"Adams, Douglas - Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

Two thousand.
Here, at a pressure of nearly seventy atmospheres, in the chilling
depths where no light reaches, nature keeps its most heated imaginings.
Two foot-long nightmares loomed wildly into the bleaching light, yawned,
and vanished back into the blackness.
Two and a half thousand feet.
At the dim edges of the ship's lights guilty secrets flitted by with
their eyes on stalks.
Gradually the topography of the distantly approaching ocean bed
resolved with greater and greater clarity on the computer displays until
at last a shape could be made out that was separate and distinct from
its surroundings. It was like a huge lopsided cylindrical fortress which
widened sharply halfway along its length to accommodate the heavy
ultra-plating with which the crucial storage holds were clad, and which
were supposed by its builders to have made this the most secure and
impregnable spaceship ever built. Before launch the material structure
of this section had been battered, rammed, blasted and subjected to
every assault its builders knew it could withstand in order to
demonstrate that it could withstand them.
The tense silence in the cockpit tightened perceptibly as it became
clear that it was this section that had broken rather neatly in two.
"In fact it's perfectly safe," said one of the officials, "it's built
so that even if the ship does break up, the storage holds cannot
possibly be breached."

Three thousand, eight hundred and twenty five feet.
Four Hi-Presh-A SmartSuits moved slowly out of the open hatchway of
the salvage craft and waded through the barrage of its lights towards
the monstrous shape that loomed darkly out of the sea night. They moved
with a sort of clumsy grace, near weightless though weighed on by a
world of water.
With his right-hand head Zaphod peered up into the black immensities
above him and for a moment his mind sang with a silent roar of horror.
He glanced to his left and was relieved to see that his other head was
busy watching the Brockian Ultra-Cricket broadcasts on the helmet vid
without concern. Slightly behind him to his left walked the two
officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration, slightly
in front of him to his right walked the empty suit, carrying their
implements and testing the way for them.
They passed the huge rift in the broken backed Starship Billion Year
Bunker, and played their flashlights up into it. Mangled machinery
loomed between torn and twisted bulkheads, two feet thick. A family of
large transparent eels lived in there now and seemed to like it.
The empty suit preceded them along the length of the ship's gigantic
murky hull, trying the airlocks. The third one it tested ground open
uneasily. They crowded inside it and waited for several long minutes
while the pump mechanisms dealt with the hideous pressure that the ocean
exerted, and slowly replaced it with an equally hideous pressure of air
and inert gases. At last the inner door slid open and they were admitted
to a dark outer holding area of the Starship Billion Year Bunker.