Dr. MacNare chuckled. "It wouldn't be quite that cosmic. An animal can't be given something it doesn't have already. All that can be done is to give it the means to fully capitalize on what it has. Animals--man included--can only do by observing the results. When you move a finger, what you really do is send a neural impulse out from the brain along one particular nerve or one particular set of nerves, but you can never learn that, nor just what it is you do. All that you can know is that when you do a definite _something_ your eyes and sense of touch bring you the information that your finger moved. But if that finger were attached to a voice element that made the sound _ah_, and you could never see your finger, all you could ever know is that when you did that particular _something_ you made a certain vocal sound. Changing the resultant effect of mental commands to include things normally impossible to you may expand the potential of your mind, but it won't give 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. * * * * *