"Theodore Sturgeon - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

With a what'll-they-think-of-next gesture she handed it back, just in time to see Chip Morton tossing
something to her underhanded. "Here's something new, too," he said.

Reflexively, she caught it, turned it over. "Some kind of baseball?"

"Well, for real short games. One hit, no ball park. It's an underwater demolition bomb."

An expression of distaste, absolutely uncolored by fear, crossed her face. "Commander Morton," she
said quietly, handing the bomb back to him, "I don't like sadistic jokes and I don't like sadists." Amid
a thundering silence she added, "I understand them very well, of course, but I don't like them."

Without a word, Chip Morton turned away and went to put the bomb away. The girl raised her
unflickering eyes and looked at Captain Lee Crane, as if to accept, quite without challenge, any
remark he might make and store it away without actually touching it. He said "It couldn't possibly go
off if dropped. It takes a fairly difficult two-handed manipulation to arm it."

"That was perfectly obvious, or he wouldn't have thrown it to me."

"You don't scare easily."

"I do if something comes up that's genuinely frightening. For anything else, I've simply developed a
reflex for analyzing what situations are before I react to what they might be."

"All the same... he will of course be disciplined for that kind of childishness."

"He has been," she said without smiling, but with an unmistakable twinkle in her eye. "You may do
as you like with him, Captain, and of course you will. We each have our own theory of discipline.
With some it's pain for the offender. With others it's correction, whether or not pain should be
involved." She paused and then said, with a recurrence of that twinkle, "In my opinion Commander
Morton stands corrected. He will never do anything like that to me again, and very probably not to
anyone else. So much for correction. As for punishmentтАФ"

The captain laughed suddenly. "I'd hate to make any crime of mine fit one of your punishments,
doctor."

Across the compartment, Congressman Parker heaved heartily on a door dog, which refused to
move. "What's in here?"

"Davy Jones' locker," said Nelson. "That's the escape hatch."

The Congressman let go the handle as if it had turned into a live mule's hind foot, and stepped back
smartly. The two Admirals did not smile, but knowing them as well as he did, Crane could see that it
was not easy. "And that?" asked the Congressman, pointing briskly to cover his embarrassment.

"Minisub," said Nelson, looking upward at the stubby craft. "When you have to go outside and
you're too deep forтАФ" he waved his hand at a neat, comprehensive row of racks of diving
gearтАФeverything from simple snorkels to heated wet-suits with self-contained air

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