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

Curious, where did the truck go? I thought suddenly. There was no way
down the cliff. I started looking around, searching for a gate, and then
discovered a small but very strange-looking building squeezed in between
grim brick warehouses. The windows of the lower story were set with iron
bars, and the bottom halves were painted white. As to doors, there weren't
any. I noticed this at once because the usual sign, which is normally placed
next to the gates, was here hung between two windows. It read: Academy of
Sciences, U.S.S.R., Srits. I went back to the middle of the street. Sure
enough-- two stories with ten windows apiece and not a single door.
Warehouses to the right and left. Srits, thought I. Scientific Research
Institute of TS. Meaning what-- Technology of Security, Terrestrial
Seismology? The cottage on hen's legs, it occurred to me, is a
museum of this SR1TS. My hitchhikers are probably also from here. Also those
two in the tearoom. ... A flock of crows took off from the roof of the house
and began circling about, cawing loudly. I turned around and started back
toward the square.

We are all naive materialists, I thought, and also rationalists. We
demand that everything should be explained immediately in rationalist terms;
that is, reduced to fit in with the handful of known facts. No one applies a
penny's worth of dialectics. It enters nobody's head that between the known
data and some new phenomena, there could be an ocean of unknowns, and so we
declare the new phenomenon to be supernatural and therefore impossible. Say,
for instance, the way Maitre Montesquieu would take the message about the
resuscitation of a dead man forty-five minutes after his heart stopped
beating. With a bayonet counterattack, that's how he would take it. Toss it
on pikes, so to speak. He would no doubt dub it obscurantism and
clericalism. That is, if he would not just wave such a datum away. If it
happened right in front of his own eyes, he would be placed in an extremely
difficult position. Such as my own at the moment, except that I was more
accustomed to it. But for him, it would be necessary either to consider it a
fraud, or to disbelieve his senses or even to renounce materialism. Most
likely he would opt for fraud. Nevertheless, to the end of his days the
memory of this adroit trick would irritate his thinking, like a mote in the
eye. . . . But we, we are the children of a different age. We have seen a
lot: the live head of a dog sewn to the body of another; the artificial
kidney as big as a closet; the iron hand operated by the nerve signals from
a live one; the people who can say, casually, "This was after I had died for
the first time.."
Yes, in our times Montesquieu would have had a poor chance of remaining
a materialist. Nonetheless we remain materialists and there is no harm done!
True enough, this can get to be difficult sometimes when a chance wind,
blowing across the ocean of the unknown, will carry our way some strange
petals from unexplored continents. Most often it happens when one finds that
which one was not looking for. Soon enough there will appear new and amazing
animals from Mars or Venus in our zoos. Of course, we will be ogling them
and slapping our sides, but we have been waiting for them a long time, and
we are prepared for their appearance. We would be much more astounded and
disappointed if there would not be any such animal or if they would be like