Where Lucian’s journey continues, and where there remained the ice, that mass without engine or rudder, broken away no one knew where from some distant coast or ice field, then left for weeks or months to currents, winds and temperatures, moving without intention, without destination, without timetable, and which one had to acknowledge was perhaps the only floating object the liner could not entirely master.
It was almost the reverse of everything that constituted the ship, since no will propelled it, no plan governed its movement, it did not seek the route it was nevertheless going to encounter, and the greater part of it, buried beneath the water, remained precisely where the eye could not measure it directly. Its visible form did not reveal its true form; what appeared was merely a consequence of what remained hidden, and every estimate had to begin from this strange disproportion between the little that showed itself and the mass whose existence that little silently attested.
Perhaps it was this, even more than its hardness, that made it so foreign to the logic of the liner... one could not know it entirely from what it showed.
The other architecture was constantly encountering similar objects, not in the sea but within itself. A word could bring forth an emotion whose origin remained impossible to locate; a smell would suddenly raise a vanished landscape. A face could provoke uneasiness without anything in its visible features fully accounting for it, and what then appeared to consciousness was sometimes only the exposed tip of a whole complex of connections, memories, associations and bodily movements whose immense activity remained outside its view. It too, then, moved among forms of which it often knew only the illuminated part.
But even this, in the case of the liner, had been calculated.
If the bow were to strike an iceberg, three compartments, it was estimated, might be opened to the sea, perhaps more depending on the angle of impact, but six others would in turn have to be flooded before any real danger arose, so that the water itself seemed to have been allotted, within the hull, a territory granted to it in advance: a few spaces it might fill, a few bulkheads against which it might rise, a few dark depths into which it was permitted to enter without the progress of the ship being truly endangered.
Very freely inspired... by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan. 1898
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