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

"That's not very scientific," said the men disapprovingly. "Are you
sure you don't mean a telepathic bond?"
"No, though it comes to the same thing in the end," answered the
elephants. "We know that we sound like we're speaking English to
you, except for the man on the left who thinks we're speaking
Hebrew."
"And what do we sound like to you?" demanded the men.
"You sound exactly as if you're making gentle rumbling sounds in
your stomachs and your bowels."
"That's fascinating," said the men, who privately thought it was a
lot more disgusting than fascinating.
"Do you know what's really fascinating?" responded the elephants.
"The fact that you've got a Jew with you." They saw that the men
didn't comprehend, so they continued: "We always felt we were in a
race with the Jews to see which of us would be exterminated first.
We used to call ourselves the Jews of the animal kingdom." They
turned and faced the Jewish spaceman. "Did the Jews think of
themselves as the elephants of the human kingdom?"
"Not until you just mentioned it," said the Jewish spaceman, who
suddenly found himself agreeing with them.
42 b.c.
The Romans gathered their Jewish prisoners in the arena at
Alexandria, then turned fear-crazed elephants loose on them. The
spectators began jumping up and down and screaming for blood-and,
being contrarians, the elephants attacked the spectators instead of
the Jews, proving once and for all that you can't trust a pachyderm.
(When the dust had cleared, the Jews felt the events of the day had
reaffirmed their claim to be God's chosen people. They weren't the
Romans' chosen people, though. After the soldiers killed the
elephants, they put all the Jews to the sword, too.)
"It's not his fault he's a Jew any more than it's your fault that
you're elephants," said the rest of the men. "We don't hold it
against either of you."
"We find that difficult to believe," said the elephants.
"You do?" said the men. "Then consider this: the Indians-that's the
good Indians, the ones from India, not the bad Indians from
America-worshipped Ganesh, an elephant-headed god."
"We didn't know that," admitted the elephants, who were more
impressed than they let on. "Do the Indians still worship Ganesh?"
"Well, we're sure they would if we hadn't killed them all while we
were defending the Raj," said the men. "Elephants were no longer in
the military by then," they added. "That's something tobe grateful
for."
Their very last battle came when Tamerlane the Great went to war
against Sultan Mahmoud. Tamerlane won by tying branches to
buffaloes' horns, setting fire to them, and then stampeding the
buffalo herd into Mahmoud's elephants, which effectively ended the
elephant as a war machine, buffalo being much less expensive to
acquire and feed.
All the remaining domesticated elephants were then trained for