’s discursiveness exasperating; he never seemed in a hurry to get to the point. It was hard to believe that he could act quickly in an emergency—yet he was one of the best yachtsmen in the world.

“It would be nice if we could claim exclusive ownership—after all, she was a British ship—”

“—built with American money—”

“A detail we’ll overlook. At the moment, she doesn’t belong to anyone, and it will have to be settled in the World Court. That could take years.”

“We don’t have years.”

“Precisely. But we think we can get an injunction to stop anyone else trying to raise her—while we go ahead quietly with our own plans.”

“Quietly! You must be joking. Know how many interviews I’ve turned down lately?”

“Probably about as many as I have.” Rupert glanced at his watch. “Just in time. Like to see something interesting?”

“Of course.” Emerson knew that whatever Parkinson called “interesting” was likely to be something he would never have another chance of seeing in his life. The real crown jewels, perhaps; or 21b Baker Street; or those books in the British Museum Library that were curiously named curious, and weren’t listed in the main catalogue…

“It’s just across the road—we can walk there in two minutes. The Royal Institution. Faraday’s lab—where most of our civilization was born. They were rearranging the exhibit when some clod managed to drop the retort he used when he discovered benzene. The director wants to know if we can match the glass, and repair it so that no one will ever notice.”

It was not every day, Emerson told himself, that you had a chance of visiting Michael Faraday’s laboratory. They crossed the narrow width of Albemarle Street, easily dodging the slow-moving traffic, and walked a few meters to the classical facade of the Royal Institution.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Parkinson. Sir Ambrose is expecting you.”

17. DEEP FREEZE

I hope you don’t mind meeting us at the airport, Mrs. Craig… Donald… but the traffic into Tokyo is getting worse every day. Also, the fewer people who see us, the better. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

Dr. Kato Mitsumasa, the young president of Nippon-Turner, was, as usual, immaculately dressed in a Savile Row suit that would remain in style for the next twenty years. Also as usual, he was accompanied by two samurai clones who remained in the background and would not say a word during the entire proceedings. Donald had sometimes wondered if Japanese robotics had made even more advances than was generally realized.

“We have a few minutes before our other guest arrives, so I’d like to go over some details that only concern us…

“First of all, we’ve secured the world cable and satellite rights for your smokeless version of A Night to Remember, for the first six months of ’12, with an option of another six months” extension.”

“Splendid,” said Donald. “I didn’t believe even you could manage it, Kato—but I should have known better.”

“Thank you; it wasn’t easy, as the porcupine said to his girlfriend.”

During the years of his Western education—London School of Economics, then Harvard and Annenberg—Kato had developed a sense of humor that often seemed quite out of keeping with his present position. If Donald closed his eyes, he could hardly believe that he was listening to a native-born Japanese, so perfect was Kato’s mid-Atlantic accent. But every so often he would produce some outrageous wisecrack that was uniquely his own, owing nothing to either East or West. Even when his jokes appeared to be in bad taste—which was not infrequent—Donald suspected that Kato knew exactly what he was doing. It encouraged people to underestimate him; and that could cause them to make very expensive mistakes.

“Now,” said Kato briskly, “I’m happy to say that all our computer runs and tank tests are satisfactory. If I may say so, what we’re going to do is unique, and will seize the imagination of the whole world. No one, but no one else, can even attempt to raise Titanic the way we’re going to do!”

“Well, part of her. Why just the stern?”

“Several reasons—some practical, some psychological. It’s much the smaller of the two portions—less than fifteen thousand tons. And it was the last to go under, with all the remaining people on deck still clinging to it. We’ll intercut with the scenes from A Night to Remember. Thought of reshooting them—or colorizing the original—”

“No!” said both Craigs simultaneously.

Kato seemed taken aback. “After what you’ve already done to it? Ah, the inscrutable Occident! Anyway, since it’s a night scene it’s just as effective in b/w.”

“There’s another editing problem we’ve not resolved,” said Edith abruptly. “Titanic’s dance band.”

“What about it?”

“Well, in the movie it plays ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ”

“So?”

“That’s the myth—and it’s utter nonsense. The band’s job was to keep up the passengers” spirits, and prevent panic. The very last thing they’d play would be a doleful hymn. One of the ship’s officers would have shot them if they’d tried.”

Kato laughed. “I’ve often felt that way about dance bands. But what did they play?”

“A medley of popular tunes, probably ending with a waltz called ‘Song of Autumn.’ ”

“I see. That’s true to life—but we can’t have Titanic sinking to a waltz tune, for heaven’s sake. Ars longa, vita brevis, as MGM almost used to say. In this case, art wins, and life takes second place.”

Kato glanced at his watch, then at one of the clones, who walked to the door and disappeared down the corridor. In less than a minute, he returned accompanied by a short, powerfully built man with the universal insignia of the global executive—a carryall bag in one hand, an electronic briefcase in the other.

Kato greeted him warmly.

“Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Bradley. Someone once said that punctuality is the thief of time. I’ve never believed it, and I’m glad you agree. Jason Bradley, meet Edith and Donald Craig.”

As Bradley and the Craigs shook hands with the slightly distracted air of people who thought they should know each other, but weren’t quite certain, Kato hastened to put the record straight.

“Jason is the world’s number one ocean engineer—”

“Of course! That giant octopus—”

“Tame as a kitten, Mrs. Craig. Nothing to it.”

“—while Edith and Donald make old movies as good as new—or better. Let me explain why I’ve brought you together, at such rather short notice.”

Bradley smiled. “Not very hard to guess, Mr. Mitsumasa. But I’ll be interested in the details.”

“Of that I’m sure. All this, of course, is highly confidential.”

“Of course.”

“First we plan to raise the stern, and shoot a really spectacular TV special as it comes to the surface. Then we’ll tow it to Japan, and make it part of a permanent exhibit at Tokyo-on-Sea. There’ll be a three-hundred-sixty-degree theater, the audience sitting in lifeboats rocking on water—beautiful starry night—almost freezing—we’ll give them topcoats, of course, and they’ll see and hear the last minutes as the ship goes underwater. Then they can go down into the big tank and view the stern through observation windows at various levels. Though it’s only about a third of the whole ship, it’s so big that you can’t see it all at one time; even with the distilled water we’ll use, visibility will be less than a hundred meters. The wreck will just fade away into the distance—so why bring up any more? The viewers will have a perfect illusion of being on the bottom of the Atlantic.”

“Well, that seems logical,” said Bradley. “And, of course, the stern is the easiest part to raise. It’s already badly smashed up—you could lift it in sections weighing only a few hundred tons, and assemble them later.”

There was an awkward silence. Then Kato said: “That won’t look very glamorous on TV, will it? No. We have more ambitious plans. This is the bit that’s top secret. Even though the stern portion is smashed to pieces, we’re going to bring it up in a single operation. Inside an iceberg. Don’t you think that’s poetic justice? One iceberg sank her—another will bring her back to the light of day.”

If Kato expected his visitor to be surprised, he was disappointed. By this time, Bradley had heard just about every scheme for raising the Titanic that the ingenious mind of man and woman could conceive.

“Go on,” he said. “You’ll need quite a refrigeration plant, won’t you?”

Kato gave a triumphant smile. “No—thanks to the latest breakthrough in solid-state physics. You’ve heard of the Peltier Effect?”

“Of course. The cooling you get when an electric current is passed through certain materials—I don’t know exactly which. But every domestic icebox has depended on it since 2001, when the environmental treaties banned fluorocarbons.”

“Exactly. Now, the common or kitchen Peltier system isn’t very efficient, but it doesn’t have to be as long as it quietly manufactures ice cubes without blasting holes in the poor old ozone layer. However, our physicists have discovered a new class of semiconductors—a spinoff from the superconductor revolution—that ups efficiency several times. Which means that every icebox in the world is obsolete, as of last week.”

“I’m sure’—Bradley smiled—’that all the Japanese manufacturers are heartbroken.”

“The scramble for the patent licenses is on right now. And we haven’t overlooked the advertising tie-in—when the biggest ice cube in the world surfaces—carrying the Titanic inside it.”

“I’m impressed. But what about the power supply?”

“That’s another angle we hope to exploit—swords into plowshares, though the metaphor is a little farfetched in this case. We’re planning to use a couple of decommissioned nuclear subs—one Russian, one U.S. They can generate all the megawatts we need—and from several hundred meters down, so they can operate through the worst Atlantic storms.”

“And your time scale?”

“Six months to install the hardware on the seabed. Then two years of Peltier cooling. Remember—it’s almost freezing down there. We only have to drop the temperature a couple of degrees, and our iceberg will start to form.”

“And how will you stop it from floating up before you’re ready?”

Kato smiled.

“Let’s not go into details at this stage—but I can assure you our engineers have thought of that small item. Anyway, this is where you come in—if you want to.”

Does he know about the Parkinsons? Bradley wondered. Very probably; and even if he’s not certain, he’ll have guessed that they’ve made an offer.

“Excuse me a moment,” said Kato apologetically, turning away and opening his briefcase. When he faced his visitors again, barely five seconds later, he had been transformed into a pirate chief. Only the barely visible thread leading to the keyboard in his hand revealed that the eye patch he was wearing was very hi-tech indeed.

“I’m afraid this proves I’m not a genuine Japanese—bad manners, you know… my father still uses a laptop, late Ming Dynasty. But monocs are so much more convenient, and give such superb definition.”

Bradley and the Craigs could not help smiling at each other. What Kato said was perfectly true; many portable video devices now used compact microscreens that weighed little more than a pair of spectacles and indeed were often incorporated in them. Although the monoc was only a centimeter in front of the eye, a clever system of lenses made the postage-stamp-sized image appear as large as desired.

This was splendid for entertainment purposes—but it was even more useful for businessmen, lawyers, politicians, and anyone who wanted to access confidential information in total privacy. There was no way of spying on another person’s electronic monocle—short of tapping the same data stream. Its chief disadvantage was that excessive use led to new types of schizophrenia, quite fascinating to investigators of the “split-brain” phenomenon.

When Kato had finished his litany of megawatt-hours, calorie-tons, and degrees-per-month coefficients, Bradley sat for a moment silently processing the information that had been dumped into his brain. Many of the details were too technical to be absorbed at first contact, but that was unimportant; he could study them later. He did not doubt that the calculations would be accurate—but there might still be essential points that had been overlooked. He had seen that happen so many times…

His instincts told him, however, that the plan was sound. He had learned to take first impressions seriously—especially when they were negative, even if he could not pinpoint the exact cause of his premonition. This time, there were no bad vibes. The project was fantastic—but it could work.

Kato was watching him covertly, obviously trying to gauge his reactions. I can be pretty inscrutable when I want to, thought Bradley… Besides, I have my reputation to consider.

Then Kato, with the ghost of a smile, handed him a small slip of paper, folded in two. Bradley took his time opening it. When he saw the figures, he realized that even if the project was a total disaster, he need give no further thought to his professional career. In the natural course of events, it could not last many more years—and he had not saved this much in his entire lifetime.

“I’m flattered,” he said quietly. “You’re more than generous. But I still have some other business to settle, before I can give you a definite answer.”

Kato looked surprised. “How long?” he asked, rather brusquely.

He thinks I’m still negotiating with someone else, thought Bradley. Which is perfectly true—

“Give me a week. But I can tell you right away—I’m quite sure no one will match your offer.”

“I know,” said Kato, closing his briefcase. “Any points you want to make—Edith, Donald?”

“No,” said Edith, “you seem to have covered everything.” Donald said nothing, but merely nodded in agreement. This is a strange partnership, Bradley told himself, and not a very happy one. He had taken an immediate liking to Donald, who seemed a warm, gentle sort of person. But Edith was tough and domineering—almost aggressive; she was obviously the boss.

“And how is that delightful child prodigy who happens to be your daughter?” Kato asked the Craigs as they were about to leave. “Please give her my love.”

“We will,” Donald replied. “Ada’s fine, and enjoyed her trip to Kyoto. It made a change from exploring the Mandelbrot Set.”

“And just what,” asked Bradley, “is the Mandelbrot Set?”

“Much easier shown than described,” answered Donald. “Why don’t you visit us? We’d like to take you around our studio—wouldn’t we, Edith? Especially if we’ll be working together—as I hope we will.”

Only Kato noticed Bradley’s momentary hesitation. Then Bradley smiled and answered: “I’d enjoy that—I’m going to Scotland next week, and think I could fit it in. How old is your girl?”

“Ada’s almost nine. But if you asked her age, she’d probably tell you 8.876545 years.”

Bradley laughed. “She does sound a prodigy. I’m not sure I could face her.”

“And this,” said Kato, “is the man who scared away a fifty-ton octopus. I’ll never understand these Americans.”

18. IN AN IRISH GARDEN

When I was a small boy,” said Patrick O’Brian wistfully, “I used to love coming up here to watch the magic pictures. They seemed so much brighter—and more interesting—than the real world outside. No telly in those days, of course—and the traveling tent cinema only came to the village about once a month.”

“Don’t you believe a word, Jason,” said Donald Craig. “Pat isn’t really a hundred years old.”

Though Bradley would have guessed seventy-five, O’Brian might well be in his eighties. So he must have been born in the 1930s—perhaps even the ’20s. The world of his youth already seemed unimaginably remote; reality outdid storytelling exaggeration, even by Irish standards.

Pat shook his head sadly, as he continued pulling on the cord that rotated the big lens five meters above their heads. On the matte-white table around which they were standing, the lawns and flowerbeds and gravel paths of Conroy Castle performed a stately pirouette. Everything was unnaturally bright and clear, and Bradley could well imagine that to a boy this beautiful old machine must have transformed the familiar outside world into an enchanted fairyland.

“’Tis a shame, Mr. Bradley, that Master Donald doesn’t know the truth when he hears it. I could tell him stories of the old lord—but what’s the use?”

“You tell them to Ada, anyway.”

“Sure—and she believes me, sensible girl.”

“So do I—sometimes. Like those about Lord Dunsany.”

“Only after you’d checked up on me with Father McMullen.”

“Dunsany? The author?” asked Bradley.

“Yes. You’ve read him?”

“Er—no. But he was a great friend of Dr. Beebe—the first man to go down half a mile. That’s how I know the name.”

“Well, you should read his stories—especially the ones about the sea. Pat says he often came here, to play chess with Lord Conroy.”

“Dunsany was grand master of Ireland,” Patrick added. “But he was also a very kind man. So he always let the old lord win—just. How he’d have loved to play against your computer! Especially as he wrote a story about a chess-playing machine.”

“He did?”

“Well, not exactly a machine; maybe an imp.”

“What’s it called? I must look it up.”

“The Three Sailors” Gambit—ah, there she is! I might have guessed.”

The old man’s voice had softened appreciably as the little boat came into the field of view. It was drifting in lazy circles at the center of a fair-sized lake, and its sole occupant appeared to be completely engrossed in a book.

Donald Craig raised his wristcom and whispered: “Ada—we have a visitor—we’ll be down in a minute.” The distant figure waved a languid hand, and continued reading. Then it dwindled swiftly away as Donald zoomed the camera obscura lens.

Now Bradley could see that the lake was approximately heart-shaped, connected to a smaller, circular pond where the point of the heart should have been. That in turn opened into a third and much smaller pond, also circular. It was a curious arrangement, and obviously a recent one; the lawn still bore the scars of earth-moving machines.

“Welcome to Lake Mandelbrot,” said Patrick, with noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “And be careful, Mr. Bradley—don’t encourage her to explain it to you.”

“I don’t think,” said Donald, “that any encouragement will be necessary. But let’s go down and find out.”

As her father approached with his two companions, Ada started the motor of the tiny boat; it was powered by a small solar panel, and was barely able to match their leisurely walking pace. She did not head directly toward them, as Bradley had expected, but steered the boat along the central axis of the main lake, and through the narrow isthmus connecting it to its smaller satellite. This was quickly crossed, and the boat entered the third and smallest lake of all. Though it was now only a few meters away from them, Bradley could hear no sound from its motor. His engineer’s soul approved of such efficiency.

“Ada,” said Donald, calling across the rapidly diminishing expanse of water. “This is the visitor I told you about—Mr. Bradley. He’s going to help us raise the Titanic.”

Ada, now preparing to enter the harbor, merely acknowledged his presence with a brief nod. The final lake—really no more than a small pond that would be overcrowded by a dozen ducks—was connected to a boathouse by a long, narrow canal. It was perfectly straight, and Bradley realized that it lay precisely along the central axis of the three conjoined lakes. All this was obviously planned, though for what purpose he could not imagine. From the quizzical smile on Patrick’s face, he guessed that the old gardener was enjoying his perplexity.

The canal was bordered on either side by beautiful cypress trees, more than twenty meters high; it was, Bradley thought, like a miniature version of the approach to the Taj Mahal. He had only seen that masterpiece briefly, years ago, but had never forgotten its splendid vista.

“You see, Pat, they’re all doing fine—in spite of what you said,” Donald told the head gardener.

Patrick pursed his lips and looked critically at the line of trees. He pointed to several which, to Bradley’s eyes, appeared indistinguishable from the rest.

“Those may have to be replanted,” he said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you—and the Missus.”

They had now reached the boathouse at the end of the tree-lined canal, and waited for Ada to complete her leisurely approach. When she was only a meter away, there was a sudden hysterical yelp and something closely resembling a small floor mop leaped out of the boat and hurled itself at Bradley’s feet.

“If you don’t move,” said Donald, “she may decide you’re harmless, and let you live.”

While the tiny Cairn terrier was sniffing suspiciously at his shoes, Bradley examined her mistress. He noticed, with approval, the careful way that Ada tied up the boat, even though that was quite unnecessary; she was, he could already tell, an extremely well-organized young lady—quite a contrast to her hysterical little pet, who had switched instantly to fawning affection.

Ada scooped up Lady with one hand, and hugged the puppy to her breast while she regarded Bradley with a look of frank curiosity.

“Are you really going to help us raise the Titanic?” she asked.

Bradley shifted uncomfortably and avoided returning that disconcerting stare.

“I hope so,” he said evasively. “But there are lots of things we have to talk over first.” And this, he added silently, is neither the time nor the place. He would have to wait until they had joined Mrs. Craig, and he was not altogether looking forward to the encounter.

“What were you reading in the boat, Ada?” he asked lightly, trying to change the subject.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked. It was a perfectly polite question, with no hint of impertinence. Bradley was still struggling for a suitable reply when Donald Craig interjected hastily: “I’m afraid my daughter hasn’t much time for the social graces. She considers there are more important things in life. Like fractals and non-Euclidean geometry.”

Bradley pointed to the puppy. “That doesn’t look very geometric to me.”

To his surprise, Ada rewarded him with a charming smile. “You should see Lady when she’s been dried out after a bath, and her hair’s pointing in all directions. Then she makes a lovely three-D fractal.”

The joke was right over Bradley’s head, but he joined in the general laughter. Ada had the saving grace of a sense of humor; he could get to like her—as long as he remembered to treat her as someone twice her age.

Greatly daring, he ventured another question.

“That number 1.999 painted on the boathouse,” he said. “I suppose that’s a reference to your mother’s famous end-of-century program.”

Donald Craig chuckled.

“Nice try, Jason; that’s what most people guess. Let him have it gently, Ada.”

The formidable Ms. Craig deposited her puppy on the grass, and it scuttled away to investigate the base of the nearest cypress. Bradley had the uncomfortable impression that Ada was trying to calibrate his I.Q. before she replied.

“If you look carefully, Mr. Bradley, you’ll see there’s a minus sign in front of the number, and a dot over the last nine.”

“So?”

“So it’s really minus 1.9999… forever and ever.”

“Amen,” interjected Patrick.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to write minus two?”

“Exactly what I said,” Donald said with a chuckle. “But don’t tell that to a real mathematician.”

“I thought you were a pretty good one.”

“God, no—I’m just a hairy-knuckled byte-basher, compared to Edith.”

“And this young lady here, I suspect. You know, I’m beginning to feel out of my depth. And in my profession, that’s not a good idea.”

Ada’s laugh helped to lift the curious sense of unease that Bradley had felt for the last few minutes. There was something depressing about this place—something ominous that hovered just beyond the horizon of consciousness. It was no use trying to focus upon it by a deliberate act of will—the fugitive wisp of memory scuttled away as soon as he attempted to pin it down. He would have to wait; it would emerge when it was ready.

“You asked me what book I was reading, Mr. Bradley—”

“—please call me Jason—”

“—so here it is.”

“I might have guessed. He was a mathematician too, wasn’t he? But I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read Alice. The nearest American equivalent is The Wizard of Oz.”

“I’ve read that too, but Dodgson—Carroll—is much better. How he would have loved this!”

Ada waved toward the curiously shaped lakes, and the little boathouse with its enigmatic inscription.

“You see, Mr. Brad—Mr. Jason—that’s the Utter West. Minus two is infinity for the M-Set—there’s absolutely nothing beyond that. What we’re walking along now is the Spike—and this little pond is the very last of the mini-sets on the negative side. One day we’ll plant a border of flowers—won’t we, Pat?—that will give some idea of the fantastic detail around the main lobes. And over there in the east—that cusp where the two bigger lakes meet—that’s Seahorse Valley, at minus .745. The origin—zero, zero, of course—is in the middle of the biggest lake. The set doesn’t extend so far to the east; the cusp at Elephant Crossing—over there, right in front of the castle—is around plus .273.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Bradley answered, completely overwhelmed. “You know perfectly well I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

That was not perfectly true: it was obvious enough that the Craigs had used their wealth to carve this landscape into the shape of some bizarre mathematical function. It seemed a harmless enough obsession; there were many worse ways of spending money, and it must have provided a great deal of employment for the locals.

“I think that’s enough, Ada,” said Donald, with much more firmness than he had shown hitherto. “Let’s give Mr. Jason some lunch—before we throw him head-over-heels into the M-Set.”

They were leaving the tree-lined avenue, at the point where the narrow canal opened out into the smallest of the lakes, when Bradley’s brain unlocked its memory. Of course—the still expanse of water, the boat, the cypresses—all the key elements of Boecklin’s painting! Incredible that he hadn’t realized it before…

Rachmaninoff’s haunting music welled up from the depths of his mind—soothing, familiar, reassuring. Now that he had identified the cause of his faint disquiet, the shadow lifted from his spirit.

Even later, he never really believed it had been a premonition.

19. “RAISE THE TITANIC!”

Slowly, reluctantly, the thousands of tons of metal began to stir, like some marine monster awakening from its sleep. The explosive charges that were attempting to jolt it off the seabed blasted up great clouds of silt, which concealed the wreck in a swirling mist.

The decades-long grip of the mud began to yield; the enormous propellers lifted from the ocean floor. Titanic began the ascent to the world she had left, a long lifetime ago.

On the surface, the sea was already boiling from the disturbance far below. Out of the maelstrom of foam, a slender mast emerged—still carrying the crow’s nest from which Frederick Fleet had once telephoned the fatal words, “Iceberg right ahead.”

And now the prow came knifing up—the ruined superstructure—the whole vast expanse of decking—the giant anchors which had taken a twenty-horse team to move—the three towering funnels, and the stump of the fourth—the great cliff of steel, studded with portholes—and, at last:

The monitor screen went blank; there was a momentary silence in the studio, induced by a mixture of awe, reverence, and sheer admiration for the movie’s special effects.

Then Rupert Parkinson, never long at a loss for words, said ruefully: “I’m afraid it won’t be quite as dramatic as that. Of course, when that movie was made, they didn’t know she was in two pieces. Or that all the funnels had gone—though that should have been obvious.”

“Is it true,” asked Channel Ten’s host Marcus Kilford—’Mucus” or “Killjoy” to his enemies, who were legion—’that the model they used in the movie cost more than the original ship?”

“I’ve heard that story—could be true, allowing for inflation.”

“And the joke—”

“—that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic? Believe me, I’m tired of hearing that one!”

“Then I won’t mention it, of course,” said Kilford, twirling the notorious monocle that was his trademark. It was widely believed that this ostentatious antique served only to hypnotize his guests, and had no optical properties whatsoever. The Physics Department of King’s College, London, had even run a computer analysis of the images reflected when it caught the studio lights, and claimed to have established this with ninety-five percent certainty. The matter would only be settled when someone actually captured the thing, but all attempts had so far failed. It appeared to be immovably attached to Marcus, and he had warned would-be hijackers that it was equipped with a miniaturized self-destruct device. If this was activated, he would not be responsible for the consequences. Of course, no one believed him.

“In the film,” continued Kilford, “they talked glibly about pumping foam into the hull to lift the wreck. Would that have worked?”

“Depends on how it was done. The pressure is so great—four hundred times atmospheric!—that all ordinary foams would collapse instantly. But we obtain essentially the same result with our microspheres—each holds its little bubble of air.”

“They’re strong enough to resist that enormous pressure?”

“Yes—just try and smash one!”

Parkinson scattered a handful of glass marbles across the studio coffee table. Kilford picked one up, and whistled with unfeigned surprise.

“It weighs hardly anything!”

“State of the art,” Parkinson answered proudly. “And they’ve been tested all the way down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench—three times deeper than the Titanic.”

Kilford turned to his other guest.

“You could have done with these on the Mary Rose, back in 1982—couldn’t you, Dr. Thornley?”

The marine archaeologist shook her head. “Not really. That was a totally different problem. Mary Rose was in shallow water, and our divers were able to place a cradle under her. Then the biggest floating crane in the world pulled her up.”

“It was touch and go, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. A lot of people nearly had heart attacks when that metal strap gave way.”

“I can believe it. Now, that hull has been sitting in Southampton Dock for a quarter century—and it still isn’t ready for public display. Will you do a quicker job on Titanic, Mr. Parkinson—assuming that you do get her up?”

“Certainly; it’s the difference between wood and steel. The sea had four centuries to soak into Mary Rose’s timbers—no wonder it’s taking decades to get it out. All the wood in Titanic has gone—we don’t have to bother about it. Our problem is rust; and there’s very little at that depth, thanks to the cold and lack of oxygen. Most of the wreck is in one of two states: excellent—or terrible.”

“How many of these little… microspheres… will you need?”

“About fifty billion.”

“Fifty billion! And how will you get them down there?”

“Very simply. We’re going to drop them.”

“With a little weight attached to each one—another fifty billion?”

Parkinson smiled, rather smugly.

“Not quite. Our Mr. Emerson has invented a technique so simple that no one believes it will work. We’ll have a pipe leading down from the surface to the wreck. The water will be pumped out—and we’ll simply pour the microspheres in at the top, and collect them at the bottom. They’ll take only a few minutes to make the trip.”

“But surely—”

“Oh, we’ll have to use special air locks at both ends, but it will be essentially a continuous process. When they arrive, the microspheres will be packaged in bundles, each a cubic meter in volume. That will give a buoyancy of one ton per unit—a comfortable size for the robots to handle.”

Marcus Kilford turned to the long-silent archaeologist.

“Dr. Thornley,” he asked, “do you think it will work?”

“I suppose so,” she said reluctantly, “but I’m not the expert on these matters. Won’t that tube have to be very strong, to stand the enormous pressure at the bottom?”

“No problem; we’ll use the same material. As my company’s slogan says, ‘You can do anything with glass’—”

“No more commercials, please!”

Kilford turned toward the camera, and intoned solemnly, though with a twinkle in his eye: “May I take this opportunity of denying the malicious rumor that Mr. Parkinson was spotted in a BBC cloak room, handing me a shoe box stuffed with well-used bank notes.”

Everyone laughed, though behind the thick glass of the control room the producer whispered to his assistant: “If he uses that joke once again, I’ll suspect it’s true.”

“May I ask a question?” said Dr. Thornley unexpectedly. “What about your… shall I say, rivals? Do you think they’ll succeed first?”

“Well, let’s call them friendly competitors.”

“Indeed?” said Kilford skeptically. “Whoever brings their section up to the surface first will get all the publicity.”

“We’re taking the long-term view,” said Parkinson. “When our grandchildren come to Florida to dive on the Titanic, they won’t care whether we raised her up in 2012 or 2020—though of course we hope to make the centennial date.” He turned to the archaeologist. “I almost wish we could use Portsmouth, and arrange for a simultaneous opening. It would be nice to have Nelson’s Victory, Henry Eight’s Mary Rose, and Titanic side by side. Four hundred years of British shipbuilding. Quite a thought.”

“I’d be there,” said Kilford. “But now I’d like to raise a couple of more serious matters. First of all, there’s still much talk of… well, ‘desecration’ seems too strong a word, but what do you say to the people who regard Titanic as a tomb, and say she should be left in peace?”

“I respect their views, but it’s a little late now. Hundreds of dives have been made on her—and on countless other ships that have gone down with great loss of life. People only seem to raise objections to Titanic! How many people died in Mary Rose, Dr. Thornley? And has anyone protested about your work?”

“About six hundred—almost half as many casualties as Titanic—and for a ship a fraction of the size! No—we’ve never had any serious complaints; in fact the whole country approved of the operation. After all, it was mostly supported by private funds.”

“Another point which isn’t widely realized,” added Parkinson: “Very few people could have actually died in the Titanic; most of them got off, and were drowned or frozen.”

“No chance of bodies?”

“None whatsoever. There are lots of very hungry creatures down there.”

“Well, I’m glad we’ve disposed of that depressing subject. But there’s something perhaps more important…” Kilford picked up one of the little glass spheres, and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. “You’re putting billions of these in the sea. Inevitably, lots of them will be lost. What about the ecological impact?”

“I see you’ve been reading the Bluepeace literature. Well, there won’t be any.”

“Not even when they wash to shore—and our beaches are littered with broken glass?”

“I’d like to shoot the copywriter who coined that phrase—or hire him. First of all, it will take centuries—maybe millennia—for these spheres to disintegrate. And please remember what they’re made of—silica! So when they do eventually crumble, do you realize what they’ll turn into? That well-known beach pollutant—sand!”

“Good point. But what about the other objection? Suppose fish or marine animals eat them?”

Parkinson picked up one of the microspheres, and twirled it between his fingers just as Kilford had done.

“Glass is totally nonpoisonous—chemically inert. Anything big enough to swallow one of these won’t be hurt by it.”

And he popped the sphere into his mouth.

Behind the control panel, the producer turned to Roy Emerson.

“That was terrific—but I’m still sorry you wouldn’t go on.”

“Parky did very well without me. Do you think I’d have gotten in any more words than poor Dr. Thornley?”

“Probably not. And that was a neat trick, swallowing the microsphere—don’t think I could manage it. And I’ll make a bet that from now on, everyone’s going to call them Parky’s Pills.”

Emerson laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised. And he’ll he asked to repeat the act, every time he goes on TV.”

He thought it unnecessary to add that, besides his many other talents, Parkinson was quite a good amateur conjurer. Even with freeze-frame, no one would be able to spot what had really happened to that pill.

And there was another reason why he preferred not to join the panel—he was an outsider, and this was a family affair.

Though they lay centuries apart, Mary Rose and Titanic had much in common. Both were spectacular triumphs of British shipbuilding genius—sunk by equally spectacular examples of British incompetence.

20. INTO THE M-SET

It was hard to believe, Jason Bradley told himself, that people actually lived like this, only a few generations ago. Though Conroy Castle was a very modest example of its species, its scale was still impressive to anyone who had spent most of his life in cluttered offices, motel rooms, ships” cabins—not to mention deep-diving minisubs, so cramped that the personal hygiene of your companions was a matter of crucial importance.

The dining room, with its ornately carved ceiling and enormous wall mirrors, could comfortably seat at least fifty people. Donald Craig felt it necessary to explain the little four-place table that looked lost and lonely at its center.

“We’ve not had time to buy proper furniture. The castle’s own stuff was in terrible shape—most of it had to be burned. And we’ve been too busy to do much entertaining. But one day, when we’ve finally established ourselves as the local nobility…”

Edith did not seem to approve of her husband’s flippancy, and once again Bradley had the impression that she was the leader in this enterprise, with Donald a reluctant—or at best passive—accomplice. He could guess the scenario: people with enough money to squander on expensive toys often discovered that they would have been happier without them. And Conroy Castle—with all its surrounding acres and maintenance staff—must be a very expensive toy indeed.

When the servants (servants!—that was another novelty) had cleared the remnants of an excellent Chinese dinner flown in especially from Dublin, Bradley and his hosts retreated to a set of comfortable armchairs in the adjoining room.

“We won’t let you get away,” said Donald, “without giving you our Child’s Guide to the M-Set. Edith can spot a Mandel-virgin at a hundred meters.”

Bradley was not sure if he qualified for this description. He had finally recognized the odd shape of the lake, though he had forgotten its technical name until reminded of it. In the last decade of the century, it had been impossible to escape from manifestations of the Mandelbrot Set—they were appearing all the time on video displays, wallpaper, fabrics, and virtually every type of design. Bradley recalled that someone had coined the word “Mandelmania” to describe the more acute symptoms; he had begun to suspect that it might be applicable to this odd household. But he was quite prepared to sit with polite interest through whatever lecture or demonstration his hosts had in store for him.

He realized that they too were being polite, in their own way. They were anxious to have his decision, and he was equally anxious to give it.

He only hoped that the call he was expecting would come through before he left the castle…

Bradley had never met the traditional stage mother, but he had seen her in movies like—what was that old one called?—ah, Fame. Here was the same passionate determination on the part of a parent for a child to become a star, even if there was no discernible talent. In this case, he did not doubt that the faith was fully justified.

“Before Ada begins,” said Edith, “I’d like to make a few points. The M-Set is the most complex entity in the whole of mathematics—yet it doesn’t involve anything more advanced than addition and multiplication—not even subtraction or division! That’s why many people with a good knowledge of math have difficulty in grasping it. They simply can’t believe that something with too much detail to be explored before the end of the Universe can be generated without using logs or trig functions or higher transcendentals. It doesn’t seem reasonable that it’s all done merely by adding numbers together.”

“Doesn’t seem reasonable to me, either. If it’s so simple, why didn’t anyone discover it centuries ago?”

“Very good question! Because so much adding and multiplying is involved, with such huge numbers, that we had to wait for high-speed computers. If you’d given abacuses to Adam and Eve and all their descendants right up to now, they couldn’t have found some of the pictures Ada can show you by pressing a few keys. Go ahead, dear…”

The holoprojector was cunningly concealed; Bradley could not even guess where it was hiding. Very easy to make this old castle a haunted one, he thought, and scare away any intruders. It would beat a burglar alarm.

The two crossed lines of an ordinary x-y diagram appeared in the air, with the sequence of integers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4… marching off in all four directions.

Ada gave Bradley that disconcertingly direct look, as if she were once again trying to estimate his I.Q. so that her presentation could be appropriately calibrated.

“Any point on this plane,” she said, “can be identified by two numbers—its x- and y-coordinates. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bradley answered solemnly.

“Well, the M-Set lies in a very small region near the origin—it doesn’t extend beyond plus or minus two in either direction, so we can ignore all the larger numbers.”

The integers skittered off along the four axes, leaving only the numbers one and two marking distances away from the central zero.

“Now suppose we take any point inside this grid, and join it to the center. Measure the length of this radius—let’s call it r.”

This, thought Bradley, is putting no great strain on my mental resources. When do we get to the tricky part?

“Obviously, in this case r can have any value from zero to just under three—about two point eight, to be exact. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Right. Now Exercise One. Take any point’s r value, and square it. Keep on squaring it. What happens?”

“Don’t let me spoil your fun, Ada.”

“Well, if r is exactly one, it stays at that value—no matter how many times you square it. One times one times one times one is always one.”

“Okay,” said Bradley, just beating Ada to the draw.

“If it’s even a smidgin more than one, however, and you go on squaring it, sooner or later it will shoot off to infinity. Even if it’s 1.0000… 0001, and there are a million zeros to the right of the decimal point. It will just take a bit longer.

“But if the number is less than one—say .99999999… with a million nines—you get just the opposite. It may stay close to one for ages, but as you keep on squaring it, suddenly it will collapse and dwindle away down to zero—okay?”

This time Ada got there first, and Bradley merely nodded. As yet, he could not see the point in this elementary arithmetic, but it was obviously leading somewhere.

“Lady—stop bothering Mr. Bradley! So you see, simply squaring numbers—and going on squaring them, over and over—divides them into two distinct sets…”

A circle had appeared on the two crossed axes, centered on the origin and with radius unity.

“Inside that circle are all the numbers that disappear when you keep on squaring them. Outside are all those that shoot off to infinity. You could say that the circle of radius one is a fence—a boundary—a frontier—dividing the two sets of numbers. I like to call it the S-set.”

“S for squaring?”

“Of cour—Yes. Now, here’s the important point. The numbers on either side are totally separated; yet though nothing can pass through it, the boundary hasn’t any thickness. It’s simply a line—you could go on magnifying it forever and it would stay a line, though it would soon appear to be a straight one because you wouldn’t be able to see its curvature.”

“This may not seem very exciting,” interjected Donald, “but it’s absolutely fundamental—you’ll soon see why—sorry, Ada.”

“Now, to get the M-Set we make one teeny-weeny change. We don’t just square the numbers. We square and add… square and add. You wouldn’t think it would make all that difference—but it opens up a whole new universe…

“Suppose we start with one again. We square it and get one. Then we add them to get two.

“Two squared is four. Add the original one again—answer five.

“Five squared is twenty-five—add one—twenty-six.

“Twenty-six squared is six hundred seventy-six—you see what’s happening! The numbers are shooting up at a fantastic rate. A few more times around the loop, and they’re too big for any computer to handle. Yet we started with—one! So that’s the first big difference between the M-Set and the S-set, which has its boundary at one.

“But if we started with a much smaller number than one—say zero point one—you’ll probably guess what happens.”

“It collapses to nothing after a few cycles of squaring and adding.”

Ada gave her rare but dazzling smile.

“Usually. Sometimes it dithers around a small, fixed value—anyway, it’s trapped inside the set. So once again we have a map that divides all the numbers on the plane into two classes. Only this time, the boundary isn’t something as elementary as a circle.”

“You can say that again,” murmured Donald. He collected a frown from Edith, but pressed on. “I’ve asked quite a few people what shape they thought would be produced; most suggested some kind of oval. No one came near the truth; no one ever could. All right, Lady! I won’t interrupt Ada again!”

“Here’s the first approximation,” continued Ada, scooping up her boisterous puppy with one hand while tapping the keyboard with the other. “You’ve already seen it today.”

The now-familiar outline of Lake Mandelbrot had appeared superimposed on the grid of unit squares, but in far more detail than Bradley had seen it in the garden. On the right was the largest, roughly heart-shaped figure, then a smaller circle touching it, a much smaller one touching that—and the narrow spike running off to the extreme left and ending at—2 on the x-axis.

Now, however, Bradley could see that the main figures were barnacled—that was the metaphor that came instantly to mind—with a myriad of smaller subsidiary circles, many of which had short jagged lines extending from them. It was a much more complex shape than the pattern of lakes in the garden—strange and intriguing, but certainly not at all beautiful. Edith and Ada, however, were looking at it with a kind of reverential awe, which Donald did not seem to entirely share.

“This is the complete set with no magnification,” said Ada, in a voice that was now a little less self-assured—in fact, almost hushed.

“Even on this scale, though, you can see how different it is from the plain, zero-thickness circle bounding the S-set. You could zoom that up forever and ever, and it would remain a line—nothing more. But the boundary of the M-Set is fuzzy—it contains infinite detail: you can go in anywhere you like, and magnify as much as you please—and you’ll always discover something new and unexpected—look!”

The image expanded; they were diving into the cleft between the main cardioid and its tangent circle. It was, Bradley told himself, very much like watching a zip-fastener being pulled open—except that the teeth of the zipper had the most extraordinary shapes.

First they looked like baby elephants, waving tiny trunks. Then the trunks became tentacles. Then the tentacles sprouted eyes. Then, as the image continued to expand, the eyes opened up into black whirlpools of infinite depth…

“The magnification’s up in the millions now,” Edith whispered. “The picture we started with is already bigger than Europe.”

They swept past the whirlpools, skirting mysterious islands guarded by reefs of coral. Flotillas of seahorses sailed by in stately procession. At the screen’s exact center, a tiny black dot appeared, expanded, began to show a haunting familiarity—and seconds later revealed itself as an exact replica of the original set.

This, Bradley thought, is where we came in. Or is it? He could not be quite sure; there seemed to be minor differences, but the family resemblance was unmistakable.

“Now,” continued Ada, “our original picture is as wide as the orbit of Mars—so this mini-set’s really far smaller than an atom. But there’s just as much detail all around it. And so on forever.”

The zooming stopped; for a moment it seemed that a sample of lacework, full of intricate loops and whorls that teased the eye, hung frozen in space. Then, as if a paintbox had been spilled over it, the monochrome image burst into colors so unexpected, and so dazzlingly beautiful, that Bradley gave a gasp of astonishment.

The zooming restarted, but in the reverse direction, and in a micro-universe now transformed by color. No one said a word until they were back at the original complete M-Set, now an ominous black fringed with a narrow border of golden fire, and shooting off jagged lightnings of blues and purples.

“And where,” asked Bradley when he had recovered his breath, “did all those colors come from? We didn’t see them on the way in.”

Ada laughed. “No—they’re not really part of the set—but aren’t they gorgeous? I can tell the computer to make them anything I like.”

“Even though the actual colors are quite arbitrary,” Edith explained, “they’re full of meaning. You know the way map makers put shades of blue and green between contour lines, to emphasize differences in level?”

“Of course; we do just the same thing in oceanography. The deeper the blue, the deeper the water.”

“Right. In this case, the colors tell us how many times the computer’s had to go around the loop before it decides whether a number definitely belongs to the M-Set—or not. In borderline cases, it may have to do the squaring and adding routine thousands of times.”

“And often for hundred-digit numbers,” said Donald. “Now you understand why the set wasn’t discovered earlier.”

“Mighty good reason.”

“Now watch this,” said Ada.

The image came to life as waves of color flowed outward. It seemed that the borders of the set itself were continually expanding—yet staying in the same place. Then Bradley realized that nothing was really moving; only the colors were cycling around the spectrum, to produce this completely convincing illusion of movement.

I begin to understand, Bradley thought, how someone could get lost in this thing—even make it a way of life.

“I’m almost certain,” he said, “that I’ve seen this program listed in my computer’s software library—with a couple of thousand others. How lucky I’ve never run it. I can see how addictive it could get.”

He noticed that Donald Craig glanced sharply at Edith, and realized that he had made a somewhat tactless remark. However, she still seemed engrossed by the flow of colors, even though she must have seen this particular display countless times.

“Ada,” she said dreamily, “give Mr. Jason our favorite quotation from Einstein.”

That’s asking a lot from a ten-year-old, thought Bradley—even one like this; but the girl never hesitated, and there was no trace of mechanical repetition in her voice. She understood the words, and spoke from the heart:

“ ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapt in awe, is as good as dead.’ ”

I’ll go along with that, thought Bradley. He remembered calm nights in the Pacific, with a sky full of stars and a glimmering trail of bioluminescence behind the ship; he recalled his first glimpse of the teeming life-forms—as alien as any from another planet—gathered around the scalding cornucopia of a Galápagos mid-ocean vent, where the continents were slowly tearing apart; and he hoped that before long he would feel awe and wonder again, when the tremendous knife edge of Titanic’s prow came looming up out of the abyss.

The dance of colors ceased: the M-Set faded out. Although nothing had ever been really there, he could somehow sense that the virtual screen of the holograph projector had switched off.

“So now,” said Donald, “you know more about the Mandelbrot Set than you want to.” He glanced momentarily at Edith, and once again Bradley felt that twinge of sympathy toward him.

It was not at all the feeling he had expected, when he came to Conroy Castle; “envy” would have been a better word. Here was a man with great wealth, a beautiful home, and a talented and attractive family—all the ingredients which were supposed to guarantee happiness. Yet something had obviously gone wrong. I wonder, Bradley thought, how long it is since they went to bed together. It could be as simple as that—though that, of course, was seldom simple…

Once again he glanced at his watch; they must think he was deliberately avoiding the issue—and they were perfectly right. Hurry up, Mr. Director-General! he pleaded silently.

As if on cue, he felt the familiar tingling in his wrist.

“Excuse me,” he said to his hosts. “I’ve a very important call coming through. It will only take a minute.”

“Of course. We’ll leave you to it.”

How many million times a day this ritual was now carried out! Strict etiquette dictated that everyone else offer to leave the room when a personal call was coming through; politeness demanded that only the recipient leave, with apologies to all. There were countless variations according to circumstances and nationalities. In Japan, so Kato was fond of complaining, the formalities often lasted so long that the caller hung up in disgust.

“Sorry for the interruption,” Bradley said as he came back in through the French windows. “That was about our business—I couldn’t give you a decision until I’d received it.”

“I hope it’s a favorable one,” said Donald. “We need you.”

“And I would like to work with you—but—”

“Parky’s made you a better offer,” said Edith, with scarcely veiled contempt.

Bradley looked at her calmly, and answered without rancor.

“No, Mrs. Craig. Please keep these figures confidential. The Parkinson group’s offer was generous—but it was only half of yours. And the offer which I’ve just received is much less than one tenth of that. Nevertheless, I’m considering it very seriously.”

There was a resounding silence, broken at last by an uncharacteristic giggle from Ada.

“You must be crazy,” said Edith. Donald merely grinned.

“You may be right. But I’ve reached the stage when I don’t need the money, though it’s always good to have some around.” He paused, and chuckled softly.

“Enough is enough. I don’t know if you ever heard the wisecrack that Titanic’s most famous casualty, J. J. Astor, once made: “A man who has a million dollars is as well off as one who is rich.” Well, I’ve made a few million during my career, and some of it’s still in the bank. I don’t really need any more; and if I do, I can always go down and tickle another octopus.

“I didn’t plan this—it was a bolt from the blue—two days ago I’d already decided to accept your offer.”

Edith now seemed more perplexed than hostile.

“Can you tell us who’s… underbid Nippon-Turner?”

Bradley shook his head. “Give me a couple of days; there are still a few problems, and I don’t want to fall between three stools.”

“I think I understand,” said Donald. “There’s only one reason to work for peanuts. Every man owes something to his profession.”

“That sounds like a quotation.”

“It is: Dr. Johnson.”

“I like it; I may be using it a lot, in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, before I make a final decision, I want a little time to think matters over. Again, many thanks for your hospitality—not to mention your offer. I may yet accept it—but if not, I hope we can still be friends.”

As he lifted away from the castle, the downwash of the helicopter ruffled the waters of Lake Mandelbrot, shattering the reflections of the cypresses. He was contemplating the biggest break in his career; before he made his decision, he needed to relax completely.

And he knew exactly how to do that.

21. A HOUSE OF GOOD REPUTE

Even the coming of hypersonic transportation had not done much to change the status of New Zealand; to most people it was merely the last stop before the South Pole. The great majority of New Zealanders were quite content to keep it that way.

Evelyn Merrick was one of the exceptions, and had defected at the (in her case, very) ripe age of seventeen to find her destiny elsewhere. After three marriages which had left her emotionally scarred but financially secure, she had discovered her role in life, and was as happy as anyone could reasonably expect to be.

The Villa, as it was known to her wide-ranging clientele, was on a beautiful estate in one of the still unspoiled parts of Kent, conveniently close to Gatwick Airport. Its previous owner had been a celebrated media tycoon, who had placed his bet on the wrong system when high-definition TV swept all before it at the end of the twentieth century. Later attempts to restore his fortune had misfired, and he was now a guest of His Majesty’s government for the next five years (assuming time off for good behavior).

Being a man of high moral standards, he was quite indignant about the use which Dame Eva had now made of his property, and had even attempted to dislodge her. However, Eva’s lawyers were just as good as his; perhaps better, since she was still at liberty, and had every intention of remaining so.

The Villa was run with meticulous propriety, the girls” passports, tax returns, health and pension contributions, medical records, and so forth being instantly available to any government inspector—of whom, Dame Eva sometimes remarked sourly, there always seemed to be a copious supply. If any ever came in the hope of personal gratification, they were sadly disappointed.

On the whole, it was a rewarding career, full of emotional and intellectual stimulus. She certainly had no ethical problems, having long ago decided that anything enjoyed by adults of voting age was perfectly acceptable, as long as it was not dangerous, unhygienic, or fattening. Her main cause of complaint was that involvement with clients caused a high rate of staff turnover, with resulting heavy expenditure on wedding presents. She had also observed that Villa-inspired marriages appeared to last longer than those with more conventional origins, and intended to publish a statistical survey when she was quite sure of her data; at the moment the correlation coefficient was still below the level of significance.

As might be expected in her profession, Evelyn Merrick was a woman of many secrets, mostly other peoples’; but she also had one of her own which she guarded with special care. Though nothing could have been more respectable, if it came out it might be bad for trade. For the last two years, she had been employing her extensive—perhaps unique—knowledge of paraphilia to complete her doctor’s degree in psychology at the University of Auckland.

She had never met Professor Hinton, except over video circuits—and even that very rarely, since both preferred the digital impersonality of computer file exchanges. One day—perhaps a decade after she had retired—her thesis would be published, though not under her own name, and with all the case histories disguised beyond identification. Not even Professor Hinton knew the individuals involved, though he had made some shrewd guesses at a few.

“Subject O.G.,” Eva typed. “Age fifty. Successful engineer.”

She considered the screen carefully. The initials, of course, had been changed according to her simple code, and the age had been rounded down to the nearest decade. But the last entry was reasonably accurate: his profession reflected a man’s personality, and should not be disguised unless it was absolutely necessary to avoid identification. Even then, it had to be done with sensitivity, so that the displacement was not too violent. In the case of a world-famous musician, Eva had altered “pianist” to “violinist,” and she had converted an equally celebrated sculptor into a painter. She had even turned a politician into a statesman.

“…As a small boy, O.G. was teased and occasionally captured by the pupils of a neighboring girl’s school, who used him as a (fairly willing) subject for lessons in nursing and male anatomy. They frequently bandaged him from head to foot, and though he now asserts that there was no erotic element involved, this is rather hard to believe. When challenged, he shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘I just don’t remember.’

“Later, as a young man, O.G. witnessed the aftermath of a major accident which caused many deaths. Though not injured himself, the experience also appears to have affected his sexual fantasies. He enjoys various forms of bondage (see List A) and he had developed a mild case of the Saint Sebastian Complex, most famously demonstrated by Yukio Mishima. Unlike Mishima, however, O.G. is completely heterosexual, scoring only 2.5±0.1 on the Standard Mapplethorpe Phototest.

“What makes O.G.’s behavior pattern so interesting, and perhaps unusual, is that he is an active and indeed somewhat aggressive personality, as befits the manager of an organization in a demanding and competitive business. It is hard to imagine him playing a passive role in any sphere of life, yet he likes my personnel to wrap him up in bandages like an Egyptian mummy, until he is completely helpless. Only in this way, after considerable stimulation, can he achieve a satisfactory orgasm.

“When I suggested that he was acting out a death wish, he laughed but did not attempt to deny it. His work often involves physical danger, which may be the very reason why he was attracted to it in the first place. However, he gave an alternative explanation which, I am sure, contains a good deal of truth.

“ ‘When you have responsibilities involving millions of dollars and affecting many men’s lives, you can’t imagine how delightful it is to be completely helpless for a while—unable to control what’s happening around you. Of course, I know it’s all play-acting, but I manage to pretend it isn’t. I sometimes wonder how I’d enjoy the situation if it was for real.’

“ ‘You wouldn’t,’ I told him, and he agreed.”

Eva scrolled the entry, checking it for any clues that might reveal O.G.’s identity. The Villa specialized in celebrities, so it was better to be excessively cautious than the reverse.

That caution extended to the celebrities themselves. The Villa’s only house rule was “No blood on the carpets,” and she recalled, with a grimace of disgust, a third world country’s chief-of-staff whose frenzies had injured one of her girls. Eva had accepted his apologies, and his check, with cold disdain, then made a quick call to the Foreign Office. The general would have been most surprised—and mortified—to know exactly why the British ambassador now found so many reasons for postponing his next visit to the United Kingdom.

Eva sometimes wondered what dear Sister Margarita would have thought of her star pupil’s present vocation; the last time she had wept was when the notice of her old friend’s death had reached her from the Mother Superior. And she remembered, with wistful amusement, the question she had once been tempted to ask her tutor: exactly why should a vow of perpetual chastity be considered any nobler—any holier—than a vow of perpetual constipation?

It was a perfectly serious query, not in the least intended to scandalize the old nun or shake the sure foundations of her faith. But on the whole, perhaps it was just as well left unasked.

Sister Margarita already knew that little Eva Merrick was not meant for the church; but Eva still sent a generous donation to St. Jude’s every Christmas.

22. BUREAUCRAT

“Sorry about the emoluments,” said Director-General Wilbur Jantz apologetically, “but they’re fixed by U.N. regulations.”

“I quite understand. As you know, I’m not here for the money.”

“And there are very considerable fringe benefits. First, you’ll have the rank of ambassador…”

“Will I have to dress like one? I hope not—I don’t even have a tux, let alone the rest of that damned nonsense.”

Jantz laughed.

“Don’t worry—we’ll take care of details like that. And you’ll be VIPed everywhere, of course—that can be quite pleasant.”

It’s a long time, thought Jason Bradley, since I’ve not been VIPed, but it would be rather tactless to say so. Despite all his experience, he was a new boy in this environment; maybe he shouldn’t have made that crack about ambassadors…

The D.G. was scanning the readout scrolling on his desk display, giving an occasional PAUSE command so that he could examine some item in detail. Bradley would have returned a substantial slice of his income to his new employers for the privilege of reading that file. I wonder if they know, he thought, about the time that Ted and I “salted” that wreck off Delos with fake amphorae? Not that I’ve got a guilty conscience: it caused a lot of trouble to people who thoroughly deserved it.

“I think I should tell you,” said the D.G., “that we did have one small problem—though I shouldn’t worry about it. Some of our more, ah, aggressively independent states-parties may not be too happy about your CIA connection.”

“That was more than thirty years ago! And I didn’t even know it was a CIA job until long after I’d signed up—as an ordinary seaman, for heaven’s sake… I thought I was joining Hughes” Summa Corporation—and so I was.”

“Don’t let it lose you any sleep; I mention it just in case someone brings it up. It’s not likely, because in all other respects your qualifications are superb. Even Ballard admitted that.”

“Oh—he did?”

“Well, he said you were the best of a bad bunch.”

“That sounds like Bob.”

The D.G. continued to examine the readout, then sat for a moment with a thoughtful expression.

“This has nothing to do with your appointment, and please excuse me if I’m speaking out of turn. I’m talking to you as man to man—”

Hello, thought Jason, they know about the Villa! I wonder how they got through Eva’s security?

But it was a much bigger surprise than that…

“It seems that you lost contact with your son and his mother more than twenty years ago. If you wish, we can put you in touch.”

For a moment, Bradley felt a constriction in his chest; it was almost as if something had happened to his air supply. He knew the sensation all too well, and felt the clammy onset of that disabling panic which is a diver’s worst enemy.

As he had always managed to do before, he regained control by slow, deep breathing. Director-General Jantz, realizing that he had opened some old wound, waited sympathetically.

“Thank you,” Bradley said at last. “I would prefer not to. Are they… all right?”

“Yes.”

That was all he needed to know. It was impossible to turn back the clock: he could barely remember the man—boy!—he had been at twenty-five, when he had finally gone to college. And, for the first and last time, fallen in love.

He would never know whose fault it was, and perhaps now it did not matter. They could have contacted him easily enough, if they had wished. (Did J.J. ever think of him, and recall the times they had played together? Bradley’s eyes stung, and he turned his mind away from the memory.)

He sometimes wondered if he would even recognize Julie if they met in the street; as he had destroyed all her photographs (why had he kept that one of J.J.?), he could no longer clearly remember her face. There was no doubt, however, that the experience had left indelible scars on his psyche, but he had learned to live with them—with the help, he wryly admitted, of Dame Eva. The ritual he had institutionalized at the Villa had brought him mental and physical relief, and had allowed him to function efficiently. He was grateful for that.

And now he had a new interest—a new challenge—as deputy director (Atlantic) of the International Seabed Authority. He could just imagine how Ted Collier would have laughed his head off at this metamorphosis. Well, there was much truth in the old saying that poachers made the best gamekeepers.

“I’ve asked Dr. Zwicker to come and say hello, as you’ll be working closely together. Have you ever met him before?”

“No—but of course I’ve seen him often enough. Last time was only yesterday, on the Science News Channel. He was analyzing the Parkinson scheme—and didn’t think much of it.”

“Between you and me, he doesn’t think much of anything he hasn’t invented himself. And he’s usually right, which doesn’t endear him to his colleagues.”

Most people still thought it slightly comic that the world’s leading oceanographer had been born in an alpine valley, and there had been endless jokes about the prowess of the Swiss Navy. But there was no getting away from the fact that the bathyscaphe had been invented in Switzerland, and the long shadow of the Piccards still lay across the technology they had founded.

The director-general glanced at his watch, and smiled at Bradley.

“If my conscience would allow it, I could win bets this way.” He started a quiet countdown, and had just reached “One” when there was a knock on the door.

“See what I mean?” he said to Bradley. “As they’re so fond of saying, ‘Time is the art of the Swiss.’ ” Then he called out: “Come in, Franz.”

There was a moment of silent appraisal before scientist and engineer shook hands; each knew the other’s reputation, and each was wondering, “Will we be colleagues—or antagonists?” Then Professor Franz Zwicker said, “Welcome aboard, Mr. Bradley. We have much to talk about.”