Endless hours were consumed in this initial study and mapping. Alice worked at it while her husband was at the university and Paul was at school. Dr. MacNare rushed home each day to go over what she had done and continue the work himself.
He grew more and more grudging of the time his classes took. In December he finally wrote to the three technical journals that had been expecting papers from him for publication during the year that he would be too busy to do them.
By January the initial phase of research was well enough along so that Dr. MacNare could begin planning the robot. For this he set up a workshop in the garage.
In early February he finished what he called the "test frame." After Paul had gone to bed, Dr. MacNare brought the test frame into the study from the garage. To Alice it looked very much like the insides of a radio.
She watched while he placed a husky-looking male white rat in the body harness fastened to the framework of aluminum and tied its legs to small metal rods.
Nothing happened except that the rat kept trying to get free, and the small metal rods tied to its feet kept moving in pivot sockets.
"Now!" Dr. MacNare said excitedly, flicking a small toggle switch on the side of the assembly.
Immediately a succession of vocal sounds erupted from the speaker. They followed one another, making no sensible word.
"_He's_ doing that," Dr. MacNare said triumphantly.
"If we left him in that, do you think he'd eventually associate his movements with the sounds?"
"It's possible. But that would be more on the order of what we do when we drive a car. To some extent a car becomes an extension of the body, but you're always aware that your hands are on the steering wheel, your foot on the gas pedal or brake. You extend your awareness consciously. You interpret a slight tremble in the steering wheel as a shimmy in the front wheels. You're oriented primarily to your body and only secondarily to the car as an extension of you."
Alice closed her eyes for a moment. "Mm hm," she said.
"And that's the best we could get, using a rat that knows already it's a rat."
Alice stared at the struggling rat, her eyes round with comprehension, while the loudspeaker in the test frame said, "Ag-pr-ds-raf-os-dg...."