"Aleksandr Abramov, Sergei Abramov. Horsemen from Nowhere ("ВСАДНИКИ НИОТКУДА", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Dyachuk grew cautious, ready for a trap.
"Hey, who's this Caius guy?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake," I sighed, "why didn't Hans Christian Andersen
deal in weather forecasts? Do you know the difference between you and him?
The colour of the blood. His is blue."
"The octopus has blue blood if you want to know."
Zernov was not listening.
"Are we roughly in the same region?" he asked suddenly.
"What region, Boris Arkadievich?"
"Where the Americans observed those clouds."
"No, quite a bit to the west," put in Dyachuk. "I've checked by the
map."
"I said 'roughly'. Clouds usually move, you know."
"Ducks too," wisecracked Tolya.
"You don't believe me, Dyachuk?"
"Of course not. It isn't even funny: clouds that are neither cumulus
nor cirrus. Actually, there aren't any at all right now." He looked up at
the open sky. "Perhaps orographic. They're lens-like in shape with an extra
layer on top.
And rose-coloured due to the sunlight. But these are dense, a greasy
rose colour and something like raspberry jelly. A lot lower than cumulus
clouds, not exactly bags blown up by the wind, but something in the nature
of uncontrolled dirigibles. Nonsense!"
These were obviously the mysterious rose-coloured clouds that the
Americans at MacMur-do had radioed about. Clouds like rose dirigibles had
passed over the island of Ross, were seen on Adelie Land and in the vicinity
of the shelf glacier Shackleton, and an American pilot was reported to have
collided with them some three hundred kilometres from Mirny. Kolya Samoilov
received the radiogram that the American radio operator sent out: "I saw
them myself, the devil take them. Racing along just like a Disney film."
At Mirny, on the whole, the men were very sceptical about the rose
clouds and only a few took the thing seriously. George Bruk, chief merry
maker, kept at the phlegmatic old-timer seismologist:
"Now you've surely heard of the flying saucers, haven't you?"
"Suppose I have."
"And about the banquet at MacMurdo?"
"So what?"
"Did you see the 'Life' reporter off to New York?"
"What are you getting at, anyway?"
"Well, rose-coloured ducks went along with him and all the sensational
news too."
"Lay off, will you. You're getting to be a pain you know where."
George lay off with a smirk and set out for some other victim. He
passed me up, considering perhaps that the chances of success were small. I
was having lunch with glaciologist Zernov, who was only eight years my
senior but was already a professor. Really, no matter how you look at it, to
be a full doctor of science at thirty-six is something to envy, though these
sciences did not seem so important to me-I'm closer to the humanities. I
didn't believe they could mean so much to human progress. And I said as much
to Zernov on one occasion.