The Titanic Mission

by Dan Gutman

  By this time, the captain of the Titanic—Edward John Smith—had been awakened by the crew and told the ship had struck an iceberg. He didn’t know the extent of the damage yet, but he knew it was serious, and he didn’t waste a minute. Smith issued an order to call for help over the wireless radio, a new technology in 1912. Then he quickly put on his full captain’s uniform—brass buttons, gold lace stripes, black tie—and rushed to the bridge.

  Smith, who was sixty-two years old, with white hair and a neatly trimmed beard, was a dashing figure. He had been a British Naval Reserve captain for twenty-five years. He was planning to retire after the Titanic’s maiden voyage. So much for that idea.

  Luke, Julia, Isabel, and David ran down the hallway and climbed the first flight of stairs they saw, turning around to make sure the steward wasn’t chasing them. David’s watch was broken, of course, and all four of them had lost track of the time while they were locked up.

  “I thought you said I wouldn’t have to run!” Isabel shouted as she struggled to make her way up the steps in her long dress.

  “Hurry! We’ve got to get up on deck!” Luke shouted back.

  “I hope we can still make it to the meeting spot in time,” Julia said.

  “Is the camera ready?” David asked Luke. “Are you ready to take the shot?”

  “I’m ready!” Luke called back, out of breath now.

  As they passed one of the starboard decks on the stairs, they stopped for a moment. There were big chunks of ice scattered across the floor. Obviously, they had been chipped off the iceberg as it went by. A group of young boys were kicking them around like they were soccer balls. A couple of teenagers were making snowballs out of the ice chunks and throwing them at each other.

  “Shut the dampers!” one of the crew members hollered through a megaphone. “Draw the fires!”

  When the Flashback Four finally got up to the main deck, members of the crew were removing the canvas covers from the lifeboats. They worked quickly but quietly, as if they didn’t want the passengers to know what they were doing.

  “What’s going on?” an elderly gentleman wearing a bowler hat asked one of the crew members.

  “This is just a precaution, sir,” he was told. “Nothing to concern yourself about.”

  Isabel desperately wanted to tell the man, “Don’t believe him! The ship is going to sink! Make sure you get into a lifeboat! Save yourself!”

  But she didn’t. The last time they tried telling the truth about what was going to happen, they were locked up and left to die.

  There were more people up on deck now than earlier. Word of the collision had passed around the ship like a game of telephone. Everybody knew that something had happened involving an iceberg, but nobody knew exactly what. Smiling gawkers poured out of the stairways and elevators to see what all the fuss was about. Some of them were carrying binoculars. It was like they were going on a whale-watching expedition.

  “Ooh, I’ve never seen an iceberg before!” an old lady told her friend excitedly.

  “Neither have I.”

  And they never would see one. The iceberg that had sideswiped the Titanic was already half a mile behind the ship. It was huge, but it was too dark to see it on a moonless night—which is one reason why Titanic had collided with it in the first place. If the moon had been full, the lookouts would have seen the iceberg from much farther away, and maybe the ship could have been steered around it.

  To the Flashback Four, the amazing thing was that everything on deck seemed so . . . normal. People weren’t running around hysterically or tearfully hugging their children one last time. They had no idea that the ship was going to sink. Everybody was just laughing, drinking, and chatting as they strolled the deck or looked out over the rail trying to catch a glimpse of the iceberg.

  “I feel like we should do something,” Isabel told the others, “or tell somebody.”

  “What’s the point?” David asked. “There’s nothing we can do now. It’s too late to prevent the ship from hitting the iceberg. The damage is done.”

  “And if we start telling them what’s going to happen next,” Luke added, “they might lock us up for good this time.”

  “Then we need to take the photo,” Julia suggested. “At least Miss Z can’t accuse us of coming home without getting the shot.”

  “Take a photo of what?” David asked. “The ship isn’t even tilted in the water yet. Miss Z specifically told us to take a picture of the Titanic as it’s sinking.”

  “It is sinking!” Julia replied. “But none of these people know it yet.”

  “What if it sinks really suddenly?” Isabel asked. “It could go under at any moment. Then we’re dead unless we’re at the meeting spot. We don’t even have life preservers. I’m going to text Miss Z.”

  She pulled out the TTT and typed this simple message . . .

  HIT BERG

  A minute or so later, this response came back . . .

  PERFECT

  Isabel texted back . . .

  EVERYTHING LOOKS NORMAL. SHIP DOES NOT LOOK LIKE IT’S SINKING.

  Miss Z replied . . .

  IT WILL. IT WILL TAKE A WHILE FOR THE HULL TO FILL WITH WATER. WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?

  A man was walking by briskly with a little dog on a leash. Isabel ran over to him.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Can you please tell me the hour?”

  “Certainly,” the man replied, taking out his pocket watch. “It’s fifteen minutes past midnight.”

  Isabel texted, IT’S 12:15.

  Miss Z replied, RELAX. U HAVE PLENTY OF TIME. SHIP GOES UNDER AT 2:20.

  Less than two hours. Not a lot of time, really. A great blast of steam blew out one of Titanic’s enormous funnels. Water had swamped one of the ship’s boilers.

  “Relax, she says,” muttered Isabel. “How can I relax when I know what’s going to happen?”

  “It’s all good,” David said. “There’s nothing we can do but wait. Then we’ll take the picture and get out of here.”

  Water poured in through the lower part of the Titanic, of course, below the water line. So it was the lowest levels of the ship that were flooding first. Coincidentally, that’s where the poorest passengers and crew members were.

  Laborers—the stokers and greasers who worked in the engine room—would be the first to die. They had no escape route.

  Above them was the part of the ship that was called “steerage.” It was filled with hundreds of immigrants who had left England, Ireland, and other countries to find new hope for a better life in America. Many of them saved money all their lives to afford the thirty-five-dollar ticket to cross the ocean. Some of them saw a toilet for the first time on the Titanic.

  The steerage class was pretty much treated like cattle. Iron gates prevented those people from mixing with the first-class passengers. The gates also prevented them from escaping the water, which had already covered the floor of their deck and was rising fast. People in steerage were starting to panic.

  But up on the top deck, where the wealthy had paid $430 for their tickets, it was like any other night on a cruise ship. People were just milling around, chatting and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening.

  The Flashback Four were tired, and it was late. With nothing to do but wait for the inevitable, they wandered into the first-class dining lounge, which extended across the full width of the ship, to get out of the cold and sit down for a while.

  The lounge was opulent, with deep pile carpets and white tablecloths. The room was decorated with crystal chandeliers, silk upholstered chairs, elegant curtains, walnut wood paneling, and potted palm trees. And lots of rich people.

  “I feel like I should be wearing a tuxedo or something,” Luke said, pulling his RMS Titanic bathrobe around him.

  “You look fine,” Julia told him. “Rich people are allowed to walk around in public wearing bathrobes. That just makes them a little eccentric. When poor people walk around in bathrobes, that means they’re crazy.”

&n
bsp; The lounge was connected to Café Parisien, one of the five restaurants on board. Luke picked up a menu that had been left on the table. Oysters . . . saute of chicken Lyonnaise . . . roast squab . . . pâté de foie gras. He had never even heard of most of the foods before.

  “People actually eat this stuff?” he asked.

  “I’m getting hungry,” Julia said. “We should have brought protein bars or something with us.”

  “I’d eat anything at this point,” David said.

  There was a four-piece band in a corner of the lounge. They picked up their instruments and began playing a popular song of the era, “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” Moments later a waiter came over, carrying a little note pad and pencil in his hands.

  “May I help you?” he asked in a British accent.

  The kids glanced at each other. None of them had any money.

  “Uh, no thanks,” Isabel told the waiter. “Would it be okay if we just hung out here for a while?”

  “Feel free to dangle from the ceiling if you’d like,” the waiter replied, just a little snootily. Then he walked away.

  A well-dressed young couple came in and sat down at the table to the right. The woman took out a cigarette and her husband reached over to light it for her, just like in the old movies. The Flashback Four watched with curiosity and some amount of disgust. None of them had ever seen anyone smoke indoors before. Isabel coughed.

  “Isn’t this exciting, darling?” the woman said, blowing a smoke ring.

  “What is?” her husband asked. He was distracted, snapping his fingers in an effort to get the attention of the waiter.

  “The iceberg, silly!” she replied. “We apparently bumped against it. Our honeymoon has been such a dead bore. But now I’ll have a story to tell the girls when we get to New York.”

  “That’s for sure,” Isabel whispered, coughing again from the smoke.

  The rest of the Flashback Four kept their mouths shut, flashing nervous looks back and forth. Finally, the waiter came over to the couple’s table.

  “My good man,” the husband said, “bring us a bottle of your finest wine, will you? And fetch me a piece of ice from that iceberg we bumped. We can put it in our drinks.”

  “Very good, sir,” the waiter said before leaving.

  “What a marvelous idea, darling!” said the woman. “We’ll toast the iceberg.”

  The Flashback Four rolled their eyes and tried not to laugh.

  “These people are oblivious,” whispered Isabel.

  “What does that mean?” Luke asked.

  “It means they have no idea what’s about to hit them.”

  The band finished playing the song and immediately launched into a jaunty version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” When the waiter arrived with a bottle of wine and glasses full of ice, the young couple took them outside so they could propose a toast to the iceberg out on the deck.

  Their table stayed vacant for a few minutes, until another couple approached. The Flashback Four had to look at the man for a few seconds until one by one they realized he had a familiar face.

  It was John Jacob Astor IV.

  “Run!” David said, getting up from his seat to bolt out of there.

  Astor held up his hand. He had a smile on his face.

  “Please,” he said, “sit down. Relax. I mean you no harm. In fact, I admire the resourcefulness you displayed to get out of that, shall I say, predicament you were in. We need more young people like that. I should hire you to work for my company. I don’t believe I caught your names when we first met.”

  “Isabel.”

  “Julia.”

  “Luke.”

  “David.”

  Each one shook the famous man’s hand.

  This time Astor was not with his entourage or bodyguards. He was with his wife. She was only nineteen years old, and noticeably pregnant. They were coming home after their honeymoon in Europe and Egypt.

  “And this lovely lady is my bride, Madeleine,” Astor said.

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” she said, looking totally bored.

  The waiter rushed over, bowing to Astor as if he was the king of England. Astor told him they were not hungry and just wanted to sit for a while. Then he leaned over to the Flashback Four.

  “Tell me,” he whispered, “how did you know? About the iceberg, I mean.”

  “Do you want to know the truth?” David asked.

  “The whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Astor replied, raising his right hand.

  “Okay,” David said. “Here’s what happened . . .”

  He proceeded to tell Astor and his wife the story of how Miss Z created the Board to send people through time, and how they had been recruited to be the Flashback Four. Madeleine was disinterested, but Astor hung on every word, especially when Luke got to the part about the Titanic sinking.

  “Fascinating!” he said when David had finished. “Mind you, I don’t believe a word of it. But you tell a marvelous tale! This ship is unsinkable, young man. Everyone knows that.”

  “Wanna bet?” David asked.

  “I’d wager two thousand dollars that your story is fabricated,” Astor replied. “But I doubt you have the funds to make a bet.”

  “Well, you’re right about that,” David admitted.

  “Please don’t tell that tale to the other passengers,” Astor whispered. “You don’t want to set off a panic.”

  He turned away from the Flashback Four to whisper a few sweet nothings in the ear of his young bride. But curiosity must have gotten the better of him, because a minute later he turned back.

  “Tell me something,” he said to David. “You claim you can predict what’s going to happen before it happens. So if you know so much, can you tell me who’s going to win the World Series this year?”

  “Uhh . . .”

  David looked at him blankly. So did the girls. David tried to come up with reasons why he didn’t know the winner of the 1912 World Series. That was more than a hundred years ago, in his world. How could he possibly be expected to know?

  “If you truly come from the future,” said Astor, “you should know who won the World Series, am I right?”

  “I’m not really a baseball fan,” said Julia.

  “Can we go now, sweetie?” Astor’s wife asked impatiently. “I’m cold.”

  Suddenly Luke stood up triumphantly. “The Red Sox won it!” he said, holding up his hand to get a high five from David.

  Luke was right. Every serious Red Sox fan knows that Boston was a baseball powerhouse during this era, winning the World Series in 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918. After that came the long dry spell when they didn’t win a championship again until 2004.

  “The Sox are gonna beat the Giants four games to three,” Luke told Astor. “Smoky Joe Wood’s gonna win two games. And that last game at Fenway Park is gonna go into extra innings.”

  “You don’t say?” Astor said, impressed. “You seem pretty sure of yourself.”

  “Oh, you can bet on it, Mr. Astor,” Luke told him. “Take it to the bank. Go make yourself another fortune.”

  “I just might do that,” Astor whispered. Then he pulled out his wallet, peeled off a bill and pressed it into Luke’s hand. “For now, we must take our leave.”

  “It was nice meeting you,” Isabel said as Astor and his wife got up.

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Astor.

  As soon as they were gone, David, Julia, and Isabel were all over Luke.

  “Why’d you tell him all that stuff about the World Series, dude?” David said.

  “Now he’s gonna bet on the Red Sox to win,” Isabel said. “He’s gonna make millions!”

  “We’re not supposed to change history, remember?” added Julia.

  “I’m not changing history,” Luke explained. “He’s not going to be betting on anybody. In a couple of hours, he’s going to be dead. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Luke opened up the bill that Astor had slipped into his hand. It was
a hundred dollars.

  “Whoa!” Isabel exclaimed. “A hundred bucks?”

  “Are you kidding me?” said David.

  “He gave you a C-note?” asked Julia. “What are you going to do with it?”

  Luke thought about it for a moment. Then he stood up.

  “Waiter!” Luke called, snapping his fingers.

  The waiter came over. He still had that snooty look on his face.

  “I thought you just wanted to . . . hang around,” he said.

  “We changed our minds,” Luke told him, waving the bill in the air. “What can we order for a hundred dollars?”

  The waiter examined the bill, as if he didn’t think it could possibly be real.

  “For a hundred dollars,” he finally said, “you can order everything on the menu.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll have,” Luke said. “Bring us everything on the menu, my good man! And make it snappy. My friends are very hungry.”

  “Very good, sir,” the waiter said, bowing deeply.

  It wasn’t long before he and a few other waiters were back, carrying big platters full of food. The Flashback Four feasted on lobster thermidor, quail’s eggs in aspic with caviar, poached salmon with dilled mousseline sauce, and other fancy fare that rich people enjoyed. They ate with silver-plated cutlery and drank from cut crystal glassware.

  The best part was that there was still enough money left over to get dessert, so the kids ordered raspberry white chocolate mousse, flambéd vanilla-poached pears with apricot sauce, Sicilian ricotta cheescake, and just to be on the safe side, various puddings and French ice cream.

  “This is amazing,” Julia said, stuffing her face.

  “I could get used to this,” added Isabel.

  For a brief moment, they were able to forget they were on a ship that would very shortly be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. When the meal was over, David could barely move back from the table.

  “This is the best meal I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

  The sumptuous feast ended when a steward burst into the lounge with a megaphone.