"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Wanderers and Travellers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

"I certainly will," he said, and turned over on his back. He folded his
arms under his head and looked at me, slowly blinking his sparse lashes.
There was something irresistibly attractive about him, but what exactly I
don't know. Perhaps it was his eyes, trusting and a little sad. Or perhaps it
was because his ears stuck out from under the bandage in such a comical
fashion. Having gazed his fill at me, he turned his eyes on a blue dragonfly
that was swaying on a blade of grass.
"Dragon-fly," he said. "Dear little dragon-fly! BlueтАФlakesideтАФbeauty!
There she sits, neatly and prettily, looking around to see what she can
gobble up." He stretched out his hand, but the dragon-fly left the blade of
grass and winged its way in an arc toward the reeds. He followed it with
his eyes and lay down again. "How complicated it is, my friends," he said,
and Masha immediately sat down and stared at him with round eyes.
"There she is, perfect, graceful, and content with everything. Ate up a fly,
reproduced herself, and is now ready to die. Simple, elegant, rational. No
spiritual perplexities, no love-pangs, no self-consciousness, no ideas about
life."
"A machine," said Masha suddenly. "A boring cyber!"
This from my Masha! I nearly burst out laughing, but restrained myself,
though believe I snorted, and she looked at me with disapproval.
"Boring," agreed Gorbovsky. "That's it. But now imagine, comrades, a
dragon-fly of a poisonous greenish-yellow colour, with horizontal red
stripes, and a wing-span of seven metres, and its jaws all covered with a
nasty black slime. Well, have you pictured it to yourselves?" He raised his
eyebrows and looked at us. "I see you haven't. But I have run away from
them like a madman, even though I've been armed. Now, the question is,
what is there in common between these two boring cybers?"
"That green one," I said, "is from another planet, I suppose?"
"No doubt about that."
"From Pandora?"
"Exactly, from Pandora," he answered.
"What have they got in common?"
"Yes, what?"
"But that's obvious." I said. "An identical level of assimilation of
information. Reaction at the level of instinct."
"Words," he sighed. "Don't be angry, but these are only words, and no
use to me. I've got to find traces of reason in the Universe, but I don't
know what it is. It's no good talking to me about different levels of
assimilation of information. I know quite well that the dragon-fly and I
have different levels, but all that is intuition. Now tell me: here I've found
an ant nestтАФdoes it represent traces of reason or not? On Leonida they
discovered buildings without windows and without doorsтАФdoes that
represent traces of reason? What have I to look for? Ruins? Inscriptions?
Rusty nails? A septihedral screw? How am I to know what traces they
leave? What if their aim in life is to destroy the atmosphere wherever they
find one? Or to build rings round the planets? Or to hybridize life? Or to
create life? Perhaps that dragon-fly was self-reproducing cybernetic
apparatus set going in times beyond memory? To say nothing of the
possessors of reason themselves. After all, one can pass a slimy creature
croaking in a puddle twenty times and only turn away from it in loathing.