RAT IN THE SKULL
I.
DR. JOSEPH MacNare was not the sort of person one would expect him to be in the light of what happened. Indeed, it is safe to say that until the summer of 1955 he was more "normal," better adjusted, than the average college professor. And we have every reason to believe that he remained so, in spite of having stepped out of his chosen field.
At the age of thirty-four, he had to his credit a college textbook on advanced calculus, an introductory physics, and seventy-two papers that had appeared in various journals, copies of which were in neat order in a special section of the bookcase in his office at the university, and duplicate copies of which were in equally neat order in his office at home. None of these were in the field of psychology, the field in which he was shortly to become famous--or infamous. But anyone who studies the published writings of Dr. MacNare must inevitably conclude that he was a competent, responsible scientist, and a firm believer in institutional research, research by teams, rather than in private research and go-it-alone secrecy, the course he eventually followed.
In fact, there is every reason to believe he followed this course with the greatest of reluctance, aware of its pitfalls, and that he took every precaution that was humanly possible.
Certainly, on that day in late August, 1955, at the little cabin on the Russian River, a hundred miles upstate from the university, when Dr. MacNare completed his paper on An Experimental Approach to the Psychological Phenomena of Verification, he had no slightest thought of "going it alone."
It was mid-afternoon. His wife, Alice, was dozing on the small dock that stretched out into the water, her slim figure tanned a smooth brown that was just a shade lighter than her hair. Their eight-year-old son, Paul, was fifty yards upstream playing with some other boys, their shouts the only sound except for the whisper of rushing water and the sound of wind in the trees.
Dr. MacNare, in swim trunks, his lean muscular body hardly tanned at all, emerged from the cabin and came out on the dock.
"Wake up, Alice," he said, nudging her with his foot. "You have a husband again."
"Well, it's about time" Alice said, turning over on her back and looking up at him, smiling in answer to his happy grin.
He stepped over her and went out on the diving board, leaping up and down on it, higher and higher each time, in smooth coordination, then went into a one and a half gainer, his body cutting into the water with a minimum of splash.
His head broke the surface. He looked up at his wife, and laughed in the sheer pleasure of being alive. A few swift strokes brought him to the foot of the ladder. He climbed, dripping water, to the dock, then sat down by his wife.
"Yep, it's done," he said. "How many days of our vacation left? Two? That's time enough for me to get a little tan. Might as well make the most of it. I'm going to be working harder this winter than I ever did in my life."
"But I thought you said your paper was done!"
"It is. But that's only the beginning. Instead of sending it in for publication, I'm going to submit it to the directors, with a request for facilities and personnel to conduct a line of research based on pages twenty-seven to thirty-two of the paper."
"And you think they'll grant your request?"
"There's no question about it," Dr. MacNare said, smiling confidently. "It's the most important line of research ever opened up to experimental psychology. They'll be forced to grant my request. It will put the university on the map!"
Alice laughed, and sat up and kissed him.
"Maybe they won't agree with you," she said. "Is it all right for me to read the paper?"
"I wish you would," he said. "Where's that son of mine? Upstream?" He leaped to his feet and went to the diving board again.
"Better walk along the bank, Joe. The stream is too swift."
"Nonsense!" Dr. MacNare said.
He made a long shallow dive, then began swimming in a powerful crawl that took him upstream slowly. Alice stood on the dock watching him until he was lost to sight around the bend, then went into the cabin. The completed paper lay beside the typewriter.
II.
Alice had her doubts. "I 'm not so sure the board will approve of this," she said. Dr. MacNare, somewhat exasperated, said, "What makes you think that? Pavlov experimented with his dog, physiological experiments with rats, rabbits, and other animals go on all the time. There's nothing cruel about it."
"Just the same," Alice said. So Dr. MacNare cautiously resisted the impulse to talk about his paper with his fellow professors and his most intelligent students. Instead, he merely turned his paper in to the board at the earliest opportunity and kept silent, waiting for their decision.
He hadn't long to wait. On the last Friday of September he received a note requesting his presence in the boardroom at three o'clock on Monday. He rushed home after his last class and told Alice about it.
"Let's hope their decision is favorable," she said.
"It has to be," Dr. MacNare answered with conviction.
He spent the weekend making plans. "They'll probably assign me a machinist and a couple of electronics experts from the hill," he told Alice. "I can use graduate students for work with the animals. I hope they give me Dr. Munitz; from Psych as a consultant, because I like him much better than Veerhof. By early spring we should have things rolling."
Monday at three o'clock on the dot, Dr. MacNare knocked on the door of the boardroom, and entered. He was not unfamiliar with it, nor with the faces around the massive walnut conference table. Always before he had known what to expect--a brief commendation for the revisions in his textbook on calculus for its fifth printing, a nice speech from the president about his good work as a prelude to a salary raise--quiet, expected things. Nothing unanticipated had ever happened here.
Now, as he entered, he sensed a difference. All eyes were fixed on him, but not with admiration or friendliness. They were fixed more in the manner of a restaurateur watching the approach of a cockroach along the surface of the counter.
Suddenly the room seemed hot and stuffy. The confidence in Dr. MacNare's expression evaporated. He glanced back toward the door as though wishing to escape.
"So it's you!" the president said, setting the tone of what followed.
"This is yours?" the president added, picking up the neatly typed manuscript, glancing at it, and dropping it back on the table as though it were something unclean.
Dr. MacNare nodded, and cleared his throat nervously to say yes, but didn't get the chance.
"We--all of us--are amazed and shocked," the president said. "Of course, we understand that psychology is not your field, and you probably were thinking only from the mathematical viewpoint. We are agreed on that. What you propose, though..." He shook his head slowly. "It's not only out of the question, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to request that you forget the whole thing--put this paper where no one can see it, preferably destroy it. I'm sorry, Dr. MacNare, but the university simply cannot afford to be associated with such a thing even remotely. I'll put it bluntly because I feel strongly about it, as do the other members of the Board. If this paper is published or in any way comes to light, we will be forced to request your resignation from the faculty."
"But why?" Dr. MacNare asked in complete bewilderment.
"Why?" another board member exploded, slapping the table. "It's the most inhuman thing I ever heard of, strapping a newborn animal onto some kind of frame and tying its legs to control levers, with the intention of never letting it free. The most fiendish and inhuman torture imaginable! If you didn't have such an outstanding record I would be for demanding your resignation at once."
"But that's not true!" Dr. MacNare said. "It's not torture! Not in any way! Didn't you read the paper? Didn't you understand that?"
"I read it," the man said. "We all read it. Every word."
"Then you should have understood?" Dr. MacNare said.
"We read it," the man repeated, "and we discussed some aspects of it with Dr. Veerhof without bringing your paper into it, nor your name."
"Oh," Dr. MacNare said. "Veerhof..."
"He says experiments, very careful experiments, have already been conducted along the lines of getting an animal to understand a symbol system and it can't be done. The nerve paths aren't there. Your line of research, besides being inhumanly cruel, would accomplish nothing."
"Oh," Dr. MacNare said, his eyes flashing. "So you know all about the results of an experiment in an untried field without performing the experiments!"
"According to Dr. Veerhof that field is not untried but rather well explored," the board member said. "Giving an animal the means to make vocal sounds would not enable it to form a symbol system."
"I disagree," Dr. MacNare said, seething. "My studies indicate clearly?"
"I think," the president said with a firmness that demanded the floor, "your position has been made very clear, Dr. MacNare., The matter is now closed. Permanently. I hope you will have the good sense, if I may use such a strong term, to forget the whole thing. For the good of your career and your very nice wife and son. That is all." He held the manuscript toward Dr. MacNare.
III.
"I can't understand their attitude!" Dr. MacNare said to Alice when he told her about it.
"Possibly I can understand it a little better than you, Joe," Alice said thoughtfully. "I had a little of what I think they feel, when I first read your paper. A-a prejudice against the idea of it, is as closely as I can describe it. Like it would be violating the order of nature, giving an animal a soul, in a way."
"Then you feel as they do?" Dr. MacNare said.
"I didn't say that, Joe." Alice put her arms around her husband and kissed him fiercely. "Maybe I feel just the opposite, that if there is some way to give an animal a soul, we should do it."
Dr. MacNare chuckled. "It wouldn't be quite that cosmic. An animal can't be given something it doesn't have already. All that can be done is to give it the means to fully capitalize on what it has. Animals--man included--can only do by observing the results. When you move a finger, what you really do is send a neural impulse out from the brain along one particular nerve or one particular set of nerves, but you can never learn that, nor just how it is you do. All that you can know is that when you do a definite something, your eyes and sense of touch bring you the information that your finger moved. But if that finger were attached to a voice element that made the sound "ah," and you could never see your finger, all you could ever know is that when you did that particular something you made a certain vocal sound. Changing the resultant effect of mental commands to include things normally impossible to you may expand the potential of your mind, but it won't give you a soul if you don't have one to begin with."
"You're using Veerhof 's arguments on me," Alice said. "And I think we're arguing from separate definitions of a soul. I'm afraid of it, Joe. It would be a tragedy, I think, to give some animal--a rat, maybe--the soul of' a poet, and then have it discover that it is only a rat."
"Oh," Dr. MacNare said. "That kind of soul. No, I'm not that optimistic about the results. I think we'd be lucky to get any results at all, a limited vocabulary that the animal would use meaningfully. But I do think we'd get that."
"It would take a lot of time and patience."
"And we'd have to keep the whole thing secret from everyone," Dr. MacNare said. "We couldn't even let Paul have an inkling of it, because he might say something to one of his playmates, and it would get, back to some member of the board. How could we keep it secret from Paul?"
"Paul knows he's not allowed in your study," Alice said. "We could keep everything there--and keep the door locked."
"Then it's settled?"
"Wasn't it, from the very beginning?" Alice put her arms around her husband and her cheek against his ear to hide her worried expression. "I love you, Joe. I'll help you in any way I can. And if we haven't enough in the savings account, there's always what Mother left me."
"I hope we won't have to use any of it, sweetheart," he said.
IV.
The following day Dr. MacNare was an hour and a half late coming home from the campus. He had been, he announced casually, to a pet store.
"We'll have to hurry," said Alice. "Paul will be home any minute."
She helped him carry the packages from the car to the study. Together they moved things around to make room for the gleaming new cages with their white rats and hamsters and guinea pigs. When it was done they stood arm in arm viewing their new possession.
To Alice MacNare, just the presence of the animals in her husband's study brought the research project into reality. As the days passed that romantic feeling became fact.
"We're going to have to do together," Joe MacNare told her at the end of the first week, "what a team of a dozen specialists in separate fields should be doing. Our first job, before we can do anything else, is to study the natural movements of each species and translate them into patterns of robot directives."
"Robot directives?"
"I visualize it this way," Dr. MacNare said. "The animal will be strapped comfortably in a frame so that its body can't move but its legs can. Its legs will be attached to four separate, free-moving levers which make a different electrical contact for every position. Each electrical contact, or control switch, will cause the robot body to do one specific thing, such as move a leg, utter some particular sound through its voice box, or move just one finger. Can you visualize that, Alice?"
Alice nodded.
"Okay. Now, one leg has to be used for nothing but voice sounds. That leaves three legs for control of the movements of the robot body. In body movement there will be simultaneous movements and sequences. A simple sequence can be controlled by one leg. All movements of the robot will have to be reduced to not more than three concurrent sequences of movement of the animal's legs. Our problem, then, is to make the unlearned and the most natural movements of the legs of the animal control the robot body's movements in a functional manner."
Endless hours were consumed in this initial study and mapping. Alice worked at it while her husband was at the university and Paul was at school. Dr. MacNare rushed home each day to go over what she had done and continue the work himself.
He grew more and more grudging of the time his classes took. In December he finally wrote to the three technical journals that had been expecting papers from him for publication during the year that he would be too busy to do them.
By January the initial phase of research was well enough along so that Dr. MacNare could begin planning the robot. For this he set up a workshop in the garage.
In early February he finished what he called the "test frame." After Paul had gone to bed, Dr. MacNare brought the test frame into the study from the garage. To Alice it looked very much like the insides of a radio.
She watched while he placed a husky-looking male white rate in the body harness fastened to the framework of aluminum and tied its legs to small metal rods.
Nothing happened except that the rat kept trying to get free, and the small metal rods tied to its feet kept moving in pivot sockets.
"Now!" Dr. MacNare said excitedly, flicking a small toggle switch on the side of the assembly.
Immediately a succession of vocal sounds erupted from the speaker. They followed one another, making no sensible word.
"He's doing that," Dr. MacNare said triumphantly.
"If we left him in that, do you think he'd eventually associate his movements with the sounds?"
"It's possible. But that would be more on the order of what we do when we drive a car. To some extent a car becomes an extension of the body, but you're always aware that your hands are on the steering wheel, your foot on the gas pedal or brake. You extend your awareness consciously. You interpret a slight tremble in the steering wheel as a shimmy in the front wheels. You're oriented primarily to your body and only secondarily to the car as an extension of you."
Alice closed her eyes for a moment. "Mm hm," she said.
"And that's the best we could get, using a rat that knows already it's a rat."
Alice stared at the struggling rat, her eyes round with comprehension, while the loudspeaker in the test frame said, "Ag-pr-ds-raf-os-dg..."
Dr. MacNare shut off the sound and began freeing the rat.
"By starting with a newborn animal and never letting it know what it is," he said, "we can get a complete extension of the animal into the machine, in its orientation. So complete that if you took it out of the machine after it grew up, it would have no more idea of what had happened than--than your brain if it were taken out of your head and put on a table!"
"Now I'm getting that feeling again, Joe," Alice said, laughing nervously. "When you said that about my brain I thought, 'Or my soul?'"
Dr. MacNare put the rat back in its cage.
"There might be a valid analogy there," he said slowly. "If we have a soul that survives after death, what is it like? It probably interprets its surroundings in terms of its former orientation in the body."
"That's a little of what I mean," Alice said. "I can't help it, Joe. Sometimes I feel so sorry for whatever baby animal you'll eventually use, that I want to cry. I feel so sorry for it, because we will never dare let it know what it really is!"
"That's true. Which brings up another line of research that should be the work of one expert on the team I ought to have for this. As it is, I'll turn it over to you to do while I build the robot."
"What's that?"
"Opiates," Dr. MacNare said. "What we want is an opiate that can be used on a small animal every few days, so that we can take it out of the robot, bathe it, and put it back again without its knowing about it. There probably is no ideal drug. We'll have to test the more promising ones."
Later that night, as they lay beside each other in the silence and darkness of their bedroom, Dr. MacNare sighed deeply.
"So many problems," he said. "I sometimes wonder if we can solve them all. See them all..."
To Alice MacNare, later, that night in early February marked the end of the first phase of research--the point where two alternative futures hung in the balance, and either could have been taken. That night she might have said, there in the darkness, "Let's drop it," and her husband might have agreed.
She thought of saying it. She even opened her mouth to say it. But her husband's soft snores suddenly broke the silence of the night. The moment of return had passed.
)
