Dr. Joseph MacNare was not the sort of person one would expect him to be in the light of what happened. Indeed, it is safe to say that until the summer of 1955 he was more "normal", better adjusted, than the average college professor. And we have every reason to believe that he remained so, in spite of having stepped out of his chosen field. At the age of thirty-four, he had to his credit a college textbook on advanced calculus, an introductory physics, and seventy-two papers that had appeared in various journals, copies of which were in neat order in a special section of the bookcase in his office at the university, and duplicate copies of which were in equally neat order in his office at home. None of these were in the field of psychology, the field in which he was shortly to become famous—or infamous. But anyone who studies the published writings of Dr. MacNare must inevitably conclude that he was a competent, responsible scientist, and a firm believer in institutional research, research by teams, rather than in private research and go-it-alone secrecy, the course he eventually followed.
In fact, there is every reason to believe he followed this course with the greatest of reluctance, aware of its pitfalls, and that he took every precaution that was humanly possible.
Certainly, on that day in late August, 1955, at the little cabin on the Russian River, a hundred miles upstate from the university, when Dr. MacNare completed his paper on An Experimental Approach to the Psychological Phenomena of Verification, he had no slightest thought of "going it alone."
It was mid-afternoon. His wife, Alice, was dozing on the small dock that stretched out into the water, her slim figure tanned a smooth brown that was just a shade lighter than her hair. Their eight-year-old son, Paul, was fifty yards upstream playing with some other boys, their shouts the only sound except for the whisper of rushing water and the sound of wind in the trees.
Dr. MacNare, in swim trunks, his lean muscular body hardly tanned at all, emerged from the cabin and came out on the dock.
"Wake up, Alice," he said, nudging her with his foot. "You have a husband again."
"Well, it's about time," Alice said, turning over on her back and looking up at him, smiling in answer to his happy grin.
He stepped over her and went out on the diving board, leaping up and down on it, higher and higher each time, in smooth co?rdination, then went into a one and a half gainer, his body cutting into the water with a minimum of splash.
His head broke the surface. He looked up at his wife, and laughed in the sheer pleasure of being alive. A few swift strokes brought him to the foot of the ladder. He climbed, dripping water, to the dock, then sat down by his wife.
"Yep, it's done," he said. "How many days of our vacation left? Two? That's time enough for me to get a little tan. Might as well make the most of it. I'm going to be working harder this winter than I ever did in my life."
"But I thought you said your paper was done!"
"It is. But that's only the beginning. Instead of sending it in for publication, I'm going to submit it to the directors, with a request for facilities and personnel to conduct a line of research based on pages twenty-seven to thirty-two of the paper."
"And you think they'll grant your request?"
"There's no question about it," Dr. MacNare said, smiling confidently. "It's the most important line of research ever opened up to experimental psychology. They'll be forced to grant my request. It will put the university on the map!"
Alice laughed, and sat up and kissed him.
"Maybe they won't agree with you," she said. "Is it all right for me to read the paper?"
"I wish you would," he said. "Where's that son of mine? Upstream?" He leaped to his feet and went to the diving board again.
"Better walk along the bank, Joe. The stream is too swift."
"Nonsense!" Dr. MacNare said.
He made a long shallow dive, then began swimming in a powerful crawl that took him upstream slowly. Alice stood on the dock watching him until he was lost to sight around the bend, then went into the cabin. The completed paper lay beside the typewriter.
Alice had her doubts. "I'm not so sure the board will approve of this," she said. Dr. MacNare, somewhat exasperated, said, "What makes you think that? Pavlov experimented with his dog, physiological experiments with rats, rabbits, and other animals go on all the time. There's nothing cruel about it."
"Just the same...." Alice said. So Dr. MacNare cautiously resisted the impulse to talk about his paper with his fellow professors and his most intelligent students. Instead, he merely turned his paper in to the board at the earliest opportunity and kept silent, waiting for their decision.
He hadn't long to wait. On the last Friday of September he received a note requesting his presence in the board room at three o'clock on Monday. He rushed home after his last class and told Alice about it.
"Let's hope their decision is favorable," she said.
"It has to be," Dr. MacNare answered with conviction.
He spent the week-end making plans. "They'll probably assign me a machinist and a couple of electronics experts from the hill," he told Alice. "I can use graduate students for work with the animals. I hope they give me Dr. Munitz from Psych as a consultant, because I like him much better than Veerhof. By early spring we should have things rolling."
Monday at three o'clock on the dot, Dr. MacNare knocked on the door of the board room, and entered. He was not unfamiliar with it, nor with the faces around the massive walnut conference table. Always before he had known what to expect—a brief commendation for the revisions in his textbook on calculus for its fifth printing, a nice speech from the president about his good work as a prelude to a salary raise—quiet, expected things. Nothing unanticipated had ever happened here.
Now, as he entered, he sensed a difference. All eyes were fixed on him, but not with admiration or friendliness. They were fixed more in the manner of a restaurateur watching the approach of a cockroach along the surface of the counter.
Suddenly the room seemed hot and stuffy. The confidence in Dr. MacNare's expression evaporated. He glanced back toward the door as though wishing to escape.
"So it's you!" the president said, setting the tone of what followed.
"This is yours?" the president added, picking up the neatly typed manuscript, glancing at it, and dropping it back on the table as though it were something unclean.
Dr. MacNare nodded, and cleared his throat nervously to say yes, but didn't get the chance.
"We—all of us—are amazed and shocked," the president said. "Of course, we understand that psychology is not your field, and you probably were thinking only from the mathematical viewpoint. We are agreed on that. What you propose, though...." He shook his head slowly. "It's not only out of the question, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to request that you forget the whole thing&mda............