Free Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea by Adam Roberts Page B

immediately – once again dead drunk, slumped unconscious on his knees with his face on the seat of a chair, in a parody of prayer. The lieutenant didn’t waste time tutting; he rummaged through the stores until he found two bottles, and a corkscrew, and came back through to the mess.
    From below climbed de Chante, and Avocat in his rubber suit, shinily wet. The diver was the only man not grinning.
    ‘Bravo Avocat!’ yelled somebody.
    But the diver merely shook his head.
    ‘Cheer up man,’ instructed Cloche. ‘You have done a great thing!’ He pulled on a cork and it emerged from the bottleneck with a gloopy noise. But he was clumsy, and spilled a portion of the wine – a freak breeze caught the droplets and spattered them upwards at the ceiling. Cloche, cursing, put his thumb over the top.
    ‘I’m sorry, Captain,’ said Avocat, glumly.
    ‘No matter! Most of the bottle remains!’
    Avocat shook his head again. ‘I don’t mean the wine.’ The breezewas certainly flowing vigorously around the cabin (although, oddly, it did not chill the skin). But when Avocat lifted his arm to rub his face, droplets were lifted from the wet rubber and flew about the space.
    The diver stood to attention. ‘Captain – I’m sorry,’ he announced, stiffly, ‘sorry to have failed to complete my mission. I have let you down!’
    ‘Don’t be absurd!’ barked Cloche, his brow crumpling. ‘What are you saying? Nonsense!’
    ‘My captain,’ said Avocat, looking crushed. ‘I didn’t get to the vents—’
    ‘What? What?’
    ‘I dared not venture out! I dared not let go my hold on the lip of the airlock! The waters—the waters are treacherous.’
    Cloche’s expression grew fierce. ‘What on earth are you talking about man? The vents have closed!’
    ‘They have?’ Avocat looked confused. ‘I don’t—I don’t understand. I did not leave the airlock.’
    ‘You’re saying you didn’t fix the ballast vents?’
    ‘No, Captain.’
    ‘But we heard you banging away!’
    ‘That,’ said de Chante, in an awkward voice, ‘was Monsieur Avocat banging the door of the airlock with his spanner. He was … keen to come back inside.’
    ‘You never left the airlock?’ thundered Cloche.
    ‘I intended to swim out, Captain. I promise you, I did. But no sooner did I put my legs out, a whirlpool seized me.’
    Cloche closed his eyes, and opened them again, as if he expected to see Avocat no longer there, vanished like a chimera. ‘This is a poor joke, sailor,’ he glowered.
    ‘I am not joking, my Captain! It sucked at my legs – I could feel the pull of the water. The dark. I was there, a cone of light no bigger than a baseball bat spilling from my helmet, in … all this dark. And the whirlpool was pulling me down—down to hell!’
    ‘You’re imagining things, man!’ put in Boucher. He uncorked the second bottle, took a swig and passed it to the dripping man.‘There’s nothing out there – a whirlpool would have registered on the ship’s sensors.’
    ‘I felt it! It was horribly strong,’ Avocat insisted, shuddering. ‘It must be this current that is pulling the entire vessel downwards! That is how we are descending as fast as we are.’
    ‘Nonsense! When we fully inflate the ballasts we will start to rise …’ boomed the captain.
    ‘Monsieur,’ noted the practical-minded Ghatwala addressing Avocat. ‘I must respectfully agree with these officers, that what you are saying makes no sense. If there were a current pulling the ship down it would pull you down at the same rate. ‘You would not feel it. And in point of fact, if the ship were being sucked down a whirlpool we would be spun round and round. We would feel that!’
    ‘If not a whirlpool,’ said Avocat, growing angry, ‘then some linear current – but strong! Strong, like a creature pulling at my legs. I could feel it pulling at my legs.’
    Ghatwala possessed a mind supple and fast-thinking, but so perfectly logical that it found it difficult