The Titanic Mission

by Dan Gutman

  “Oh come on,” Isabel said. “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

  “No, listen!” Julia said excitedly. “Remember Miss Z told us that pants didn’t have zippers in 1912? We could invent the first zipper! Soon they’ll be putting them on pants, jackets, backpacks, suitcases, everything! We’ll make a fortune, you guys!”

  In fact, Julia was absolutely right. While the first primitive zipper was invented long before 1912, the modern zipper was perfected by a Swedish American engineer named Gideon Sundback in December of 1913. He patented it in 1917. It wasn’t called a zipper until 1923.

  “So your brilliant plan is for us to invent the zipper?” David asked.

  “Yeah, why not?” said Julia.

  “Good luck with that,” said David.

  It took three days for the Carpathia to get to New York City. The Flashback Four spent most of that time wandering around the deck, brainstorming other products they could invent and planning for their future.

  Nobody would know them in New York. They had no identification, but they had a thousand dollars. As a group, they agreed to pretend they were orphans who had lost their parents on the Titanic. The first thing they would need to do would be to find a place to stay.

  They talked about whether or not they should go to school in New York. Not all twelve-year-old kids went to school in those days. If the zipper idea didn’t work out, they could always get jobs, they agreed. The first federal child labor law wasn’t passed until 1916.

  There was a bustle of excitement and anticipation when one of the other passengers spotted the first glimpse of land.

  “It’s New York City!” somebody shouted.

  Word got passed around quickly and all the passengers rushed to the rail.

  “I went to New York on a trip with my family when I was a little kid,” David told the others as they squinted their eyes to see. “We went up to the top of the Empire State Building. And I had a hot dog on the street. That’s all I remember.”

  “I don’t think the Empire State Building was even built in 1912,” Isabel said.

  She was right. It would be nineteen years before the classic skyscraper would be completed. The New York skyline as they knew it didn’t exist yet. In 1912, the tallest structure in the world was—believe it or not—the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They would be arriving to a different world.

  “Look!” Julia suddenly shouted. “I see it!”

  There it was, one of the most famous images in the world—the Statue of Liberty, holding her torch high in the sky. It was a beautiful thing.

  A hush fell over the passengers at the rail of the Carpathia. Luke turned around to see the other passengers looking at it. Their eyes were filled with hope. Many of them had come to America for the freedom it offered. He and his friends would have freedom too—maybe more freedom than they really wanted.

  It was raining slightly when the ship approached New York Harbor. Thanks to the recent invention of the wireless, the newspapers had been alerted about what happened to the Titanic. So the whole world knew about it. As a result, the waters around Pier 54 were swarming with rowboats full of reporters hoping to get exclusive interviews with the survivors.

  “Did you see the iceberg?” one of them shouted through a megaphone.

  “What happened to Mr. Astor?” asked another. “Is it true that he is dead?”

  “Did you see people drowning?”

  Photographers in the boats were jockeying for position to take the pictures that would appear in all the newspapers the next day. They fired off dozens of blinding magnesium flashes.

  “Horrid vultures,” one of the passengers grumbled. “Just horrid.”

  The sight of all those photographers gave Julia another idea.

  “Y’know,” she whispered to Luke, “I bet we could make a fortune selling that picture you took of the Titanic.”

  “We could,” he replied, “if there was a way to get it out of the camera.”

  “Oh yeah,” Julia said, disappointed. There were no digital cameras in 1912. There was no digital anything in 1912.

  The newspapers would report that there were thirty thousand people waiting to greet the Carpathia as it docked at Pier 54. That may have been an exaggeration, but the place was jammed. People were everywhere, waving, shouting, and crying. American flags were flying at half-mast to mourn the Titanic passengers who had lost their lives.

  “I can’t wait to see Mommy and Daddy,” said a little girl on the Carpathia as she scanned the faces of the people below.

  “We will start a new life in America,” a Bulgarian man told his family.

  “So will we,” mumbled Julia.

  Luke had been quiet as the ship pulled into New York Harbor. An idea had been bubbling up in his head, but he was reluctant to mention it until he had thought it through. Finally, as ropes were being tied to secure Carpathia to the pier, he decided to share it with the others.

  “Guys,” he said with excitement in his eyes, “I just got a great idea!”

  “You’re just trying to cheer us up, man,” David replied. “I know you.”

  “No, listen,” Luke said. “It just hit me. Miss Z is going to be down there with all those people.”

  “What?” said Isabel.

  “She’s down there!” Luke insisted. “She has to be.”

  “What do you mean?” asked David. “That makes no sense at all.”

  “Think about it,” Luke told them. “She was texting us with the TTT, and suddenly it stopped working, right? She doesn’t know it fell into the water. But when we stopped communicating, she must have figured we either went down with the Titanic or we got into a lifeboat, right? So put yourself in her shoes. She’s going to try to bring us back. What would you do?”

  “I’d go to New York,” David replied.

  “Right!” Luke said. “But not New York in the twenty-first century. That wouldn’t do any good. She had to go to New York in 1912.”

  “So she’d use the Board to send herself here!” shouted Isabel. “Then she could use it to bring us back home!”

  “Exactly!”

  “But she told us she can’t send us to the same place twice,” Julia said. “Remember?”

  “It’s not the same place!” Luke told Julia. “She sent us to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean the first time. And that was four days ago.”

  “Luke is right!” Isabel exclaimed. “She’s going to be there! We’re going to be rescued!”

  All four members of the Flashback Four were suddenly filled with hope as they looked over the railing to search the crowd below. There were thousands of faces down there.

  “How will we find Miss Z?” asked Julia.

  “We won’t have to,” Luke assured her. “She’ll find us.”

  The gangplank was lowered and the passengers began lining up to get off the ship. First, a few people who needed medical attention were carried off in stretchers. Finally the line began to move forward and the Flashback Four made their way down the long gangplank.

  Lists of the Titanic’s survivors had already appeared in the newspapers, but they were incomplete. Many of the people waiting at the dock had no idea whether their loved ones were alive or not. So when they finally saw their brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles coming off the Carpathia, there was a huge outpouring of emotion. Entire families broke down in tears of happiness as they were reunited with loved ones.

  As they walked down the gangplank, the Flashback Four scanned the sea of faces, looking for Miss Z.

  “Is that her?” Isabel said excitedly, pointing to a lady sitting in a wheelchair.

  “Nah, too old,” said David.

  “Miss Z might have sent somebody else to come get us,” suggested Luke. “That would make sense.”

  “Maybe she sent Mrs. Vader,” said Julia. “Keep an eye out for her.”

  “It could be anybody here,” David said.

  They reached the end of the gangplank and stepped onto solid ground for the first time in four days.
The dock was filled with people, making it hard to move. The Flashback Four joined hands so they would not be separated. They made their way to one side, where it wasn’t so crowded.

  “Miss Z will be able to find us more easily after some of these people go home,” Isabel said.

  It had stopped raining. The Flashback Four continued to watch the crowd. Old-time cars spewing exhaust came and left the streets around Pier 54, taking passengers away. Some people got picked up by a horse and buggy. An hour went by.

  “She must be here somewhere,” Isabel said, continuing to scan the crowd left and right.

  “Maybe she got caught in traffic,” suggested Julia.

  “There’s no traffic!” David said, rolling his eyes. “She’s using the Board to get here, remember?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Another hour passed. Every time a stranger walked in their direction and made eye contact, the Flashback Four got excited, thinking it could be the person who was coming to pick them up. But the person always walked away, going to greet somebody else.

  Hopes were starting to fade.

  By around four o’clock in the afternoon, the crowd had thinned out. Almost all of the passengers had been picked up. The reporters and photographers had left to go file their stories for the morning papers. The sun was dipping down in the sky. Soon it would be dark out.

  “Where is she?” Luke asked impatiently as he paced back and forth.

  A park bench on the dock was empty, so Luke, Isabel, Julia, and David went over and sat on it.

  “Maybe she forgot about us,” David said, his shoulders drooping.

  “She didn’t forget,” Luke replied.

  “Maybe she just doesn’t care what happens to us,” Isabel said sadly. “Maybe she’s just not coming. I knew this whole thing was a mistake from the beginning.”

  Even Luke, always the optimist, didn’t argue the point.

  As the last of the other passengers left the dock with their families, Luke, David, Isabel, and Julia sat silently on the bench looking out at the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and wondered what their future would be.

  EPILOGUE

  WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE FLASHBACK FOUR? Will they ever be picked up and returned to Boston in the present day? Or will they live the rest of their lives a century in the past? And most importantly, will they invent the zipper?

  You’ll have to wait for the next Flashback Four adventure to find out.

  FACTS & FICTIONS

  Everything in this book is true, except for the stuff I made up. It’s only fair to tell you which is which.

  First, the made-up stuff. The Flashback Four, Miss Z, and Mrs. Vader do not exist. There’s no such thing as a smartboard that enables people to travel through time. At least not yet.

  The Titanic, of course, did exist. Lots of ships have sunk throughout history, and some suffered more casualties. But none was as famous as the Titanic.

  People who grew up during this millennium remember September 11. People who grew up in the 1960s remember the Kennedy assassination. People who grew up in the 1940s remember Pearl Harbor. And people who were growing up in 1912 would always remember where they were when they heard the Titanic had sunk.

  Just about everything in this book about the Titanic—the names, dates, times, locations, statistics—is true. I did the research by reading many of the hundreds of books that have been written on the subject. Two were especially helpful: A Night to Remember by Walter Lord and The Story of the Titanic as Told by Its Survivors by Jack Winocour. If you’re fascinated by the Titanic—as so many people are—there’s lots more information about it. Go to your local library. Google it. There’s tons of stuff online.

  And of course, watch the 1997 movie Titanic if you haven’t already seen it. By the way, it cost more money to make that movie than it cost to build the original ship!

  Part of the story of the Titanic that did not fit in this book was what happened after the tragedy was over. An investigation was held, and as a result many things were done to make ships safer. They were built with double hulls and bigger bulkheads. They were required to have wireless communication equipment. The International Conference on the Safety of Life at Sea created a system to observe and track the path of icebergs. And of course, ships were required to carry enough lifeboats to hold all the passengers and crew.

  Today, some cruise ships are twice the size of Titanic, and they’re much safer.

  A lot of people are to blame for the tragedy of the Titanic, but nobody was ever arrested or jailed for it. It was never determined who made the decision to use iron rivets instead of steel, or who decided sixteen lifeboats was enough, or who misplaced the ship’s only pair of binoculars.

  Captain Smith went down with the ship, and his body was never found.

  The lookout who first spotted the iceberg seconds before the collision actually survived. His name was Frederick Fleet. He would commit suicide, but that was many years later (1965), and it appeared to have nothing to do with the Titanic tragedy.

  John Jacob Astor’s body was one of the 306 found floating in the water after Titanic went under. The initials on his shirt collar, his jewelry, and $2,440 in his pocket were used to identify him. His young wife, Madeleine survived, and gave birth to a son four months later. She named him John Jacob. Madeleine would have inherited five million dollars if she had remained single, but she gave it up when she fell in love with a childhood friend and married him. She had two more children and died from a heart ailment in 1940 at age forty-six. John Jacob died in 1992.

  Isidor Straus’s body was recovered, but his loving wife, Ida, was never found.

  For decades after it went under, treasure hunters searched for the wreck of the Titanic. It sat undisturbed on the ocean floor for seventy-three years. Then, on September 1, 1985, oceanographer Bob Ballard finally discovered it—ten miles from where it had been thought to be. It was Ballard who confirmed what some witnesses had reported—that the Titanic had broken into two pieces before it sank.

  Most people don’t know that the Carpathia, the ship that rushed to rescue the Titanic survivors, also met with a sad ending. In July of 1918, near the end of World War I, it was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. For more than eighty years, it also sat undiscovered at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Then, in 2000, it was discovered, 120 miles west of Ireland.

  Now the story of the Titanic is beginning to fade from memory. In 2009, the last survivor of the ship passed away. Her name was Millvina Dean. She was nine weeks old when the Titanic sank, and ninety-seven when she died.

  But the sad story of the Titanic continues to capture our imaginations, and every few years it comes back for the next generation to find, and to remind us of the limits of technology and the power of Mother Nature.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Courtesy of Dan Gutman

  DAN GUTMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the Genius Files series. He is also the author of the Baseball Card Adventure series, which has sold more than 1.5 million copies around the world, and the My Weird School series, which has sold more than 10 million copies.

  Thanks to his many fans who voted in their classrooms, Dan has received nineteen state book awards and ninety-two state book award nominations. He lives in New York City with his wife, Nina. You can visit him online at www.dangutman.com.

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  CREDITS

  Cover art © 2017 by Scott Brundage

  Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons

  COPYRIGHT

  The author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs: Nina Wallace, here, here, here; INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo, here; Travis Commeau, here.

  FLASHBACK FOUR #2: THE TITANIC MISSION. Copyright © 2017 by Dan Gutman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936040

  ISBN 978-0-06-223635-7

  EPub Edition © March 2017 ISBN 9780062236371

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