Expedition to the Depths of the Ocean. Андрей Тихомиров
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to the ball it is thicker, and at the edges it is very thin.
Inside the ball there is a gondola, where I sit. It is so balanced that my seat and the seat of my partner, the instruments and control handles remain in place, no matter how the outer shell moves. "Medusa" can float in any position, and I will not even notice it.
They chose the right vessel for Vasiliev. "Medusa" can easily escape from the sea serpent or paralyze it with an electric charge, if necessary. We found Vasiliev.
I was sitting in the cockpit of a helicopter flying over the ocean. I decided to sit in the cockpit at the airfield, because it is faster and more reliable. This way I could control the landing process and be sure that everything will go well.
I thought about my friends – Vasiliev and Titov. Vasiliev was fearless, but his fearlessness sometimes seemed a little strange to me. And Titov always remained calm and collected, even in the most difficult situations.
Now they were together in the cabin, and I wondered: what would happen if they were alone in a tight space? What if something went wrong? I remembered how I had once seen adult hunters who had never shot before suddenly become completely different after their first shot. Maybe Titov would change too?
I looked at the photographs they had given me. One of them was a strange photograph taken by a TV camera from a ship. The picture showed a huge creature with three eyes and a wide mouth. It looked very scary, and its gaze made me feel uneasy.
This photograph reminded me that we were going on a dangerous journey. But I knew that my friends were ready for any challenges and would help each other.
You could be delighted by such a beast, even if you were not infected with Vasiliev's obsession. It is easy to imagine what the scouts would have felt if they had seen this monster face to face.
I turned the photograph over. On the back was a short note from a scientific protocol. The TV camera transmitted the picture. Then it was observed on the screen on board the ship: the open mouth suddenly approached the camera, a tooth flashed in the light, the observers saw something like a throat, and then it became dark. The cable to which the camera was tied stretched taut, like a fishing line when catching a large fish. Attempts to pull the camera out were fruitless. After a ten-minute struggle, when the cable was wound around the winch drum, then lowered to relieve the tension, it broke, and the monster that had swallowed the camera disappeared. Judging by the size of the camera, the creature that had dealt with it with such ease must have been quite large. Biologists had never seen anything like it and did not describe it in their books. A dispute broke out, into which Vasiliev unexpectedly intervened. Having seen a photograph that was broadcast on terrestrial television, he “identified” the monster as a sea serpent. As proof, he cited several thousand written testimonies and drawings by artists of past centuries.
One of these “proofs” was in my hands, in the same stack of photographs. A three-eyed monster with an open mouth was chasing a small vessel that was fleeing with all sails set. At the stern, one of the sailors was kneeling and stretching his arms to the sky. The body of the serpent was hidden in the water, only the hump-like tops of the thick rings were protruding above the surface. This did not quite match Vasiliev’s version that sea serpents rise to the surface only dead, but the “portrait resemblance” was almost complete.
“Captain, are you asleep?” they called out to me. A smiling Salnikov was looking at me from the screen.
“Everything is fine.” I'm trying to come up with some plausible version. I can't just search at random!
– Try it, – Salnikov encouraged me. – I flew in from vacation specifically to take part in the solution. And I've already heard at least a dozen hypotheses. Your thoughts are especially interesting.
– I'm starting from the most extreme assumption, – I said. – Something happened that made even a man like Titov forget himself.
Titov was still the ship's commander, and according to the instructions, he could disobey Vasiliev if the latter demanded, say, unreasonable actions from him. On the other hand, Titov, if he had undertaken something beyond the usual limits, would certainly have informed the ship cruising on the surface of his decision in advance. There is only one conclusion: he did not have time to do this. Something happened suddenly that immediately put Titov out of action. – For example, the Medusa ran into an underwater rock due to a radar error?
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