Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea by Adam Roberts Read Free Book Online

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 theladder, 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