Learning from the Titanic - N. Barry Carver (best book clubs .TXT) 📗

“You’re right. I haven’t introduced myself, I’m John Smith.”

said the man in the strange striped jacket but he seemed to have forgotten that it was customary to offer your hand with your name.

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, sir. My name is Ruth Becker and the woman there, with the baby, is my mom. Next to her is my sister Marion,” reciprocated the pretty pre-teen girl giving a slight curtsy with her name, and pointing out each family member in turn. “He’s not really a baby, he’s old enough to walk you know,” she continued indicating the toddler, “he’s just sick right now. That’s why we’re going to America. He’ll be fine in no time.”

“I’m sure.” Looking out at the darkness, over the rail into the invisible sea rushing along below, Mr. Smith considered something for a moment. Then he looked at the girl a bit harder than anyone had ever looked at her before. “Tell me, Miss Ruth, why is it that you would make such a long journey for a child who might not survive it? How does that make sense?”

The girl recoiled from the roughness of his question. She thought about running off to join her family but that this unusually pale man had caught her curiosity. His large eyes seemed to glow in the moonless mid-April night and, in all the adventure of a great sea crossing, he stood out. It was as if he were dressed for an antique costume party and his accent along with his manners were completely unique.

In her best scolding tones she answered him with, “That’s not a proper thing to ask, Mr. Smith,” then let her clenched jaw tell him the rest.

“Pardon, I do not intend to offend you, I am simply trying to get a sense of your... motivation,” this skinny man said, but he did not release her from his stare. He was looking at her every hair and freckle; listening to her breathe; smelling the lavender of bath soap and trying to judge the value of her slightest movements.

“He’s my little brother. How could we not fetch him a cure if it were on the far side of the moon?” tamping down her indignation, Ruth was really trying to explain this to someone who didn’t seem to know any better. When she could tell he was actually paying attention, she calmed a bit and tried to make it clearer, “My father, he’s a missionary, caught a bug down in India and Richard, that’s my little brother’s name, came down with it too. They have a treatment in the states that they just don’t have down there.” Adding, after gathering her breath, “He really will be all right, you know... and you never know what he’ll get up to when he’s grown.”

To help ease his understanding she laid her hand on his arm, as if to let him know that she forgave his abrupt manner. It was an innocent gesture that any child might offer a confused adult, but Mr. Smith was no confused adult.

As her hand came to rest on his arm, the tiniest sliver of exposed flesh, between his out-of-fashion glove and slightly too short coat sleeve, made contact with the portion of her wrist that was bared by her reaching. In that moment, a small spark leapt between them... but this was no ordinary static discharge. This was the very thing that Mr. Smith had been avoiding during his nine previous days on the planet. It was the contamination that was feared and the answer to many puzzles neither of them could ever have worked out otherwise.

For that brief instant, instead of contracting some unknown pathogen from the inferior humanoid species (as he’d been told), he sent millions of synaptic messages racing up Ruth’s arm and into her brain. Instantly he realized that his entire mission had been a fraud and in that same spark, she knew more than anyone else could ever have guessed about this foreign visitor.

“You’ve been lied to,” she exclaimed in a forced whisper, “and... oh my heavens!”

“Please, Ruth, say nothing more,” he said, jolting his coat back into position, “Give it time. I’m sorry this has happened, but you must keep what you know to yourself.”

And suddenly, what she knew was plenty.

This “man” was a genetically altered spy, sent to report back on the danger Earth posed to the rest of the intergalactic community. No, it was more than that, Smith was the last spy. His mission was to report that there was no redeemable value to be found in humankind. He had spent the last week confirming that the people of Earth were reaching a technical expertise that would soon allow them to split the atom and, when they did, they would pose a potential threat to the balance of power between vast governments covering unimaginably large sections of space.

It had already been agreed that Earth should be destroyed. The only question left was the amount of cover up that would be needed. How many other species knew of this planet? Would any of them find any reason to speak up for it? Was there any reason to preserve any of its genomes?

Smith’s mission had been to check the boxes off on a mental form that would clear the way for this potential threat, and the two-and-a-half-billion human beings on it, to be erased from existence. He’d been sent to “learn” that humanity was a blight and report that its eradication was the only reasonable course of action.

For a twelve-year-old girl it was as if every dial on her fledgling intellect had been spun up to maximum and, by looking into the jet-black orbs that passed for John Smith’s eyes, she knew all this information had passed in one direction only. He had learned only that she was, and perhaps all earthlings were, no threat at all. At least not yet.

“Your entire premise is a sham,” said the girl, in an impossibly adult tone, “you didn’t come to learn anything.”

“But I have, I am on this ship only to confirm that, in the states, humans are just a dangerous, careless and vulgar as they are throughout Europe,” he said as his stare returned to her. There was no longer any need for pretense.

Ruth could see the ill-fitting teeth and oddly curved mouth–now that she knew what to look for. Mr. Smith was so poor an imitation of a human that she was surprised she hadn’t noticed it straight off.

“You’re wrong... and I’m the proof. I can understand everything about you and you know nothing about us.” But even as she spoke, the spark that had illuminated and informed her of so many fresh realities was ebbing. Her newfound genius and clarity was slipping away and would be a distant memory in a few more seconds. “Humans are better than you know,” was all that was left to her to say before she was overcome with an urgent need to sleep. It had all been too much for her system and psyche to handle.

Her head was pounding and, even with his gloved hand on her arm, she could barely reach her mother on wobbling legs. A quickly summoned attendant from the ship’s sickbay had to help the mother and three children to their cabin while Mr. Smith disappeared into the sauntering crowd on the deck.

Ruth’s dreams were studies in the dead end of trying to prove your value to someone who was not interested. While they became ever more disjointed and vague as she turned in her covers, she felt that she was failing at something very important and there was nothing she could do to get out of it. In the middle of her fourth night at sea, she became groggily aware that the ship had stopped moving and that there was a glow of fireworks outside her window.

With little understanding of how any of it fit together, her mother bundled her in her warmest clothes, wrapped the youngest in yet another blanket and stepped the three of them through the hatchway into the noise and commotion of the sinking Titanic.

How they made it from their cabin to the deck was an indecipherable blur. They were following along behind one of the uniformed crew who pushing open the way for them, past dozens of anxious men who seemed to bow their heads as the family passed.

As they approached lifeboat eleven the two younger children were quickly placed on board but, as if only to add to her confusion, Ruth and her mother were held back. That’s when Ruth spied Mr. Smith. He was standing at the rail holding other men back from crowding onto the lifeboat. He did this only by his being there. He did not, as the other men around him did, lock arms with the others to make a chain around the vessel about to be lowered. He seemed just to be caught in the human tide, neither trying to get into a boat nor actively preventing anyone else from doing so.

He looked across at her unsure what she retained of the memories and thought he had inadvertently shared. She stared back recalling the events of the previous evening but with no trace of the great deep understanding that she’d gained for such a short time. The scream of her mother brought her to focus back to the lifeboat between them.

They had begun to push the boat forward, to lower it over the side, and her mother was frantic that her youngest were about to be lost at sea. After a few moments agitation, the steward relented and allowed the mother to join the youngest... but still barred Ruth from joining them.

So there she stood, watching her family lowered to the ocean to disappear into the night with only the echo of her mother’s voice imploring her to find the next lifeboat and be the first on board.

But the next lifeboat came and went.

The last of the rockets –not fireworks at all but beacons of distress– was fired off into an all too black and empty horizon. The arguments became screams and somewhere, off in the distance, the band slowly went silent. Ruth found herself jostled through the crowd until she was once again against the rail with Mr. Smith.

Her fuzzy memory had only left her with the impression that Mr. John Smith was traveling to learn something. Something she might help teach him for a report, but that she could not put into words. Now, unexpectedly reunited, she was left unable to grasp what the subject was or the importance of it.

“I hope your report will...” she faltered, not conscious of why she started with this line, “be a favorable one.”

“Miss Ruth it seems you are an amazing teacher,” said Mr. Smith, adjusting his teeth as he spoke through them.

It was as if the terror around them had been paused for a moment and they could pick up their conversation where they had left it, and yet something had changed.

“Then,”