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

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 тАУ man included тАУ 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 definitesomething, 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 particularsomething 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 тАУ a rat, maybe тАУ 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 тАУ 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