"Aleksandr Abramov, Sergei Abramov. Horsemen from Nowhere ("ВСАДНИКИ НИОТКУДА", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автораtwo there, one next to the other. I figured another one had been unloaded
and went back to sleep. In the morning there was only one again. So I asked the engineer where the other one had gone, and he burst out laughing. 'Hey, you drank too much, you were seeing double. How much did you guys put away?' " I was rather suspicious about the true criminals of this splitting, but I didn't say anything. What I did was I brought along my camera, I had a hunch it might come in useful. Which it did. We were about three-hundred metres above the ocean at the very edge of the ice. We could clearly see the unloaded boxes and machines, the small pieces of broken ice at the shore and the blue icebergs out in the pure water. The biggest towered up a few kilometres from the coast line, but did not float or bob on the waves-it was sitting firmly in the water fixed securely to the bottom. We called it 'The End of the Titanic' in memory of the famous liner that collided with a colossal iceberg at the beginning of the century. This one was even larger. Our glaciologists calculated that it was roughly three thousand square kilometres in area. That was the goal of the Disney characters that had stretched out single file across the sky. I began to film without waiting for a close approach. They were flying at the same altitude as we were, they were rose-coloured without a single spot and resembled dirigibles at the tail end of a column. From the front they were like boomerangs or swept-back airplane wings. "Shall we turn back?" said Ozhogin in a whisper. "We can put on speed." "Why?" I sniggered. "You can't get away from them anyway." I could sense the tension in Ozhogin's muscles, but I didn't know whether it was due to fear or going to." "How do you know?" "Because they duplicated your helicopter last night, you yourself saw it," I replied. He didn't say anything. Meanwhile the column had approached the iceberg. Three rosy dirigibles hung in the air, getting redder and opening up their familiar saucer-like stemless poppies, motionless at the corners of an enormous triangle over the island of ice; then the swept-wing boomerangs plunged downwards. They went into the water like fish, no splash, no sound, only white spurts of steam encircled the iceberg. Probably the temperature gradient between the new substance and the water was too great. Then all was calm. The poppies flowered over the island and the boomerangs, disappeared. I waited patiently while the helicopter slowly circled over the iceberg a bit below the poppies hanging in the sky. "What's going to happen now?" Ozhogin asked hoarsely. "Is this the end?" "I don't think so," I replied cautiously. About ten minutes must have passed. Suddenly the mountain of ice shook mightily and then slowly rose out of the water. "Let's go," I yelled to Kostya. He understood and swung our plane to the side, away from the dangerous orbit. The bluish hunk of ice, scintillating in the sun, had already risen above the water. It was so large that it was difficult to find any comparison. Imagine an enormous mountain cut off at the base and rising upwards like a toy balloon. It gleamed and glistened shimmering in a million colours of molten sapphires and emeralds sprinkled all over it. This was a scene you could sell your soul to the devil for. I was the king. Only Ozhogin and I and the astronomers of Mirny witnessed this incomparable spectacle. A miracle of ice rose out of the |
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