The Great Troll War полностью

‘I asked her,’ I said. ‘Numerical values don’t mean much to them.’

‘Counting is overrated,’ said Feldspar. ‘I know that you have an above-average number of legs, and I can know that without doing any counting at all.’

‘I have two legs,’ I said. ‘That’s the average number, surely?’

‘Someone, somewhere, is missing a leg,’ he said, ‘perhaps both. Which changes the average. You have the mode of human legs – that occurring most often in a data-set. The average number of legs on a human is somewhere around 1.99999 recurring, but without counting everyone and their legs, which is both futile and time-wasting, we’ll never know for sure.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘but if I asked all the Dragons on the planet whether they liked rice pudding, and fifty per cent said they didn’t, that wouldn’t really be very helpful, would it?’

‘It would be correct,’ said Feldspar, who hated rice pudding, ‘but yes, statistically it’s a little meaningless – when you hear about percentages as the result of a survey, it’s always a good idea to find out the size of the sample. Flush,’ he added, laying down his cards, ‘queen high.’

‘Zambini always said that with surveys it’s useful to find out who paid for it before accepting the findings,’ I replied, also laying down my cards. ‘Pair of nines.’

After several hours of pointless speculation over the Trolls, more chat about hard numbers versus ratios and me losing all the money in my pockets, we were summoned back to the control room.

‘We’re almost there,’ said the captain. ‘Chief geologist?’

The geologist looked up from her Ground Penetrating Sonar screen and told us that Shandar’s building carried on beneath the soil for a good seventy or eighty feet – the normal depth of foundations for a building this size – so the captain ordered us to dive and we felt the sub pitch down as we bored deeper into the rock. Ninety minutes and a game of Scrabble and mug of cocoa later, the geo-navigator reported that the sub-basements were guarded by six feet of reinforced cement and two-inch-thick steel plate.

‘Problems?’ I asked.

The captain replied no, as they had something called a ‘thermic lance’ for just such an eventuality, and had just given the order to halt the main engines when I felt the craft lurch oddly. A warning klaxon went off somewhere and the geologists rapidly consulted their instruments.

‘Speak to me, Number Two,’ said the captain.

‘Exterior temperature is rising,’ she said, twiddling a few knobs and staring at some dials.

‘What?’

‘Twenty-five degrees under the hull and rising.’

‘Impossible! Sensor error?’

‘They’re all reading the same, ma’am.’

‘Explanation?’

‘Working on it now, ma’am.’

I could sense by the urgency in the captain’s voice that this was not something they had experienced before. I looked across at Feldspar, who stared back at me and shook his head resignedly. This felt like magic. The navigation officer pressed a few buttons and the Ground Penetrating Sonar, more usefully directed forward or upward, was now looking directly below, and it seemed as though there was something large beneath us – and quite hot. The craft lurched again and pitched downward. I grabbed hold of a bulkhead to steady myself as several pencils and a coffee mug slid off the navigation table to land with a clatter on the floor.

‘We’re descending,’ said the helmswoman, ‘deck to topside one twenty feet and increasing.’

‘Permission to fire seismic charges, Captain,’ said the chief geologist.

‘Granted.’

The geologist opened a spring-loaded access panel marked ‘Emergency Only’ and pressed four red buttons. There was a pause and we heard two pairs of muffled concussions. To figure out the nature of the rock strata, small charges are detonated and the return echoes studied to give an idea of the underlying geological structure. I figured the charges were used sparingly as they would give away the craft’s position.

‘Full astern both,’ said the captain, and a shudder ran though the craft – but with apparently no effect at all. The craft lurched again and pitched down more markedly, while at the same time several control panels fused in a flurry of sparks and we were plunged into darkness.

‘Captain,’ said the geologist once the red emergency lights had flickered on, ‘sensors indicate the heat below us is a … magma chamber, and we’re heading straight into it.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the captain. ‘There’s not been any volcanic activity on this island for over fifty million years – the crust here is eighteen miles thick.’