"Now!" Dr. MacNare said excitedly, flicking a small toggle switch on the side of the assembly.

Immediately a succession of vocal sounds erupted from the speaker. They followed one another, making no sensible word.

"He's doing that," Dr. MacNare said triumphantly.

"If we left him in that, do you think he'd eventually associate his movements with the sounds?"

"It's possible. But that would be more on the order of what we do when we drive a car. To some extent a car becomes an extension of the body, but you're always aware that your hands are on the steering wheel, your foot on the gas pedal or brake. You extend your awareness consciously. You interpret a slight tremble in the 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—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!"

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