The Point of Aversion



 

"A brown one," Professor Shingle said, licking his bottom lip with his white tongue, his left fist in his right palm, his eyes like shimmering lanterns beneath thin, gray eyebrows. His voice resounded like rivets shaking. Across the room Frederick Quill walked deliberately toward the tarnished wire boxes sitting in rows against the east wall of the room. The cages were positioned like the glass windows of a vending machine, only they contained not sandwiches, or candy, but rats ---- R. Norvegica to cite their scientific appellation----small hairy quadrupeds, whiskers fluttering, anxious, no more aware of where they were and what lay ahead for them than small children in cribs. Frederick Quill clicked open the door to a cage, reached in his slender hand and calmly, but with the precision of a cobra, pulled out a single brown mouse. It felt like an organ suddenly taken from a human's gut, squirming with life, muscles twitching. He closed the door and carried it back across the slick floor to where Professor Shingle bent waiting.

"Here," he said.

Professor Shingle looked up, spying the rat in his assistant's fingers. He nodded and took the animal into his palm, muttering. He stroked the rat softly. "You're a bright one, aren't you?"

Professor Shingle could tell about such things. He had a way with animals, a touch, a second sense which people had recognized and told him about. He could walk into a barn and calm a bucking horse with his voice, or make a cat fetch slippers. It was the type of understanding with such creatures that one read about occasionally in books, but was no more easily explained than physics, or homing pigeons. Hunch-backed slightly (a condition he'd acquired at birth), a round, pudgy and pock-marked face, the Professor stood on his stout legs like a man who not only could relate to the minds of animals in the phylum below Homo Sapiens, but a man who might have relatives there, perhaps, in the forests. The Professor took the brown rat and put him into the black hole at the near end of his contraption, a look of disjointed ecstasy on his face.

It was indeed a strange experiment he was involved in. To a casual observer it seemed to show nothing, give no facts of scientific usefulness: a complicated diversion with less purpose than card tricks. But casual observers were not for whom the experiment had been constructed. A scientist, one educated in the field of psychology and human behavior, or neurochemistry; such a scientist would find the experiment most intriguing. Frederick Quill was undecided.

From where Professor Shingle placed the rat there ran a series of squared, red mazes, running throughout the structure. This myriad of tunnels formed, in all, seven complex mazes; so complex even a single maze presented a difficult proposition for a rat to register into its short-term memory. At the end of each maze a standard conditioning bar allowed the rat to obtain two things: the entrance to the next maze and an item of food. In addition, there sat beneath each bar an electric shock grid. This shock grid linked up to a timer initiated by the last door proceeded through. The first timer was activated by the Professor when he set the rat into the maze. Through these timers the amount of voltage that ran to the grid could be attenuated so that the longer it took to reach a maze's end the stronger the charge of electricity that waited. Though these charges never reached a fatal level, the shocks were nonetheless unsettling. At the end of the seventh maze the door opened up into the first maze, leaving the experiment theoretically without end. But only if the animal could stay alive under such conditions.

What Professor Shingle was finding,_ and it was a discovery that he found most remarkable, was that the rats could tolerate only so much of the test. At some point or another every subject----without exception would resign to starvation in order to forego the shock accompanying it's next meal. Connected to the timers and the voltage regulators Professor Shingle had affiliated several graphs to record the length of time through each maze and the voltage delivered at each door. From these graphs the Professor could calculate the total time of the test, the time for each successive maze, the voltage at each door and the number of mazes the rats went through before finally surrendering. These statistics allowed the Professor to cipher what he termed the "Point of Aversion."

Pain. Pleasure. Abdication. Stoicism.

It was now the fifth week of the experiment and Frederick Quill was apprehensive. Though it was not Frederick Quill's place to make judgments on the Professor's studies and procedures, he still found it difficult to balance out the ends with the means. And there were other things. Frederick Quill was not an unorthodox scientist. He was intent, meticulous, often speculative, but always aware, it seemed, that the world of science was bottomless, interminable, as unpredictable as congressmen. To be absolutely sure of one's technique often presaged a serious flaw and uncertainty, he knew, belied the certain. In this type of clinical behaviorism the problem of variables tended to multiply geometrically with every control and to be comfortable with one's set-up was seldom a healthy state of affairs. The idea of experimenting, period, as far as Frederick Quill was concerned, inferred a state of imperfection. But, for all his rationalizing, this most recent endeavor had him slightly on edge.

He'd been wary of Professor Shingle when he first came to work with him, drawing back when the old man would look up at him with his yellow teeth, grinning like a devil. But he'd always tried to divert his attention away from the man's demeanor toward the mechanics of the experiment, or the flighty characteristics of the rats whispering schemes against the wall. It was not just the barbaric effect of the experiment

that bothered him (though he did wince each time he noticed a rat stuck with a painful dilemma), nor did the problem lie in the mere behavioral incongruities the results pointed to. It was something in the strange mood that had slowly crept on Professor Shingle as the experiment progressed. The Professor's eyes had changed their light, turned from their furry gray to blue, and his cheeks seemed to be all aglow. While the Professor had always been a punctual fanatic, he'd suddenly begun arriving late, sometimes by half an hour or more, dead tired and, it appeared to Frederick Quill, under the effects of some narcotic. Why, at this point in Shingle's uneventful but moderately successful career he had decided to toy with drugs or other forms of self-abuse was utterly baffling to his laboratory assistant. It was as if the Professor suddenly found a social life beyond the stark and odiferous instruments of his workshop.

The Professor bent over his contraption like a vulture, watching a rat scurry around a corner and edge up to a gate. The organism sniffed at the food waiting beyond the shock grid, the circuitry in its tiny brain sparking with distress. Professor Shingle waited until the subject made its decision then he stepped away from the table, shuffled to his desk and sat down. He picked up a pen and scratched at a graph. He lifted his head and quietly looked towards Frederick Quill, who stood by the maze with a clipboard. Professor Shingle spoke softly, as if something were caught in his throat.

"Frederick. I'd like you to join me tonight. A colleague of mine, Dr. Titus, has prepared a demonstration on adrenalin amplitudes which I expect you'll find most fascinating."

Frederick Quill looked over nervously. He'd heard Professor Shingle talk about Dr. Titus. The Doctor had written a book in the early seventies about dreams and had reached a modicum of success. Yet since that time he'd become a virtual recluse. If Professor Shingle was odd, then Dr. Titus was spooky. The whole idea of joining the two for an exercise in biological empiricism made Frederick Quill sick to his stomach. He blanched, suddenly thinking back to the time, just out of Ohio State, when he'd elected to drop out of the magic troupe he had been involved with and take his career seriously. God this place smelled funky!

"You'll be on the clock, of course."

"What time?"

"About seven thirty. Near the Jacobsen warehouse. You remember where we had the symposium on digestion?" Frederick Quill nodded, hesitantly, and checked his watch. He had planned to meet Allison for pizza and beer.

Passion. Abdication. Submission.

That night it rained heavily, and to make the overall disposition even worse there had been a watch for tornadoes since early in the afternoon. Frederick Quill gripped the wheel tightly, peering cautiously through the downpour, looking for road signs each time lightning lit up the town. He found the address and saw the Professor flash his lights as he pulled up. Professor Shingle stepped out with his umbrella and approached his assistant.

"Quite a rainstorm," the old man shouted through the roaring rain, his face dripping with sweat and rainfall.

Frederick Quill nodded in agreement, then ducked beneath his own umbrella and hopped through the puddles, squinting to see his way into the recessed doorway.

"Dr. Titus will be along shortly," the Professor said, fumbling to find the key, cursing under his breath. "He told us to wait inside."

"What is this place?", Frederick Quill asked, looking about anxiously, suddenly uneasy.

"Belongs to Dr. Titus. Has a marvelous lab inside."

He found the right key and quickly pulled the door open. "Take a look. I think you'll find it fascinating."

Frederick Quill stepped into the doorway and had begun to close his umbrella when suddenly he and the Professor were made to jump by the striking of a lightning bolt so close they could hear the intense charge sizzle with electricity only a moment before the thunder crashed in behind it. It was a stroke of incredible fortune for Frederick Quill. In that brief illumination the red surface of the walls inside the doorway came into focus and, above them, a ceiling webbed with extension cords. The assistant pivoted as the Professor made his charge. He threw out his leg and stepped aside, tumbling the old scientist head over heels to the floor. They looked at each other, the rain drumming insistently behind them. Professor Shingle's face was shocked and helpless. Frederick Quill bent down and looked into the Professor's eyes, then he reached down to him, picked up his umbrella, stepped back, pushed the door closed, and let the experiment began.

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