Passage

The mail clerk shifted the stack of mail to one hand so he could unfold the note. He read it, nodded, and handed Mr. Briarley the sodden mail. Then he reached inside the neck of his uniform and pulled out a ring of iron keys on a chain. He lifted the chain and the keys from over his head and handed them to Mr. Briarley, taking back the mail.

“Which one is it?” Mr. Briarley asked, but the mail clerk had already begun sorting again, putting the unreadable letters into the pigeonholes.

Mr. Briarley waded back across the mail room, out the door, and down the passage, the chain swinging from his hand. He started up the stairs. “Where are we going now?” Joanna asked, clambering after him.

“That is the question,” Mr. Briarley said. “To Hades or heaven? Or to the pharaohs’ Hall of Judgment?” He reached the top of the steps and turned back down Scotland Road, where the water was now a stream flowing down the center of the tiled floor. “And in which boat?” he asked. “Charon’s ferry?” He led her around to the metal stairway and past it, to an elevator with a brass folding grille across it. “Or King Arthur’s funeral barge?”

He pushed the grille open. “After you,” he said, bowing. Joanna stepped in, and he got in after her and pulled the grille across. “Frodo boarded an elven ship at the Grey Havens.” He pushed an ivory button labeled “up.” The elevator rumbled upward. “And the dead in Outward Bound found themselves on an ocean liner much like this one.”

The elevator jerked to a halt, and Mr. Briarley shoved the grille open and strode out ahead of Joanna toward the doors that led out on deck. “And then, of course there’s the Ancient Mariner’s ship. ‘ “There was a ship,” quoth he,’ ” he said, and pushed the doors open. They were on the Boat Deck. She could see the lights from the wireless room and the bridge ahead.

“It’s fitting that that was your favorite poem,” Mr. Briarley said, walking purposefully past the lifeboats toward the wireless room. “It has icebergs in it, you know. ‘And ice, mast-high, came floating by, as green as emerald.’ ”

“Is that the connection?” Joanna asked. “Is that what you were reading that day?”

He didn’t answer. He had stopped outside the wireless room, in front of a padlocked metal locker, and was taking the ring of keys from around his neck. “Is it?” Joanna said, clutching at his sleeve.

He knelt in front of the locker. “No,” he said, trying the long-barreled keys one after the other in the padlock, “though it would be appropriate. Ships figure heavily in it, and water.” He inserted a key. It didn’t fit. He tried another. “And death. ‘Four times fifty living men, they dropped down one by one.’ ” It didn’t fit. He tried another. “The universality of death, is that the symbol you’re looking for?”

The key fit. He opened the locker, pulled out a wooden box, and carried it across to the railing. “Certainly that was the Titanic. Astors and Irish immigrants, stokers and schoolteachers, perishing together in the icy water.”

He opened the box, squatted down, pulled out a cardboard cylinder and stood it against the railing, and then stood up again. “Children and debutantes and professional cardsharps, all equally helpless, equally doomed.”

He patted the pockets of his gray vest as if he were looking for something. “Unless, of course, you were in steerage, where your chances of perishing were somewhat more than equal.” He pulled a book of matches out of his pocket. “In which case — step back.”

“What?”

“Step back,” he said, and put out his hand to push her away. He knelt, striking the match as he did so, holding it to the bottom of the cylinder.

In the last split second before he lit the fuse, she thought, The rockets! He’s setting off the distress rockets! and a stream of flame shot up and burst into a shower of white sparks. Joanna craned her neck, looking up at the falling white stars, and as she did, she had the feeling that it was important, that she was close to the meaning.

“Would you like me to do that for you, sir?” a man’s voice said, and Joanna looked down and saw an officer in a white uniform standing next to Mr. Briarley.

“Thank you.” Mr. Briarley handed over the matches to the officer and walked rapidly down the deck to the staircase.

Joanna ran after him. “Mr. Briarley! Wait!” She caught up with him on the second landing. “In which case, what?”

“In which case,” he said, hurrying down the carpeted stairs, “the meaning of the Titanic becomes a political one. The evils of a class-structured society, or of plutocracy, or the repression of women.”

“It wasn’t political,” Joanna said. “It was something important.”

“Important,” he said, reaching the bottom of the stairs. He strode across the foyer to a door and opened it. “After you,” he said, bowing, and she stepped through.

And saw too late that it was the passage she had come through in. “No, wait, you haven’t — ” she said, and was back in the lab.