"Resnick, Mike - The Elephants on Neptune" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

men as elephants.
"Well, I'll be damned!" said the leader of the men. "You're
elephants!"
"And you're men," said the elephants nervously.
"That's right," said the men. "We claim this planet in the name of
the United Federation of Earth."
"You're united now?" asked the elephants, feeling much relieved.
"Well, the survivors are," said the men.
"Those are ominous-looking weapons you're carrying," said the
elephants, shifting their feet uncomfortably.
"They go with the uniforms," said the men. "Not to worry. Why would
we want to harm you? There's always been a deep bond between men and
elephants."
That wasn't exactly the way the elephants remembered it.
326 b.c.
Alexander the Great met Porus, King of the Punjab of India, in the
Battle of the Jhelum River. Porus had the first military elephants
Alexander had ever seen. He studied the situation, then sent his men
out at night to fire thousands of arrows into extremely sensitive
trunks and underbellies. The elephants went mad with pain and began
killing the nearest men they could find, which happened to be their
keepers and handlers. After his great victory, Alexander slaughtered
the surviving elephants so that he would never have to face them in
battle.
217 b.c.
The first clash between the two species of elephants. Ptolemy IV
took his African elephants against Antiochus the Great's Indian
elephants.
The elephants on Neptune weren't sure who won the war, but they knew
who lost. Not a single elephant on either side survived.
Later that same 217 b.c.
While Ptolemy was battling in Syria, Hannibal took thirty-seven
elephants over the Alps to fight the Romans. Fourteen of them froze
to death, but the rest lived just long enough to absorb the enemy's
spear thrusts while Hannibal was winning the Battle of Cannae.
"We have important things to talk about," said the men. "For
example, Neptune's atmosphere is singularly lacking in oxygen. How
do you breathe?"
"Through our noses," said the elephants.
"That was a serious question," said the men, fingering their weapons
ominously.
"We are incapable of being anything but serious," explained the
elephants. "Humor requires that someone be the butt of the joke, and
we find that too cruel to contemplate."
"All right," said the men, who were vaguely dissatisfied with the
answer, perhaps because they didn't understand it. "Let's try
another question. What is the mechanism by which we are
communicating? You don't wear radio transmitters, and because of our
helmets we can't hear any sounds that aren't on our radio bands.""We
communicate through a psychic bond," explained the elephants.