He awakened in a place that was not a room but a cosmos. At first he recognized nothing, not even his own mountainous body. Because he was not a man now, shapes no longer had the same meaning; he could not tell the ceiling from the floor.
He had expected all this, and yet nothing was as he had expected. It was evident that he had made a serious, fundamental error; luckily, it was one that would be easy to correct next time.
He moved dizzily around the room, found the rabbit's water dish and drank, tasted its food; he even walked over the body that had been his own and peered with one eye into its nostril, where the hairs fluttered with barely perceptible breathing.
He had no idea how much time had passed before the voices began. They came through wires into the room: slow, booming sounds that vibrated in the air like flapping dishcloths.
"The theory is that if the brain is alive but not functioning, the consciousness has got to go somewhere."
"All right, but where?"
"That's what he wanted to find out. He did it to a dog, you know, and left it in a Faraday cage with a frog."
"Frog and dog. That's funny. Why the Faraday cage?"
"He hoped it would restrict the movement of consciousness to whatever animal he put in the cage. He wanted to make sure it didn't just drift away to God knows where."
"I see. And?"
"Well, the frog didn't move for a while. Then it hopped over to the dog's dish and tried to eat dog food."
That voice must be Mathews, his assistant; the other he didn't know. He located the rabbit's dishes again in the enormous space and went there under the eye of the television camera. Surely they must notice. But the voices went on.
"I see. So then he decided to try it on himself?"
"Yes, because that's the whole point-- to experience the world through the sen-sorium of another animal. If it works, it will be a tremendous breakthrough-- something we always thought belonged to metaphysics."
"But it doesn't seem to be working."
"We don't know that."
"The rabbit was supposed to do something with those alphabet charts?"
"That was our hope, but there are all kinds of reasons it might not be possible. Anyway, we'll find out soon enough."
"If he comes out of this."
"Yes."
Hearing these words, he darted toward the giant square things that must be alphabet charts, pressed his nose to one, then another. The shapes on them were meaningless to him; he was more aware of their smell. But surely they would see that he was trying?
"Hot for this time of year."
"Yes. It's almost time. We may as well go in."
Booming footsteps in the corridor, squeak of wheels on the trolley. A line of darkness opened from the floor upward and widened. Then the vast foreshortened shapes were moving around him.
"When you turn off the current, his cortical activity will resume?"
"Yes."
One of the men was bending to look at the rabbit. "Do you suppose he's in there?" The rabbit hopped and sat still.
He flew at the man, hovered in front of his cratered face. Here I am, here! Not the rabbit--me!
"Hold on a minute."
"What's the matter?"
"Before we do anything else, I'm going to swat this blasted fly."
Help, it's me. Whack.
