"Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. Monday begins on Saturday (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

I was getting hungry, and it was time to go to the post office, where
my friends might be waiting for me even then. I locked the car and went out
the gate.
I was unhurriedly sauntering down Lukomoriye Street, hands in the
pockets of my gray GDR jacket, looking down at my feet. In the back pocket
of my favorite jeans, crisscrossed with zippers, jingled the crone's
coppers. I was reflecting. The skinny brochures of the "Znanie" society had
accustomed me to the concept that animals were incapable of speech. Fairy
tales from childhood, on the other hand, had insisted on the opposite. Of
course, I agreed with the brochures, since never in my life had I seen
talking animals. Not even parrots. I used to know one parrot who could growl
like a tiger, but human-talk he could not do. And now-- the pike, the tomcat
Basil, and even the mirror. Incidentally, it is precisely the inanimate
objects that speak the most often. And, by the way, it's this last
consideration which would never enter the head of my great granddaddy. In
his ancestral viewpoint, a talking cat would be a much less fantastic item
than a polished wood box, which howls, whistles, plays music, and talks in
several languages. As far as the cat goes, it's more or less clear. But how
about the pike? A pike does not have lungs. That's a fact. True, they do
have an air ballast bladder whose function as far as I know is not entirely
understood by icthyologists. My icthyologist acquaintance, Gene Skoromahov,
postulates that it is truly totally unclear, and when I attempt to reason
about it with arguments from the "Znanie" brochures, old Gene growls and
spits in contempt. His rightful gift of human speech seems to desert him
completely.
I have this impression that as yet we know very little about the
potential of animals. Only recently it became clear that fish and sea
animals exchange signals under water. Very interesting pieces are written
about dolphins. Or, let's take the ape Raphael. This I saw for myself. True,
it cannot speak, but instead it has this developed reflex: green light--
banana; red light-- electric shock. Everything was just fine until they
turned on the red and green lights simultaneously. Then Raphael began to
conduct himself just like, for instance, old Gene. He was terribly upset. He
threw himself at the window behind which the experimenter was seated, and
took to spitting at it, growling and squealing hideously. And then there is
the story-- "Do you know what a conditioned reflex is? That's what happens
when the bell rings and all these quasi-apes in white coats will run toward
us with bananas and candies,"-- which one ape tells the other.
Naturally, all of this is not that simple. The terminology has not been
worked out. Under the circumstances, any attempt to resolve the questions
involving the potential and psychology of animals leaves you feeling totally
helpless. But, on the other hand, when you have to solve, say, a system of
integral equations of the type used in stellar statistics, with unknown
functions under the integral, you don't feel any better. That's why the best
thing is to-- cogitate. As per Pascal: "Let us learn to think well-- that is
the basic principle of morality."
I came out on the Prospect of Peace and stopped, arrested by an unusual