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

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 тАУ than your brain if it were taken out of your
head and put on a table!"
"Now I'm getting thatfeeling 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, becausewe 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 тАУ 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.




V.

Month followed month. To Alice it was a period of rushing from kitchen to
hypodermic injections to vacuum cleaner to hypodermic injections, her key to the
study in constant use.
Paul, nine years old now, took to spring baseball and developed an indifference to