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--than your brain if it were taken out of your head and put on a table!"
"Now I'm getting that _feeling_ 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, because _we 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."
"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--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.