cucumbers, or starfish might have been made several minutes ago or hundreds of years past, because the microscopic animal and plant remains that comprise the deep-ocean ooze filters down from above at the rate of only one or two centimeters every thousand years.
'There's a lovely creature,' Giordino said pointing.
Pitt's eye followed Giordino's finger and picked out a strange blue-black animal that seemed a cross between a squid and an octopus. It had eight tentacles linked together like the webbed foot of a duck, and it stared back at the Sea Slug through two large globular eyes that formed nearly a third of its body.
'A vampire squid,' Gunn informed them.
'Ask her if she's got relatives in Transylvania?' Giordino grinned.
'You know,' Pitt said, 'that thing out there sort of reminds me of your girl friend.'
Gunn jumped in. 'You mean the one with no boobs?'
'You've seen her?'
'Rave on, envious rabble,' Giordino grumbled. 'She's mad about me and her father keeps me floating in quality booze.'
'Some quality,' Pitt snorted. 'Old Cesspool Bourbon, Attila the Hun Gin, Tijuana Vodka. Who the hell ever heard of those labels?'
Throughout the next few hours, the wit and the sarcasm bounced off the walls of the Sea Slug. Actually, it was put on; a defense mechanism to relieve the gnawing pangs of monotony. Unlike romanticized fiction, wreck- hunting in the depths can be a grueling and tedious job. Add to that the aggravated discomfort of the cramped quarters, the high humidity and chilling temperatures inside the submersible, and you have the ingredients for provoking an accident through human error that could prove both costly and fatal.
Pitt's hands stayed rock-steady as they handled the controls, guiding the Sea Slug a scant four feet above the bottom. Giordino's concentration was nailed to the life support systems, while Gunn kept his eyes skinned on the sonar and magnetometer. The long hours of planning were over. It was now a case of patience and persistence, mixed with that peculiar blend of eternal optimism and love of the unknown shared by all treasure seekers.
'Looks like a pile of rocks up ahead,' Pitt said.
Giordino stared up through the viewports. 'They're just sitting there in the ooze. I wonder where they came from.'
'Perhaps ballast thrown overboard from an old windjammer.'
'More likely came from icebergs,' Gunn said. 'Many rocks and bits of debris are carried over the sea and then dropped to the floor when the icebergs melt-' Gunn broke off in the middle of his lecture. 'Hold on . . . I'm getting a strong response on the sonar. Now the magnetometer is picking it up, too.'
'Where away?' Pitt asked.
'On a heading of one-three-seven.'
'One-three-seven it is,' Pitt repeated. He swept the Sea Slug into a graceful bank, as though she was an airplane, and headed on the new course. Giordino peered intently over Gunn's shoulder at the green circles of light on the sonarscope. ''A small dot of pulsating brightness indicated a solid object three hundred yards beyond their range of vision.
'Don't get your hopes up,' Gunn said quietly. 'The target reads too small for a ship.'
'What do you make of it?'
'Hard to say. No more than twenty or twenty-five feet in length, about two stories high. Might be anything . . . .'
'Or it might be one of the Titanic's boilers,' Pitt cut in. 'The sea floor should be littered with them.'
'You move to the head of the class,' Gunn said, excitement creeping into his tone. 'I have an identical reading, bearing one-one-five. And here comes another at one-six-zero. The last has an indicated length of approximately seventy feet.'
'Sounds like one of her smokestacks,' Pitt said.
'Lord!' Gunn murmured hoarsely. 'It's beginning to read like a junkyard down here.'
Suddenly, in the gloom at the outer edge of the blackness, a rounded object became visible, haloed in the eerie light like an immense tombstone. Soon the three pairs of eyes inside the submersible could distinguish the furnace gratings of the great boiler, and then the row upon row of rivets along the iron seams and the torn, jagged tentacles of what was left of its steam tubing.
'How would you like to have been a stoker in those days and fed that baby?' Giordino muttered.
'I've picked up another one,' Gunn said. 'No, wait . . . the pulse is getting stronger. Here comes the length. One hundred feet . . . two. . .'
'Keep coming, sweetheart,' Pitt prayed.
'Five hundred . . . seven . . . eight hundred feet. We got her! We've got her!'
'What course?' Pitt's mouth was as dry as sand.
'Bearing zero-nine-seven,' Gunn replied in a whisper.
They spoke no more for the next few minutes as the Sea Slug closed the distance. Their faces were pale and strained with anticipation. Pitt's heart was pounding painfully in his chest, and his stomach felt as if it had a great iron weight in it and a huge hand crushing it from the outside. He became aware that he was allowing the submersible to creep too close to the ooze. He pulled back the controls and kept his eyes trained -through the viewport. What would they find? A rusty old hulk far beyond hope of salvaging? A shattered, broken hull buried to its superstructure in the muck? And then his straining eyes caught sight of a massive shadow looming up ominously in the darkness.
'Christ almighty!' Giordino mumbled in awe. 'We've struck her fair on the bow.'
As the range narrowed to fifty feet, Pitt slowed the motors and turned the Sea Slug on a parallel course with the ill-fated liner's waterline. The mere size of the wreck when viewed from alongside her steel plates was a staggering sight. Even after nearly eighty years, the sunken ship proved to be surprisingly free of corrosion; the gold band that encompassed the 882-foot black hull glistened under the high-intensity lights. Pitt eased the submersible upward past the eight-ton portside anchor until they could all clearly make out the three-foot-high golden letters that still proudly proclaimed her as the Titanic.
Spellbound, Pitt picked up the microphone from its cradle and pressed the transmit button. Modoc, Modoc. This is Sea Slug . . . do you read?'
The radio operator on the Modoc answered almost immediately. 'This is Modoc, Sea Slug. We read you. Over.'
Pitt adjusted the volume to minimize the background crackle. 'Modoc, notify NUMA headquarters that we have found the Big T. Repeat, we have found the Big T. Depth twelve thousand three hundred and forty feet. Time, eleven-forty-two hours.'
'Eleven-forty-two?' Giordino echoed. 'You cocky bastard. You only missed by two minutes.'
REGENESIS
The Titanic lay cloaked by the eerie stillness of the black deep and bore the grim scars of her tragedy. The jagged wound from her collision with the iceberg stretched from the starboard forepeak to the No. 5 boiler room nearly three hundred feet down her hull, while the gaping holes in her bow below the waterline betrayed the shattering impact made by her boilers when they tore from her bowels and smashed their way through bulkhead after bulkhead until they plunged free into the sea.
She sat heavily in the ooze with a slight list to port, her forecastle set on a southerly course, as if she were still pathetically struggling to reach out and touch the waters of a port she had never known. The lights from the submersible danced over her ghostlike superstructure, casting long spectral shadows across her long teak decks. Her portholes, some open, some closed, marched in orderly rows along the broad expanse of her sides. She presented an almost modern, streamlined appearance now that her funnels were gone; the forward three were nonexistent, two probably having been carried away by her dive to the bottom, while number four lay fallen across the After Boat Deck. And, except for the scattered strands of rusty, disconnected funnel rigging that snaked over the railings, her Boat Deck showed only a few hulking air vents standing silent guard above the vacant Welin davits that had once held the great liner's lifeboats.
There was a morbid beauty about her. The men inside the submersible could almost see her dining saloons and staterooms flooded with lights and crowded with hundreds of light-hearted and laughing passengers. They could visualize her libraries stacked with books, her smoking rooms filled with the blue haze of gentlemen's cigars,
