McFerrin was astonished. He couldn't believe the NUMA captain and crew were willing to risk their own lives and ship in a rescue attempt. "How many can you take on board?" he inquired.

"How many have you got?" Pitt asked back.

"Over two thousand. Up to twenty-five hundred."

"Two thousand," Burch groaned. "We'll sink like a rock with two thousand people piled on the decks."

Discovering the officer on the upper deck who was hailing him, Pitt shouted back. "Other rescue ships are on the way. We'll take all if we can. Have your crew drop lines so your passengers can descend to our deck."

Burch smoothly worked the propulsion controls, moving his ship slowly forward, then manipulating the bow thrusters with a deft hand, swinging his ship toward the liner inches at a time. Everyone on board Deep Encounter stared up in awe at the great stern soaring over them. Then came the scraping sound of steel against steel. Thirty seconds later, the two ships were firmly lashed together.

Hawsers were passed over by the survey ship's crew, while the cruise liner's crew uncoiled lines and threw them over the sides, their ends trailing into the waiting hands of the scientists, who hurriedly tied them to any object that held firm. The instant all lines were secure, Pitt shouted for the Emerald Dolphin's, crew to begin lowering the passengers.

"Families with children first," McFerrin shouted through his bullhorn to the crew. The old tradition of women and children first was now commonly ignored by modern seamen in favor of keeping families intact. After the sinking of the Titanic, when most of the men had gone down with the ship, leaving widows with fatherless small children, practical minds had felt that families should either live as one or die as one. With few exceptions, the younger, single passengers and the senior citizens stood back bravely and watched as crewmen lowered husbands, their wives and young children down to the Deep Encounter, where they found themselves safe on the work deck amid the submersibles, robotic underwater vehicles and hydrographic survey equipment. Next came the elderly who had to be forced to drop over the side, not because they were afraid but because they believed the younger people, with their lives ahead of them, should go first.

Surprisingly, little fear was shown by the children descending down the lines. The cruise director and members of the ship's band and theatrical troupe began playing and singing songs from Broadway shows. For a while, some people even began to sing along as the evacuation seemed to be going efficiently, without bottlenecks, but as the fire came closer, the heat intensified and the fumes made it difficult to breathe, the crowd turned back into a frightened mob. Suddenly, there was a mad rush by those who decided to take their chances in the water rather than wait their turn to shimmy down the lines to safety. The ones who jumped were mostly younger people who went over the railing from the lower decks. They fell like rain, colliding with those already floating in the water. Several miscalculated and dropped onto the deck of the Deep Encounter, sustaining major injuries or dying horribly on impact. Others fell between the ships and were crushed to death when the wave action pushed the hulls together.