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

The man on the screen said, "Today's top of the news comes from the top of the world. The
unpredictable Admiral Harriman Nelson has done it again! Since his retirement from the Navy some
four years ago to enlist in the newly created Bureau of Marine Exploration, the Admiral has been
secretly at work constructing the first submarine ever built outside the Navy Department. Into it has
gone his entire personal fortuneтАФyou will recall that the Nelsons, with all their past glories in the
form of college presidents, Congressmen, State governors and philanthropists, have been an
investment banking family for three generationsтАФand every penny he could scrape up from sources
as widely separated as Foundation grants and collections of school-children's pennies. His
brainchild, a fantasticтАФ"

Here the commentator's well-barbered head gave way to a picture of a detailed model of the
Seaview, which in due course dissolved to a montage of the keel-laying ceremonies, the launching,
and the commissioning ceremonies of the craft.

"тАФa fantastic atomic submarine with an amazing glass noseтАФis undergoing final tests in Arctic
waters, where it will follow the trail blazed twenty years ago by the first atomic submarineтАФunder
the ice and across the Pole.

"This sub of the future," the commentator went on, becoming visible again and, Captain Lee Crane
thought, having run a comb through his faultless waves while off camera, "this child of determined
imagination out of the Age of the Computer, is the world's largest mobile oceanographic laboratory.
It was designed to search out the mysteries of the deep as well as to be a research center to test the
miracle weapons of tomorrow. To operate this awesome robot, the Admiral has enlisted a hand-
picked crew from former Navy men with long experience on atomic subs. To sit in judgment on
these final tests, the Bureau of Marine Exploration has sent its top officer, the former Vice Admiral
B.J. Crawford and the congressional watchdog of the budget, Congressman Llewellyn Parker, by
carrier and 'copter to rendezvous with the submarine Seaview."

Lee Crane, lounging against the forward bulkhead, and behind most of the watchers, was amused to
see the slight twitch and erection of the head, the reddening of the ears of the visiting admiral and
the visiting penny-pincher, as each in turn their names were called. In his mind's eye he could see the
imp called Vanity winging about overhead, ready to swoop down at the public mention of any name,
to seize its owner by the ears (hence the reddening) and pull (hence the twitch and straightening of
the neck). The commentator permitted himself to be replaced by a full-color portrait of Crane's
"boss," the driving force behind the Seaview and all it stood for, Admiral Harriman Nelson. And sure
enough, the Admiral's ears, here in the flesh, pinkened, and the great bull's head, terror of the china-
shop, twitched and rose.

"And so the question of the day comes to this," said the now disembodied commentator, "Will the
final test on the U.S.O.S. Seaview turn it into 'Nelson's Folly,' or will it be another triumph of an
already great manтАФa great scientist and inventor, who in spite of what some call an odd-ball

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

reputation, may yet emerge as the predominant scientific genius of our time."

Admiral Nelson let his gray eaves of eyebrows come up a notch, and otherwise held his face as if it
had been carved there by Gutzon Borglum. But Captain Crane saw the slight turn his right hand gave