Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (21 page)

Everybody picked themselves up. Billiard-Fanon was clutching his wrist and grinning. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Monsieur Indian. Now
you
have the pistol.’

Jhutti was holding the gun.

‘You have lost your mind, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘You cannot be trusted with this weapon.’

‘Jhutti,’ said Le Petomain. ‘Give
me
the gun.’

Jhutti looked at the pilot. His expression was not calm. ‘He shot Lebret! In cold blood! Billiard-Fanon shot Monsieur Lebret in the face!’

Billiard-Fanon laughed. ‘Lebret was a devil. Literally so! Did you see his master, the father of lies, poke his dinosaur fingernail in at the bullet hole and rip the panel? Satan seeking to reclaim the body of his son.’

Jhutti addressed the ensign directly. ‘Why shoot him?’

‘His head must have been made of paper!’ Billiard-Fanon exclaimed. ‘The bullet went straight through – as if his skull were not there. It went straight through and punctured the skin of the submarine. Did anybody else see that? I expected the bullet to lodge in the man’s skull, but his skull must have been made of soft cheese.’

‘It
was
a reckless action, Jean,’ said Le Petomain, sorrowfully. ‘It endangered us all.’

‘Nonsense!’ boomed Billiard-Fanon. ‘I
saved
us all! That man – say rather, that devil, Lebret – he was the cause of all our woes. He was the Jonah. We’ve got rid of him. Now we will be well.’

‘The mess is flooded!’ growled Castor. ‘We have no access to the forward portion of the
Plongeur
at all!’

‘So what?’ laughed the ensign. ‘We have the bridge, and our cabins. The engines are still working, which means that we still have air to breathe.’ He looked around at the other men. ‘There
was nothing fore, anyway. The ballast tanks are ripped. What else? The torpedo tubes? We don’t need them!’

‘The food,’ said Capot. ‘What are we going to eat?’

Billiard-Fanon laughed. ‘Have faith, and the Lord will provide! We can throw a fishing line out through the airlock, and try a bit of native calamari.’ He was rubbing his wrist, back and forth. ‘You’re missing the larger picture, messieurs! Food? Jesus lasted forty days in the wilderness without food, tormented by devils the entire time! God has seen fit to test us. Do you think we’re not in a wilderness? A wilderness of water! And can you not see the devils that torment us? There is only one way to survive this situation, and it is faith. Faith!’

‘Forty days without food,’ said Capot, in a grim voice.

‘Ensign Billiard-Fanon,’ said Le Petomain. ‘I am relieving you of command. Monsieur Jhutti, please give me the gun.’

But the scientist did not relinquish the pistol.

‘Hey!’ said Castor. ‘Why should
you
assume command? I’m the engineer! I outrank you.’

‘You do not,’ said Le Petomain. ‘And besides, Lieutenant Boucher may regain consciousness at any moment. As pilot, I …’

‘I am chief engineer! I
outrank
you,’ Castor repeated.

‘A self-confessed bigamist,’ Le Petomain began.

Castor clapped his hands together. ‘What has that got to do with anything? What has that got to do with anything – down here?’

‘I am assuming command of the
Plongeur
,’ Le Petomain repeated.

‘Monsieur Indian,’ said Castor, stepping forward. ‘I request you give me the gun.’

‘Oh what does it matter who has the gun?!’ shouted Pannier. ‘What does it matter? We’ve no flotation; we’ve no food or drink; we’re tumbling through an alien sea, completely out of control! Command? Command is a chimera! We’re all going to die. We were all always going to die.’ He kicked at the wall. ‘Cut off from the galley! No drink at all!’ he repeated. ‘Not even a single glass to ease the terror of mortality!’

‘We could, perhaps,’ suggested Capot, whose mind was also
clearly running along similar grooves, ‘use the remaining diving suit? We lost one suit when de Chante … was taken, but we have another.’

‘Taken!’ repeated Le Petomain. ‘You’ve no proof that’s what happened to poor de Chante! None of us know what happened to him!’

‘At any rate, there
is
another diving suit, down below. One of us could get into that, and retrieve some food and drink from the kitchen.’

‘It’s …’ said Le Petomain. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. But it would be a desperate strategy. How would we gain access? The mess is flooded now – if we opened the hatch, we risk inundating the bridge as well.’

‘Perhaps a diver could swim out and round. The breach in the wall is large enough to allow a diver in, I think?’

Billiard-Fanon had sat himself down and was kissing his wrist and repeating the Lord’s Prayer. But upon hearing this he spoke up. ‘Satan himself is out there. Good luck swimming through that! You wondered what happened to Monsieur de Chante? Now you know! The devil snatched him to his scaly bosom.’

Castor took another step towards Jhutti. ‘I repeat my request, Monsieur, that you give me the pistol. I am now the ranking officer.’

‘I think,’ said Jhutti, backing off, ‘it would be better if I held on to this gun. I have no interest in whether Monsieur Castor or Monsieur Le Petomain has precedence, in terms of the chain of command. Consider me a neutral party. At any rate, this gun has caused enough damage, I feel.’

‘Don’t let him have it!’ chirruped Billiard-Fanon, with a lopsided grin. ‘He’s not even a Christian! It will anger God if he has it!’

‘Capot,’ said Le Petomain. ‘Please go aft and check on the lieutenant. He will have been thrown around by the tossing and bucking of the submarine. Go and see if he is alright.’

‘Capot,’ said Castor, standing taller. ‘Capot – wait.’ When the sailor hesitated, the engineer said, ‘Yes, on second thoughts, go. Go and have a look-see, check on Monsieur Boucher.’

Castor looked from pilot to engineer and back. Then, without a word, he climbed up and along the wall, manoeuvred himself with some difficulty through the hatch and went aft.

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Jhutti, fitting the pistol into a pocket in his tunic, ‘you could agree to share command?’

‘As if it matters!’ laughed Billiard-Fanon. ‘We must
pray
, brothers! Prayer is all that will save us now. God is testing us.’

‘Jean,’ said Le Petomain. ‘You have acted recklessly, and endangered the ship. You should not have discharged that pistol inside the submarine.’

‘Come! That little hole in the skin would have been perfectly mendable,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘It wasn’t my little bullet that did the damage! My little bullet of justice. It was the finger of Satan, poking through that hole – ripping the skin of the submarine like cotton!’

‘I think you ought to go back to your cabin, Jean,’ said Le Petomain. ‘If you want to pray – well then, pray there. Prayer can’t do any harm, I suppose.’

‘Are you locking me up, Annick?’ asked Billiard-Fanon, looking up with a lopsided grin. ‘Are you trying to
contain
me?’

‘He’s right,’ Castor said. ‘I agree. You’re a liability, Monsieur. You have proved that.’

Capot poked his head through the sideways-lying hatch. ‘The lieutenant is conscious,’ he announced.

Le Petomain, Castor and Jhutti made their way, awkwardly, through the hatchway and up the slant, rolled-about corridor. Boucher was sitting on what had once been the wall of his cabin. Le Petomain and Castor squeezed through into his cabin.

The lieutenant’s first words were, ‘Clearly we are still descending. What depth have we reached, Monsieur Le Petomain?’

‘We have been around the clock more times than anybody has been able to count, Lieutenant,’ reported the pilot. ‘Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of “depth” I would say – soon we will approach a million.’

‘Kilometres?’ repeated Boucher. ‘Why not leagues? And besides,
surely you mean “metres”. Do not attach a keel to the metre. It’s bad seamanship.’ Then he laughed a weirdly high-pitched, childish laugh,

Le Petomain looked at Castor uncertainly. ‘I regret to report, Lieutenant,’ he went on, ‘that not only have we lost the ability to refloat the main ballast tanks, but there has been a breach in the wall of the mess.’

‘That’s what Capot just told me,’ said Boucher. He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘I feel awful, really bad. A headache like … a headache like—’ He looked up, suddenly startled. ‘Wait – who are you?’

‘I am Le Petomain,’ said Le Petomain.

‘I know
that
,’ snapped Boucher. ‘How did the mess get flooded?’

‘A firearm was discharged inside the vessel, Lieutenant,’ said Jhutti.

‘That’s a damn foolish way to celebrate Christmas Day!’ said Boucher. ‘Who did it? Was it you, Monsieur?’

‘No!’ replied Jhutti, startled.

‘It was Billiard-Fanon,’ said Castor. ‘The fool’s gone God crazy.’

‘Well,’ said Boucher, vaguely. ‘We’re all under a lot of strain. You should probably tell the captain, though. He’ll want to know that there’s a hole in the skin of his vessel.’

‘The captain is dead, Lieutenant,’ said Le Petomain, in a tentative voice.

Boucher buckled up his brow and stared at his own feet. But whatever he saw there only seemed to inflame his anger. ‘I know that,’ he said, darkly. Then he started shouting, ‘You think I don’t know
that
? Of course I know that! Oh Christ, we’ll need to organise a burial at sea, I hate those. Surface! We can’t do it submerged, we’ll have to come to the surface.
Yes
, that’s an order! Look – look – pilot. Pilot. Monsieur …’

‘Le Petomain?’ suggested Le Petomain.

‘Exactly! I am in command, because the captain is dead.’

‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

‘In which case my orders are – take us back into port. Take us back to Saint-Nazaire.’

There was an awkward silence. ‘Lieutenant,’ said Castor, tentatively, ‘that may be …’

‘Those are my orders, goddammit!’ Boucher sounded querulous rather than furious, but he would brook no disagreement. ‘Follow my orders! Obedience, Monsieur, obedience. The captain is very keen on obedience. Don’t make me tell him you disobeyed me.’

‘But …’

‘Orders! And turn the vessel around – I mean, bring it about, so that I can lie properly on my couch. I’m not comfortable crouched here hallways between wall and ceiling.’

‘We cannot necessarily control the …’ Castor began.

‘What? What’s that? Speak up, man! Damnable
ringing
in my ears.’ Boucher tapped two forefingers at both his ear holes. ‘Horrible ringing noise.’

‘We have suffered a number of malfunctions,’ said Le Petomain, speaking loudly and clearly. ‘That make it impossible to bring the vessel into a proper orientation.’

‘What? Really? Oh well. They’ll be able to fix that, back at Saint-Nazaire.’

‘Lieutenant … ?’

But Boucher’s temper sizzled again. ‘You have your orders, messieurs! You have your orders! Now leave me alone. Leave me alone.’

There was little point in staying. The three men extricated themselves from the cabin. ‘Well,’ said Le Petomain, when they were all out in the corridor. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Get along,’ said Castor. ‘As best we can. I’ll go and see how the engines are bearing up, under all this abuse.’

‘Very well. I’ll go back to the bridge.’

Castor clambered up, and disappeared from view. Le Petomain and Jhutti started the harder business of climbing down the slanting mineshaft that the corridor had become. Before they reached the bottom, Capot’s face appeared in the hatchway. ‘It’s another light, Annick,’ he said. ‘Come and see.’

18

THE DEMONS OF THE SEA

Now that the submarine had been rolled about through ninety-degrees, getting to the observation chamber was easier – a shuffle along rather than a ladder-climb down. ‘Turn the interior light off,’ Le Petomain instructed.

Jhutti complied. An eerie blue glow of filled the chamber. ‘Another sub oceanic sun, I presume,’ said the pilot. ‘Will we fall into it, as we did before? Get ourselves boiled like potatoes in a pot?’

‘I think we’re already missing it,’ said Capot. ‘Look.’

Shuffling along, they peered in at the corner of the observation porthole – the circle of blue-white brightness was clearly visible, half obscured by the body of the submarine. There was motion in the lit water too. ‘More cuttlefolk?’ suggested Le Petomain.