"Ben Bova - Life As We Know It" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

"What's that?"

In the hazy light, a dark shape drifted by, too distant to make out any detail.

"Follow it!" Lopez-Oyama snapped.

Then his face reddened. It would take some ten hours for his order to reach the
probe. In his excitement he had forgotten.

Allie turned to me. "Are the close-up cameras working?"

They were. I gestured toward the screens that showed their imagery. The dark
hulk, whatever it was, had not come within the narrow focus of either of the
close-view cameras. Both screens showed nothing but the cloudy water, tinted
sickly green by the laser light.

"Another one!" somebody shouted.

This time the shape drifted past the view of one of the close-up cameras,
briefly. We saw a bulbous dark dome, almost spherical, with snake-like
appendages dangling from its bottom.

"Tentacles!"

"It's an animal! Like an octopus!"

I scanned the numerical data on the bottom of the screen. The object, whatever
it was, was three and a half kilometers from the probe. And it was four hundred
and thirty-two meters long, from the top of its dome to the tip of its
tentacles. Huge. Fifteen times bigger than a blue whale. Immense.

"It's not moving."

"It's drifting in the current."

"The tentacles are just hanging there. No activity that I can see."

"Conserving energy?"

"Maybe that's the way it hunts for prey."

"Trolling?"

It looked dead to me. Inert. Unmoving. It drifted out of the close-up camera's
view and all the heads in the room swivelled to the wide-angle view. The dark
lump did nothing to show it might be alive.

"What's the spectrograph show?"