"Ellison-SunkenCathedral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

His father -- whom he had loved and admired more than he had ever been able to
say, ever been able to tell the man -- had been slammed to pulp between the
upper and lower dies of a gigantic body-part hydraulic punch press in the old
Poletown plant, the Dodge main plant, in Hamtramck, the East Side of Detroit, in
1952 when Dennis was less than a year old. George DeVore Lanfear had reached
into the four foot high opening with his left hand when the cold-stamped steel
front door stuck in the press. He reached in with a long piece of pry metal, as
he had done a hundred times before, knowing that the press operator had set the
safety buttons that would protect him. The press was on hold, the clutch was
locked; he extended himself into that empty space between iron jaws, sixteen
feet deep, twelve feet wide, until the upper half of his body right to the
belt-line was under a metal roof, resting on a metal deck; and the master button
die setter was an alcoholic who was half-wasted from the night before, and the
clutch didn't hold, and the safety failed, and the press automatically repeated
the operation, and the press smashed down with a roof pressure of one hundred
tons, and infant Dennis Lanfear was without a father. Dead as table scraps, in
the old Dodge Main on Joseph Campeau Avenue, on the East Side of Detroit, in
1952, before Dennis could tell him how much he loved and admired him. Which he
came to understand, when he grew older, because of the stories his mother told
him about his father, was a manifestation of his infinite, terrible loss.

Dennis Lanfear had grown to manhood without ever having been given the moment to
embrace his father, and tell him how dear his memory had become to him. Could
never tell him, not when he was fourteen and went to see the building in which
his father had died (and got bad directions and hitchhiked out to Ypsilanti,
Where he wound up at the soon-to-be-closed Willow Run plant that had helped win
World War II); not when he was twenty-two and joined the U.S. Navy to honor the
service in which George Lanfear had served during the battle of the Gulf of
Leyte; not when he was thirty-five and got his top security clearance and was
assigned as First Sonar Technician at the clandestine listening station and
torpedo test site here at Andros, the secret base most line-item military
agendas listed only as "U.S. Navy Autec Range."

Nor could he tell his father, more than forty years gone, that he had been
picking up something bewildering on his screens for quite a while now.

He had no way of telling George Lanfear that something wild and weird and
possibly wonderful -- like the secret dream of his otherwise mundane life -- was
going on in that absolute nowhere called the Tongue of the Ocean. Something that
could not be named, and certainly could not be brought to the attention of his
superiors . . . because it made no sense.

So now he walked. Having invaded one of the old shipyards on Andros, having
"liberated" some old unassisted "hardhat" diving dress from rusted lockers,
having repaired it and made it sound lit was gear dated 1922), and having
adapted the gear to accommodate a synthetic mixture called heliox, which mix of
helium and oxygen would allow him to exceed the two hundred foot depth this kind
of hardhat gear usually permitted, he was nearing the spot indicated on his
sonar readings.