Passengers died or lived according to the whims of fate. A firstclass passenger who’d been brushing his teeth ran back to the bedroom to find the wall gone, his wife vanished. On the deluxe foyer deck two people were killed instantly. Twentysix Italian immigrants in the smaller, cheaper cabins of the lowermost deck were right in line with the collision and died in a mass of crushed steel. Among them were a woman and her four young children. There were miracles as well. A young girl scooped out of a firstclass cabin woke up in the Stockholm’s crumpled bow. In another cabin the ceiling crashed down on a couple, but they managed to crawl out into the corridor. ‘

Those from the two lowest decks had the toughest struggle, fighting their way up the slanting smokefilled passageways against a stream of oilslicked black water. Gradually people began to work their way to the muster stations and waited for instructions. .

Captain Calamai was at the far side of the undamaged bridge when the ships hit. Recovering from his initial shock, he pulled the ship’s telegraph lever to Stop. The ship eventually came to a halt in the deep fog.

The second officer strode to the inclinometer; the instrument that measured the ship’s angle.

“Eighteen degrees,” he said. A few minutes later he said, ‘Nineteen degrees.’

Cold fingers brushed the captain’s heart. The list should be no more than fifteen degrees, even with two compartments flooded. A tilt of more than twenty degrees would overwhelm the watertight compartments.

Logic was telling him the situation was impossible. The designers guaranteed that the ship would remain on an even keel with any group of two compartments flooded. He called for damage reports from each deck; especially on the status of the watertight doors, and ordered an SOS sent out with the ship’s position.

Officers rushed back to the bridge with damage reports. The engineroom crew was pumping the starboard compartments, but water was coming in faster than they could get it out. The boiler room was flooded, and water was flowing into two more compartments.

The problem was at A Deck, supposed to serve as a steel lid over the transverse bulkheads that divided the ship into compartments. Water was flowing down those passenger stairways into the other compartments.

The officer called out the new reading. “Twentytwo degrees.”

Captain Calamai didn’t have to look at the inclinometer to know the list had, passed the point where it could be corrected. The evidence was in the slant of the chartlittered floor right at his feet.

The ship was dying.

He was numb with grief. The Andrea Doria was not just any ship. The twentyninemilliondollar Queen of the Italian Line was the most magnificent and luxurious passenger vessel afloat. Barely four years old, it was launched to show the world that the Italian merchant marine was back in business after the war. With its graceful black hull and white superstructure, the rakish red, white, and green funnel, the liner looked more like the work of a sculptor than a marine architect.