"Allen Steele - Oceanspace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

deep ocean be-fore it abruptly ends at the rugged escarpment which marks the farthest edge of the North
American continent; beyond that lie the vast undersea plains of the Atlantic Basin.
The Blake Plateau is a prehistoric relic of the last ice age. The same climatic shifts which caused walls
of gla-cial ice to advance across Canada into the Midwest also dropped the average sea level to the
present boundaries of the continental shelf; when the glaciers receded during the Oligocene epoch some
25 million years ago, the seas rose and the continental shelf gradually vanished beneath the waves. As it
did, rivers and estuaries carried post-
glacial sediments across the new coastline to the Florida-Hatteras Slope, where they settled upon the
leading edge of the tectonic plate forming the American continent. Thus the Blake Plateau was created.
Down here, there is no sunrise or sunset, only the eter-nal midnight of the abyss, pierced briefly by
quick-moving sources of bioluminescence: gape-jawed anglerfish, gulper eels, and tiny squid, stalking
one an-other in the frigid darkness. All else is dark, and still.
And then… something moves.
First, there's a faint sound: the gentle thrum of props, like the distant echo of a submarine earthquake, yet
con-stant, more regular. Then a dim, horizontal row of lights descends from unknown regions far above.
As the light pierces downward, it startles the fish and eels; for a few moments they break off their deadly
games to swim a little closer and investigate the source of the light and sound, until it becomes apparent
even to their primitive minds that the intruder is alien to their world, and therefore dan-gerous. They
speed away before the narrow swath of light can find them.
Downward the machine glides, the forward end of its long form backlit by thallium iodide lamps: a pair
of enormous, multijointed manipulators mounted above a ti-tanium sphere, itself connected by a slender
collar and thick steel trusses to a long cylinder, on top of which was mounted an open-top cargo bed.
Two barrel-shaped ma-neuvering thrusters are positioned along its port and star-board sides; at the aft
end, recessed within a cone-shaped cowling, is the lazily rotating propeller of its main en-gine. There's
no color down here—even within close proximity of the halogens, everything is rendered in muted
shades of greenish gray—so there's no way of telling that the submarine is painted bright fluorescent
yellow, interspersed with bands of reds and white.
At the front of the sphere, below and between the arms, is a single, cyclopean eye: a Plexiglas window,
two inches thick. Dim light glows within the porthole, sil-houetting a vague form. A creature not born in
this dark universe, yet, due to a long series of evolutionary pro-cesses stretching back millions of years,
a distant cousin nonetheless.


file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20Oceanspace.html (2 of 231)13-8-2005 23:04:20
 Allen Steele - Oceanspace


A man. A human being. Joe Niedzwiecki.
One eye on the porthole, the other on the bathymetric chart displayed on the computer screen beneath
the window, Joe Niedzwiecki gently pulled back the yoke. The bottom itself was still invisible through
the dish-size porthole, but the steady, high-pitched pings of the active sonar told him it was down there
nonetheless, coming closer with each passing second.
Joe inched back the yoke a little more, then found the throttle bar with his right hand and yanked it back
to neutral. Gravity would take care of the rest; all he had to do was make sure the little submersible
didn't crash-land. The silt stirred up by the thrusters was becoming more dense, as if he was flying
through a thick green cloud. Two fathoms… one and half… one fathom… and suddenly the floodlights
captured a flat, muddy surface just below him, strewn with small, dark brown rocks.
There was an abrupt jar as the DSV's skids connected with the seafloor. He checked the screen again,