Chapter 2 Iceberg

"Coming, Moody," Nelson called out, flinging open the wardrobe and at the same time beginning to unbutton his shirt. In five minutes, he was garbed exactly as Captain Smith would have been, in austere blue-black wool trousers and jacket, his tunic carrying gold braid and stripes. Pem had made sure Captain Smith—wherever he was—had left behind him his uniform, to give the admiral 'authenticity.'

Nelson opened the door bravely and faced the young officer, seeing the eager expectation on the smooth face of a born helper. Moody almost caught up his arm to lead him to the bridge, but at the last minute, he remembered himself and just saluted. The admiral, now the Titanic captain, returned the salute and led the way. He had studied Titanic diagrams on so many occasions, he knew the ship by heart—almost better than he did the Seaview. He knew where the bridge was.

So far, so good. He had fooled Moody. But would Murdoch, or Lightoller, the second officer on the ship, and the senior-most surviving officer of the disaster, be as easy to fool?

At the bridge, Murdoch gave him the reports of several ships' sightings of icebergs. He looked them over, having already read them once that night—back in his cabin on the Seaview. Everything that could be known about that night, he knew. The single volume he looked at was quite complete on the subject of the sunken ship.

Nelson looked at the reports anyway, making his way to the front of the bridge for a glance at the water. "Heading?" he asked.

Heading given. The quartermaster at the wheel looked over at the captain as he spoke.

"Speed?"

"Twenty-one knots, sir."

The admiral had to think quickly here. He knew the speed of the Titanic had climbed to twenty-two point five knots before grinding across the iceberg. If he dropped the speed, there was a chance of saving the ship. If he did save her though, he faced the dilemma of changing history.

What a dilemma it was! Of course, it was one that only Mr. Pem in his crabby evil-mindedness could have conceived. How could the admiral, a true mariner, a born seaman, allow a ship to founder under his control, taking with her to the bottom over fifteen hundred souls, when he could save her!

He knew what was going to happen that night at 11:42, or was it 11:43? The iceberg would rip open the bottom of the vessel. He'd bring the Titanic to an all-stop, but then urged on by Bruce Ismay the builder to get going again, he'd pass along the order to restart the engines.

Forward movement would rip out rivets and widen vertical seams, and compartments would flood with ocean water as the bulkheads were breached. The Titanic could have rested on the iceberg for some time waiting for help, pumping out water, floating, actually, on her pumps. Help would have eventually come. Moving the ship consigned her to the bottom and a thousand a half souls to their deaths.

Could he bring himself to duplicate Smith's orders, could he allow himself to utter the orders that he knew would bring the ship to her doom, could he do this knowing how many would die? Or that he himself would never reach port alive?

What was history, but unfolding events? Couldn't events have unfolded in any other way? Why not let the Titanic survive, just this once? All the movies had her go down. He remembered one where the sober priest had gone down to the boiler room to save souls, and ended up dying. Why not change film history, too, while he was at it? An interesting line of inquiry.

Nevertheless, if the liner didn't sink, would his beloved Seaview be there in the future? Hard to say, but one thing was clear. No two vessels could have been more unalike than the Titanic and the Seaview! What had the two boats to do with one another? Both were big, not to mention grossly expensive and hard to supply, and that was it.

If the Titanic sank or didn't sink in the cold North Atlantic, how would that affect the Seaview or her crew? The admiral knew the answer to that before he had stated the question. Any change, no matter how slight, to the way things had gone before, and future events might just not happen at all, or happen so differently that the whole world and all future time changed. Maybe for the worse.

If—

"Begging your pardon, Captain," said a man at the admiral's elbow. "We just got another report of that iceberg sighting." Now it was a particular iceberg. A definite problem was shaping up. This situation was becoming grave. Did he say 'grave'?

"Give me the coordinates." The admiral bent to the task of reading them with Fourth Officer Boxhall, a thin man with a nervous pair of watery eyes. Dark and of a sloping forehead, Boxhall looked, in a word, consumptive. Luckily for him, he survived the sinking of the Titanic and was the first to tell Captain Rostron on the bridge of the Carpathia, the rescue ship, of the Titanic disaster.

Later in life, as an aged man, he died of simple poor health, made worse by his long night at the oars of Lifeboat 2. Joseph Groves Boxhall had earlier asked Captain Smith, Nelson knew, if everything was going to be alright, to which the Titanic captain replied, "The ship'll sink within an hour to an hour and a half."

"Keep on the same heading as before," said Nelson, now feeling the part of the 'captain.' "I'm going to be in my quarters."

"Should you really leave the bridge, sir?" asked Murdoch, confidentially moving over to stand next to the admiral. "I mean, sir, the crew's jumpy tonight."

They're jumpy! exclaimed the admiral, the victim of Pem's evil trick, in his own mind. What about me?

"I have one matter to attend to, and then I'll be back. Don't—ah—hit anything before I return."

Murdoch's face became ghastly white in the dim light of the nighttime bridge. "No, sir," he said, faltering back a step. "Wouldn't think of it, sir."

"Good man," said the admiral, hoping that if he found Mr. Pem, he could persuade him to take him back to the Seaview before he had to decide on changing history or not.

Back at his quarters, which he found with no trouble, Nelson looked at the captain's beautiful wall-clock, a priceless object constructed of mahogany and teak and gold. Ah, there was glamor in those days. Truly.

What the admiral saw on the clock's face made his heart stop beating for at least a full minute. He had to reach out and grab the back of the captain's desk chair before he fell. It was past 11 o'clock in the evening on the fatal night the Titanic hit the 'berg. He had fewer than thirty minutes left.

What did he hear, was that music playing in one of the salons? No way he could have heard that—he must have been imagining it from all the stories that told of how the Titanic's big parties continued while the ship plowed on to be wrecked.

"Mr. Pem! Pem!" the admiral called nervously into the air. He kept his voice moderately low, for fear of sending any 'listeners' outside his door into a tail spin.

Pem appeared, jolly as ever, like the rogue he was. He could laugh while the admiral sweated it out being the Titanic's captain! He could sit there in the captain's easy chair, and mincingly smile and smile, a dapper rattler.

"Yes, dear Admiral?" Pem suddenly looked concerned, but it was a fake, rattlesnake's concern. "You don't look well around the gills."

"I'm not, Pem. To be honest with you, I can't go through with this charade any longer. I'm not Smith. I couldn't make the same lame-brained mistakes he made that night! I won't wreck this ship! Did you hear that?"

"You're shouting so, Admiral, of course I heard you. Half the boat could hear you. I'm sure Lightoller and Murdoch on the bridge heard you—"

"Oh, Pem, shut up, will you? Try to be serious."

"I assure you I am, Admiral. I'm always serious where you're concerned." That oily smile again.

"In just a few moments, this ship will hit an iceberg, Pem. Maybe not you, but I'm going to die. Leaving that out of the equation, a lot of other people are going to die, too."

"Why, Admiral, you act as if I had caused the original sinking of the Titanic. I assure you I had been born only a few years before it happened."

"Don't mix me up, Pem. You know what I mean. We have to do something—I have to do it, to stop this boat from hitting that iceberg!"

"Admiral, your humanity becomes you, as usual. But consider, if you do alter this boat's course or change her speed, or do both in time to save 'er, then you'll be changing your precious history. What if I were to tell you that you can't save the boat without making some drastic changes to your own future?"

"What future? I'll die right here on the Titanic!" The admiral was getting a little past reason, Pem noted.

"But you would be born, Admiral Nelson, in two years' time. Your life would continue. Something else you must know, though."

The admiral ran his hand through his hair again—for the fortieth time that night. He did that when he was nervous at some quirk of the Seaview's or her crew, and usually had to keep reminding himself to stop it. Take up gum-chewing or nail-biting instead. He was afraid he was losing his hair.

"What's that?" he asked, knowing he would dread the answer.

"When I mentioned before that some drastic changes would occur to your own future life, I meant it, Admiral. I'm talking about Lee Crane."

"What about Lee Crane? He's not even here." No, thought the admiral, he's safe aboard the Seaview, probably asleep in his bunk. Lucky him.

"That's right. He's not here, and he won't be here—not ever."

"What are you babblin' about, Pem?"

"On earth, I mean. You see, my dear Nelson, someone is on this ship right now, a young man of German extraction who will live on to fight in the First World War if you prevent the Titanic from going down."

"So? A lot of Germans fought in that war," said the admiral, very snidely. "What's one more, more or less?"

"That's right, but this particular German will shoot Captain Crane's father and that will put a damper on the prospects of your good captain's—and friend's—ever existing."

"You're lying."

"I am?"

"You're saying if I save this boat, then a German on board lives, fights in the war, and kills Lee's, I mean Captain Crane's father?"

"Precisely. You do catch on so fast, Admiral."

"Pem. You're a big blowhard. Get me off this ship and nothing that shouldn't have happened will happen, or nothing that should happen, will—I don't know what I'm saying."

"Calm, Admiral. Calm. The ship has ten minutes to go. Don't you want to be up there with your crew?"

"Huh?"

"Your crew, they look up to you so."

"Yes, I'd better get up there. I just want to say, Pem, you've finally beaten me. A worthy opponent always deserves respect." The admiral made a move to the leather easy chair where Pem was sitting. He extended his hand.

"Why, Admiral," said Pem, rising and grinning broadly again. "I'm touched. You do respect me? You're not just saying that, hoping that I'll remit your death sentence on this ship?"

The admiral swallowed hard at those words, 'death sentence,' but came forward anyway, still with hand out. Pem switched the ubiquitous time device to his left hand in order to take Nelson's right. Nelson suddenly dove for the time device, overturning the chair with Pem in it, his gross little legs flying up in the air with Nelson on top of him.

Nelson struggled to stand, pulling Pem up by his coat lapels and flinging him back against one of the portholes of the cabin. Just as Nelson got a hand around the device, both men turned their attention to the sight of a huge block of ice drawing near. Suddenly there was a pounding on the 'captain's' door and Moody called in.

"Sir, begging your pardon. Come, quickly, the lookouts have spotted a big 'berg. We're running close to it, Captain."

"Admiral, there you go. Panic in the situation, but trust in you. How can you let the young officer down?"

Nelson's mind was a-whirl. He looked again and saw the sight that would have given even Horatio Nelson pause.

"I'm coming," he yelled, and started to take his hold off the time device in Pem's hands. "Alright, I'm coming," he added, more for Pem's benefit than Moody's at the door.

The admiral disengaged himself from Pem and turned away abruptly. Suddenly, he swung around again and landed a fist against Pem's jaw, knocking the portly man across over the upturned easy chair. As he tumbled to the floor in front of it, Pem's fingers depressed the winder on the old-fashioned watch. Several things happened at once. Not all of them were good for all people.

The true captain 'returned' to his quarters just as Moody frantically opened the door, checking to see that his 'captain' was indeed on his way. The admiral and Mr. Pem were transported back to the time device's last known coordinates, the admiral's cabin aboard the Seaview.

In the aftermath of hitting the iceberg, and losing a bunch of rivets, The Titanic sunk and more than 1,500 people lost their lives. Seven hundred and ten survived, picked up by the Carpathia a couple of hours later in several small lifeboats, a few of these boats under-filled.

Mr. Pem had a swollen jaw to go with his swollen ego. He didn't have enough power to transport himself, the admiral, and poor Captain Smith all over again—so he had to leave the Seaview rather a broken man.

"Are you telling us that you actually went back to the Titanic?" asked Lee, incredulous upon hearing the admiral's story.

The admiral had to admit, it was hard to make this stuff up.

"I did," he said, sipping his coffee in the observation nose of the Seaview, relaxing with his senior officers while the boat moved gracefully through the deep undersea waters. "I don't know if I would have been able to give those orders Smith gave that night. He wrecked his ship and lost all those lives, including his own.

"I'd like to think I would have had the courage, though, to go through with the sinking. Your father's life, too, Lee, was in the balance. But I don't know. Up there on the bridge, I could see the faces, hear the music, if only in my mind. I never met any of the passengers. Never had time. Some of them would have torn my heart out. Especially—"

Here Nelson stopped, thinking of the faces of children in steerage class, bright and giddy, eagerly looking forward to a new land. And their parents—

He looked up at Lee. "Could I have given them over to the sea?"

30

Thanks for reading!

Addenda:

1. A memorial plaque to James Pell Moody was placed in the Church of St. Martin on the Hill, Scarborough, England. It reads: "Be Thou Faithful Unto Death and I Will Give to Thee a Crown of Life."

2. Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic plied the waters for many years after the Titanic sank in the cold North Atlantic that night in April. 1912. Another ship in the Olympic class as well, the Britannic, hardly survived its first year afloat when she too went down "hard by the bow"—in only fifty-five minutes—after hitting a floating sea mine during the First World War. Having been refitted as a hospital ship in that war, the Britannic never carried a fare-paying passenger, and the Titanic never carried another one.