by Ann
A small white muzzle is pointing watchfully at him from a paper crevice; he fumbles in his pocket for a carrot chunk. He is, of course, unbalancing the treatment, his conscience remonstrates. But he has an answer; he has carrots for them all. Get down, conscience. Carefully he unlatches a cage. The white head stretches, bright-eyed, revealing sleek black shoulders. They are the hooded strain.
‘Have a carrot,’ he says absurdly to the small being. And she does, so quickly that he can barely feel it, can barely feel also the tiny razor slash she has instantaneously, shyly given his thumb before she whisks back inside to her babies. He grins, rubbing the thumb, leaving carrots in the other cages. A mother’s monitory bite, administered to an ogre thirty times her length. Vitamins, he thinks, enriched environments, that’s the respectable word. Enriched? No, goddam it. What it is is something approaching sane unstressed animals – experimental subjects, I mean. Even if they’re so genetically selected for tameness they can’t survive in the feral state, they’re still rats. He sees he must wrap something on his thumb; he is ridiculously full of blood.
Wrapping, he tries not to notice that his hands are criss-crossed with old bites. He is a steady patron of the antitetanus clinic. But he is sure that they don’t really mean ill, that he is somehow accepted by them. His colleagues think so too, somewhat scornfully. In fact, Smith often calls him to help get some agonized creature out and bring it to his electrodes. Judas-Lipsitz does, trying to convey by the warmth of his holding hands that somebody is sorry, is uselessly sorry. Smith explains that his particular strain of rats is bad. A bad rat is one that bites psychologists; there is a constant effort to breed out this trait.
Lipsitz has tried to explain to them about animals with curved incisors, that one must press the hand into the biter’s teeth. ‘It can’t let go,’ he tells them. ‘You’re biting yourself on the rat. It’s the same with cats’ claws. Push, they’ll let go. Wouldn’t you if somebody pushed his hand in your mouth?’
For a while he thought Sheila at least had understood him, but it turned out she thought he was making a dirty joke.
He is giving a rotted Safeway apple to an old male named Snedecor whom he has salvaged from Smith when he hears them call.
‘Li-i-ipsitz!’
‘Tilly! R.D. wants to see you.’
‘Yo.’
R.D. is Professor R.D. Welch, his department head and supervisor of his grant. He washes up, makes his way out and around to the front entrance stairs. A myriad guilts are swirling emptily inside him; he has violated some norm, there is something wrong with his funding, above all he is too slow, too slow. No results yet, no columns of data. Frail justifying sentences revolve in his head as he steps into the clean bright upper reaches of the department. Because he is, he feels sure, learning. Doing something, something appropriate to what he thinks of as science. But what? In this glare he (like his rats) cannot recall. Ah, maybe it’s only another hassle about parking space, he thinks as he goes bravely in past R.D.’s high-status male secretary. I can give mine up. I’ll never be able to afford that transmission job anyway.
But it is not about parking space.
Doctor Welch has a fat file folder on his desk in Exhibit A position. He taps it expressionlessly, staring at Lipsitz.
‘You are doing a study of, ah, genetic influences on, ah, tolerance of perceptual novelty.’
‘Well, yes…’ He decides not to insist on precision. ‘You remember, Doctor Welch, I’m going to work in a relation to emotionalism too.’
Emotionalism, in rats, is (a) defecating and (b) biting psychologists. Professor Welch exhales troubledly through his lower teeth, which Lipsitz notes are slightly incurved. Mustn’t pull back.
‘It’s so unspecific,’ he sighs. ‘It’s not integrated with the overall department program.’
‘I know,’ Lipsitz says humbly. ‘But I do think it has relevance to problems of human learning. I mean, why some kids seem to shy away from new things.’ He jacks up his technical vocabulary. ‘The failure of the exploration motive.’
‘Motives don’t fail, Lipsitz.’
‘I mean, conditions for low or high expression. Neophobia. Look, Doctor Welch. If one of the conditions turns out to be genetic we could spot kids who need help.’
‘Um’mmm.’
‘I could work in some real learning programs in the high tolerants, too,’ Lipsitz adds hopefully. ‘Contingent rewards, that sort of thing.’
‘Rat learning…’ Welch lets his voice trail off. ‘If this sort of thing is to have any relevance it should involve primates. Your grant scarcely extends to that.’
‘Rats can learn quite a lot, sir. How about if I taught them word cues?’
‘Doctor Lipsitz, rats do not acquire meaningful responses to words.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Lipsitz is forcibly preventing himself from bringing up the totally unqualified Scotswoman whose rat knew nine words.
‘I do wish you’d go on with your brain studies,’ Welch says in his nice voice, giving Lipsitz a glowing scientific look. Am I biting myself on him? Lipsitz wonders. Involuntarily he feels himself empathize with the chairman’s unknown problems. As he gazes back, Welch says encouragingly, ‘You could use Brown’s preparations; they’re perfectly viable with the kind of care you give.’
Lipsitz shudders awake; he knows Brown’s preparations. A ‘preparation’ is an animal spread-eagled on a rack for vivisection, dosed with reserpine so it cannot cry or struggle but merely endures for days or weeks of pain. Guiltily he wonders if Brown knows who killed the bitch he had left half dissected and staring over Easter. Pull yourself together, Lipsitz.
‘I am so deeply interested in working with the intact animal, the whole organism,’ he says earnestly. That is his magic phrase; he has discovered that ‘the whole organism’ has some fetish quality for them, from some far-off line of work; very fashionable in the abstract.
‘Yes.’ Balked, Welch wreathes his lips, revealing the teeth again. ‘Well. Doctor Lipsitz, I’ll be blunt. When you came on board we felt you had a great deal of promise. I felt that, I really did. And your teaching seems to be going well, in the main. In the main. But your research; no. You seem to be frittering away your time and funds – and our space – on these irrelevancies. To put it succinctly, our laboratory is not a zoo.’
‘Oh, no, sir!’ cries Lipsitz, horrified.
‘What are you actually doing with those rats? I hear all kinds of idiotic rumors.’
‘Well, I’m working up the genetic strains, sir. The coefficient of homozygosity is still very low for meaningful results. I’m cutting it as fine as I can. What you’re probably hearing about is that I am giving them a certain amount of enrichment. That’s necessary so I can differentiate the lines.’ What I’m really doing is multiplying them, he thinks queasily; he hasn’t had the heart to deprive any yet.
Welch sighs again; he is worried, Lipsitz thinks, and finding himself smiling sympathetically stops at once.
‘How long before you wind this up? A week?’
‘A week!’ Lipsitz almost bleats, recovers his voice. ‘Sir, my test generation is just neonate. They have to be weaned, you know. I’m afraid it’s more like a month.’ ‘And what do you intend to do after this?’
‘After this!’ Lipsitz is suddenly fecklessly happy. So many, so wondrous are the things he wants to learn. ‘Well, to begin with I’ve seen a number of behaviors nobody seems to have done much with – I mean, watching my animals under more…more naturalistic conditions. They, ah, they emit very interesting responses. I’m struck by the species-specific aspect – I mean, as the Brelands said, we may be using quite unproductive situations. For example, there’s an enormous difference between the way Rattus and Cricetus – that’s hamsters – behave in the open field, and they’re both rodents. Even as simple a thing as edge behavior –’
‘What behavior?’ Welch’s tone should warn him, but he plunges on, unhappily aware that he has chosen an insignificant example. But he loves it.
Welch barely glances at the drawings, pushes it away.
‘Doctor Lipsitz. You don’t appear to grasp the seriousness of this interview. All right. In words of one syllable, you will submit a major project outline that we can justify in terms of this department’s program. If you can’t come up with one such, regretfully we have no place for you here.’
Lipsitz stares at him, appalled.
‘A major project…I see. But…’ And then something comes awake, something is rising in him. Yes. Yes, yes, of course there are bigger things he can tackle. Bigger questions – that means people. He’s full of such questions. All it takes is courage.
‘Yes, sir,’ he says slowly. ‘There are some major problems I have thought of investigating.’
‘Good,’ Welch says neutrally. ‘What are they?’
‘Well, to start with…’ And to his utter horror his mind has emptied itself, emptied itself of everything except the one fatal sentence which he now hears himself helplessly launched toward. ‘Take us here. I mean, it’s a good principle to attack problems to which one has easy access, which are so to speak under our noses, right? So. For example, we’re psychologists. Supposedly dedicated to some kind of understanding, helpful attitude toward the organism, toward life. And yet all of us down here – and in all the labs I’ve heard about – we seem to be doing such hostile and rather redundant work. Testing animals to destruction, that fellow at Princeton. Proving how damaged organisms are damaged, that kind of engineering thing. Letting students cut or shock or starve animals to replicate experiments that have been done umpteen times. What I’m trying to say is, why don’t we look into why psychological research seems to involve so much cruelty – I mean, aggression? We might even…’
He runs down then, and there is a silence in which he becomes increasingly aware of Welch’s breathing.
‘Doctor Lipsitz,’ the older man says hoarsely, ‘are you a member of the SPCA?’
‘No, sir, I’m not.’
Welch stares at him unblinkingly and then clears his throat. ‘Psychology is not a field for people with emotional problems.’ He pushes the file away. ‘You have two weeks.’
Lipsitz takes himself out, momentarily preoccupied by his lie. True, he is not a member of the SPCA. But that ten dollars he sent in last Christmas, surely they have his name. That had been during the business with the dogs. He flinches now, recalling the black Labrador puppy, its vocal cords cut out, dragging itself around on its raw denervated haunches.
Oh God, why doesn’t he just quit?
He wanders out onto the scruffy grass of the campus, going over and over it again. These people. These…people.
And yet behind them loom the great golden mists, the reality of Life itself and the questions he has earned the right to ask. He will never outgrow the thrill of it. The excitement of actually asking, after all the careful work of framing terms that can be answered. The act of putting a real question to Life. And watching, reverently, excited out of his skin as Life condescends to tell him yes or no. My animals, my living works of art (of which you are one), do thus and so. Yes, in this small aspect you have understood Me.
The privilege of knowing how, painfully, to frame answerable questions, answers which will lead him to more insights and better questions as far as his mind can manage and his own life lasts. It is what he wants more than anything in the world to do, always has.
And these people stand in his way. Somehow, some way, he must pacify them. He must frame a project they will buy.
He plods back toward the laboratory cellars, nodding absently at students, revolving various quasi-respectable schemes. What he really wants to do is too foggy to explain yet; he wants to explore the capacity of animals to anticipate, to gain some knowledge of the wave-front of expectations that they must build up, even in the tiniest heads. He thinks it might even be useful, might illuminate the labors of the human infant learning its world. But that will have to wait. Welch wouldn’t tolerate the idea that animals have mental maps. Only old crazy Tolman had been allowed to think that, and he’s dead.
He will have to think of something with Welch’s favorite drive variables. What are they? And lots of statistics, he thinks, realizing he is grinning at a really pretty girl walking with that cow Polinsky. Yes, why not use students? Something complicated with students – that doesn’t cost much. And maybe sex differentials, say, in perception – or is that too far out?
A wailing sound alerts him to the fact that he has arrived at the areaway. A truck is offloading crates of cats, strays from the pound.
‘Give a hand, Tilly! Hurry up!’
It’s Sheila, holding the door for Jones and Smith. They want to get these out of sight quickly, he knows, before some student sees them. Those innocent in the rites of pain. He hauls a crate from the tailboard.
‘There’s a female in here giving birth,’ he tells Sheila. ‘Look.’ The female is at the bottom of a mess of twenty emaciated struggling brutes. One of them has a red collar.
‘Hurry up, for Christ’s sake.’ Sheila waves him on.
‘But…’
When the crates have disappeared inside he does not follow the others in but leans on the railing, lighting a cigarette. The kittens have been eaten, there’s nothing he can do. Funny, he always thought that females would be sympathetic to other females. Shows how much he knows about Life. Or is it that only certain types of people empathize? Or does it have to be trained in, or was it trained out of her? Mysteries, mysteries. Maybe she is really compassionate somewhere inside, toward something. He hopes so, resolutely putting away a fantasy of injecting Sheila with reserpine and applying experimental stimuli.
He becomes aware that the door has been locked from the inside; they have all left through the front. It’s getting late. He moves away too, remembering that this is the long holiday weekend. Armistice Day. Would it were – he scoffs at himself for the bathos. But he frowns, too; long weekends usually mean nobody near the lab. Nothing gets fed or watered. Well, three days – not as bad as Christmas week.
Last Christmas week he had roused up from much-needed sleep beside a sky-high mound of term papers and hitchhiked into town to check the labs. It had been so bad, so needless. The poor brutes dying in their thirst and hunger, eating metal, each other. Great way to celebrate Christmas.
But he will have to stop that kind of thing, he knows. Stop it. Preferably starting now. He throws down the cigarette stub, quickens his stride to purposefulness. He will collect his briefcase of exam papers from the library where he keeps it to avoid the lab smell and get on home and get at it. The bus is bound to be jammed.
Home is an efficiency in a suburban high-rise. He roots in his moldy fridge, carries a sandwich and ale to the dinette that is his desk. He has eighty-one exams to grade; junior department members get the monster classes. It’s a standard multiple-choice thing, and he has a help – a theatrically guarded manila template he can lay over the sheets with slots giving the correct response. By just running down them he sums an arithmetical grade. Good. Munching, he lays out the first mimeoed wad.
But as he starts to lay it on the top page he sees – oh, no! – somebody has scrawled instead of answering Number 6. It’s that fat girl, that bright bum Polinsky. And she hasn’t marked answers by 7 or 8 either. Damn her fat female glands; he squints at the infantile uncials: ‘I won’t mark this because its smucky! Read it, Dr. Lipshitz.’ She even has his name wrong.
Cursing himself, he scrutinizes the question. ‘Fixed versus variable reinforcement is called a–’ Oh yes, he remembers that one. Bad grammar on top of bad psychology. Why can’t they dump these damn obsolete things? Because the office wants grade intercomp
arability for their records, that’s why. Is Polinsky criticizing the language or the thought? Who knows. He leafs through the others, sees more scribbles. Oh, shit, they know I read them. They all know I don’t mark them like I should. Sucker.
Grimly masticating the dry sandwich, he starts to read. At this rate he is working, he has figured out, for seventy-five cents an hour.
By midnight he isn’t half through, but he knows he ought to break off and start serious thought about Welch’s ultimatum. Next week all his classes start Statistical Methods; he won’t have time to blow his nose, let alone think creatively.
He gets up for another ale, thinking, Statistical Methods, brrr. He respects them, he guesses. But he is incurably sloppy-minded, congenitally averse to ignoring any data that don’t fit the curve. Factor analysis, multivariate techniques – all beautiful; why is he troubled by this primitive visceral suspicion that somehow it ends up proving what the experimenter wanted to show? No, not that, really. Something about qualities as opposed to quantities, maybe? That some statistically insignificant results are significant, and some significant ones…aren’t? Or just basically that we don’t know enough yet to use such ultraprecise weapons. That we should watch more, maybe. Watch and learn more and figure less. All right, call me St. Lipsitz.
Heating up a frozen egg roll, he jeers at himself for superstition. Face facts, Lipsitz. Deep down you don’t really believe dice throws are independent. Psychology is not a field for people with personality problems.
Ignoring the TV yattering through the wall from next door, he sits down by the window to think. Do it, brain. Come up with the big one. Take some good testable hypothesis from somebody in the department, preferably something that involves electronic counting of food pellets, bar presses, latencies, defecations. And crank it all into printed score sheets with a good Fortran program. But what the hell are they all working on? Reinforcement schedules, cerebral deficits, split brain, God knows only that it seems to produce a lot of dead animals. ‘The subjects were sacrificed.’ They insist on saying that. He had been given a lecture when he called it ‘killing.’ Sacrificed, like to a god. Lord of the Flies, maybe.