The teaser principle was a relic from the days of the great editor Richard Kohl, who saw it as a last opportunity to preserve literacy in the world, but Jonathan disagreed. Even the “Notes from the Purser’s Mailbag” could be scanned and recited in fastspeak by the computer. Instead of laboring over the alphabet, every schoolchild had been trained to listen to and comprehend computer readings—including instant translations of any language, from Chinese to ancient Babylonian—at five times the speed of human speech.

Jonathan had tried to convince Virginia that reading was becoming a lost art. It was, to him, no more necessary than the memorization of multiplication tables in the aftermath of the first pocket calculators. Why bother, when with a pierced ear and an equally painless bonephone implant, every child could have the entire universe at her fingertips, with the great works of art and literature included and accessible through a mere touch for instant fastspeak or visualization.

But book publishers were all dinosaurs. Worse off now even than dinosaurs! The dinosaurs—dwarfed and genetically redesigned into household pets— were living and breathing on the last day. Not so Virginia. Jonathan found it difficult to believe that she had ever been fully alive. He remembered the days when he could almost hear the slosh of formaldehyde in her veins—preserver of literacy, indeed!

So he had activated his bonephone and, almost from the hour of the world’s end, begun revising TITANIC ILLUSTRATED. Writing a history book was now probably even more pointless than Virginia’s concerns about literacy, but it made perfect sense in its own way. Jonathan’s response to the disaster that had overtaken humanity was to escape into another disaster.

Each day he compulsively improved the program, to the extent that the computer was now enabling him to converse, in rudimentary fashion, with the “ghosts” of Titanic’s passengers and crew. With each passing hour, his program became more lifelike, and as he wandered endlessly through sinking corridors, his subconscious self, fully aware of what he was really up to, made him gravitate toward passenger Edith Russell. More and more of the computer’s memory was being dedicated to her. She was becoming increasingly articulate, no longer merely responding to questions with appropriate answers from her diaries and memoirs. On at least two occasions she had even asked Jonathan questions of her own, and it was possible to believe that if he continued improving the program, he might simulate in her the perfect illusion of self-awareness.

Presently, he was standing with Edith and Mr. Rothschild on E Deck forward. A steward came striding down the long hallway and joined them. The young man’s clothes were drenched in sweat. The whole corridor was slanting toward the bow, and the lights had dimmed to an ominous red glow. Thirty meters ahead, a lake that had no business being there gleamed obsidian black as it lapped at the doors of the first class staterooms. A leather pillow floated in it.

“Gee,” Mr. Rothschild said, “this is really beginning to look serious.”