The Titanic Mission

by Dan Gutman

  “You look fabulous,” Mrs. Vader told the girls, applauding. “And you boys look so handsome!”

  “I’ll be the prettiest girl on the Titanic,” Julia said, striking a pose and giggling uncontrollably.

  “Yeah,” David said, rolling his eyes, “and one of the few who doesn’t die.”

  “What if I have to run someplace?” asked Isabel. “I can’t run in this dress.”

  “You won’t have to run anywhere,” David told her. “We’ll take the photo and get out of there.”

  “Okay, let’s get this thing over with,” Luke said, putting the sailor hat on his head.

  Miss Z turned to her computer and found the file she had created titled “FLASHBACK FOUR.” Then she pointed a small remote control at the Board on the other side of the room. It buzzed gently as it turned on and flashed some quick messages to indicate it needed a little time to warm up.

  The Board resembled an ordinary smartboard like the ones you may have in your school, but it was so much more. I could devote the next few pages to explain exactly how the Board works. I could talk about the speed of light and space-time and black holes and tunnels through the universe. But to be honest, time-travel is far too complicated for me to understand, and unless you’re a physicist it would just sound like a lot of mumbo jumbo to you too.

  Needless to say, the Board was packed full of ridiculously expensive microprocessors, software, and advanced technology that is generations beyond anything you’ve seen or even heard of. People like Miss Z who have gobs of money can get hold of stuff that won’t be available to the general public for many years.

  The important thing to know is that the Board can send a person—or a group of people—to any moment and any spot on the globe if you plug in the exact time, latitude, and longitude. It works. Like magic. You’ll have to take my word for it.

  Luke, Isabel, Julia, and David stood up and went over to the Board, positioning themselves boy-girl-boy-girl. Miss Z motioned for them to move closer to the Board. Two feet was the perfect distance. Isabel checked to make sure she had the TTT. Luke patted his pocket to be certain the camera was in there.

  “Okay, are you kids ready?” asked Miss Z, typing some commands on the keyboard.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Isabel replied.

  “Promise you’re not going to drop us in the ocean?” asked David.

  “I promise,” Miss Z told him. “Okay, this is it. You may want to close your eyes for the next minute or so. It’s going to be pretty bright in here. Good luck. Remember, stay together at all times. Work as a team. Keep in touch with me. Bring back that photo. And stay safe. That’s what it’s all about.”

  She tapped a few keys. There was a brief buzzing sound, and then the screen on the Board lit up in a blast of bright blue. After a few seconds, the blue split into five separate bands of different colors, and then they merged together to form one band of intense white light. It appeared to stretch out and away from the surface of the Board until it reached the kids. It was like the Board was sucking them in.

  “The light!” Isabel said. “It’s so bright. I can see it through my eyelids.”

  “You’ll be able to open your eyes in a moment,” Miss Z told her, “and it will be 1912.”

  An intense humming sound reverberated around the room, a low frequency rumbling like the purring of a gigantic cat.

  “A few more seconds . . . ,” said Miss Z.

  Then, one by one, the kids started to flicker. It was almost imperceptible at first, but after a few seconds it became more obvious. It looked like a fluorescent light bulb that needed to be replaced.

  It was happening. Luke, Isabel, David, and Julia were stepping out of one era and into another. At that point, it was too late to go back.

  “This is it,” Luke said. “Speak now, or forever hold your—”

  And then they vanished.

  CHAPTER 5

  A SMALL CITY

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG.

  Something had gone horribly wrong. David knew it the instant he appeared in 1912. He wasn’t on the deck of the Titanic. He had landed headfirst in the water.

  “She missed!” he screamed, his mouth full of water as he struggled to keep his head above the surface. “I’m in the ocean! Help!”

  Actually, David hadn’t landed in the ocean. He had landed in a swimming pool. The swimming pool that happened to be in a large room on the deck of the Titanic.

  “I can’t swim!” he gagged, spitting out water. “I’m drowning! Somebody help me!”

  Luke, Julia, and Isabel had landed right next to the pool, just inches from the edge. Luke grabbed both girls by the elbows and pulled them back just before they would have fallen in too. Fortunately, no other passengers were in the pool room at the time to witness this strange event.

  “I’ve got you, dude!” Luke shouted to David. Thinking fast, he took the camera out of his pocket and handed it to Isabel to hold. Then he dove into the pool.

  The water was only about six feet deep, and David could have simply stood on his tiptoes to keep his head above the surface. But he didn’t know that. He flailed his arms around wildly in a desperate attempt to avoid going under for a second time.

  Luke swam over, wrapped one arm firmly around David’s chest, and pulled him to the side of the pool.

  “You’re okay!” Luke whispered in his friend’s ear. “I’ve got you, man. Everything’s gonna be okay!”

  David managed to grab a metal bar and hoist himself out of the water. He lay on the blue and white tiles at the edge, spitting, sputtering, and heaving.

  “Miss Z didn’t tell us . . . there was a swimming pool,” he groaned.

  Luke climbed out of the pool, chuckling a little to himself. He grabbed a towel that said RMS TITANIC on it and wiped his face with it. He tossed another one to David.

  “I almost died!” David shouted. “It’s not funny!”

  “Not to you, maybe,” Luke said. The girls tried to hide their smiles behind their hands. That’s when Isabel noticed David’s wrist.

  “The watch!” she said, grabbing David’s arm. “The second hand isn’t moving. Miss Z told us not to get it wet, and now it’s ruined. She’s going to be mad.”

  “It’s her fault,” Julia said. “She’s the one who dumped David in the pool. She can’t blame us this time.”

  “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” Luke said. “How will we know when it’s five minutes after two? That’s when Miss Z said for us to be at the meeting spot so she can bring us back home.”

  “We better check in with her,” Isabel said as she pulled out the TTT. “I’m just glad I didn’t fall in the pool. This would be ruined too.”

  Isabel turned on the TTT and texted this message . . .

  LANDED SAFELY ON TITANIC

  A few seconds later, a response came back from Miss Z . . .

  GREAT! ANY PROBLEMS?

  DAVID LANDED IN SWIMMING POOL, Isabel texted. THE WATCH IS BUSTED.

  OKAY, Miss Z texted back. NO WORRIES. JUST ASK SOMEBODY WHAT TIME IT IS.

  Of course. Lots of passengers would be wearing watches. Simple problem, simple solution. A bigger problem was that Luke’s and David’s clothes were now soaking wet. And these were the only clothes they had.

  Luke looked around, as if a rack of men’s clothes would be conveniently placed next to the swimming pool. It wasn’t, of course. But there was a men’s locker room in the corner.

  There were no clothes in there either, but hanging from hooks on the wall were several fancy navy blue bathrobes with the words RMS TITANIC embroidered on the backs in red. They were there for the passengers to take.

  “Nice!” David said. “And these will make cool souvenirs to bring home. They’re a lot cooler than those lame clothes Miss Z gave us.”

  “You’re telling me,” Luke said, pulling off his sailor suit.

  The boys put on the bathrobes and couldn’t resist strutting a little as they came out of the locker room.

  “C
heck out our new duds,” David told the girls.

  “Now we look cool,” said Luke.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Julia said. “Bathrobes? Really?”

  “Is that all you’re wearing?” asked Isabel.

  “We kept our underwear on,” Luke explained. “What, do you have a better idea?”

  “Boxers or briefs?” asked Julia.

  “None of your business,” David replied.

  Neither of the girls could come up with a better idea, so the Flashback Four left the swimming pool and walked out on the main deck. The smell of fresh paint was in the air. That’s how new the Titanic was.

  “This is it,” Luke said, marveling at the whole experience. “We’re on the Titanic.”

  The sun had already set, and the sky was dark. They estimated that it was past ten o’clock, because Miss Z had said they would arrive at 9:40. It wasn’t a windy night, but it was cold enough to see your breath when you exhaled. Luke pulled his bathrobe tightly around him.

  “Can you imagine how cold that water is?” Julia asked as she leaned over the railing and looked down. It was a long way down.

  “Close to freezing,” Isabel replied. “I looked it up back home. That’s why so many people are going to die tonight. They’re not going to drown. They’re going to freeze to death.”

  The thought of people dying made everyone stop for a moment. To the Flashback Four, the tragedy of the Titanic was no longer some fuzzy legend that took place more than a century ago. They weren’t reading about it in a book or watching a Hollywood movie. It was immediate, and it was unfolding before their eyes.

  Reminded of their mission, the team set out to get their bearings on the ship. Their first priority was to find the spot where they would meet so they could be scooped up off the deck before Titanic sank—the I’m-the-king-of-the-world spot.

  The first thing you notice on a huge vessel is that it doesn’t even feel like you’re on a boat. It’s just so big. There were nine decks on the Titanic, and the whole ship was about the height of an eleven-story building. When it rocked up and down or back and forth, the passengers could barely sense any movement. At the time, Titanic was the largest human-made moving object in the world. It was more like a small city that happened to be floating in the ocean.

  And what a city it was! Titanic had its own hospital, a library, two barber shops, squash courts, and a darkroom for developing pictures. The crew published a daily newspaper called Atlantic Daily Bulletin. There were five pianos on board and four elevators. Besides the swimming pool there was a state-of-the-art (for its time) gym, and a Turkish steam bath that was decorated like a room in a sultan’s palace. The layout of the ship was so complicated that when they got on board, all the passengers were given a guide book to help them find their way around.

  There were two elegant restaurants—the Café Parisien and the À la Carte. In order to feed over two thousand people, the Titanic was stocked with a hundred thousand pounds of beef, thirty thousand eggs, and fifty tons of potatoes.

  Hidden out of sight, in the bowels of the ship, were 159 furnaces and twenty-nine boilers that generated the steam to power the engines, each one the size of a large room. Titanic burned 650 tons of coal a day.

  The only thing missing from Titanic was enough lifeboats to hold all those passengers and crew members after the whole thing went underwater.

  Many of the passengers had retired to their staterooms for the night, but there were some scattered loners and lovers out for a late stroll. The women were dressed exactly the way Julia had predicted they would be, in fancy dresses, enormous hats, and lots of jewelry.

  “The ladies are so beautiful!” Julia marveled.

  “That one by the rail looks like she’s wearing the drapes,” cracked David.

  Waiters were hustling around serving people coffee and tea. Luke boldly walked up to one of them.

  “Excuse me, my good man,” he said. “Can you tell me what time it is?”

  “Certainly,” the waiter replied, pulling out one of those old-timey watches attached to a chain in his pocket. “It’s ten minutes after ten o’clock. Past bedtime for you young folks, I’d say. Do your parents know where you are?”

  “Oh, I think this is going to be a late night,” Luke said.

  Once the waiter was out of earshot, David pulled Luke aside.

  “We’re just observers, remember?” he said sternly. “We’re not allowed to do anything that might change history.”

  “What history could I change?” Luke replied. “I’m just stating facts. We’re going to hit the iceberg at 11:40. That’s about an hour and a half from now. It’s going to be a late night for everybody on this ship tonight.”

  Standing at the rail and looking down at the water, Isabel seemed lost in thought. Both of the boys went over to see if she was okay.

  “This is like a miniature world,” she said. “All the rich people are up here on the top deck eating, relaxing, and laughing in their fancy clothes. The poor people who scraped together enough money to come to America must be in the decks below us. And then at the bottom there must be even poorer people—the laborers who shovel coal into the furnaces. It must take hundreds of people working night and day to keep a ship like this moving forward.”

  David rolled his eyes.

  “It’s just a boat,” he said. “You don’t need to get all sentimental about it.”

  “Yeah,” Luke added, “there are rich people and poor people here. Just like anyplace else.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Isabel sighed. “But a whole lot of them aren’t going to be alive in a few hours.”

  “That can’t be our problem,” Luke told her. “We have a job to do. Come on, let’s go find the meeting spot.”

  The three of them wheeled around to see . . . nobody.

  “Where’s Julia?” all three said at once.

  CHAPTER 6

  DECISIONS

  JULIA HAD DISAPPEARED. NOT IN THE POOF! SENSE of the word. She just wasn’t there anymore.

  “She was here a minute ago,” David said, quickly looking up and down the deck.

  “Oh no!” Isabel said. “Maybe she fell overboard! Or do you think maybe she was kidnapped?”

  “She wasn’t kidnapped,” Luke said, rolling his eyes. “Who would kidnap her? She must have run away, again. Remember what happened at Gettysburg?”

  Of course they did. How could they forget? Soon after they had arrived in Gettysburg, Julia had vanished. The other members of the Flashback Four had tracked her down to the room where Abraham Lincoln was staying that night. This was where Lincoln would finish writing the Gettysburg Address. Julia knew that there were only five existing copies of the speech in Lincoln’s handwriting. Her idea was to grab one so she could make a fortune selling it after she got home.

  Not that Julia needed money, of course. She just enjoyed the thrill of getting it.

  “We’ve got to find her,” Isabel said urgently.

  At that moment, the TTT buzzed in her pocket.

  “Ignore it!” David said, but Isabel dutifully checked the message from Miss Z . . .

  DID YOU MAKE IT TO THE MEETING PLACE?

  “Forget about that!” Luke told Isabel. “We don’t have time to chat with her now! Julia’s getting away!”

  But Isabel had been brought up to respect her elders. It would be wrong to ignore Miss Z’s text. She typed . . .

  JULIA IS MISSING

  The response came back almost instantly.

  WHAT? WHERE IS SHE?

  “If we knew where she was, she wouldn’t be missing,” David pointed out.

  DON’T KNOW, Isabel typed.

  GO FIND HER! Miss Z replied.

  “She must have ducked inside one of the staterooms,” David said, snapping into action. “I’ll look down this way. Isabel, you go that way. Luke, check over there. Let’s meet back here in ten minutes whether we find her or not. We’ve got to stay together.”

  “Right!” shouted Isabel and
Luke.

  Each of the three ran off in a different direction to search for Julia. The Titanic was enormous, of course, but Julia had only been gone for a few seconds. She couldn’t be very far away.

  The two boys headed toward the bow and stern (that’s the front and back of a ship, to you landlubbers), and Isabel ducked down the nearest hallway.

  There were a bunch of stateroom doors down the twisting hallway, and Isabel heard footsteps ahead of her. She followed them, trying to be as quiet as possible as she ran. The stateroom doors were all closed. Some of them had small signs with names on them. MR. AND MRS. STRAUS. THE MARTIN BROTHERS. The footsteps always seemed to be a few turns ahead of her. And then they stopped. A door clicked shut.

  “Julia!” Isabel half whispered and half shouted. “Julia, where are you?”

  There was no answer. Isabel looked up and down the row of stateroom doors, hoping that one of them would open again. None of them did, so she tried turning doorknobs. The first five were locked. The next one turned. Isabel pushed open the door quietly.

  Julia was standing there, hunched over a chest of drawers.

  “Julia!”

  Julia gasped, startled. She had something in her hand, and quickly shoved it into a drawer before turning around.

  “Isabel! What are you doing here?” she whispered. “You scared me to death!”

  “What are you doing here?” Isabel asked. “You know we’re supposed to stay together as a group. What’s in that drawer?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What is it?” Isabel insisted.

  Julia sighed. She had the mind of a master thief but lacked the technique.

  “Remember that blue diamond necklace that Rose had in the Titanic movie?” she asked Isabel. “It was called the Heart of the Ocean.”

  “That was just a movie,” Isabel told her. “The necklace never existed in the real world.”

  “I know,” Julia explained as she turned around to open the drawer, “but there were lots of diamonds and precious objects that were lost on the Titanic. And this is the most valuable one of them all.”