"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Wanderers and Travellers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

Very gently I raised the marker and aimed it at the inflated back. The
silvery mass of small fry suddenly darted away and vanished and it seemed
to me that the eyelid above the great glassy eye flickered. I pulled the
trigger and immediately sprang up and away from the caustic sepia.
When I looked again, the septopod was no longer to be seen: only a dense
blue-black cloud was spreading through the water and clouding the
bottom. I came to the surface and swam to shore.
It was a fine hot day. A blue haze hung above the water, the sky was
white and empty, except beyond the forest where a great motionless mass
of bluish cloud towered.
On the grass in front of our tent sat a stranger in bright swimming
trunks with a bandage round his forehead. He was tanned and not so
much muscular, as extraordinarily sinewy, as though covered with a whole
network of ropes under the skin. You could see at once that he was
incredibly strong. Before him stood my Masha in her blue
swimsuitтАФlong-legged, sunburnt, and with a shock of sun-bleached hair
down her back. So, she wasn't sitting by the water, anxiously waiting for
her daddy. She was excitedly telling this sinewy fellow something, waving
her arms the whole time. I was even hurt that she hadn't even noticed my
appearance. But the man did, and quickly turned his head, looked at me
intently, and smiled, waving his open hand. Masha spun round and
shrieked happily "There you are!"
I climbed out on to the grass, took off my mask and wiped my face. The
man was smiling as he examined me.
 "How many did you mark?" asked Masha in a business-like manner.
"One". My jaws were cramped with the cold.
"Oh you!" said Masha.
She helped me to take off my aqualung, and I stretched out on the
grass.
"Yesterday he marked two," explained Masha. "The day before
yesterday four. If it goes on like that, we'd better move on to another lake."
She took a towel and began to rub my back. "You look like a quick-frozen
gander," she proclaimed. "This is Leonid Andreyevich Gorbovsky. He's an
astro-archaeologist. And this, Leonid Andreyevich, is my daddy, Stanislav
Ivanovich."
The sinewy Leonid Andreyevich nodded and smiled.
"Are you frozen?" he asked. "It's so lovely hereтАФthe sun, green grass..."
"He'll be all right soon," said Masha, rubbing me with might and main.
"He's usually quite jolly, but he's chilled to the bone".
It was clear she had been saying all sorts of things about me and now
was doing her best to vindicate my reputation. Let her. I hadn't timeтАФ my
teeth were chattering.
"Masha here and I were very worried about you," said Gorbovsky. "We
even wanted to dive in and find you, but I don't know how. I expect you
can't even imagine a man who's never had to dive in the course of his
work." He turned over on his back, then on his side, and leaned on his
arm. "Tomorrow I'm flying off," he confided to me. "And I simply don't
know when I'll ever have the chance again to lie on the grass by a lake and
have the possibility of diving with an aqualung." "Feel it, then," I said.
He looked carefully over the aqualung and touched it.