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

"You're quite right, Doctor," Crane said quickly, to nip off anything further Chip might have to
offer: un-nipped, he would, too, thick, with a broad trowel.

"Let's take her down, Captain."

"Aye aye, sir," said Crane briskly. He wheeled to the bulkhead, palmed the bridge tweeter, and said,
"Any time you're ready, Mr. O'Brien." The Dive Officer's voice came back at him out of the grille as
if by speaking Crane had released a spring: "Aye sir!" Crane said, "Shall we all go up to the bridge?"

Drinks were finished, set aside, and Crane led the way forward, followed by Chip, who stepped over
the high sill of the water-tight door and immediately turned to help Dr. Susan Hiller over it, saying,
in that I'll-take-care-of-you-cookie voice of his, "Ship's etiquette sometimes looks mighty rude to a
landlubber, ma'am. But an officer never lets a lady precede him. I guess because it's too easy to step
over one of these sills into a bucket."

"I have been aboard a ship before, Commander," said the psychiatrist, not smiling at all, which
almost made the Captain laugh out loud. He stepped aside and let them all come through and mill
around, then touched a stud, and the curtain-wall behind him slid right and left away, and they found
themselves standing at the aft end of the submarine's unique transparent nose. Like any small boy
with new trains to show, like any girl with a two-carat diamond to flash, likeтАФwell, any human with
something wondrous to display, he smiled and soaked up the three gasps that came from the guests.
He glanced at Admiral Nelson, and saw him eating it with as much relish as he was.

And it was a sight to come upon without warning. What was called the bridge was the extreme bows
of the huge sub. A single gigantic curved beam connected keel with backbone, swelling at the dead-
forward point to a great escutcheon of steel, which formed the ram prow up ahead. Transversely, this
was braced by two more curved beams, so that dead ahead one saw a cross of steel with the
escutcheon at their joining, and the spaces between the arms were filled with what at first seemed to
be nothing at all. Since the hull was nearly eighty feet high, and the waterline just below the arms of
the cross, one might look down into thirty feet of water, up at the sky, and have sea level about at
one's shins.

"By... golly," mumbled Admiral Crawford. "Nelson, I've lived with this thing about half as long as
you have, blueprints on up, and I thought I knew what it would be like. But... you've got to be here to
believe it."

"Those... ports? windows? They're so big!" said the svelte psychiatrist, wonderstruck as any child.

"Structurally, they're not windows or ports or anything else but just plain hull," said Admiral Nelson.


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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

"X-tempered herculite," said the captain. "A process Admiral Nelson developed. And that is the right
description. They're just oversized hull plates which happen to be transparent." He stepped to a
console and touched a control. "Deck's clear, Mr. O'Brien?"

"All clear, sir!"