"E.Voiskunsky, I.Lukodyanov. The Crew Of The Mekong (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

IN WHICH A STRANGE OCCURRENCE TAKES PLACE ON BOARD THE M.S. UZBEKISTAN


There is a great temptation to start a novel of adventure with a
shipwreck. Something like this:
"With a sickening crunch the three-masted bark Aretusa, sailing from
the New Hebrides with a cargo of copra, listed heavily to starboard. The
raging sea swept over-"
But we did not yield to the temptation. This true story of ours will
open without a shipwreck. Since we wish, however, to conform throughout to
the dictates of good style, we solemnly promise to arrange one later on.
So much for that.
One fine summer day the m.s. Uzbekistan was approaching a large Caspian
town. The time was shortly after lunch, and the promenade deck was deserted
except for a man in a green check suit. He was taking his ease in a deck
chair, sheltered from the broiling sun by an awning.
Nikolai Opratin, a person destined to play no small role in this story,
was a lean, dapper man in his late thirties. He had an energetic face, with
a bony chin, thin lips and a high brow ending in a carefully concealed bald
patch. His close-shaven cheeks and the aroma of his aftershave lotion
created the impression that he had just stepped out of a barber's chair.
Postprandial naps were a pernicious habit in which Nikolai Opratin did
not indulge. He reclined in his deck chair, gazing at the ship's broad,
foamy wake. On his right he could see the grayish-yellow strip of coastline
rising out of the blue sea. The long hilly island at the entrance to the bay
was already in sight.
The island had been much smaller twenty years ago, Opratin reflected.
Through the centuries the level of the ancient Caspian had often risen and
fallen, sometimes by as much as eighty metres. In recent years it had
dropped greatly. Man, no longer willing to be just a passive observer, had
now set himself the difficult task of raising the level of the Caspian. One
of the ideas suggested was to seal off, with a dam, the Bay of
Kara-Bogaz-Gol, where the hot desert sun evaporates fourteen cubic
kilometres of Caspian water annually. Another was to divert northern rivers
into the Caspian. Under this bold scheme, the Kama, Vychegda and Pechora
rivers were to be pumped across the watersheds and made to flow southwards
into the Volga, which empties into the Caspian Sea.
Even if Kara-Bogaz-Gol Bay were cut off from the sea, northern rivers
diverted, and water from Central Asia's great Amu Darya river added, the
level of the Caspian would not rise by the desired three metres before the
year 2000.
That was far too long to wait. Actually, the addition of only one
thousand cubic kilometres of water to the Caspian in the course of one year
would do the trick.
But this was easier said than done. Several thousand giant pumps and a
power station with a capacity of scores of millions of kilowatts would be
required to shift that amount of water from the Black Sea, say, to the
Caspian in one year.
Nikolai Opratin, Candidate of Science (Tech.), had all these figures at