A second source of iron substrate with its roots intact came up in the form of a davit bitt, also recovered from the approximate location of boat 8, near the place where Violet Jessop’s old friend Jock Hume had joined his fellow band members, trying to calm the crowds with music.
These two rusticle bases were the only samples raised from the Titanic for study this year, with the understanding that after the organisms were removed for dissection and preservation, the davit bitt and the rail section were to be returned to the Titanic’s portside boat deck.
The rusticles were, in their own right, fascinating enough to create their own field of study. Whatever cycles (annual or otherwise) were involved in the rusticles’ growth rings, the rings themselves had more than doubled in thickness during the past seven cycles, which was consistent with the unusually rapid growth rate of Georgyj Vinogradov’s gorgon and the apparently explosive increase in the rusticle-based deterioration of the Titanic. The recent identification of rusticlelike fossils in Australia, dating back approximately 2.5 billion years, added spicier seasonings to our bio-archaeological dreams, turning them into an analogy of what the multicellular origins of plants and animals might have looked like and turning our quest into the sincerest form of ancestor worship. Science was telling us that we might have begun as clay and iron-oxide–rich mud around the bacteria-smeared hydrothermal springs of the sea, much as the biblical book of Genesis said we were: born of mud and dust.
Although we were by now thinking a little more kindly about mud and bacterial slimes, Johnston and I did not mention Genesis to the Russians; we presumed that they must have been as troubled as American atheists by the Apollo 8 crew’s reading from Genesis thirty-three years earlier. Yet something else happened with our rusticle samples—which, with the aid of such meddling as the calculation of odds against coincidence, could be bound in the meddlings of hindsight and (rightly or wrongly) interpreted as echoing Clarke’s fire in the sky.
The davit bitt had pieces of rope still dangling from it. The railing, when Abernathy first brought it out of the sample basket, had broken into the shape of a cross. Someone had gasped at this, as though it were a kind of omen. The rail was merely crosshatched metal; “so, naturally it could break into the shape of a cross,” I wrote later. I’d have been impressed if the metal had broken into the far less probable shape of a fish or a Star of David. The davit bitt, when viewed from a certain angle, was also cross-shaped, and the length of rope draped over both arms of it had brought an even louder and more unexpected gasp—this time from one of the Russian scientists.
She said, “Two were hung on their crosses with rope… on that hill, that day. Three were crucified on that hill. A third cross is coming. And it will be big. Terrible big.”
“Imagine no religion,” John Lennon had sung. I mentioned to Ken Marschall that the Russians had tried that experiment, and what the Russian scientist just said seemed to me the strangest of observations, coming as it did from a person from a country in which the entire population had been raised atheist.
Marschall told me to walk with him to the top decks and to look at something I had seen many times, then to look again and really see it for the first time. At the top of what we sometimes called the Keldysh’s grand stairway, couches and armchairs were set about a meeting table. On one wall was mounted a stained-glass window, an abstract splash of color not very different from many similar examples of 1970s and 1980s architectural perks. It blended practically undetected into the background—and, according to Marschall, that might have been the whole point. He ran his finger down one line of colored curves and shapes and asked, “What do you see?”
“My God,” I said.
“That’s exactly what the artist must have been trying to say,” Ken said.
Hidden on a ship once commanded by the KGB—hidden in open view, for those who had eyes to see—were the Madonna and child.
“Who would have thought it?” I said to Abernathy. “Glass cutting as a subversive activity.”
Abernathy, who was a restaurateur as well as a deep-ocean explorer, spent many of his free moments in the ship’s galley with the Russians. “As the wise man goeth the fool,” he told me. “You have been out here for weeks with the Russians, and still you have no idea what it means to be Russian.”
SEPTEMBER 1, 2001
Paxton was convinced he would never have any idea what sort of creature left a big puff of swirling mud behind as it fled ahead of the Mir-1’s floodlights during its approach to boiler room number 2. His initial suspicion of a large octopus left him thoroughly “creeped out.”
“I felt a presence,” he said, “as [though] it were still lurking somewhere along the starboard hull, beyond the range of our lights.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, and I told him about one of my mentors, Ed Coher, who had conducted a histological analysis on a large octopus body part that washed up on a Florida beach. Though the results remained inconclusive, some size estimates for the full creature outclassed the largest squid pieces found in the stomachs of sperm whales. “What you’re afraid of, Bill, I wouldn’t worry about meeting it on your next dive,” I assured him. “The occi that Doc Coher described is probably not hiding in or around the Titanic, because the Titanic just isn’t a big enough playground.”
In a log entry, I wrote, “Out here we [are] coming up with a lot of ‘I-don’t-knows.’ What kind of animal is a flashing Milk Dud, really? What was that large, poly-nose-like thing flying like a bat out of hell from behind the Titanic’s boilers? We’re never afraid of not having answers; it’s running out of questions [that] we should fear most. Being confused (‘What the hell is that?’) means some explorer is having a good day.”
The “flashing Milk Duds” and the presence of large-eyed fish near the wreck were powerful indicators that there existed bottom-dwelling creatures who used bioluminescent organs as defensive and/or predatory stun weapons. Video of cruises through the Titanic’s debris field often revealed the puff trails of animals fleeing ahead of the submersibles’ lamps or a tripod fish sitting light-stunned on its stiltlike fins.
I had a picture in my mind of creatures never seen before, swimming away from us the moment our lights began shining over the rim of a mound or a dune. I told Anatoly Sagalevich that one thing I really wanted to try was to move along the bottom with our lights completely off, then turn them on with our cameras running “and see who is around.”
The Russian word nyet is designed to somehow mean much more than “no.” Sagalevich explained that here and there, new boulders were appearing on the bottom, boulders not on the previous year’s maps of the debris, because these boulders were being dropped randomly by icebergs each winter and spring.
“It’s easy to get killed by an iceberg down here,” Sagalevich said sternly. One did not even have to crash the ports of the crew compartment into a boulder directly. Any part capable of imploding—an external camera, a lamp—would do the killing. At the Titanic’s depth, and at six thousand pounds per square inch, a crushed lamp would implode faster than the speed of sound, creating a shock wave that could implode the other lamps, the cameras, and the crew compartment—all within less time than was required for a shout to travel the length of a New York City bus.