Lucianna_Todd
Чё?! Ты "Повелителя мух" вообще читала?! Ты хоть знаешь, о чём там речь-то? Там нет ни операций на мозге, ни сознания с подсознанием!

Была и осталась. Не истери на ровном месте.
Lucianna_Todd
Ну, т.е., гидрофобии у Рафа не было. А ты ранее утверждала обратное. И воспоминания внезапно стали смутными... Прогресс.

"Well, I don't know so much about that," replied Mr. Powell. "One of them was an absolute bastard of a dog--mind you, it'd had enough to make it, poor sod--but there was nobody cared to touch it, not even old Tyson--"

"Tyson? He's the man about the place?"

"Yeah--feeds them, cleans them out an' all that. I always say he knows more about the work at Lawson Park than anyone else. He deals with all the animals, you see, and it's his business to know what each one's being used for and by whom. The rest of us, except for the Director, only know about the projects we're doing ourselves. No, but that seven-three-two, it really was a dangerous animal--it was always muzzled before it was brought out for tests--"

"What were the tests?" asked Driver.

"Well, they were something like the tests carried out by Curt Richter at the Johns Hopkins medical school in America--what's his thing called?--The Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man.' D'you know that?"

Like a good many young people immersed in specialized work, Mr. Powell tended to forget that others were likely to be unfamiliar with his background material.

" 'Fraid I don't--not up my street really."

They came back into the yard and Mr. Powell, hands in pockets, stopped and leaned against the netty wall.

"Well, Richter put wild rats and domesticated rats into tanks of water to swim until they drowned; and he found that some of them died very rapidly for no apparent reason. A bloke called Cannon had already suggested that it might be psychogenic--you know, fear, with consequent over-stimulation of the sympathicoadrenal system; accelerated heartbeat, contraction in systole--all that jazz. What Richter established was that it wasn't fear but hopelessness--over-stimulation of the parasympathetic system, not the sympathicoadrenal. This seven-three-two dog of ours at Lawson Park had been given all sorts of drugs--you know, atropine and the colingerics, and adrenalectomy and thyroidectomy--you name it. But the real thing was that it had been continually immersed, drowned and revived, so that it had built up a terrific resistance, based on the conditioned expectation that it was going to be removed again. It didn't succumb to the usual psychogenic factors; on the contrary, it was doing fantastic endurance times, very very interesting. They're funny things, you know, hope and confidence," said Mr. Powell rather sententiously. "For instance, they're present a good deal less strongly in dogs that haven't been domesticated. Wild animals, and therefore by inference primitive men--creatures living in precarious situations--are more susceptible to fear and strain than domesticated animals. Strange, isn't it?"

"What was the object all sublime?" asked Driver, as they made their way through the Manor into the square and got back into his car.

"Well, that was a sort of psychological thing, too, as I understand it," replied Mr. Powell. "That was why they needed an adult, thoroughly domesticated dog--they paid quite a bit for it, I believe, to some woman in Dalton."

"Why did she part with it, d'you know?"

"Well, it wasn't originally hers. Apparently it had belonged to her brother in Barrow, but it had somehow or other brought about his--I'm not sure, but his death, I believe I heard--in an accident with a lorry, so naturally she wasn't keen on keeping it. That's an exceptional situation, of course. In the normal way domesticated animals-people's pets--aren't easy to come by for this work, as you can well believe. The operation was something quite new--a bit like a leucotomy, but that's misleading, really. To be perfectly frank, there were innovatory complications that put it a long way beyond me. But the general purpose--and no one'll be able to say, now, how far it was successful; not in this particular case, anyway--was to bring about a confusion of the subjective and objective in the animal's mind."

"How would that work in practice, then?" asked Digby Driver, accelerating out of the square and up the hill towards the Coniston road.

"Well, as I understand it--whoops!" Mr. Powell belched beerily, leaned forward and frowned, seeking an illustrative example. "Er--well, did you ever read a book called Pincher Martin, by a man named Golding? You know, the Lord of the Flies bloke?"

"I've read Lord of the Flies, but I don't think I know this other book."

"Well, the chap in it's supposed to be dead--drowned at sea; and in the next world, which is a sort of hellish limbo, one of the things he does is to confuse subjective and objective. He thinks he's still alive and that he's been washed up on a rock in the Atlantic, but actually it's an illusion and the rock is only a mental projection--it's the shape of a back tooth in his own head. The dog that had this operation might have illusions something like that. Suppose it had come to associate--well, let's say cats with eau de cologne, for instance--then it might be observed to treat some inanimate object--a cardboard box, say--as a cat when it was subjected to the smell of eau de cologne: or conversely, it might see something objective and act as though it was nothing but the equivalent of some thought in its mind--I can't think what, but you get the general idea."