Greatgrandfather just couldn’t see it that way. He had felt that given respect and good taste, the entire wreck could be raised and displayed in an underwater museum, and the world would accept it without hard feelings. The project needed careful planning, so he had enlisted men like Richard Tuna and Jason Bradley. Ballard never forgave him for it.

By 2010, all of Ballard’s injunctions against raising the Titanic had been reversed. The “debris field” between the two portions of the ship had already been stripped clean, removing much of the force from the oceanographer’s argument that R.M.S. Titanic should be left undisturbed, as a permanent memorial on the seafloor. As a cradle of iron pipes enclosed the liner’s bow section and was preparing to lift it, Ballard led an extremist faction of Bluepeace in an assault.

Titanic’s sinking had proven that objects falling four kilometers through water could reach unexpected velocities. The broken-off stern section was hammered so deeply into the seabed that simply uncovering it would be a major task. She had hit at more than eighty kilometers per hour, and that fact suggested to Ballard his course of action. Downblast had caused most of the damage he had seen when he discovered the Titanic in 1985. The same effect might save her.

One night, scores of stubby-winged airplanes lifted off from Halifax with one destination in their grim minds: 49°56′49″ west longitude, 41°43′57″ north latitude. They were balsa wood cruise missiles, hobby-shop built, propeller driven. Invisible to radar and heat-seeking equipment, fueled for a one-way trip that reduced weight and more than doubled their payload capacity, the robot planes came in from the north, skimming low over the ocean and dropping hundreds of “flechettes,” streamlined lead darts that were sinking at more than 130 kilometers per hour by the time they reached the Titanic.

Bluepeace knew that it was putting no human lives at risk. All work on the wreck was being done by remote control from the surface. Ballard was not homicidal, but he did commit robocide that night, and succeeded in delaying the raising just long enough. The technical failures that followed, set against the backdrop of an improbable natural upheaval, again paralleled the collision of machine and nature that had set the 1912 disaster in motion. The great underwater avalanche of 2010 swept over and removed R.M.S. Titanic from sight. After the surge, camera sleds found no sign of the wreck or of the lift cradle and its attendant robots in the field of freshly deposited mud.

“More than a few men are free at last,” said one prominent philosopher, “from the obsessions of a lifetime.” He was wrong. Once people had touched her, the legendary ship did not easily let them go. Random House’s TITANTIC ILLUSTRATED, one of the world’s first virtual reality programs, had been selling briskly for more than sixty years, even as the great ship lay hidden. Hollis’s passenger had come to the excavation to update the latest edition. He was the right man for the job; even though his work had been finished by the tenth dive, he came down at every opportunity, as obsessed with the big ship as anyone she had ever known.