snaps clattered through the craft, and the captain stopped speaking. ‘But,’ he resumed, shortly, ‘we were sailing east as we dived, and we have not moved far from the coast of France, so that we are in effect diving towards the mountain-slope of the continental shelf. As to its precise depth, it is hard to say. Somewhere between two and four thousand metres, I would guess.’
‘Two thousand is fast approaching,’ reported Ghatwala.
‘And if we crash nose-first into the ocean floor,’ Lebret said, insouciantly, ‘I presume it is the end?’
‘There’s no chance of us settling gently onto a soft bed of sand,’ said Cloche. ‘If that is what you mean. No, if we hit the floor it will rupture the craft and we will die in moments. But, Monsieur, if that possibility scares you, I can assure you: the pressures at the abyssal depths will crush us in an instant, like an ogre’s paw closing around an egg. Such a death will at least be quick!’
‘Hardly a fairy-tale ending,’ replied Lebret, distantly.
The depth gauge spun past two thousand metres.
The noises increased in volume and variety. A toccata of snapping and cracking noises marked the ever-increasing external pressure squeezing the hull. The whole submarine began to vibrate, and sway its massy snout in the water.
‘Castor?’ bellowed the captain, abruptly, shouting along the corridor. ‘Report!’
When there was no reply, he called again, ‘Monsieur! Tell meat once – why is my ship shaking her head like a melancholy-mad elephant?’
There were some indistinct voices from the front of the craft, and then Castor came clambering up the corridor. ‘I’ve closed the ballast tanks by hand, but the pumps are struggling to pump air back in – the pressure’s too high. Or else there’s still some breach in the tanks. Or … I don’t know! It ought to be working, but it is not.’
‘Why are we shaking from side to side?’
‘I don’t—don’t know, Captain.’
A growling noise swelled from the rear of the craft, overlaid by a wild percussion of cracks from the hull all around them, like a great quantity of pebbles hurled forcefully against a wall of metal.
‘What about the vanes?’
‘Won’t budge, sir, I don’t know why! They’ve seized, they’ve seized completely.’
‘Captain,’ came another voice. It was Billiard-Fanon, running through from the rear.
‘What is it, enseigne ?’
‘The propellers are turning! The gearing has sheared – I can’t turn them off, short of shutting down the entire engine.’
The skin above Cloche’s beard whitened visibly. ‘There must be a way to decouple the driveshaft!’
‘Do I take it,’ said Lebret, his insolent smoothness apparently unaffected by the disaster, ‘that we are not only sinking, but actively powering ourselves into intolerable depths? Actively hurrying towards the rocky anvil that will shatter us to pieces?’
Billiard-Fanon scrambled back up the corridor to the engine room, gabbling ‘Aye-sir! Aye-sir!’ like a slogan. At the other extreme of the craft Castor’s bestial face head popped through the doorway. ‘The ballast tanks won’t inflate, sir. They won’t. There’s—there’s—’
‘What is it, sailor?’
Castor spoke again in a smaller voice, ‘There’s nothing we can do, sir.’
The captain looked about, his brows ridged with wrinkles like beach sand at low tide. ‘But this makes no sense! Three vitalsystems malfunctioning simultaneously – and on our first proper dive?’
‘Ill luck,’ noted Lebret, laconically.
‘Luck? It must be sabotage!’ roared the captain. ‘It cannot be otherwise!’
‘Well, Captain,’ said Lebret with a weary sigh. ‘If one of the crew has betrayed us, he is going to die along with everyone else. So justice will at least be done.’
The descent continued to tug insistently inside the guts of all the crew.
‘There must be something we can do!’ declared the captain.
The depth gauge spun past three