"C M Kornbluth - Shark Ship" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

Shark Ship



C. M. Kornbluth




Shark Ship



IT WAS THE SPRING SWARMING of the plankton; every man and woman and most of the children
aboard Grenville's Convoy had a job to do. As the seventy-five gigantic sailing ships plowed their two
degrees of theSouth Atlantic, the fluid that foamed beneath their cutwaters seethed also with life. In the
few weeks of the swarming, in the few meters of surface water where sunlight penetrated in sufficient
strength to trigger photosynthesis, microscopic spores burst into microscopic plants, were devoured by
minute animals which in turn were swept into the maws of barely visible sea monsters almost a tenth of an
inch from head to tail; these in turn were fiercely pursued and gobbled in shoals by the fierce little brit, the
tiny herring and shrimp that could turn a hundred miles of green water to molten silver before your eyes.



Through the silver ocean of the swarming the Convoy scudded and
 tacked in great controlled zigs and zags, reaping the silver of the sea in the endlessly reeling bronze nets
each ship payed out behind.



The Commodore on Grenvllle did not sleep during the swarming; he and his staff dispatched cutters to
scout the swarms, hung on the meteorologists' words, digested the endless reports from the scout
vessels, and toiled through the night to prepare the dawn signal. The mainmast flags might tell the captains
"Convoy course five degrees right," or "Two degrees left," or only "Convoy course: no change." On those
dawn signals depended the life for the next six months of the million and a quarter souls of the Convoy. It
had not happened often, but it had happened that a succession of blunders reduced a Convoy's harvest
below the minimum necessary to sustain life. Derelicts were sometimes sighted and salvaged from such
convoys; strong-stomached men and women were needed for the first boarding and clearing away of
human debris. Cannibalism occurred, an obscene thing one had nightmares about.



The seventy-five captains had their own particular purgatory to endure throughout the harvest, the
Sail-Seine Equation. It was their job to balance the push on the sails and the drag of the ballooning seines
so that push exceeded drag by just the number of pounds that would keep the ship on course and in
station, given every conceivable variation of wind force and direction, temperature of water, consistency
of brit, and smoothness of hull. Once the catch was salted down it was customary for the captains to
converge on Grenville for a roaring feast by way of letdown.