Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (6 page)

The dial reached the limit of its measurement: 9999.9 metres
flashed briefly before the disks all turned as one and a depth of 0000.0 was recorded. There was a collective gasp.

Slowly, Le Petomain reached inside his tunic, and brought out a pearl-inset handle, the size and shape of a razor shell. The slightest pressure of his thumb flicked the blade of this knife into play, and – looking momentarily at his captain – he brought it down and carved a small nick onto the metallic top edge of his instrument panel. As he folded the knife away he spoke to the entire room. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘whether that is the last time we will go, as the phrase has it, “round the clock”.’

Since their collective extinction was apparently not as imminent as they had previously assumed, the captain declared that they should return to their posts and attempt again to repair whatever damage had precipitated the disaster in the first place. ‘Monsieur Castor,’ he said. ‘Take Capot and Avocat and try once again to restore the propeller to our control. Monsieur Chatallah, perhaps you would accompany my chief engineer?’

‘Ghatwala,’ said Ghatwala.

The captain did not acknowledge this correction. ‘I suppose it
will
be necessary to close down the engine altogether. I presume your assistance in doing so, and in restarting the device, will prove invaluable.’

‘The engine is not designed to be switched off mid-voyage,’ said Ghatwala. ‘I say so only to warn you, Captain. We can turn it off; but there are no guarantees we can turn it on again. And without the engine …’

‘I appreciate the consequences of being without the engine, Monsieur. No power, therefore no air. I have confidence in your ability to restart the atomic pile. We have twelve hours of battery power. I trust you can perform the operation within that time frame?’

‘We shall try, Captain,’ said Ghatwala.

‘Good. Billiard-Fanon and de Chante – please try once again to close the ballast tanks. If we can fill them again with air, then I
will be well pleased. The vanes must also be unfrozen, and returned to my control.’

‘Aye, sir!’

‘Aye, sir!’

‘Monsieur Jhutti. You and I will undertake a survey of the whole craft. If you would be so kind? Your specialist knowledge will prove useful to me.’

‘Of course.’

‘Messieurs,’ announced the captain, standing. ‘I do not know what has happened to us. But we are still alive! And as long as our hearts are beating, and our lungs drawing breath, we may set our collective will and intelligence against this pitiless environment.’

‘Perhaps I should accompany you as well, Captain?’ said Lebret, hauling himself awkwardly to his feet.

‘There is no need,’ the captain replied.

‘As you wish,’ Lebret said, indifferently. ‘There is, of course, one explanation for our present situation that nobody has offered.’

‘And what is that?’ asked the captain, with a sarcastic edge to his voice.

‘We all
expected
to die,’ said Lebret. ‘Perhaps we did. You said yourself, captain, that death is an infinite ocean. Who’s to say that we are not now voyaging through precisely that body of water? Perhaps the afterlife –
our
afterlife, I mean – will be a Flying Dutchman eternity of traversing these black submarine waters.’ He looked around the bridge. The faces of several of the crew had fallen. That of Le Banquier in particular looked horror-struck.

For a moment even the captain looked alarmed at this thought. But then he struck his broad chest with his heavy fist, and boomed out. ‘Nonsense!
I still live
! Look at you all—idiots! You think
you
are whimpering shades? You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Still sweating and farting? Ghosts? Nonsense! You are living men – living Frenchmen! You ought to act accordingly.’

‘Sir!’ barked the crew, automatically.

‘Monsieur Lebret,’ the captain said. ‘I have changed my mind. It would be a good idea for you to accompany us after all.’ And as the crew vacated the bridge – all save Le Petomain, who remained
at the controls – Cloche took Lebret by his arm. ‘I’ll thank you
not
to undermine the morale of my crew, M’sieur,’ he said, in a tight voice.

‘Captain,’ said Lebret, extracting his arm from the older man’s grasp, ‘you can rest assured—I will not.’

The captain declared that he wanted to ascend into the conning tower, and take a look through the periscope. ‘I don’t expect to see anything but darkness,’ he admitted. ‘But still.’

This presented a problem, however. As he started to unscrew the ceiling hatch above the bridge, water began leaking into the bridge. It did not spurt, which was a good sign. Rather it poured as steam might, making a shimmering semi-circular pattern under the electric lights.

The captain stopped unscrewing the hatch, but neither did he close it up entirely. The water continued coming out, in an agitated mist. ‘It’s cold!’ Cloche declared, as the water swirled about his head. ‘If the con is flooded, and we are at the depths the instruments suggest – why then the pressure ought to have shot this hatch like a cannonball from a gun as soon as I began to turn it. On the other hand, if the pressure has reduced to the levels the gauge says, it ought to be possible to repair any leaks in the con.’

‘What do you suggest, Captain?’ asked Jhutti. He was staring at the strange behaviour of the water, billowing in chill clouds.

‘De Chante!’ Cloche bellowed. ‘Come here – and bring a tool box!’

The mate appeared a moment later, clambering up the sloping corridor. ‘One,’ said the captain. ‘Two. Three!’

He unscrewed the hatch and let it bang downwards, fully open. A quantity of water fell through the hole, falling not as a shower but rather, it seemed, as a single bundle, almost like a transparent sack filled with brine and attached to the underside of the hatch. It splashed through the grid in the floor of the bridge and drained through into the bilges. But something had whipped up the internal breeze, and droplets sprayed all about, wetting everybody. It was very cold. Gasping at the chill, de Chante climbed up the
ladder, his toolbox hooked over his elbow like a flower-seller’s basket. ‘Captain, it’s …’ he began to say. More water, a great chunk of it, fell through the hatch. There was a bang, perhaps the sound of de Chante falling over, and more water came down. The whole bridge was being sprayed, water blowing in every direction.

The fall of water diminished. From above came the sound of plangent metallic clangs.

‘Can you fix it?’ the captain called up.

And a moment later, the reply, ‘Done, sir! The plates had been a little bent, but I’ve forced them back down.’

Indeed, the flow of water diminished, and eventually resolved itself into a series of heavy droplets. De Chante came down the ladder; he was of course soaked. ‘Good work, sailor,’ said his Captain. ‘Go and change into dry clothes.’

The captain, Jhutti and Lebret climbed up into the con. Water ran along the walls, and droplets of spray, supported by a gust of air coming up through the hatch, swam in the air. The three men were soon thoroughly wet.

Cloche did not extend the periscope. He put his eyes to the viewer and swivelled it about. There was nothing to see. ‘Perfectly black in every direction,’ he noted. ‘Perhaps that is as one might expect.’

Lebret took a turn after Cloche, and finally Jhutti. But there was really nothing to see except blackness. In his wet clothes, and in the chill of the little space, Jhutti was shivering. ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘One thing occurs to me. It makes no sense; but I can think of no other explanation for our … I apologise, my French is not providing me with the correct word.’

‘Our predicament,’ said Lebret.

‘Our situation,’ corrected Cloche. ‘Your explanation, Monsieur Jhutti?’

‘We have descended
below
the level of the seabed – that much is clear. Even the deepest portions of the Atlantic do not … descend to ten thousand metres. Even the deepest Pacific trenches do not go down so far! Only one … possibility explains these things. We must have passed below the earth’s crust.’

‘Yet we are still floating in water,’ Lebret pointed out.

‘The precise composition of the interior of the globe has yet to be established. It is certainly the case,’ Jhutti went on, hugging himself and even hopping on the spot to warm himself, ‘that seismographic evidence points to it being molten magma, mantled over by solid rock. But who knows what reservoirs of water lie within that substratum? The only explanation that fits the facts is that we have somehow slipped into such a hidden reservoir of water.’

‘With respect, Monsieur,’ said Lebret. ‘I dispute your assertion that such a theorem explains all the facts. Even if we accept that there are bulbs of water, hidden within the rock of the earth’s mantle, and connected to the oceans by uncharted chimneys – a circumstance no scientist or geologist has ever supported – nonetheless, the water pressure
within
such spaces would be immense. As immense as at the bottom of the Mariana trench!’ He then added something in Punjabi, speaking fluently and rapidly.

‘I did not realise,’ said the captain, eyeing him, ‘that you spoke Indian.’

‘Do you not?’ replied Lebret, drily.

Cloche scowled.

‘Captain, I agree it sounds unlikely,’ said Jhutti. ‘But – what if a crust of rock had sealed away a reservoir of water – the reservoir itself having previously existed at regular water pressures? We have somehow fallen inside. Perhaps … perhaps our descent coincided with that crust of rock falling away. If that were the case, then perhaps the much higher pressure water at the bottom of the Atlantic would
wash
into the relatively low-pressure cavity, and equally likely that (being in the vicinity) we would be flushed through too, like flotsam being rinsed down a plughole as the bath empties.’

‘If that is what has happened,’ Lebret returned, ‘then – and depending upon the size of this notional cavity of yours – the water pressure will rise steadily, and quickly. Eventually we will be crushed.’ Lebret ground his cigarette into the metal floor of
the con with his boot. ‘If it will not disarrange you, my eminent friend, I shall retain my scepticism.’

‘You have another explanation?’ asked Jhutti, shivering.

‘It seems to me,’ said Lebret, ‘unlikely that a reservoir of any size could exist in such proximity to the enormous pressures of the water at the bottom of the Atlantic. If the crust were thin enough to crumble, it would have done so long ago. Are we to believe it is simply a matter of coincidence that this rock doorway you posit opened just as we approached? No, sir.’ He shook his head, and added something in Punjabi. Then he reverted to French, ‘Also, we must consider our orientation. We began our dive some small distance west of the French coast, and facing east. We should have crashed – as the captain here predicted we
would
crash – into the flank of the continental shelf. That would place your speculative underground sea beneath France, would it not? Under the
Pays des Gasgogne
. Which is to say – beneath one of the most thoroughly studied geological areas on the globe. Can we believe that a few kilometres directly underneath France there is a subterranean ocean that no scientist has yet noticed? That is hard to credit.’

‘I repeat my question, my friend,’ said the shivering Indian. ‘What alternative explanation can you offer?’

Lebret smiled and shook his head. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘It is a pure mystery. Isn’t that exciting?’

‘Messieurs,’ said the captain. ‘I propose we change into dry clothes. I intend to tour the ship, and I would like you to accompany me. As to your theories of oceans beneath the land – they are, I fear, what my grandmother used to call
les sottises
. There must be some other explanation.’

‘At any rate,’ opined Lebret, ‘this gives is the opportunity to explore whatever new realm it is we have entered.’

‘I am not interested in that,’ barked Cloche. ‘Our job is to get back to port – and only that.’

‘Come!’ wheedled Lebret. ‘We might discover whole new continents down here, and claim them for France!’

‘No,’ boomed Cloche, striking the metal wall with his fist. ‘That is not our mission!’

‘But …’ Lebret began to say.

‘No!’ Cloche cut him off, again. Lebret flushed pink with a sudden anger; but a moment later his composure reasserted itself, and the colour drained from his face.

The three men descended, and closed the hatch to the con. It took only minutes for them to change their clothes, and place the wet gear in one of the ventilated airing cupboards with which the aft corridor was supplied.

Cloche led the way into the rear of the craft. They came first of all into a cluttered space – silver-steel cabinets lining the wall, pipes and cables snaking like metal creepers over the ceiling and wall. Beyond that the corridor split like the forks of a Y, passing either side of the central engine. The pile itself was painted red. Sheets of close laid wire were pinned to its wainscot like corduroy; and silver panels were bolted at regular intervals along its flank. It was humming audibly. The breeze was even stronger here; as the captain approached, a sheet of paper blew from a work surface and squirled up towards the ceiling. Two floor panels were up, and the very top of Capot’s ruddy head of hair was visible poking out of the hole.

‘Holloa!’ boomed the captain.

There was the sound of motion below. ‘Captain!’ cried Castor, climbing high enough for his doggish face to appear over the lip. ‘I’ve been looking at ways of decoupling the drive shaft without stopping the engine – but it’s spinning full pelt! We are going to have to shut the reactor down.’

Ghatwala’s head poked up as well. ‘Captain, I repeat – the device is not designed to be switched off and on like a diesel engine. Turning it off involves withdrawing a number of the uranium-oxide lances upon which the reaction depends. Only when enough have been withdrawn will the engine shut down. More worrying, reinserting them risks chain-reaction.’

‘What do you think,
Monsieur
Castor?’ the captain asked.

‘I can’t see any other way of getting into the workings and seeing
why the driveshaft gears have fused – let alone separating them,’ said Castor, wiping his forehead on the meat of his forearm. ‘But, see, I’m used to regular engines which – as
Monsieur Visage-noir
here says – can be simply shut down. Oh, I’ve done my homework on these atomic piles, of course, and I’ll say only this: The US Navy have been running their USS
Nautilus
, their atomic sub, for three years. And in all that time the engine has only ever been shut off in dock.’