Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

by Adam Roberts

  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 Only when enough have been withdrawn will the engine shut down.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.’

  ‘This is correct,’ confirmed Ghatwala.

  ‘It is a balance of risk, Captain Cloche,’ declared Lebret. ‘If Monsieur Jhutti is correct in his speculation, then we are plunging rapidly towards what must be the rocky floor of a brine-filled subterranean cavern. If so, then there is a hypothetical risk that we will all die. On the other hand – tampering with the pile introduces a real risk that we will all die.’

  ‘The reactor circulates water at extremely high pressures and temperatures,’ said Jhutti. ‘I cannot recommend tampering with it.’

  The captain brooded. ‘I must have command of my sub returned to me,’ he announced. ‘There is a risk, yes of course – but we are all as good as dead anyway! Castor, proceed.’

  ‘Captain—’

  Cloche roared. ‘I have made my decision. You shall respect my authority.’

  Castor wiped his hands on his trousers, paused just long enough for the delay to register as insubordination, and replied, ‘Yes, Captain.’

  With Jhutti and Ghatwala supervising his every movement, Castor withdrew the reaction mass from the centre of the pile. The lights throughout the vessel flickered and dimmed as battery power took up the slack. The hum of the engines died, and the propellers ceased churning the water.

  ‘Good,’ declared the captain. ‘Now get in there and find out why the driveshaft has seized!’

  He came back down the sloping corridor, awkwardly, and into the bridge. In the uncanny quiet, Le Petomain looked round. Two large, distinct beads of sweat, like glass tadpoles, were visible upon his forehead. ‘Captain!’

  ‘The props are stilled,’ announced the captain. ‘Our rate of descent must have diminished.’

  ‘No change, my Captain!’

  Cloche said nothing: he made his way to the instrument panel, and saw for himself. They were descending at exactly the same rate as they had been without the action of the propellers. ‘That can’t be! With the tanks open, of course we will still descend – but we are,’ and he made a quick calculation in his head, ‘we are dropping at greater than terminal velocity in water!’

  ‘I know, sir. I can’t explain it.’

  ‘We are surrounded by water – are we not?’

  ‘We are, sir. We’ve sampled it – it’s in the catalytic tanks.’

  ‘Then,’ announced the captain, ‘we are simply falling too fast. Faster than physics can explain – or allow!’

  Ghatwala was helping Castor examine the main propeller drive-pole. The other crew were at their posts. Jhutti, feeling at a loose end, came through to the mess. It was deserted, except for Lieutenant Boucher, who was enjoying a quiet smoke. He offered the scientist a cigarette.

  ‘Gladly,’ said Jhutti. He seated himself next to the lieutenant at the table.

  ‘So. Do you believe this theory that the earth is hollow and filled with water?’ the lieutenant asked Amanpreet Jhutti, as both filled their lungs with particulate tobacco.

  ‘It goes against everything modern science has established concerning our globe,’ was Jhutti’s opinion.

  ‘Indeed! Well one thing occurs to me – we are still descending, at something approaching a metre a second. If this continues we will soon have descended deeper than the earth’s diameter. Then we shall know – unless, perhaps, we suddenly pop into sunlight and air, off the coast of New Zealand! Surfacing upside down, our propeller still churning!’ Boucher laughed; and even the sober Jhutti smiled.

  ‘Not a very likely circumstance,’ the scientist said.

  ‘Of course I know that,’ said Boucher. ‘Only – are any of the things that have occurred to us likely? Would you like to lay a wager with me, Monsieur Scientist, as to whether our adventure will end with us simply surfacing in some antipodean sea?’

  ‘I do not gamble, I am afraid,’ said Jhutti.

  ‘Like Einstein’s God,’ said Boucher, beaming again. ‘But, you know – I think it was you, but perhaps it was your colleague – somebody mentioned Jules Verne earlier.’

  This mention of the celebrated author’s name seemed almost to startle Jhutti. ‘What of him?’

  ‘Only, Monsieur, that in addition to writing his famous story of submarine adventure, Verne also wrote a story about a journey towards the centre of the earth. Perhaps you know it?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Jhutti.

  ‘Then you’ll recall what filled the globe in Verne’s narrative? A great ocean! A vast primal sea, swimming with dinosaurs and pteric fish!’ Boucher laughed again. ‘Could it be that we have somehow slipped out of reality altogether, and into the imagination of Monsieur Jules Verne?’

  The lieutenant was, of course, joking; but Jhutti, peering at the glowing end of his cigarette, appeared to be taking the idea seriously.

  ‘A dead man’s imagination,’ he said, in a dull voice. ‘Monsieur Lebret suggested that we had indeed all died, and were now voyaging through the unforgiving medium of human mortality. Is your idea more outrageous than his?’

  ‘Oh, I did not mean to be taken literally!’ said Boucher, smacking the flat of his hand upon the metal surface of the table and barking with laughter. ‘Sailing inside Verne’s head? No man has a skull so capacious!’

  Jhutti smiled, but only weakly. ‘Though I have dedicated my life to material science, yet I still live with the insights of my mother-civilisation in my heart. One thing we Indians understand, that too many Westerners have yet to grasp, is that “reality” is not so simple or straightforward as it is sometimes thought to be. Reality, in truth is … what is the word? Reality is ironic. In a deep sense.’

  ‘No mysticism, my Hindu friend,’ laughed Boucher, draining his coffee. ‘We need practical solutions to our problems.’

  ‘And who is to say that mysticism is not practical?’ returned Jhutti, smiling.

  After three hours work, Castor re-emerged from beneath the metal floor of the engine room, his face grimed. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the shaft,’ he gasped. ‘I don’t know why the gearbox seized up. I can’t find a reason.’

  ‘There must be a rea
son,’ insisted the captain.

  ‘Without doubt,’ agreed Castor, hauling himself upon his elbow. ‘But I can’t work it out. Neither can the black-faced gentleman you sent to assist me.’ Given the amount of black engine grease smeared over Castor’s own face, this racist descriptor was, to say nothing else, imprecise. ‘The problem must have been in the gearing; but why they should seize up – I simply don’t understand it.’

  ‘Will the system work correctly if we restart it?’ Cloche wanted to know.

  Castor shrugged his shoulders after the manner only Frenchman are properly capable of. He plunged his face into a large white flannel, and rubbed as if he wished to erase his own features.

  ‘Well,’ Cloche declared. ‘We must have power. Monsieur Ghatwala—can you restart this bomb-like motor?’

  ‘With the assistance of my tovarisch, Jhutti, I can,’ was Ghatwala’s answer. He went off to retrieve Jhutti and begin the delicate procedure.

  6

  THE INFINITE OCEAN

  Jhutti and Ghatwala, acting together, and proceeding with a ponderous caution that, perhaps counterintuitively, actually infected the rest of the crew with fear, re-inserted the reaction mass into the atomic pile. The temperature inside the engine rose perilously high, but then settled back within operational parameters.

  The engines restarted. The propellers were once again under the pilot’s control.

  But this did little good. With or without propeller motion, the Plongeur sank at a too-precipitous speed. Reversing the props, hoping to draw the vessel backwards and upwards, or at the least to arrest the velocitous downward trajectory, had no effect at all. ‘Even if we were dead weight in the water,’ Le Petomain grumbled, ‘we shouldn’t be sinking this fast.’

  They all knew it to be true.

  For three days and nights the Plongeur descended. The crew passed through a period of collective elation at having escaped what had been, after all, inevitable death in that initial catastrophic descent. But this did not last long, and it was succeeded by a period of gloom. They were still alive, true; but they were confined, helpless and unable to see how, or even if, they might ever return to their homes. For twenty-four hours the captain considered whether to risk sending out a diver into the unknown waters. During that time, the depth gauge passed its limit no fewer than nine times. The crew watched with fascination, and then horror, and finally with boredom as the numbers continued their relentless accumulation.

  Odd things were happening inside the vessel, though, and these only served to make the crew nervous and unhappy. The talk was of haunting. The talk was of the spirits of the discontented dead. The captain scoffed noisily and publicly when these rumours were reported to him. ‘In the middle of the twentieth century?’ he demanded. ‘To talk of ghosts and goblins? Absurd!’ But the sailors continued their agitated chatter. The consensus was – something supernatural was at play.

  For instance, the strange breezes and drafts all about the Plongeur did not abate. Air blew up hard and cold from the floor for no evident reason – the bottoms of the sailors’ trouser legs were often inflated and even lifted a little way up the calves of their legs. Jackets shifted weirdly about the wearer’s torso. Or, sometimes, the air would blow downwards from the ceilings and along the walls. There was nothing dangerous or harmful about these breezes, but that did not stop them from being profoundly unnerving. ‘There is nowhere for this air to be blowing from,’ growled Billiard-Fanon. ‘You! Indian Monsieur! You’re a scientist – can you explain it?’

  ‘It is puzzling,’ said Jhutti, shaking his head. ‘It must, as Monsieur Lebret noted, have to do with the differential of temperature between …’

  ‘Can you explain? Yes or no!’

  ‘No, Monsieur. I regret to say.’

  Sometimes the air would gust violently – loose papers would be blown hard from a desk and slap against the ceiling of the room. They would then fall back down, but in a more slow and leisurely fashion than one might expect. Cups held in the hand would suddenly fly out, and clang against the wall. The breeze would whip coffee from mugs and spatter it in fat droplets upon the sides of the room. Sailors took to fitting lids to their cups and drinking through the aperture of a prised-back side in order to defeat this poltergeist.

  ‘Poltergeist,’ said Avocat. ‘Or poltergeists? Plural? They seem to be everywhere!’

  ‘I have books in my quarters,’ said Monsieur Jhutti. ‘They just flew from the shelf! They literally flew! They fluttered about the ceiling like trapped birds! I was forced to lock them in my seaman’s trunk.’

  ‘We are haunted,’ said Billiard-Fanon, in a sepulchral voice. ‘We must pray – we must pray to the God of justice, the enemy of Satan.’

  ‘Come!’ said Lebret, shaking his head and smoking another cigarette. ‘Do you genuinely believe a submarine can be haunted? I have never read a ghost story set aboard a submarine! We are not a Gothic mansion, after all!’

  ‘I don’t know why nobody has written such a story,’ said Billiard-Fanon, shivering. ‘Our vessel is as big as a house, is it not? People die aboard submarines, do they not? Why might they not come back and haunt it? We need a priest, to exorcise the Plongeur!’

  ‘You were the one, Monsieur Lebret,’ observed Lieutenant Boucher, ‘who suggested we were all dead.’

  ‘You think we are haunting ourselves?’ asked Lebret. ‘Come come! How could that be?’

  ‘I had to put my chest upside down,’ said Le Petomain. He looked around. ‘My sea chest. Where I store my stuff. The lid kept flying open. Just the lid. I don’t understand it – I don’t pretend to understand it. The chest itself sits firm on the floor, but the lid keeps banging open. As if the poltergeist wants to rummage through my things. So I turned it upside down, and now it sits still and calm.’

  ‘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 obser
ved; ‘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.