Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (8 page)

‘An evil spirit,’ said Billiard-Fanon, with a preacher’s vibrato. ‘It need not be the spirit of a dead man. It could be a devil.’

‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ insisted Lebret, shaking his head. ‘This is a new realm! An entirely new ocean! The English poetess Joan Keats talks of Balboa laying eyes for the first time upon the Pacific ocean with wonder and admiration! We are the new Balboas – and all you can do is fret like schoolchildren about ghost stories?’

‘The sooner we can get home,’ was Billiard-Fanon’s surly reply, ‘the better.’

*

There seemed no obvious explanation for these small-scale mysteries – sharp breezes that blew up from nowhere to splash coffee out of cups or slap the captain’s cap off his head and playfully roll it along the ceiling until its choleric owner grabbed it and wedged it back upon his head.

Nor was this all. They did what they could to discover more about the surrounding medium. Samples of water were drawn from the catalytic tanks and examined. Plain, unsalinated, pure water – clear and without contaminant of any kind, as far as they could see. Lebret, in a gesture the others considered rash, drank a mouthful; he appeared to suffer no ill effects.

‘Fresh
water!’ said the captain, shaking his head in bewilderment. ‘Not even brine! Yet more mystery!’

‘At any rate it shows,’ Boucher said, ‘that we are no longer in the Atlantic – for that ocean is salt.’

‘As if such a thing needed showing,’ grumbled Lebret. ‘As if anybody could doubt it! Come Captain – we have discovered a
new
ocean! Let us name it – we can call it after you.
La Cloche Mer
.’

The captain snapped his teeth together. ‘No!’ he growled. ‘I’ll not play such games. We are not here to explore. Our job is to return to France – nothing more.’

‘But we must explore a little deeper,’ suggested Lebret. ‘Who knows what riches lie just a few fathoms below us …’

‘Stop it, M’sieur!’ Cloche ordered him. ‘Once and for all – no.’

Sonar returned nothing. From time to time the captain would climb into the con and peer through the periscope – but nothing could be seen save perfect blackness. ‘We might be floating in outer space,’ he observed; ‘were it not that we can feel ourselves descending.’

‘And that we are able to circulate water from our immediate environment through our catalytic tanks,’ Boucher noted.

‘A good thing too,’ Cloche agreed. ‘Or we would suffocate in days.’

The captain invited his lieutenant, Lebret, Castor and the two
scientists to the bridge to discuss what they ought to do. Le Petomain was again in the pilot’s chair.

‘I have been revolving whether I ought to send out a diver,’ Cloche announced. ‘Of course, I have no desire to send a man to
certain
death. We have no real knowledge of where we are, or what dangers there might be. We are moving through a sunless sea, of the kind the poet hymned – I forget his name.’

Lebret gave voice to what everybody in the vessel was thinking. ‘We have been working on the assumption that we are sinking through some subterranean ocean. But messieurs – we are at an approximate depth of
ninety thousand kilometres
. The earth itself is no more than thirteen thousand kilometres in diameter.’

Boucher was shaking his head, but Lebret pressed on, ‘Any idea that we somehow slipped through a fissure in the ocean bed and into a body of water contained within the earth is surely exploded by our continuing descent.’

‘It cannot
be
,’ growled Cloche, from the captain’s chair, his right hand gripping his own beard as if thereby holding on to logical reality itself. ‘Are we caught in some … circular current? Are we rolling round and round?’

‘It is hard to see how that can be, Captain,’ said Lebret. ‘We would hardly feel the descent in the vertical plane, the way we do.’

‘No, no,’ countered Boucher. ‘Let us not entirely abandon Occam’s razor! The possible, no matter how unlikely, is always to be preferred to the impossible, however appealing. Our depth gauge does not measure absolute depth, after all.’

‘I am not sure I know what “absolute depth” means, anyway,’ said Jhutti.

‘If modern science is wrong, and our globe
is
truly filled with water,’ Boucher pressed, ‘—and if we have somehow made our way to that interior ocean, well it would not be a stationary mass, would it? The earth turns, and its diurnal spin would twist any interior body of liquid into a permanent, three-dimensional whirlpool. Rather than simply plunging directly down, perhaps we have rather been following a spiral, down through the fluid gyre?’

‘An ingenious theory,’ admitted Jhutti. ‘Although an unlikely
one. Our motion has continued with a downward vector without interruption. Were we caught in a vortex, there would be palpable shearing vectors, motions to the side. Quite apart from the fundamental unlikelihood of any such inner whirlpool of water going undetected by modern science.’

‘There must be
some
explanation,’ insisted the captain.

‘Indeed there must,’ agreed Lebret. ‘I have no desire to contradict the lieutenant, but it seems to me that even a spiral descent must come to an end long before a hundred thousand kilometres.’

‘So?’

‘So, we must address the possibility that ours is … is no longer a terrestrial location.’

The six other men on the bridge looked from one to the other; several shook their heads. ‘Impossible,’ declared Boucher. ‘Permit me to invoke Occam’s razor once more. Any possible explanation must, even if unlikely, be possible.’

‘I do not pretend to be able to explain how the transition occurred – or where we now find ourselves. But I am emboldened to go further in my speculations.’

‘Please do, Monsieur Lebret,’ instructed the captain.

‘I suggest we have slipped from our material dimension into another.’

‘Another
dimension
?’ snapped Cloche. ‘Meaningless pseudobabble! Explain yourself.’

‘There is one datum I can adduce, I believe,’ said Lebret, scratching his beard with his left hand and manoeuvring a cigarette out of its case with his left, ‘to support my theory. The pressure! Let us agree, for the sake of argument, to trust our instrumentations, and agree that we have passed through a continuous column of water – for surely we
are
surrounded by water, and have been this whole time – to a “depth” of one hundred thousand kilometres. Were such a prodigious depth possible in any terrestrial location, the pressures at the bottom would be … quite unimaginable! Millions of tonnes per square centimetre, enough to crush the water itself into a supersolid. Probably enough to crush the atoms into a nuclear furnace. We ought, according to everything we
know of the physical sciences, we ought to be sailing through the heart of a burning star, not an ocean! Whatever else is happening to us in our strange voyage, it is not that!’

‘Then what, Monsieur?’

‘Indulge me, my friends,’ said Lebret. ‘Imagine that we
have
passed through some … portal. Imagine that we have moved from the finite Atlantic into an infinite ocean. A body of water literally without limit.’

The others considered this bizarre suggestion. ‘This is your earlier theory … that we have passed from life to death?’ demanded Cloche.

‘By no means,’ said Lebret, an uncharacteristically sombre expression on his face. ‘I consider our plight material, not spiritual. But I ask you – if we imagine a body of water infinite in extent in all directions – what would the water pressure be within it?’

It was such a strange, and unexpected question, that at first nobody offered to answer it. Eventually, however, Jhutti stirred himself.

‘A strange speculation! I would say,’ Jhutti said, speaking slowly as if working it out as he went along, ‘that at every point an infinite quantity of water would press down. That, in brief, were such a body of water to exist (and I do not concede for a moment that it ever could) then the water pressure within it would be … infinite too. Water could not exist under such a circumstance. Indeed,
matter
could not exist like that, in any form.’

‘With all respect due to your eminence and intellectual capacity, I cannot agree,’ said Lebret, smiling. He then said something rapidly in Punjabi, before going on in French. ‘Water at the bottom of the Mariana trench is crushed by the
weight
of water, not its mass. Weight is a function of gravity. I am not proposing a vast planet surrounded by a vast ocean – an oceanic Jupiter, or something of that sort. Such a thing would not fit the circumstances in which we find ourselves.’

‘Jupiter – or say rather
Neptune
,’ murmured Ghatwala.

‘No – I am proposing an
infinite
ocean. Imagine it! In such a location there would be no place in which the pressure could
build
up
, for there would be nowhere for the mass of water to
bear down upon
. Do you see?’

‘I am not sure,’ said Jhutti. ‘An infinite ocean strikes me as a rank impossibility. Where would all the water in such a place
come from
?’

‘Well – if it comes to that,’ returned Lebret. ‘We might ask – where does all the matter in our actual universe “come from”?’

‘These are questions beyond observational science,’ said Jhutti, a little primly.

‘In which case …’ drawled Lebret, complacently.

But Jhutti was not finished. ‘Even if I accepted so outrageous a supposition as your
infinite universe of water
,’ he said. ‘I do not believe the medium would remain uniformly dissipated. Surely it would coalesce into innumerable gravitational centres?’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Lebret. ‘For such a cosmos would be governed not by the simple gravitational mechanics of agglomerative matter, but by the infinitely more subtle and complex equations of fluid dynamics – and (since our measurements confirm that the temperature of the fluid is as high as 4°C) Brownian motion. Any whirlpool or tourbillon would be as likely to disaggregate as aggregate the medium.’

‘No—no—’ Jhutti said. ‘You do not give enough credit to the inescapable, agglomerative powers of gravity itself.’

‘I might wish, Monsieur,’ said Pierre Boucher, scratching the pockmarked lunar expanse of his great white brow, ‘that you talk in ordinary French …’

‘I repeat,’ said Jhutti, ‘that the existence of such an entity – an infinite universe comprised wholly of water – is mere supposition. There is certainly no evidence that we have
entered into
such a place. How could we have done so? By what means?’

‘Say rather,’ said Lebret, ‘by what portal? For as to the existence of some sort of portal, at least, we must all agree. In the world with which we are familiar, our rapid descent should have terminated in the ocean floor. It did not. Logically, therefore, we somehow passed
through
– or beyond, or behind, or in some other dimensional relation
to
– that brute physical reality.’

‘I have another objection to Monsieur Lebret’s ingenious theory,’ put in Dilraj Ghatwala. ‘For we are all of us standing upon the deck of this bridge, under the influence of gravity. How could that be, in the bizarre universe you suggest?’

‘Ah!’ said Lebret, seemingly pleased. ‘That, Monsieur, is a
very
good point! And I concede without blushing that I am not certain of the answer. But I can at least think of a number of ways in which it can be explained. Some portal – I make no apology for reusing the word – had granted us egress. Presumably it has also allowed in a quantity of water. The release of water, at the immense pressures of the Atlantic bottom, into a vast reservoir of water at what are evidently much lower pressures must perforce have been after the manner of a great
jet
. What if the
Plongeur
were rolled about, and what we perceive as gravity is in fact the
acceleration
imparted to us by the force of this spout? Or what if – more fancifully – the portal has somehow allowed in
gravity itself
from our world?’

‘Preposterous!’ exclaimed the usually polite Jhutti, unable to contain himself further. ‘Gravity is not a fluid, to be released like a stream from a water pistol! And we could hardly have experienced an acceleration of one gravity continually, smoothly, without turbulence or interruption for
three days straight
! If we had, then by now we would be travelling at …’ he performed a rapid mental calculation, ‘… at nearing one hundred and fifty thousand metres per second!’

But Lebret lost none of his good humour. ‘Good points, all,’ he conceded. ‘In which case, there must another explanation! One thing only is certain –
we need to explore
. We must continue our journey through this strange new medium, and not return too precipitously to France.’

‘Enough,’ said the captain. ‘None of this helps me make the decisions required by command. Shall I send a seaman out in a suit, and hope he can fix the ballast tank intakes? I
must
regain control of my own ship! That is the most important thing. Everything else is secondary.’

‘Indeed, sir’ said Boucher, smartly.

‘Very well,’ said Cloche. ‘Let me make plain, gentlemen, my broader strategy: regain control of my vessel, in order to retrace our trajectory. Into whatever bizarre place we have sunk, it must be possible to return the way we came.’

‘You are the captain,’ Lebret observed.

‘Thank you for noticing, Monsieur Lebret!’ returned Cloche, sarcastically.

‘I would only note, sir,’ Lebret added, with the slightest hint of insolent emphasis on the honorific, ‘that if my hypothesis is correct, then ascent or descent will be equally fruitless. The chance of finding the precise point at which we passed from the mundane ocean to this strange new location – if it
be
infinite – is mathematically: zero. We can never again return home. We shall sail these endless, unlit waters until our food gives out and we starve – or until we grow insane with confinement and kill one another.’ He smiled a weird little smile.