Glancing round, he saw the ample bed, a nice sofa and a small table with four chairs, all very good quality and customized specially for this room. The pillows were fulsome and the coverlet nicely embroidered in gold and red. The sink to the left of the room was marble and came with gold-plated taps. Above these was a beautifully framed mirror. He caught his reflection: a rather gaunt face, his black hair slicked back with Roland’s Macassar Oil accentuating his prominent cheekbones and large, dark eyes.
Turning back to the room, he noted that his suitcases had been brought from the hotel. ‘Well, I think this is going to be worth every penny,’ he said aloud.
Crouching down, he found the safe under the bed. Recalling the private combination he had been given with his ticket, he opened the safe and stowed away his precious boxes with their priceless contents — the ibnium isotope in its protective case and his leather briefcase holding his latest research documents secured inside the second locked box. He then spun the dial on the front of the safe and stood up.
With his brief perusal of the plan near the Grand Staircase he had memorized the layout of the entire ship. It was one of his gifts — an almost perfect analytical memory, a natural ability that had served him extremely well in his chosen career. He stepped out of his cabin, locked the door and headed along a carpeted corridor feeling elated.
He emerged onto the boat deck, a promenade that was used by both First and Second Class passengers, and as he approached the railing he heard a whistle sound. This was followed by a loud blast from the ship’s klaxon. The Titanic juddered as it pulled away from the quayside.
22
The ocean was calm and the Titanic as steady as a dart. But even so, the majority of passengers in First Class were confined to their cabins afraid to move too far from their marble washbasins.
Fortescue was not one of them. He had been a member of the Harrow sailing club and then a leading light in the Cambridge rowing team that had gone on to win the 1900 boat race by a staggering twenty lengths. He loved the water.
The ship had sailed from Southampton to Cherbourg, a five-hour voyage across the English Channel, to pick up 274 more passengers. From there, steaming through the night, the Titanic headed north-west bound for Queenstown near Cobh on the south coast of Ireland. The ship had dropped anchor at 11.30 the following morning, taken on the final 120 passengers and raised the Stars and Stripes above her deck, signifying the next port of call was New York harbour. By early afternoon the giant liner had slipped out into the Atlantic Ocean.
It was now Friday evening and Fortescue felt more relaxed than he had done for a long time. He had been both inspired and weighed down by the responsibility placed upon him; now the heaviness on his shoulders was lifting and he was beginning to enjoy himself. And as his mind quietened, he felt energized. Alone in his cabin with a very good claret, he sat at a compact mahogany desk with a sheaf of paper from the drawer and his favourite fountain pen. He had brought his notes from Manchester and found that his mind was wonderfully receptive to picking up the theoretical threads where he had left them before leaving the university.
From the early days of the work on atomic energy he had felt that he and Rutherford were merely scratching at the surface of a vast, barely imagined world of knowledge. At times he visualized them as children unlocking a Pandora’s box or stepping into some vast spectral land yet still only glimpsing one tiny corner of it. However, during the past few weeks he had sensed that he really was onto something tangible, something he could grasp.
But then, alone in the quiet cold of his flat in Manchester, the doubts had begun. Clouded by nervous tension over the task ahead of him, he had retreated intellectually, the self-questioning becoming more intrusive. Was he deluding himself? Was he chasing phantoms? Had he fooled himself into believing in a theory a better man would have instantly realized as wrong? His equations felt correct instinctively and that was half the battle, and the early experimental successes were irrefutable. The equations were also very beautiful and that proved to him that he was on the right path, but something was holding him back. There was still something missing.
He ran the equations through his mind again. They did not quite tally.
Then he saw it, or thought he saw it. Juggling half a dozen different expressions in his mind simultaneously, he changed a negative to a positive and rearranged a set of symbols in the next row. But no, it still eluded him. He took a sip of wine, letting it roll around his mouth sensuously. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the extra terms and the three or four other equations he would need to bring into the picture.
After a moment he managed to assemble them on the page in front of him and trawl through them one at a time, checking each term, every mathematical symbol. Then, he had it. The fifth equation was wrong — the power was squared instead of cubed and he needed a new term on the right. He made the changes and appraised the outcome. It worked. He pressed on, applying the new result in the next row of equations and they too all fell into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
What he had visualized was, he knew, the essence of an incredibly powerful and totally original way of thinking about energy. It was simple, pure, complete and irrefutably true.
But there was more, so much more. He knew it instinctively, but as he reached to grab it, it slipped away. Fortescue let out a sigh. He had experienced this before. A thought, a stray strand of an idea, a tiny thread that could be unravelled into something immense… it was there, but not there. He could see it, yet it was invisible.
He couldn’t give up, not now. He tried to pull the ideas back. They moved further away. He tried harder to ensnare the elusive concept, pull it to him, but no, it was dissolving, melting to nothing.
He took a deep breath and slumped in the chair. ‘You will return to me,’ he whispered. He stood up and changed for dinner.
He did not see another soul until he reached the main hallway leading to the First Class Dining Saloon on D-Deck and a group of passengers heading towards him. They made a stylish foursome: the women wore similar formal dresses, one black, the other white; the men had dressed just as he had done in black bow tie and dinner suit, hair slicked back. The older of the two men had a cane. Fortescue nodded to them politely and made his way to the reception area
It was a large room, white pillars breaking up the space, the ceiling heavily patterned with elegant white reliefs. The spotless carpet was a pleasing red, subtly patterned to reflect the shapes embossed into the ceiling. Wicker chairs and chaises longues had been placed in clusters around the room with little drinks tables between them. There were perhaps a score of passengers seated drinking and chatting animatedly in pairs and small groups.