– My conclusion: to look for Hurges’s tables if it is technically feasible and if costs of searches in power to our state.
– Sorry, the academician – asked a question the elderly economist – and atom splitting, so to speak, in factory scale, will not cause…
– World accident? – Toffel asked. – I do not think. As I already told, atoms split now nearly daily. And anything, world целехонек. I had to hear similar fears more than once. I believe that they are superficial.
– Your opinion, professor Reynberg?
The low, tidy old man – a small beard klinyshky, long gray-haired moustaches – easily rose, abruptly turned to Toffel, then to the chairman and peas scattered words:
– First of all I have to note one sad misunderstanding. Here it was told about getting of internal energy when splitting an atomic nucleus. When romantic fantasts write about similar things, it is still admissible, but when with the idea of production of inexhaustible intratomic energy the scientist acts, I as the power engineering specialist, I protest. It is extremely deep, sad and even harmful mistake. When splitting an atomic nucleus we will not have any internal energy while exists and will not disprove the second law of thermodynamics.
And not Hurges, as far as I understand aspired to it. He was interested in the splitting of atomic kernels, but not energy. It approached a question as the physicist, the chemist, but not as the power engineering specialist. And in this gun light of Hurges – the greatest invention if it is only not the myth. But it let will be defined by chemists.
Reynberg quickly sat down and took a sip to tea.
– And it is necessary to look for? – the chairman asked it.
– If you intend to get energy from atom, then there is no need to climb under water. Chimeras and on the earth are enough – Reynberg from the place answered and all at once drank up the cooled-down tea.
– Your word, professor Bagorsky.
Powerful the put man with gray moustaches and young eyes got up without hurrying, leaned hands against a table and began:
– I, as well as all of us, have very poor materials to judge Hurges’s opening in essence. But also what is what I managed to get acquainted with is, enough, to draw a conclusion that the question deserves the close attention. I agree with Pyotr Ivanovich Reynberg: power here at anything. – Reynberg victoriously looked at Toffel. – However from it the question does not become less important – Bagorsky continued. – Companion Azores retold to me everything that he heard from Cara, and I had such impression: if this person can be also mistaken, as well as everything, then he is not inclined to enter into deception of others obviously. And the fact that he told about experiences of the died inventor is something extraordinary. If Hurges’s “gun” is capable to knock out at insignificant power consumptions the set quantity of electrons from an atomic nucleus, then this really epoch-making invention. Here Pyotr Ivanovich remembered fantasts and novelists. If I belonged to them, I could represent to you wonderful prospects. But I am not a fantast and not the novelist. You know value of a problem of decomposition of an atomic nucleus also. And I can tell you only one: if we manage to get keys to Hurges’s invention from an ocean floor and if it equals only the tenth part of our hopes, then and in this case expenses on searches of the hided treasure hundreds and thousands of times will pay off.
The chairman addressed the chairman ЭПРОНа to the engineer Kirillov:
– Your opinion?.
Kirillov, the healthy, suntanned man of average years, in a sea jacket, rose and slowly began:
– We do still precisely not know the place where “Leviathan” sank, and depth is absolutely unknown. All business depends eventually on depth. EPRON still worked at depths about twenty-thirty is put off.
– Companion Kirillov – suspended him the chairman – most of the audience here – people overland, got used to consider on meters.
– The sea sazhen equals to six feet, or one and eighty six 100-th meter – Kirillov explained. – Well, I will transfer to meters. And so, we work at depths of fifty-sixty meters and above, of course.
– Not more deeply?
– Depth in hundred meters for the diver in a usual diving suit is considered already record. In the American rigid suits it is possible to fall by two hundred, even by three hundred meters. It is meanwhile border for divers. It is possible to fall by depth seven hundred fifty – one thousand meters only in the special steel gondola capable to sustain huge pressure. Unfortunately, in a similar gondola it is only possible to observe underwater life, to photograph – and only. We need to act under water – to lift the sunk ship or, in case of need, to find by it Hurges’s “treasure”. Then business comes down to that, “Leviathan” how deeply lies. You know that in oceans there are depths in ten thousand meters. And modern border of lowering – a little more than one thousand meters.
– A stratosphere, it appears, it is easier to win, than the hydrosphere – concluded, grinning, the chairman.
– Yes, thirty kilometers are easier to rise above the ground by twenty five – than to go down to the ocean on two-three kilometers. The terrifying pressure of water keeps secrets of sea superdepths. I even doubt whether people will be able and to go down in the future to the deepest places of the ocean…
– Even in a gondola?
– Even in a gondola, and only to observe. The gondola with people has to be tied to a cable or a chain that it could be pulled out from water. But no cable of ten kilometers will sustain a body weight. … I do not know it… the cable should be done in the form of a cone with a huge diameter in the basis. I do not say any more that from the ship it is impossible to lift such weight and cranes such it is impossible to build.
– And if to lower a steel sphere without people, but with devices which would transfer to the earth of the image of the deep-water world? – the economist became interested.
Kirillov grinned.
– You offer me the questions overstepping the bounds of diving practice. It if you want, already area almost a fantasy. But I believe, as with such sphere nothing will turn out.
– The steel sphere with walls of enormous thickness – did not calm down the economist.
– And glass? – Kirillov asked. – After all your sphere has to have windows through which it would be possible to light with a searchlight a seabed for operation of the TV. It seems to me that even quartz glass will not sustain pressure. Besides, do not forget that such sphere will not have any wires. Probably, in him it is necessary to have power plant or accumulators of sufficient force and radio station. However and there is more to come. How to transfer the image without wires? Radio beams will be absorbed by ten-kilometer thickness of water. No, what is located at a depth of ten kilometers is completely inaccessible for us.
– Fortunately, “Leviathan” sank not in Silent, and in the Atlantic Ocean, more “shallow”. However, and in Atlantic there are “failures” depth in several kilometers, but there are much also depths, available to us. There are also underwater ridges which tops lie rather close to the surface of the ocean, and here and there these mountain tops rise over the surface of the ocean, creating all the known islands, for example group of the Azorsky, Canary Islands.
In this regard I submit the general plan of an expedition so. In the distress signals dispatched by “Leviathan” on the eve of death the longitude and width are marked. This place, as far as I know, represents rather raised underwater plateau with extremely cut up relief. There are both deep abysses, and high mountains. On the general cards