“It’s the difference between intelligence and conditioned response,” Engersol had explained. “Essentially, the stupidest rats simply respond to the smell of food, proceeding directly toward it along the single path they know. Others won’t retreat from the scent, even if it means not getting to the source. But a few of them seem to have figured out that there is a route through, and if they can find it, they’ll be rewarded.”
The next day they’d attached electrodes to the brains of three of the rats, and been able to watch their brain activity as they passed through the mazes and dealt with the changes in the twisting pathways.
While the boys in the class had remained glued to their computer screens, talking excitedly as they spotted the changes in the rats’ brain-wave patterns, Amy had grown quieter and quieter.
At the end of the hour, as she and Josh had left the building and started toward their next class, she’d made a sour face. “I think it’s mean.”
“What is?” Josh had asked.
“Treating the rats that way. Sticking those electrodes in their heads and making them run through the mazes.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Josh asked. “If we don’t do experiments, we can’t learn anything. Besides, the rats don’t even know what’s happening to them. They don’t feel anything.”
“How do you know?” Amy challenged. “What if they hurt?”
“But they don’t,” Josh protested. “Dr. Engersol says—”
Amy’s sour look turned angry. “I don’t care what Dr. Engersol says. Everybody in the seminar acts as if he’s some kind of genius or something!”
“Well, he is!” Josh flared. “And if you had any brains—”
But once more Amy hadn’t let him finish. “I have as many brains as anybody else in that class,” she’d snapped. “And I won’t believe any old thing he tells me just because he says I should. Anyway, if he knows so much, how come he says everything we’re doing is experimental?”
Josh had decided there was no point in arguing with her. He dropped the subject. But now, as they mounted the steps to the building that housed the artificial intelligence lab, he gazed quizzically at her. “So what are you going to do? You can’t just quit.”
“Why not?” Amy asked. “Besides, Dr. Engersol wants me to be in some kind of experiment this afternoon, but he wouldn’t tell me what it is.”
Josh stopped short. “What kind of experiment?”
Amy’s eyes rolled impatiently. “Didn’t I just say he wouldn’t tell me? He only said it had to do with how people think. But if he won’t tell me what it is, how am I supposed to know if I want to do it?”
“Maybe that’s part of it,” Josh speculated. “Maybe if you know what it is beforehand, it does something to the results. You know, gives you too much time to think, or something.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Amy replied as she pulled the door open. “If he won’t tell me what it is, I don’t see why I should do it at all.”
They walked silently down the hall to the lab, where the rest of the class was already clustered around a cage. George Engersol peered up, fixing on them for a second, then glancing meaningfully toward the clock on the wall. “Congratulations,” he commented. “You made it with a full three seconds to spare. But since you did make it, why don’t you come over here so we can get started.”
Amy, stung by the director’s sarcastic tone, felt her eyes fill with tears, but managed to control them. Josh, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice the bite in Engersol’s words at all, for he had already joined the group around the lab table and was staring curiously at the animal in the cage.
It was a cat, and the fur was shaved off its head, which was bristling with tiny electrodes. The wires from the electrodes were bundled together and ran out through the bars of the cage to a computer.
The cage itself was divided into three sections, the largest of which held the cat. The other two, arranged side by side at one end of the cage, were separated from the cat by twin doors, each of which was triggered by a large colored button.
“The cat has already been conditioned,” Engersol explained. “A slight electrical charge can be transmitted through the floor of its cage. When the cat feels the charge, it can stop it by hitting either of the two buttons on the smaller compartments, which have also released a small quantity of food into the main cage.”
Amy, thinking of Tabby — who was even now curled up on the pillow on her bed — shuddered as she gazed at the grotesque-looking cat, its bald head sprouting a tangle of wires. It was prevented from pawing the wires away by a large, cone-shaped plastic collar around its neck. “It doesn’t look very happy,” she said, almost under her breath.
Engersol shrugged. “I don’t suppose it is. On the other hand, it’s not suffering at all, nor is the electrical charge enough to hurt it. It merely startles it into a conditioned response.”
“But where’s the food?” Jeff Aldrich asked, his eyes fixed on the empty spaces where the rewards for a proper response should have been.
Engersol smiled approvingly. “That,” he told the class, “is the whole point of today’s experiment. What we are going to do is offer the cat two negative experiences. Today, instead of releasing food and interrupting the electrical current, one of the buttons will trigger the snarl of a dog, while the other one will release a small amount of skunk musk. Neither of which,” he added, “is a cat’s favorite thing. Thus, the cat will have some choices to make. If it wants to stop the electrical charge, it must elect to face either the snarls of the dog or the smell of the skunk.”
Amy Carlson’s face set stubbornly. “I don’t think we ought to do it,” she said. “It’s cruel!”
Engersol offered her a reassuring smile. “The cat won’t be hurt, Amy. And since it’s being monitored by the computer, we should be able to find out a lot about the physical processes its brain goes through as it tries to come to a decision. It’s a Hobson’s choice experiment, in which any action results in a negative experience. Shall we begin?”
Without waiting for a reply from any of the kids, he threw a switch activating the electrical charge.
The cat’s body tensed, and it immediately reached out with a paw and took a swipe at the left hand button.
Instantly, a small speaker within the cage blared out the sound of a snarling dog.
Startled, the cat leaped back, and was once more subjected to the tingling of electricity. It reached out again, trying the other button.
Now, the area around the cage began to reek of skunk, causing the children to hold their noses, and the cat — only an inch from the nozzle spraying the redolent gas — to jerk reflexively back once again.
Amy, outraged by what she saw, grabbed her book bag from the table on which she’d dropped it only a few minutes earlier and started toward the door. “I’m leaving,” she said. “And I’m not coming back, either!”
Startled by her words, Josh turned away from the cage. “Come on, Amy, it’s not like we’re hurting it!”
“You are, too,” Amy insisted. “You’re torturing it, and I’m going to tell!”
A groan rose from the rest of the boys in the class. Amy turned scarlet, furious at what was being done to the hapless animal in the cage and at the reaction of her classmates as well. “I hate all of you!” she yelled. Then her right arm rose and she pointed an accusing finger at George Engersol. “You’re just as mean as they are!” Bursting into sobs, she fled from the room.
Josh started after her, but Engersol stopped him before he was halfway to the door. “Let her go,” the director of the Academy said. “It’s all right. Her reaction was a perfectly legitimate response to the experiment. And in a way, she’s right — what we’re doing isn’t very pleasant for the cat. It’s not suffering any long-term damage, at least not physically. But,” he went on, drawing the attention of the class back to the cage, “let’s take a look at what’s happening to its brain.”