You could be delighted by such a beast, even if you were not infected with Vasiliev's obsession. It is easy to imagine what the scouts would have felt if they had seen this monster face to face.
I turned the photograph over. On the back was a short note from a scientific protocol. The TV camera transmitted the picture. Then it was observed on the screen on board the ship: the open mouth suddenly approached the camera, a tooth flashed in the light, the observers saw something like a throat, and then it became dark. The cable to which the camera was tied stretched taut, like a fishing line when catching a large fish. Attempts to pull the camera out were fruitless. After a ten-minute struggle, when the cable was wound around the winch drum, then lowered to relieve the tension, it broke, and the monster that had swallowed the camera disappeared. Judging by the size of the camera, the creature that had dealt with it with such ease must have been quite large. Biologists had never seen anything like it and did not describe it in their books. A dispute broke out, into which Vasiliev unexpectedly intervened. Having seen a photograph that was broadcast on terrestrial television, he “identified” the monster as a sea serpent. As proof, he cited several thousand written testimonies and drawings by artists of past centuries.
One of these “proofs” was in my hands, in the same stack of photographs. A three-eyed monster with an open mouth was chasing a small vessel that was fleeing with all sails set. At the stern, one of the sailors was kneeling and stretching his arms to the sky. The body of the serpent was hidden in the water, only the hump-like tops of the thick rings were protruding above the surface. This did not quite match Vasiliev’s version that sea serpents rise to the surface only dead, but the “portrait resemblance” was almost complete.
“Captain, are you asleep?” they called out to me. A smiling Salnikov was looking at me from the screen.
“Everything is fine.” I'm trying to come up with some plausible version. I can't just search at random!
– Try it, – Salnikov encouraged me. – I flew in from vacation specifically to take part in the solution. And I've already heard at least a dozen hypotheses. Your thoughts are especially interesting.