The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats
James Tiptree, Jr.
James Tiptree, Jr. (1915–1987) was an award-winning American speculative fiction writer whose visionary stories and novels often seemed to have no antecedent. The author’s real name, not known publicly until 1977, was Alice Bradley Sheldon, which she termed ‘good camouflage’. Although Sheldon gained a sterling reputation within the science fiction field, winning the Hugo Award, her fantastical Quintana Roo stories set on the Yucatan Peninsula are also very powerful. Occasionally she would write within or at the edges of recognizable traditions of weird fiction, as exemplified by the very dark ‘The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats’ (1976).
He comes shyly hopeful into the lab. He is unable to suppress this childishness which has deviled him all his life, this tendency to wake up smiling, believing for an instant that today will be different.
But it isn’t; is not.
He is walking into the converted cellars which are now called animal laboratories by this nationally respected university, this university which is still somehow unable to transmute its nationwide reputation into adequate funding for research. He squeezes past a pile of galvanized Skinner boxes and sees Smith at the sinks, engaged in cutting off the heads of infant rats. Piercing squeals; the headless body is flipped onto a wet furry pile on a hunk of newspaper. In the holding cage beside Smith the baby rats shiver in a heap, occasionally thrusting up a delicate muzzle and then burrowing convulsively under their friends, seeking to shut out Smith. They have previously been selectively shocked, starved, subjected to air blasts and plunged in ice water; Smith is about to search the corpses for appropriate neuroglandular effects of stress. He’ll find them, undoubtedly.
Eeeeeeee – Ssskrick! Smith’s knife grates, drinking life.
‘Hello, Tilly.’
‘Hi.’ He hates his nickname, hates his whole stupid name: Tilman Lipsitz. He would go nameless through the world if he could. If he even could have something simple, Moo or Urg – anything but the absurd high-pitched syllables that have followed him through life: Tilly Lipsitz. He has suffered from it.
Ah well. He makes his way around the pile of Purina Lab Chow bags, bracing for the fierce clamor of the rhesus. Their Primate Room is the ex-boiler room, really; these are tenements the university took over. The rhesus scream like sirens. Thud! Feces have hit the grill again; the stench is as strong as the sound. Lipsitz peers in reluctantly, mentally apologizing for being unable to like monkeys. Two of them are not screaming, huddled on the steel with puffy pink bald heads studded with electrode jacks. Why can’t they house the creatures better, he wonders irritably for the nth time. In the trees they’re clean. Well, cleaner, anyway, he amends, ducking around a stand of somebody’s breadboard circuits awaiting solder.
On the far side is Jones, bending over a brightly lighted bench, two students watching mesmerized. He can see Jones’s fingers tenderly roll the verniers that drive the probes down through the skull of the dog strapped underneath. Another of his terrifying stereotaxes. The aisle of cages is packed with animals with wasted fur and bloody heads. Jones swears they’re all right, they eat; Lipsitz doubts this. He has tried to feed them tidbits as they lean or lie blear-eyed, jerking with wire terrors. The blood is because they rub their heads on the mesh; Jones, seeking a way to stop this, has put stiff plastic collars on several.
Lipsitz gets past them and has his eye rejoiced by the lovely hourglass-shaped ass of Sheila, the brilliant Israeli. Her back is turned. He observes with love the lily waist, the heart-lobed hips that radiate desire. But it’s his desire, not hers; he knows that. Sheila, wicked Sheila; she desires only Jones, or perhaps Smith, or even Brown or White – the muscular large hairy ones bubbling with professionalism, with cheery shop talk. Lipsitz would gladly talk shop with her. But his talk is different, uninteresting, is not in the mode. Yet he too believes in ‘the organism,’ believes in the miraculous wiring diagram of life; he is naively impressed by the complexity, the intricate interrelated delicacies of living matter. Why is he so reluctant to push metal into it, produce lesions with acids or shock? He has this unfashionable yearning to learn by appreciation, to tease out the secrets with only his eyes and mind. He has even the treasonable suspicion that such procedures might be more efficient, more instructive. But what holistic means are there? Probably none, he tells himself firmly. Grow up. Look at all they’ve discovered with the knife. The cryptic but potent centers of the amygdala, for example. The subtle limbic homeostats – would we ever have known about these? It is a great knowledge. Never mind that its main use seems to be to push more metal into human heads, my way is obsolete.
‘Hi, Sheila.’ ‘Hello, Tilly.’
She does not turn from the hamsters she is efficiently shaving. He takes himself away around the mop stand to the coal-cellar dungeon where he keeps his rats – sorry, his experimental subjects. His experimental subjects are nocturnal rodents, evolved in friendly dark warm burrows. Lipsitz has sensed their misery, suspended in bright metal and plexiglas cubes in the glare. So he has salvaged and repaired for them a stack of big old rabbit cages and put them in this dark alcove nobody wanted, provoking mirth among his colleagues.
He has done worse than that, too. Grinning secretly, he approaches and observes what has been made of his latest offering. On the bottom row are the cages of parturient females, birthing what are expected to be his experimental and control groups. Yesterday those cages were bare wire mesh, when he distributed to them the classified section of the Sunday Post. Now he sees with amazement that they are solid cubic volumes of artfully crumpled and plastered paper strips. Fantastic, the labor! Nests; and all identical. Why has no one mentioned that rats as well as birds can build nests? How wrong, how painful it must have been, giving birth on the bare wire. The little mothers have worked all night, skillfully constructing complete environments beneficient to their needs.
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 ou
t 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.
‘Edges. I mean the way the animal responds to edges and the shape of the environment. I mean it’s basic to living and nobody seems to have explored it. They used to call it thigmotaxis. Here, I sketched a few.’ He pulls out a folded sheet, pushes it at Welch. ‘Doesn’t it raise interesting questions of arboreal descent?’
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…’
&
nbsp; 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.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 101