Chapter 19
Five hours.
They had five hours left.
After he’d ended the call, Will stared at the cabin’s wall, waiting for his brain to work through the shock.
Think. Think.
Reason finally fought its way to the surface, but it offered him no solace—only a cruel, cold realization.
He couldn’t go back; he couldn’t fix anything.
All he had was the here and now, and certain doom coming at midnight.
If there was a chance to cheat his way out of this situation, Emily would’ve been the first person to mention it.
He closed his eyes and clenched his fists.
For Emily, it was easy—not from an emotional perspective, but from a simple matter of time separation.
Not only did she have as long as she wanted to study and prepare; for her, the ship had gone down over a century ago.
A clear, established event, like her own birth.
But for Will, the ship was still here, fearlessly trudging through the night. They were all still here. And no matter what Emily’s history books or movies said, he had to try. He had to do something. Even if he only had five hours.
Should he go find his family? Prepare them for the inevitable? But he still had time and opportunities to prevent the inevitable. If he could do that, all would be well, and Sylvia and the children would never need to know. They’d never feel the panic he was feeling.
He got up and started walking, out to the hallway, toward the staircase, before he finally decided on the course of action and reoriented himself.
He’d learned from time travel that adjustments to events were a finicky thing—easier to do in advance than to fix in retrospect and much easier to make in small measures rather than big swings.
There were the obvious solutions for the ship—it stopping right now, for example—but Will couldn’t see how he could do that.
A passenger emergency would propel them forward, if anything, and he could hardly sabotage the boilers to make the ship stop.
No, he had to start from the easiest, least intrusive option.
He couldn’t stop the ship, but he could make sure help would be there when they needed it.
He headed up the stairs to the boat deck.
The wireless. Emily had said help wouldn’t come in time because the other ships were too far away or didn’t hear the signal, like the Californian.
So all he had to do was make up a business emergency that would require sending a wireless to the Californian and assure their operator wouldn’t leave for the night until the Titanic sent out the distress signal.
Nerves gathered in his stomach and reached up, contracting his lungs.
He’d have to lie and cheat, and annoy some people in the process, but he had to do it.
He squared his shoulders, ran through the lines he’d say to the operator in his head, and knocked on the door of the Marconi room.
After no response, he tried again, then pried the door open.
The main room was empty. By the wall, the operating table was left in disarray. The operator’s headphones lay abandoned in front of the long, metallic cylinder of the emergency transmitter, with stacks of notes left nearby, held down by a paperweight.
Panic rose in Will’s throat for a moment—was he somehow too late already?
—but noises wafted in from the adjoining room.
He gently pushed in the door, left ajar, and found the two operators, Phillips and Bride, sitting on the floor, tinkering with an open machinery box, overcrowding the already small, tightly packed room.
This room held most of the machinery used to operate the wireless.
On their earlier visit, Bride even allowed Tristan to take a peek in here, and Tristan ooh-ed and aah-ed as he observed the bright blue sparks from the rotary spark discharger.
The bulky motor generator set, with a large wooden box to the side, took about a third of the floor.
Above it was a regulator panel full of switches and dial gauges.
Brass wires hung from the walls, reaching across the room.
To most, it would look terrifying, if not dangerous; to Will, it was more like a standard day at the office.
Phillips looked up as Will entered. “Mr. Marshall?”
“I …” the surprising sight almost made him forget his prepared lie. “I need to send an urgent message to the Californian.”
“Sorry, you’re out of luck. Wireless has broken.”
The ball of nerves sank back into the bottom of his stomach. Five hours. “How?”
“No idea,” Bride said. “Might be too many messages overwhelming it. We’ve been swamped with passenger messages and ice warnings all day. But at least Jack doesn’t need to listen to the Californian’s operator screeching into his ear anymore, huh?” He lightly punched his friend in the shoulder.
Phillips smiled and shook his head.
“Anyway, we think it might be the condenser,” Bride continued. “We’re working on fixing it.”
“I thought only certified technicians were allowed to do repairs?”
“Yes, sir.” Phillips turned his attention back to the box.
Will thought in silence for a moment. “Would you like a hand?”
“You don’t have a license, do you?” Phillips asked.
“Not for this one, unfortunately.”
Phillips weighed his head. “Well, you’ll fit right in, then. Sit down.”
Will did, and they got to work.
“You filthy bastard. Got you.” Phillips knocked on the open lid of the transformer box. After trying everything they could with the condenser—with no success—they figured the problem must lie elsewhere.
“The insulation on the wire is burned through,” Phillips said. “Came in contact with the casing, caused a short.”
“Then we only need to re-insulate it,” Will said.
“Mm-hmm. Tape?” Phillips turned to Bride, who nodded and left the room, returning shortly with a roll of insulating tape. Phillips worked swiftly and efficiently and fixed the problem in minutes.
“Let’s get back on track, then.” He sat down behind the operating table and put on the headphones. “Would you mind waiting a bit, Mr. Marshall? I have a stack of messages to transmit first, now that Cape Race is in range.”
Will’s first instinct was to say, “Of course, take your time,” before he remembered time was the one thing they didn’t have, and he couldn’t afford to be polite. “It really is urgent,” he said instead.
Phillips wavered.
“I’ll pay you double,” Will tried. Wireless, as incredible as it was, wasn’t profitable for the ships unless they charged the affluent passengers, eager to boast to their friends by sending a message from the middle of the ocean.
“Boss is going to be happy,” Bride said.
Phillips slumped his shoulders. “Fine.” He turned to the transmitter and put his hand on the Morse button. “Message?”
“Tell them to stay on the line for a few more hours. I’ll have an important message regarding their cargo, from England, but I need to wait for my contact to deliver me the information.”
Phillips raised an eyebrow, but then started transmitting, anyway. Will clenched his hands in his pockets, wiping off the sweat. It was an awful excuse, but if it worked, that’s all it had to do.
“They’re not responding,” Phillips said.
“Try again. Please.”
“Sir …”
“Triple.”
Phillips sighed and tried again. “Nothing. Might be the operator has turned in for the night. It is late, after all.”
“It’s not that …” For the first time since they’d started to repair the wireless, Will glanced at the clock on the wall.
Half to midnight.
They were too late.
“I need to go,” he threw out as he was already halfway through the door, and raced through the hallway toward the nearest deck exit. His carefully curated list of possibilities, all the subtle changes he could try, burned in front of his eyes.
All the options, all their hope, gone.
He burst out on the deck, his rapid breath condensing in the chilly night air. The bridge was around the corner; he took to running, passing the firmly lodged, covered lifeboats, and crashed into the wheelhouse, stopping before any of the officers could react to him.
“Iceberg,” he said.
“Sir,” said one of the officers, “you’re not allowed in here.”
“Iceberg warnings. Did you get a warning?”
“All day, yes,” said another officer, nursing a cup of hot tea. “Please, if you might remove yourself from—”
“No, no, you don’t understand.” Will walked past the first officer, blocking his view, and addressed the helmsman. “There’s one right out there. An iceberg. We’re headed—”
“We know about the ice field,” the tea officer responded. “There’s no need to worry. Other ships, much less advanced, have passed it. Why don’t you turn in for the night …”
“No!” How could he make them understand? They’d think he was paranoid.
“Kinsley,” the tea officer said to the first one with a small nod.
Kinsley grabbed Will by the arm and started dragging him out. “Come, sir. As you’ve heard, there’s no danger.”
Will shook off his grasp. “We are in the middle of an ice—”
“Sir!” Kinsley grabbed him again and nodded his head at another officer, who also came to help, securing Will on the other side. “You need to leave.”
“Turn the ship to the left,” Will yelled past Kinsley’s shoulders. “You still have time! Turn it now!”
“Sir, if you don’t calm down, I’ll have to take you to the hospital,” Kinsley said. “And you’ll spend the night in the padded room. Do you understand?”
Will finally stopped resisting. Kinsley’s lowered eyebrows and sharp, icy blue gaze made it clear that wasn’t an empty threat.
He couldn’t leave Sylvia and the children alone. Not after he’d failed in all his other plans.
“Understood. I’m leaving.” He shook off the two officers—or they let him go, now that he’d stopped being a nuisance. “I apologize for the disturbance.”
“Take a moment and relax, yes?” The officer next to Kinsley said.
Will only nodded. The officers waited as if to make sure he wasn’t going to have another outburst, then headed back to the wheelhouse, murmuring about paranoid passengers on the way.
He was left alone, but instead of heading back to the cabin, Will took the stairs down to the promenade deck.
Rubbernecking—he’d only heard it applied to tourists, but Emily ascribed it to accident onlookers as well, when she once vented about being stuck in traffic—the irresistible, morbid curiosity to look at a horrible thing that’s happened.
And he knew one was about to happen.
With a bated breath, he waited. The night was calm, peaceful—but also pitch black.
Along the sky, thousands, millions of stars spread, concentrated along the silvery belt of the Milky Way.
He’d never seen this many stars, not even when he was little and he sneaked out into the vineyards way past his bedtime so he could look up and dream about the things he wanted to do and be.
But no moon shone, and it made the ocean a big, black void, indistinguishable from the horizon.
It seemed incredible, unbelievable, that their doom could be right out there.
In fact, as Will stood on the deck and the ship gently swayed forward and stars passed over his head and nothing stirred—not on deck, not out there—he believed, for a moment, that Emily had simply made a mistake.
They were fine. Everything would be fine.
Perhaps the officers listened to him and adjusted the ship’s direction.
Perhaps the iceberg was slightly off. They would’ve seen it by now.
It would’ve happened by now.
He closed his eyes and breathed, not minding the cold biting his cheeks. Surely, it was over. They were safe.
And then a bell rang in the distance. Not down the ship—up, in the crow’s nest. The faint ringing of the telephone came from the deck above him, leading to a commotion on the bridge.
The ship started turning left, hard.
His heartbeat picked up, jumping into his throat, as he ran to the railing and bent over, straining his eyes to discern anything on the horizon.
A straight, blurry stripe where the stars dipped into the ocean—and in the middle of it, a wiggle, as if the artist painting the horizon had his hand shake and ruined the perfect line.
As the ship moved ahead—slowing down, but turning still—the wiggle grew larger, biting into the starry sky, until it turned into a dark mass, obscuring the right side of the ocean.
The iceberg rose ahead of them, fast traveling toward the starboard side. But they were turning. They were going to pass it. They had to.
Will closed his eyes. Turn. Turn. Turn. And he waited. A second, five, ten, not daring to look, as if not looking would make the iceberg pass easier. He hadn’t frozen time, but it felt all the same, the seconds dragging on, echoing in the silence.
Silence.
And then a low moan of steel being ripped asunder.
Titanic had struck the iceberg.