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—a rat, maybe—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—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.

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 hamsters and guinea pigs. When it was done they stood arm in arm viewing their new possession.

To Alice MacNare, just the presence of the animals in her husband's study brought the research project into reality. As the days passed that romantic feeling became fact.

"We're going to have to do together," Joe MacNare told her at the end of the first week, "what a team of a dozen specialists in separate fields should be doing. Our first job, before we can do 

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