"Gordon R. Dickson - Space Winners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

glass walls of the turtle cage, when he heard Taub calling him.

"Jim!тАФJim! Hey! Get over here! I need you!"

Hastily, Jim shut off the hose, dropped it, and sprinted back to the pool. Taub was hanging
so far out of his saddle behind the transmitter that it looked as if he was about to dive into
the pool himself. Down below him, Susy was lying still and dead-

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Gordon R. Dickson

looking, on her side on the bottom of the pool with her gills motionless.
"Slammed her with one!" shouted Taub to Jim, "Since we were late, I started her out at the
top of the scale."

Reaching the poolside, Jim nodded and dove in. A couple of strokes brought him alongside
the sunken shark. He got to his feet, reached down and put his arms around the sandpaper-
rough body just back of the high first dorsal fin, sticking up like a sail from the spine of the
shark. He lifted the tiger-striped body, righting it in the water, and began to slowly slosh
with it along the length of the tank.

Susy's undershot mouth, with its murderous multiple rows of teeth, hung open and her gills
stirred, opening, as the pressure of the water flowing in through the mouth and out through
the gill openings pushed them. For a moment they fluttered slightly, as if Susy herself was
trying to use them, then they relaxed again. Jim kept pushing the shark forward, until he
came to the end of the tank, when he turned about and headed back in the opposite
direction.

"How is she?" It was Taub, down from the transmitter and squatting beside the pool to
hand Jim a belt with weights on it. Jim paused to hook the belt around his waist, so the
weights would hold him down and give his feet traction against the bottom of the pool.

"Her gills fluttered," Jim said. "She ought to come out all right."

SPACE WINNERS

17

"Good," said Taub. "Keep walking her. That setting on the transmitter must be something
special. When she comes to, I want to try her again. I've never seen one of the sharks
knocked out like that before." He went back to the transmitter.

Jim kept at the necessary work of pushing Susy through the water. Without the movement-
forced flow of oxygen-bearing water over and past her gills, the unconscious shark would
literally drown. Coming up to one end of the pool, Jim caught sight of the milky reflection of
his own image, cast back by the shadowed tile above the water at that end.

His square shoulders were hunched forward like a fullback's. Under the dark cap of his
black hair and equally dark eyebrows, reflected in the tank wall, his square face was set,