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

opposing force, namely, different ideas about prices.
Two tall young men strode quickly towards the bazaar. The tow-headed,
blue-eyed man, whose name was Yura Kostyukov and who wore a bright red
short-sleeved shirt and sand-coloured trousers, glanced at his watch.
"It's a quarter to nine already. Val is probably waiting for us at the
yacht club."
"Let her wait," his friend Nikolai Potapkin said. "The worst that can
happen is she'll give you a tongue-lashing." Nikolai had a high forehead,
prominent cheekbones and a shock of dark hair. His grey eyes were calm and
somewhat quizzical. The rolled-up sleeves of his white shirt revealed a pair
of hairy muscular forearms.
The two friends passed through an arched gateway and came out near a
display of paintings, some of them executed on cardboard, some on oilcloth
and some on polythene film. They were the kind of paintings you will see
only at bazaars. Most of them were crude copies of well-known canvases. The
two young men stopped in front of one of them which depicted a plump nude
with pinkish-purple skin reclining on the bright blue surface of a pond
beside a dazzlingly white swan.
"Just look at that," Yura remarked. "What a wealth of colour!"
"It's Leda and the swan, from Greek mythology," said Nikolai.
Yura laughed. "You mean that fat lady is Leda, the Spartan beauty? The
mother of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra? The mother-in-law of King Menelaus
and King Agamemnon?"
"But look at how she's lying on the water," Nikolai said.
At that moment a man in his forties, wearing large, horn-rimmed
eyeglasses, with greying hair, plump tanned cheeks and a small pot-belly,
came up to them.
"Fie," he said in a low voice. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."
The two young men turned round. "Why, it's Boris!" Yura exclaimed.
"Fie," the plump man repeated. Boris Privalov was head of the
department in which the two young men were employed as research engineers.
"Staring at a nude!"
"No- I'm intrigued by the way she's floating on top of the water,"
Nikolai said. "You might think she was lying on a sofa."
Boris Privalov examined the pinkish-purple lady more closely. "H'm,
yes, indeed. An extraordinary case of surface tension. But you didn't come
here to buy a painting, did you?"
"Of course not. We're looking for a pulley-block for our stay-sail
halyard," Yura explained. "We were at the marina, giving the boat a
onceover, and we saw a block had to be replaced. We couldn't find anything
suitable in the store-room there. Dockmaster Mehti said we were getting to
be as finicky as pampered lap dogs. He said that if we didn't like the block
he offered us we could trot down to the bazaar for one. So that's that. Are
you looking for anything in particular?"
Before replying, Privalov glanced about. "No, just browsing, so to
speak."
"Do you suppose it would be possible to build up surface tension
artificially?" Nikolai asked.
"Build it up, you say?"
"Yes." Nikolai put a finger on the blue surface of the water in the