The Titan Drowns: Time Travel Romance by Nhys Glover (highly recommended books .txt) 📕

lowered her gently to the floor next to the bed. ‘I am really going to die?’

‘Not if you choose to join us in New Atlantis. Then your wife will be dead four hundred years and you will have no need of divorce.’

‘Why me? Why did you come back for me of all the people in the world who must die?’

‘Humanity of the future is sterile. It has been for hundreds of years. When we discovered time travel, it became our first task to repopulate the world with worthwhile people from the past who had disappeared from their own time lines. For some, it was getting lost in the wilderness; for others it was falling off boats. But what they all have in common is that their bodies were never found.’

‘And my body will never be found?’

‘That is right. And you are a worthwhile person with a flexible mind who can accept the unbelievable. You have proved that here today.’

‘The proof was pretty convincing.’

‘Yes, but we would never have opened the Portal in front of you if we were not already sure that you were a suitable candidate. Luke might think you are a stuffed shirt, but he also knows what it takes to be a citizen of New Atlantis. He was impressed with the speed with which you came to accept what we told you. It took him many months and he was living in our world at the time.’

‘How does it happen, my disappearance?’

‘Are you sure you want to know this right now?’ she teased, beginning to remove the shoulder of her dressing gown.

Max stopped her and frowned. ‘Yes. I need to know.’

‘You drown when the Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage. Your body is never recovered.’

Max swore loudly and colourfully as he backed off from her and spun around, raking his hands through his dark hair as if he wanted to tear it from its roots.

‘The Titanic, Eilish, the Titanic is unsinkable! Her sister ship the Olympic rammed another ship and tore a hole in her side and she still didn’t sink. This is ludicrous. You cannot expect me to believe this! I am dreaming. That is the only answer. I will wake up with you in my arms on that bed and all of this will be just a dream.’

Eilish came toward him slowly and rested her head on his bent shoulder. ‘Not dreaming, my love. The Titanic will hit an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic at eleven forty on the fourteenth of April and will sink two hours and twenty minutes later, taking with her two-thirds of those aboard her.’

‘But I am not even planning to take that voyage! Agnes would…’ He stopped and stared suddenly into middle distance. ‘I am going to take that voyage because I met you, and I will not care if it inconveniences Agnes.’

‘And you will take out a large life insurance policy with Lloyds to cover your journey, making her the beneficiary. She will be well set up for the rest of her life.’

He swore again, this time more softly, but with just as much passion. ‘I am not dreaming. This is all true. In a little over two weeks, I will be aboard an unsinkable, sinking liner and will travel to the future to live out my days with a three hundred-year-old woman I love passionately and completely. How is any of this possible?’

‘Come to bed, Max. There is plenty of time to ponder the mysteries of the Universe. Right now, there are better uses of your time…’

He looked over at her and his expressive hazel eyes told her that he was happy to oblige. A slow, satisfied smile crossed his lips and he swung her once more into his arms.

‘As you have come such a long way to meet me, I had better make it worth your while then…’

Sometime later that afternoon as rainclouds gathered outside the window, Max shifted onto his side and stared down at Eilish as she drowsed languidly at his side. He looked so fierce, suddenly, that her heart lurched. The adrenalin surge, which accompanied her heart’s reaction brought Eilish to full wakefulness as she reached for him.

‘What is it my love?’ she asked.

Max took her hand and kissed it gently. ‘Nothing… everything. I have been thinking over this terrible event that you tell me will happen. That you want me to be part of.’

‘Yes?’

‘If you come from the future and know such terrible calamities befall us, why do you not do something to change them? Surely you could stop this war that is coming knowing what you do? Surely you could warn the Titanic’s Captain so no one need die?’

Eilish sighed and rested her head on his arm stroking it lazily. They had made love three times now and each time was better than the last. Her body was sore and exhausted but her soul reached out for him, wanting to be joined again.

‘We cannot interfere with history. There were many arguments in the early days about such matters. If we truly wanted to change the terrible destruction wrought on our planet, surely we could go back to where it began and effect the changes necessary?

‘But the more they grappled with the quandary, the more they realised that even if, and there is a significant if in this scenario, we could change pivotal events, might we not inadvertently create even worse results? And while doing that, we might wipe out the ancestors of the minds that discovered time travel so that it never came into being. We would then never go back in time to change the past… the past and future are inexplicably connected. Our world is built on an infinite number of tiny, insignificant events that add up to something monumental. If we know something happened in the past, then it is part of us in the future. We can no more change it as remove a card from the base of a house of cards and expect it to stay standing.’

‘Then how can you justify taking me?’

‘Historically, you disappeared from the timeline. There is no record of you being seen after the alarm was raised. That past will not change.’

She shifted onto her side so she could look him in the eye. ‘Greater minds than ours have grappled with this, and there are interesting anomalies that show, in retrospect, of our involvement. For instance, I was always meant to come back here and fall in love with you. If not, what other reason would you have had for being on the Titanic when you had other definite plans in place?

‘And Luke has booked our tickets on the Titanic under names of people who our research uncovered never existed.'

Max frowned deeply. She hurried on to try to explain. ‘The records of those who travelled on the Titanic are patchy but quite detailed. By setting our computers to do backgrounds… sorry, a computer is a machine that thinks and performs many of the tasks men previously did. In this case, it gathers information from a multitude of sources and cross checks it with others. In this way, we discovered anomalies… people who were no more than names with false dates of birth and home addresses on the ship’s manifest.

‘We matched up these details with people on our teams so we knew who would be going, right down to one Michael O’Riley, son of Mary and Ryan O’Riley, who boarded the ship at Southampton as third class passengers. Michael is ten, Mary is twenty-six and Ryan is listed as twenty-nine. The O’Rileys never lived at the address listed on the manifest. In fact, no O’Rileys with those names and dates of birth were ever born. They did not exist. But Mary,’ she indicated herself, ‘her husband Ryan, who with any luck will look considerably younger than twenty-nine the next time I see him, and Michael, who will probably answer more to Brat than Micky, will board the Titanic on the tenth of next month. As will eight other non-existent passengers who were said to have died when the ship sank that day.’

‘Incredible!’

‘It truly is. When we started finding where we may have stepped in, it made things so much easier. But a lot of times we didn’t know we influenced events until it happened… like you. Like Cara.’

‘Cara?’

‘Cara is a Newcomer like you will be. She was Retrieved from 2010, I think. Do not quote me on that year. She introduced the idea of Retrieving children, something our society had been loath to do up to that point. This mission is not so much about Retrieving you and a few other adults we have identified, but forty-eight children in third class. There were huge losses of children in steerage and we plan to offset those losses by Retrieving as many children as we can. We have no idea how successful we will be, but when it is a choice between death and a new life in a safe and beautiful world, then we will do our best.’

‘Why, if there were more losses, are you only aiming for forty-eight?’

‘Because those are the children who were never seen during the chaos of the final hours. Or did not match up with bodies recovered and unidentified.’

‘And their parents?’

‘We will play that by ear. But as a matter of Protocol, we will not take adults who were not vetted first for suitability. Our people have tracked down many of the parents already and have found them unsuitable, several others… we are not sure about yet. But our attitude is that those parents would want us to save their children, if that possibility is open to them.’

‘What makes someone suitable?’ Max lay back on his pillow and brought Eilish’s head onto his bare chest.

‘Flexibility of mind, moral character and being a productive member of their society.’

‘My affair with you casts doubt on my moral character.’

She chuckled and reached down to stroke his tired member. It jumped into action at the first stroke. He groaned and drew her hand away. ‘I am a middle-aged man and should not have the constitution of a young man, as I seem to be exhibiting. If you want me to live long enough to board that ship, treat me gently, I beg you.’

Eilish rose up and kissed him on the mouth, running her tongue along the seam of his closed lips. ‘You are simply making up for lost time. All that stored seed that never had a chance to be planted before.’ She froze in place.

‘What?’

‘You will never father a child. That is the price you will pay for joining us. Your seed will become sterile.’

He opened his mouth and kissed her deeply. ‘As long as I can still spill my sterile seed in you, I will not care. I did not expect to have children with Agnes, anyway.’

‘Yuk, that sounds awful! Anyway, I digress. I was explaining about Cara and the temporal anomalies. Jac was Cara’s Retriever and he fell in love with her. He gave her a card and a piece of jewellery and it was not until after he bought them that he remembered seeing the card and the jewellery box on the coffee table in her police files. He chose the card because it looked familiar. It looked familiar because he saw the card he would give her in the police files hundreds of years later.

‘Then there’s Jane. She was a nineteen-year-old shop assistant in Sydney, Australia, in 1968. Julio met her as part of his reconnaissance. He was there to Retrieve a boy who fell off a ferry. Jane was briefly mentioned as having died trying to save his life. That’s when it got interesting. Jane would never have been on that ferry that day if Julio hadn’t suggested it to her. She was always supposed to be Retrieved, we just didn’t know it.

‘And then there is one of our most unusual cases to date. One of