"Gene Wolfe - Morning Glory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

"I'm not sure. It may have been self-hypnosis."
"Nothing striking though?"
"No. But you see, I had eaten - at least in a sense - the morning glory. I
think that may be why my father-" He hesitated, lost in the complications of
the thought he was trying to formulate. Black was the Freudian; he himself,
at least by training, a Watsonian behaviorist.
"Further dreams may tell us more about what's going on," Black said. It
was one of his stock dismissals. "Don't forget you've got counseling
tomorrow." As Smythe closed the door Black added, "Good-bye, Schmidt."
Smythe turned, wanting to say that his father's father had been American
consul in Nuremberg, but it was too late. The door had shut.
To reach his own laboratory he went down two flights of stairs and along
a seemingly endless hall walled with slabs of white marble. The last lecture
of the day had been finished at four, but as he approached the laboratory
area in the rear of the building he heard the murmur of a few late-staying
students still bent over their white rats. Just as he reached his own door
one of these groups broke up, undergraduates, boys in sweaters and
jeans, and girls in jeans and sweaters, drifting out into the corridor. A girl
with long blond hair and a small heart-shaped face stopped as he opened
the door, peering in at the twisting, glowing, rectangular tubes that filled the
bright room. On an impulse Smythe said, "Come in. Would you like to see
it?"
The girl stepped inside, and after a moment put the books she was
carrying on one of the lab benches. "What do you do here?" she said. "I
don't think I've ever seen this place." The light made her squint.
Smythe smiled. "I'm called a vine runner."
She looked at him quizzically.
"People who put rats through mazes are called rat runners; people who
use flatworms are worm runners."
"You mean all these square pipes are to test the intelligence of plants?"
"Plants," Smythe said, allowing himself only a slight smile, "lacking a
nervous system, have no intelligence. When they display signs of what, in
such higher creatures as flatworms, would be called intelligence, we refer
to it as para-intelligence or pseudo intelligence. Come here, and I'll show
you how we study it."
The rectangular passages were of clouded, milky white plastic panels
held together with metal clips. He unfastened a panel, showing her the
green, leafy tendril inside.
"I don't understand," she said. "And I don't think you really believe that
about pseudo intelligence. Intelligence ought to be defined by the way
something responds, not by what you find inside when you cut it open.
"Out of fear of being accused of heresy I won't agree with you - but I
have, on occasion, been known to point out to my departmental superiors
that our age is unique in preferring a pond worm to an oak tree."
The girl was still looking at the twisting white passages sprawling along
the bench. "How does it work?" she asked. "How do you test them?"
"It's simple, really, once you understand that a plant 'moves' by growth.
That's why it has no musculature, which in turn, by the way, is why it has no
nervous system. These mazes offer the plants choice points in the form of
forked passages with equal amounts of light available in each direction. As