Sagalevich called out an alert to the Mir-2 crew, announcing that we might need its help. Then he turned to me and said the words one never wants to hear from a Russian pilot: “We have problem. How are you?” Admitting the problem meant it was serious, and the question—coupled with a deep look into my eyes (then into Pace’s)—really meant “How are you going to behave?”
I answered, “Biology. I’m going to do what I came here for,” and I returned to my camera and my notebooks. It occurred to me that this was to be my last dive—my “retirement” dive—but I was not overly concerned that before the night was through, I would be feeling a strange kinship with Captain Edward J. Smith, for whom the Titanic’s maiden trip was to have been his “retirement” voyage.
I had full confidence in Sagalevich and his machines. He was, after all, the Mirs’ chief designer. It seemed to me, as he cleared debris from external cables with the robot arm and repaired our hydraulics with an intensity of concentration rarely seen in a human being, that he was more concerned about losing face by not completing the work before the Mir-2’s lights came around the next pinnacle than about any possibility that this was a one-way trip.
Sagalevich beat the Mir-2. At 10:10 p.m., we were parked on the edge of a sheer cliff that dropped into what Lost City’s discoverers had named the Atlantis Fracture Zone. Like hundreds of other such fractures, it ran perpendicular to the continental spreading center. The volcanic center extended literally from pole to pole, diving deep under Antarctica, where it had sprouted Mount Erebus.
My attention was drawn to a new mystery. At the cliff’s edge and along the base of the nearest Lost City tower, I had seen white sea urchins, each with spines about ten centimeters (four inches) long. The spines seemed not to have afforded the urchins much protection. Scattered in every direction were little strewn fields of urchin needles, looking as though someone had dropped a whole planeload of white drinking straws. A crevice under my viewport, about one yard wide and slightly more than ankle deep, appeared to be an entire bedding plane of urchin spines and shell fragments—an echinoderm graveyard. Many of the spines, I noticed, had been broken, as though chewed and spat out.
Something had an appetite for sea urchins—something reasonably large and strong. Vertebrate or invertebrate? We could only guess, but none of us would have been shocked if it turned out to be something no one had yet seen.
If one had to be given a last dive, the Lost City site was the perfect place for it. In water clear enough to give the impression that we were flying helicopters through the air, the skyscraperlike pinnacles were a landscape so large and so beautiful that if I were given just one choice, either to fly into Earth orbit or to go back again into the deep, I would go back once more into the ever-black. If I were forced to choose between the Titanic and the Lost City, I’m not sure which one I would pick, but the Lost City might win.
That’s how magical the day’s exploration had been. We saw blizzards of marble-sized “stars,” or dandelion seeds, each of which had snowy white arms branching from its center. The undersea dandelions were drifting microbial colonies of some sort—probably bacterial—but the avalanche and the broken sampler had precluded collection.
It was William Beebe’s magical world squared down there; it was my wildest childhood dream, lived for real. But sooner or later you have to surface into the human world. Sooner or later you have to wake up.
August 9 came on like a thunderbolt, bringing with it news that my lungs were trying again to develop bacterial pneumonia. Dr. Singleman ordered a minimum two days of absolute bed rest in addition to increased prednisone dosing. During the discussions that followed, he pointed out that on an expedition hundreds of miles away from helicopter rescue, if a flare-up of this sort ever became uncontrollable, the entire expedition could be required to turn back. I had seen not only my last submersible dive but my last voyage as well.
As the 2005 expedition moved deep into its planning phase—with yet another new, smaller, and more agile generation of bots coming on line—the shock-cocoon events witnessed at the World Trade Center weighed more heavily than ever before on our thoughts about the Titanic. Shock cocoons, large and small, had shown up in every direction. They probably accompanied all catastrophic, explosive events, but they remained a persistent enigma.
One of the mission goals was to seek out new shock-cocooned chambers deep within the Titanic. Unfortunately, my attempts to understand the World Trade Center shock cocoons had added the unpredictability of the ground zero lung phenomenon to the equation and ultimately kept me ashore, but daily contact would be maintained with Roy Cullimore, Lori Johnston, and Jim Cameron.
This was the year we finally learned that the mysterious, mahogany-dwelling white worm of the first-class reception and dining area was neither entirely white nor a worm. In 2001, Georgyj Vinogradov had suspected that he saw “head features” reminiscent of sea cucumbers; yet pieces of elongated “worm” weaving in and out of mahogany burrows were so stretched out that it was difficult to tell where one worm began and another ended—so difficult, in fact, that it was possible to joke about a good reason for not sampling one of the worms with a clasper: “They’re all one worm,” Jim had said, “threaded through all the wood; and this worm is all that’s holding the Titanic together. Cut that thread at any point, and the whole thing will unravel, causing the final collapse of Titanic.”
The misnamed, misunderstood (and fortunately, not mistreated) white worm was finally identified when a minibot entered a first-class pantry room in the bow and revealed preserved wood still covering every wall. The fronts of the cabinets had either fallen off during the impact with the bottom or been eaten away by marine life. Inside, bone china plates and saucers were still neatly stacked behind vanished cabinet doors. On one side of a saucer stack, its entire body visible for the first time, lay a “white worm,” with its head resting in the hole it had apparently eaten through a side panel.
Clearly, this was the same animal whose brethren had taken up residence in the reception area’s black mahogany. Against the pantry’s lighter wood, and with its body lying on a shelf (in relaxed compression rather than being stretched out), the lavender hue that artist and historian Ken Marschall had always assigned to the reception area’s strange invaders was much more prominent. Its distinctive, luminous “side ports” and other elements of its morphology were unmistakable. Vinogradov was right: we had been observing echinoderm morphology all along. The misnamed and still poorly understood “white worms” were actually a type of sea cucumber never observed outside the Titanic. They were cousins of the starfish, flowerlike crinoids, and the black sea cucumbers that inhabited the plains outside for a radius of at least six miles.
The lavender sea cucumbers with the glowing rows of “ports” were not creatures of the plains. They were, like most of the animals seen inside the Titanic, different from those seen outside. At the Lost City vents, and along all of the major hydrothermal vent zones, our machines had glided over cracks often less than a yard across and dropping down deeper than our lights could reveal. Only now were minibots coming into existence that were small enough to navigate into those cracks—which girdled the entire planet, opening wherever the hydrothermal seams opened. These narrow nooks and crannies of Earth provided many tens of thousands of unexplored cubic miles, vast tracts of hidden surface area, and unknown nutrient sources. The Titanic’s interior was probably giving us a fleeting glimpse of what we would find when our bots finally descended into those nooks and crannies.