A. Belyaev - Classics fantasy – 12

– Not with your nose a diver to be, Makar Ivanych! – Vanyushka joked. – To seven god bore this nose, to one got. However, if to cut off from kilograms, then, maybe, and will enter.

– However there is nothing to scoff – Makar Ivanovich sensitively answered. – And there is nothing bad. It is told: the nosovity, the krasovity.

– Do not mourn, Makar Ivanovich. I to you will make the device by the special order. Rubber also will be enough for your nose – Guzik calmed the old man.

And the announced Vanyushka already sverzitsya overboard in the mask, dived, but came up outside soon, having nearly choked. He did not get used to inhale oxygen a nose yet, and to exhale carbonic acid a mouth. It was necessary to get used to the device.

– You will manage to swallow sea water still! – Guzik shouted to it. – Climb, listen further!

Vanyushka was lifted aboard.

– Harafo, only water in a mouth climbs! – Vanyushka told.

– It is a “winter” suit – Guzik continued the explanations. – It is, actually, usual diving inert, except for the fact that supply with oxygen comes from own “gas generator”. But here, however, there is one more small improvement – he modestly declared. – In matter – a suit lining – there are metallic threads which are connected to the accumulator. Threads can heat up and give heat. In such suit it is possible, without being afraid to catch cold, to fall to ice waves of the Ledovity ocean or to rise by height in ten thousand kilometers over the Earth’s surface.

At last the last – the rigid device for underwater depths – was continued by Guzik. – In it it is possible to plunge on three hundred meters and more. It is supplied with especially strong lamps. I do not know whether this device is required to you. Already “and depth of fifty meters the bottom opustevat, and at a depth of four hundred – there are no large seaweed. Sea flora is concentrated on the narrow strip going not further in one hundred and fifty nautical miles from the coast. And all infinite extent of a bottom of the seas is farther and deeper is the desert deprived of any vegetation.

– Yes, but the rigid device can be necessary for us for the research purposes. Eventually the ocean floor is studied far not fully – Volkov objected.

That time on a bottom of the sea Volkov and Vanyushka plunged, and cob-nosed Konobeev only with envy looked at them and grunted with such upset look that Guzik felt sorry for the old man, and he promised to produce a nanosnik in the handicraft method here, on the place, in the temporary laboratory.

And already in the following trip Konobeev with pleasure pulled a black rubber tire on the pear-shaped nose. In big points, with a huge black nose, with a gray-haired small beard and long moustaches it looked extraordinary comical.

– Directly water! – Vanyushka shouted, rolling with laughter.

– Even more important, the Neptune – sea god! – Volkov responded, echoing Vanyushke.

– Neptune Ivanych! Great!

And followed Konobeev this “Neptune Ivanych”.

* * *

Fishermen and hunters live in the world of a case, good luck, risk, an adventure, surprise. It leaves a special mark on their psychology. The everyday situation deprived of sharp experiences, surprises and risk seems to them boring and fresh. They need an eternal game with fire, dangers; they need novelty and sharpness of impressions. Such is there was also an old man Konobeev. Hunting feelings and instincts over the years did not die away, and inflamed in it stronger. His gray eyes under shaggy black eyebrows came to life, lit up sparks when he had to fight against waves or a wild animal. And now the new pleasure, untried feeling, perhaps, the whole chain of new adventures was necessary to it. Poor Marfa Zakharovna! It was waited by new tests, a new strip of loneliness. When it was asked where the husband, she only hopelessly waved a hand.

Konobeev should fall by an ocean floor, that ocean which ruthlessly absorbed fishermen, their networks and production; to go on a visit to fishes, to look how they live-live there. In a diving half mask Konobeev felt like the fantastic sea tsar. Guzik, worrying a little, explained to the old man as it is necessary to inhale and exhale air, but Konobeev waved away with such look as if it all life went in this half mask and was born at an ocean floor.

– However I will not choke! – he spoke. – Here only one is bad: it is impossible to smoke there. Make favor, Mikol, think up somehow that I with a tube could go. – Guzik, laughing, promised to think up.

Konobeev well remembers how he for the first time in a shirt and ports (so the old man considered more decently – he did not recognize pants) fell by an ocean floor. Water was cool and pleasantly pricked the tempered body, forcing to move quicker, as on a frost. With breath Makar Ivanovich is an excellent swimmer and nyrets – coped soon, starting up a stream of bubbles through a mouth. During a calm from a surface it was easy to determine by these bubbles where there is a diver.

Having plunged into the mysterious twilight of a seabed, Makar Ivanovich from pleasure sniffed and walked in depth. Lit a lamp. On light was going to look at incredible quantity of fishes on an unprecedented show. They were curious not less people.

“Fishes, fishes, how many! – Konobeev thought, coming to fishing delight and being enough them directly with hands. – What disappointment, did not occupy network! However now you will not leave me!” – And he walked on the underwater wood of seaweed, surrounded with hordes of the fishes shining sides at turn as silver knives. It was so amusing, extraordinary and beautifully that Konobeev suddenly, having forgotten where he is, began to guffaw with all the might lungs, having started up so many bubbles on a surface that sitting on the boat seriously were disturbed for the old man. However, bubbles soon began to appear regularly, but they were removed further and further. They died it is visible soon.

Konobeev for the first time walked several hours in a row, almost till the sunset. Returned excited, shining.

– Well and life under water, however! – he told. – And why people on the earth live, but not in the sea-okiyane?

As it was pleasant to wander in novel tracks of an underwater taiga, Makar Ivanovich had to constrain the hunting passions and to set to work. And works was more than enough.

The Japanese fishers and poachers who were darting about at our coast with surprise and displeasure glanced at a big white tent which appeared in one night on the bank of the small river flowing into the ocean. It was “general staff” where there lived Vanyushka and Volkov. Soon near this tent others appeared; in several days on the coast there were navezeno many boards, logs, bricks. Saws began to squeal, began to knock axes. Temporary barracks began to grow.

Among the invited workers was many Japanese and Chinese who had to prepare cabbage as it prepares at them in the homeland. And the Russian workers studied at Japanese and Chinese. Volkov cared for that the export goods met all requirements of foreign consumers of a sea cabbage. The seaweed taken from water washed out in special tubs, cleared of sand and silt, sorted manually, once again cleared, small izrezyvat and put even layers of a certain size on the bamboo mats outspread in the open air in inclined situation. From these layers of seaweed dry plates turned out. The dried-up plates which stuck together in zhelatinoobrazny weight were torn off from mats and pressed for giving of uniform thickness to them. Tiles in 25x30 centimeters developed on ten pieces and accurately communicated. Volkov drew great attention to that tiles were prepared accurately and equally as chocolate bars.