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

Rank had its privileges. There was no such relief for the captains' Net Officers or their underlings in
Operations and Maintenance, or for their Food Officers, under whom served the Processing and
Stowage people. They merely worked, streaming the nets twenty-four hours a day, keeping them bellied
out with lines from mast and outriding gigs, keeping them spooling over the great drum amidships, tending
the blades that had to scrape the brit from the nets without damaging the nets, repairing the damage when
it did occur; and without interruption of the harvest, flash-cooking the part of the harvest to be cooked,
drying the part to be dried, pressing oil from the harvest as required, and stowing what was cooked and
dried and pressed where it would not spoil, where it would not alter the trim of the ship, where it would
not be pilfered by children. This went on for



weeks after the silver had gone thin and patchy against the green, and after the silver had altogether
vanished.



The routines of many were not changed at all by the swarming season. The blacksmiths, the sailmakers,
the carpenters, the water-tenders, to a degree the storekeepers, functioned as before, tending to the
fabric of the ship, renewing, replacing, reworking. The ships were things of brass, bronze, and unrusting
steel. Phosphor-bronze strands were woven into net, lines, and cables; cordage, masts, and hull were
metal; all were inspected daily by the First Officer and his men and women for the smallest pinhead of
corrosion. The smallest pinhead of corrosion could spread; it could send a ship to the bottom before it
had done spreading, as the chaplains were fond of reminding worshippers when the ships rigged for
church on Sundays. To keep the hellish red1 of iron rust and the sinister blue of copper rust from
invading, the squads of oilers were always on the move, with oil distilled from the catch. The sails and the
clothes alone could not be preserved; they wore out. It was for this that the felting machines down below
chopped wornout sails and clothing into new fibers and twisted and rolled them with kelp and with glue
from the catch into new felt for new sails and clothing.



While the plankton continued to swarm twice a year, Grenville's Convoy could continue to sail theSouth
Atlantic, from ten-mile limit to ten-mile limit. Not one of the seventy-five ships in the Convoy had an
anchor.



The Captain's Party that followed the end of Swarming 283 was slow getting underway. McBee, whose
ship was Port Squadron 19, said to Salter of Starboard Squadron 30: "To be frank, I'm too damned
exhausted to care whether I ever go to another party, but I didn't want to disappoint the Old Man."



The Commodore, trim and bronzed, not showing his eighty years, was across the great cabin from them
greeting new arrivals.