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

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 тАУ 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 тАУ
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 isyours?" 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.