Читать книгу Deadly Whiteness - Alex Nork - Страница 2

It happened just as it had to happen, but still he got excited. Though he was so sure in advance that without being frightened to endanger his success he bought two crates of champagne before sailing.

Today it will be drunk for his and their common success.

Tuccert thought once again about the champagne which should be sufficient for the officers of the flag-cruiser and for those who will arrive from three other ships. Two dozen for thirty people will certainly be enough.

According to the sea tradition he was first congratulated by the radio-operator. Only after this did he read the order of the Minister of Defense and his congratulations on becoming General.

Let anybody say whatever he likes, pretend to be a modest employee, but he will not pretend, moreover before himself. To enter the ranks of elite officers of a great power with the greatest navy in the world is a tremendous honor. And it is not given for nothing.

He gave twenty five years to the ocean.

As one gives oneself to a friend. Because ocean had always helped him. All victories, all joys were here and not in the studies and research centers. The final results were summed up by the ocean.

So yesterday he summed up the results of long work of Tuccert and his team, scientists, technologists and those on the top of the Navy who did not believe in the project and tried to slow down its movement.

They have won again – he and his ocean.

A happy coincidence – his brother happened to be near on his research ship. Just about a hundred miles from here.

“A happy coincidence is God’s praise deserved by the man”, – their late father used to say.

It is strange that inspite of his experience and education he always feels tiny before the image of his father, a simple hard-working farmer in far-away rural province, preserved in his memory. He had been very religious and hardly read anything besides canonical books, he had not watched films and had watched TV quite rarely. But Tuccert was sure, not only in his childhood, but at present, that father knew everything. Knew not quantitively, but qualitatively, to the very depth. As the ocean knows everything and about everything.

Tomorrow the squadron will go back, leaving here for remaining final touches of work a little ship. And already in the middle of the day they will cross with Marc, his elder brother.

Five years difference in their childhood had never been an obstacle between them. One of the reasons was that Marc who went through his mother’s death at the age of six thought that his junior brother suffered most of all the members of his family. He was doomed not to know the real childhood at all.

The two village children had a wonderful fate.

They had always been crazy about the ocean. They saw it in the cinema, in the pictures, on TV. But until Pete was seven and Marc twelve the living ocean was the main attraction for them.

By that time their father could afford to leave his work for a week and take them to Atlantic coast. They came to the hotel late in the evening, that’s why they had to wait till morning. But just at the dawn Mark woke up small Pete and both of them, nearly trembling, went to the long-expected meeting.

In the skylight, still without sunshine, the ocean was incredibly enormous and quiet.

Pete suddenly saw, at the distance of half a mile from the shore, a lonely and motionless navy ship with a high deck, exquisitely curved towards water from the bow and the stern. They saw the masts with technical gadgets the function of which was ununderstandable. They also saw the above-mast ovals of fire complexes.

Elegant ant fearless master of the ocean was standing peacefully before them. It was as noble as its own silhouette.

He wanted to point out the ship to his brother, but the latter was looking fascinatedly into transparent water spread at their feet: at the stalks of seaweeds, at small fish gliding among them, at the gentle semisphere of a jellyfish, which seemed to breathe, enjoying the quietness near the shore.

It was then that they made their life choice – he and Marc, who has become a very well-known specialist in ocean fauna.