Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

by Adam Roberts

  ‘The unexpected quiet is a little oppressive, no?’ laughed Lebret, from his seated position – legs akimbo, bracing himself against the bar in the floor to prevent himself from slipping forward.

  ‘Both the tanks still refuse to close,’ announced Boucher, pulling himself alongside Le Petomain. ‘But there is good news – if these pressure readings are correct.’

  ‘How can they be?’ snapped Billiard-Fanon, climbing up and checking the instrumentation himself. ‘It’s nonsense!’

  ‘Sir?’ said the lieutenant. ‘Before, it would not have been possible to pump air back into the tanks, even if we could close them. The pressures were much too high – the pump could never have done the work, and the air itself would simply have compressed and liquefied, giving us no buoyancy. But if the pressures are falling at the rate this dial suggests – then soon it would be possible to refloat the tanks.’

  ‘Assuming we can close them.’

  ‘I know it seems impossible, sir. But if the pressure keeps falling there’s even the chance that we could put a diver into the water. To have a look at the vents from the outside.’

  ‘At seven thousand metres below the surface?’ scoffed Cloche. ‘Don’t talk nonsense. A man in a diving suit would be squashed to jelly in an instant!’

  ‘But, sir, the pressure gauge reads …’

  ‘I don’t care what it reads! Would you trust that gauge with your life, sailor? I can feel in my bowels that we are still descending – that we’ve been descending without intermission – and accordingly there’s no way that instrument can be wrong! So, we have gone down and down. It follows, as the night the day, by all that is immutable in the laws of physics, that the pressure must be approaching a thousand kilograms per square centimetre.’

  The lieutenant did not contradict his captain, but his face betrayed disagreement.

  ‘Seven thousand five hundred metres,’ announced Le Petomain.

  ‘It is,’ declared the captain. ‘It is—’ But he could not find in his vocabulary the word that expressed what it was.

  ‘To have prepared for inevitable catastrophic extinction,’ observed Lebret, lighting yet another cigarette. ‘And then for it simply to evaporate into mystery. It is anticlimactic. Is it not?’ And he laughed.

  5

  THE IMPOSSIBLE DEPTHS

  The captain called a general muster. By the time the entire complement of crew had reassembled in the bridge (with the exception of Pannier, who was discovered dead drunk and passed out in the kitchen), the depth gauge showed a depth of nine thousand metres. The pressure sensors, at the same time, registered a pressure of only eighty kilograms per square centimetre – a lesser weight upon the hull than had obtained before the disaster had struck.

  The crew discussed the impossibility of this; but there was nowhere for the discussion to go except round and round. The bottom line was that most of the crew believed the impossibly low pressure reading – it was consistent, after all, with the absence of compression noises from the hull. Some refused to believe it, on the equally reasonable grounds that a depth of nearly a full kilometre must necessarily, by the laws of physics, entail a pressure much greater than the dial showed. This was an unavoidable fact of nature.

  A breeze had started up in the cabin; gentle but persistent – it blew at the trouser legs and jacket flaps, and agitated them. Lebret wondered aloud whether it derived from a steeped temperature differential between the outside water and the warmer innards of the craft. It seemed a trivial matter. Men tugged their tunics down, and smoothed their fluttering trouser legs.

  Then, Monsieur Ghatwala suggested a means of testing the pressure gauge reading. The Plongeur possessed the capacity to generate its own air by breaking down seawater into its constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen. To this end small catalyst tanks existed, one on each side of the craft, with systolic hoses connecting them to the open water. ‘Open these,’ Jhutti suggested, ‘and circulate the water. If the external pressures are truly as manageable as the dials suggest, that operation should proceed without a hitch. But if the pressures are what they should be at a depth of almost,’ he swallowed before uttering the number, ‘ten thousand metres, then opening the tanks will cause them to crumple.’

  ‘To crumple,’ said Castor, ‘explosively! That might cause significant damage to the Plongeur.’

  The captain considered this.

  ‘Captain,’ put in Jhutti. ‘I might simply note that at a depth of nine and a half thousand metres the Plongeur should long since have been crushed to a mass of metal. Nobody has dived to such depths! Not in the history of mankind! And I, who know the design parameters of this craft better than any, know that it was not designed for such a thing. Opening the catalytic tanks is a very small risk, when set against the simple impossibility of our being alive at all.’

  Cloche nodded a single nod. ‘Do it,’ he ordered.

  The tanks were opened. Water circulated, and the atomic pile began its work of recharging the ship’s onboard oxygen supply. Everything happened without a hitch.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ the captain breathed.

  ‘It merely confirms the evidence of our own ears,’ was Lebret’s opinion. ‘When the pressure built up, the metal walls of our oceanic coffin shook and wailed. That they have ceased their unpleasant music proves the pressure to have reduced.’

  ‘But how?’ Boucher demanded, banging the side of a bank of instruments with his fist. ‘It is wholly against the laws of physics!’

  ‘It is,’ confirmed Jhutti. ‘I can see no explanation for it. None at all.’

  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.