"Rog Phillips - Rat in the Skull" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phillips Rog)

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 тАУ 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
onAn 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!"