Rog Phillips

“ 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. ”

“ Dr. MacNare said one day, "will have to wear this robot all his life. It has to be just right."
And with each litter of baby rats Alice said, "I wonder which one is Adam."
They talked of Adam often now, speculating on what he would be like. It was almost, they decided, as though Adam were their second child.
And finally, on November 2, 1956, everything was ready. Adam would be born in the next litter, due in about three days.
The amount of work that had gone into preparation for the great moment is beyond conception. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 coördination, then went into a one and a half gainer, his body cutting into the water with a minimum of splash. ”

“ MacNare loaded the cages into his car and drove them to a pet store that had agreed to take them.
When he returned, he joined Alice in the study, and at five minutes before four, with Alice hovering anxiously beside him, he opened the cover on Adam's chest and turned on the master switch that gave Adam complete dominion over his robot body.
Adam was beautiful—and monstrous. Made of metal from the neck down, but shaped to be covered by padding and skin in human semblance. ”

“ Any movement of his right front leg, for example, tells his mind that he is making a sound. But, since his leg is not connected to the sound system of his robot body, his ears bring no physical verification of the sound. The mental anticipation of that verification then becomes a disembodied voice to him.
"The end result of all this is that Adam is becoming convinced that there is a hidden side of things (which there is) , and that it is supernatural (which it is, in the framework of his orientation) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 what 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. ”

“ MacNare wrote, "Something is developing which I hesitate to put down on paper—for a variety of reasons. Creating Adam was a scientific experiment, nothing more than that. Both the premises on which the project was based have been proven: that the principle of verification is the main factor in learned response, and that, given the proper conditions, some animals are capable of abstract symbol systems and therefore of thinking with words to form meaningful concepts. ”

“ For it would have been impossible for him to have realized that he was only a rat. You see, Joseph MacNare had taken great care that Adam never, in all his life, should see another rat.
There remains only the end of Adam to relate.
Physically it can be only anticlimactic. With his metal body out of commission from a dozen or so shots, two of which destroyed the robot extensions of his eyes, he remained helpless until the coroner carefully removed him. ”

“ Dr. MacNare said, "is the big question. I think he will. I think so now even more than I did at the start. Aside from eating and sleeping, he has no avenue of expression except his robot body, and no source of reward except that of making sense—human sense."
The days passed, and became weeks, then months. During the daytime when her husband was at the university and her son was at school, Alice would spend most of her hours with Adam, forcing herself to smile at him and talk to him as she had to Paul when he was a baby. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This, of course, is an accurate realization, because to him the robot is his body, and he knows nothing of the existence of his actual, living, rat body.
"In addition to these two effects, there is a third one. A feeling of walking, and sometimes of floating, of stumbling over things he can't see, of talking, of being talked to by disembodied voices.
"The explanation of this is also obvious. When he is being bathed his legs are moved about. Any movement of a leg is to him either a spoken sound or a movement of some part of his robot body. ”

“ 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. ”

“ MacNare does not state in his notes what this test was to be: but his wife says that it probably refers to the time when he pinched Adam's tail and Adam complained of a sudden, violent headache. This transference is the one well known to doctors. Unoriented pain in the human body manifests itself as a "headache," when the source of the pain is actually the stomach, or the liver, or any one of a hundred spots in the body. ”

“ What we are going to have to do is make sure he is completely unconscious before taking him out and bathing him. His mental health is far more important than exploring the interesting avenues opened up by this unforeseen development. ”

“ When they reached the front door Tony opened it, and when it was open they ran, not stopping to close the door behind them.
There isn't much more to tell. It is known that Tony and Bill arrived at their respective homes, saying nothing of what had happened. Only later did they come forward and admit their share in the night's events.
Joe and Alice MacNare arrived home from the party at Professor Long's at twelve thirty, finding the front door wide open, the lights on in the living room, and the television on. ”