"Caribbean Crisis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

The needle began to climb faster.
Seventy ... ninety ... a hundred ... two hundred ...
The mate licked his thin lips as the needle climbed steadily to five hundred.
A cold feeling moved deep in his stomach as the metres told of the fantastic pressures now coming to bear on the sphere. Two hundred pounds on the square inch!
The needle crept up to the six hundred mark. It passed it. Seven hundred ...
Then the radiophone crackled into sudden life:
"It's very dark now. We're using the lamps--" came Harben's voice. "Can't see much yet. We're just opposite a grotto of some sort; a cave in the cliff face. The water seems thicker; like oil. It's quite weird. I've never seen anything to compare with --"
Suddenly Harben's matter-of-fact tone was cut off by a gasp.
"God! What is it?"
His voice was suddenly shrill with excitement and horror. "My God! This is awful -- I never thought -- it's -- it's disgusting! Horrible! Pull us up! Pull the sphere up! Quickly!"
Vasquez flicked the switch. "What is it, sir? What have you seen?"
But Harben was deaf to the mate's inquiries. "For Heaven's sake do something! Pull us up! It's going to kill us! It's awful! We were mad to risk it! Hurry! You've got to save us!"
Already the mate had slammed the machinery into reverse. Now, with hands that shook, he flicked the switch and spoke again.
"What is it? What's wrong?"
There was no reply.
For ten long seconds there was nothing but silence.
Then suddenly the whole ship lurched. Shock waves crashed upwards, rocking the vessel like a toy.
A burst of muffled thunder reverberated up from the deep, smashing against the ship's keel ... And a sound like the bellow of some enormous sea-beast erupted from the ocean.
The mate was flung backwards. He crashed against a bank of metres. Glass shattered and flew like rain.
He scrambled desperately to reach the radiophone. But the boat lurched again. He pitched headlong.
A second time he tried and managed to grab the handset.
"Mr Harben! Mr. Harben! What happened?"
But the phone was dead. No static crackled; no side tones. The link was broken.
Frantically, the mate wrenched open the hatch of the cabin and tore up the companionway. The crew were sprawled all over the deck.
Vasquez stumbled towards a man and hauled him to his feet.
"What happened? What did you see?"
The crewman shook his head numbly.
The mate ran to the ship's rail where the derricks poked out over the ocean. Part of his answer was there.
Instead of taut, straining cables there were only contorted steel wires. Wires which had only whipped up from the sea, relieved of their burden -- to tangle round the screaming pulleys in an inextricable, tortured mass.
"Madre de Dois! May the saints preserve them! What was it? What did they see? What got them?"
Vasquez stared down into the imperturbable waters which covered the deepest ocean valley in the world -- and knew that nothing could save the two men that had gone down.
Without the cables to support them, nothing lay between the bathysphere and the bedrock of the Tangaras Deep -- except water.
Six miles of it!
Two men had gone down there. They were doomed. Two men -- hopelessly, irrevocably, trapped in a twelve-ton coffin of stainless steel -- plunging down thirty thousand feet to the deepest place on earth!
Never to return!
"They are finished," Vasquez mouthed the incredible words as they froze on his lips. "We shall never save them."
The eighth son of an Indian fisherman, Vasquez had been taught from the age of five to fear the sea and its mysteries.
All the tales of sea monsters he had ever heard came flashing into his mind.
Cold fear seized him.
What had happened?
The sea foamed and boiled softly against the side of the rocking vessel. Mysterious, dangerous -- it seemed to be laughing at the mate, mocking him.
Two more victims had been taken into its insatiable depths.
The sea -- or something that lurked beneath the sea -- had claimed two more human lives.

2. DIVE SINISTER
Hoddard Curtis, blond-headed, broad and bitterly angry, grated his teeth with suppressed fury as he was encased in inch-thick armour plating, on the deck of the research ship Gorgon.
Only two hours ago he had returned to the ship with good news. The Florida Marine Institute had promised to give him another grant. He had returned with a light heart , bouyant and confident because his research was to be allowed to continue.
Years of work had gone into the construction of the bathysphere. Two hours ago he had returned to the ship with a new lease of life -- assured that all the money, blood and sweat of the last five years would soon give way to the realisation of a dream.
Then he'd met Vasquez.
And two hours ago, to the minute, his dream had been shattered ...