"Perhaps ballast thrown overboard from an old windjammer."

    "More likely came from icebergs," Gunn said. "Many rocks and bits of debris are carried over the sea and then dropped to the floor when the icebergs melt-" Gunn broke off in the middle of his lecture. "Hold on . . . I'm getting a strong response on the sonar. Now the magnetometer is picking it up, too."

    "Where away?" Pitt asked.

    "On a heading of one-three-seven."

    "One-three-seven it is," Pitt repeated. He swept the Sea Slug into a graceful bank, as though she was an airplane, and headed on the new course. Giordino peered intently over Gunn's shoulder at the green circles of light on the sonarscope. ''A small dot of pulsating brightness indicated a solid object three hundred yards beyond their range of vision.

    "Don't get your hopes up," Gunn said quietly. "The target reads too small for a ship."

    "What do you make of it?"

    "Hard to say. No more than twenty or twenty-five feet in length, about two stories high. Might be anything . . . ."

    "Or it might be one of the Titanic's boilers," Pitt cut in. "The sea floor should be littered with them."

    "You move to the head of the class," Gunn said, excitement creeping into his tone. "I have an identical reading, bearing one-one-five. And here comes another at one-six-zero. The last has an indicated length of approximately seventy feet."

    "Sounds like one of her smokestacks," Pitt said.

    "Lord!" Gunn murmured hoarsely. "It's beginning to read like a junkyard down here."

    Suddenly, in the gloom at the outer edge of the blackness, a rounded object became visible, haloed in the eerie light like an immense tombstone. Soon the three pairs of eyes inside the submersible could distinguish the furnace gratings of the great boiler, and then the row upon row of rivets along the iron seams and the torn, jagged tentacles of what was left of its steam tubing.

    "How would you like to have been a stoker in those days and fed that baby?" Giordino muttered.

    "I've picked up another one," Gunn said. "No, wait . . . the pulse is getting stronger. Here comes the length. One hundred feet . . . two. . ."

    "Keep coming, sweetheart," Pitt prayed.

    "Five hundred . . . seven . . . eight hundred feet. We got her! We've got her!"

    "What course?" Pitt's mouth was as dry as sand.

    "Bearing zero-nine-seven," Gunn replied in a whisper.

    They spoke no more for the next few minutes as the Sea Slug closed the distance. Their faces were pale and strained with anticipation. Pitt's heart was pounding painfully in his chest, and his stomach felt as if it had a great iron weight in it and a huge hand crushing it from the outside. He became aware that he was allowing the submersible to creep too close to the ooze. He pulled back the controls and kept his eyes trained -through the viewport. What would they find? A rusty old hulk far beyond hope of salvaging? A shattered, broken hull buried to its superstructure in the muck? And then his straining eyes caught sight of a massive shadow looming up ominously in the darkness.

    "Christ almighty!" Giordino mumbled in awe. "We've struck her fair on the bow."

    As the range narrowed to fifty feet, Pitt slowed the motors and turned the Sea Slug on a parallel course with the ill-fated liner's waterline. The mere size of the wreck when viewed from alongside her steel plates was a staggering sight. Even after nearly eighty years, the sunken ship proved to be surprisingly free of corrosion; the gold band that encompassed the 882-foot black hull glistened under the high-intensity lights. Pitt eased the submersible upward past the eight-ton portside anchor until they could all clearly make out the three-foot-high golden letters that still proudly proclaimed her as the Titanic.

    Spellbound, Pitt picked up the microphone from its cradle and pressed the transmit button. Modoc, Modoc. This is Sea Slug . . . do you read?"

    The radio operator on the Modoc answered almost immediately. "This is Modoc, Sea Slug. We read you. Over."

    Pitt adjusted the volume to minimize the background crackle. "Modoc, notify NUMA headquarters that we have found the Big T. Repeat, we have found the Big T. Depth twelve thousand three hundred and forty feet. Time, eleven-forty-two hours."

    "Eleven-forty-two?" Giordino echoed. "You cocky bastard. You only missed by two minutes."

REGENESIS

    The Titanic lay cloaked by the eerie stillness of the black deep and bore the grim scars of her tragedy. The jagged wound from her collision with the iceberg stretched from the starboard forepeak to the No. 5 boiler room nearly three hundred feet down her hull, while the gaping holes in her bow below the waterline betrayed the shattering impact made by her boilers when they tore from her bowels and smashed their way through bulkhead after bulkhead until they plunged free into the sea.

    She sat heavily in the ooze with a slight list to port, her forecastle set on a southerly course, as if she were still pathetically struggling to reach out and touch the waters of a port she had never known. The lights from the submersible danced over her ghostlike superstructure, casting long spectral shadows across her long teak decks. Her portholes, some open, some closed, marched in orderly rows along the broad expanse of her sides. She presented an almost modern, streamlined appearance now that her funnels were gone; the forward three were nonexistent, two probably having been carried away by her dive to the bottom, while number four lay fallen across the After Boat Deck. And, except for the scattered strands of rusty, disconnected funnel rigging that snaked over the railings, her Boat Deck showed only a few hulking air vents standing silent guard above the vacant Welin davits that had once held the great liner's lifeboats.

    There was a morbid beauty about her. The men inside the submersible could almost see her dining saloons and staterooms flooded with lights and crowded with hundreds of light-hearted and laughing passengers. They could visualize her libraries stacked with books, her smoking rooms filled with the blue haze of gentlemen's cigars, and hear the music of her band playing turn-of-the-century ragtime. The passengers walked her decks, the wealthy, the famous, men in immaculate evening dress, women in colorful ankle-length gowns, nannies with children clutching favorite toys, the Astons, the Guggenheims, and the Strauses in first class; the middle-class, the school teachers, the clergymen, the students, and the writers in second; the immigrants, the Irish farmers and their families, the carpenters, the bakers, the dressmakers, and the miners from remote villages of Sweden, Russia, and Greece in steerage. Then there were the almost nine hundred crew members, from the ship's officers to the caterers, the stewards, the lift boys, and the engineroom men.

    Great opulence lay in the darkness beyond the doors and portholes. What would the swimming pool, the squash court, and the Turkish baths look like? Was there a rotten remnant of the great tapestry still hanging in the reception room? What of the bronze clock on the grand staircase, or the crystal chandeliers in the elegant Cafe Parisien, or the delicately ornate ceiling above the first-class dining saloon? Would, perhaps, the bones of Captain Edward J. Smith remain somewhere within the shadows of the bridge? What mysteries were there to be discovered within this once colossal floating palace if and when she ever greeted the sun again?