Rog Phillips
Roger Phillip Graham published under almost 20 different pseudonyms, utilizing many female names as well as male ones. Women writing as men was commonplace at the time, however very few men wrote stories under female pseudonyms. This was likely a result of Phillips attempting to prove the validity of his work, as using a female name supposedly doubled ones odds of rejection by a publisher.
“Dirty old rat!” Tony said vindictively, jabbing at the rat with his finger and evading the snapping teeth.
Tony does not understand the complexities of Adam's being, therefore assumes he is a dirty, stupid rat and attempts to subdue the rat.
“The end result of all this is that Adam is becoming convinced that there is a hidden side of things (which there is), and that it is supernatural (which it is, in the framework of his orientation).
Adam understands the strange sensations he experiences during his bath to be supernatural, and becomes deeply religious. This is likely a comment from Phillips on how we use religion to justify things we don't understand.
“Unknown to us, Adam has been becoming partly conscious during his bath. Just conscious enough to be vaguely aware of certain sensations, and to remember them afterward. Few, if any, of these half remembered sensations are such that he can fit them into the pattern of his waking reality.
As Adam develops a tolerance to the opiates used to sedate him while he is bathed, he becomes conscious of him being removed from his robot body.
moron
Word commonly used at the time to describe someone with developmental disabilities.
Slowly, subtly, Adam’s rat body became to Alice a pure brain, and his legs four nerve ganglia. A brain covered with short white fur; and when she took him out of his harness under opiate to bathe him, she bathed him as gently and carefully as any brain surgeon sponging a cortical surface.
The natural body of the rat becomes a medium only created for controlling the body, which is an unsettling idea.
They could hear a male voice jabbering nonsense, and finally repeating over and over again, “Oh my, oh my, oh my,” in a tone all the more horrible because it portrayed no emotion whatever.
Adam shows regret for killing Paul, however he lacks the emotional capability to understand why, as a result of his being a rat.
Then why did Adam deliberately kill Joe by breaking his neck? Was it because, in that three hours, he had put together the evidence of his senses and come to the realization that he was not a man but a rat? It’s not likely. It is much more likely that Adam came to some aberrated conclusion dictated by the superstitious feelings that had grown so strongly into his strange and unique existence, that dictated he must kill Joseph.
Adam considers himself as human as the rest of the non-rat population. However, to the reader and to the rest of the human population, he is obviously a sub human species. This may be a commentary about the way we perceive humans that are different than us, typically we greet those people with fear and animosity, as is noticeable in the civil rights movement.
Adam was beautiful–and monstrous. Made of metal from the neck down, but shaped to be covered by padding and skin in human semblance. From the neck up the job was done. The face was human, masculine, handsome, much like that of a clothing store dummy except for its mobility of expression, and the incongruity of the rest of the body
This paragraph is a commentary on the common fear of human achievement, the act of creating something unnatural to be merged with something natural.
her key to the study in constant use.
Emphasizing the importance of the locked study door, and alluding to the fact that Adam is to be unfamiliar with the rest of the human population.
It would perhaps be impossible to conceive the full horror of his last hours, but we can at least make a guess. Asleep when the boys entered the study, he awakened to a world he had never before perceived except very vaguely and under the soporific veil of opiate.
Phillips here portrays Adam as a human, justifying his actions by explaining the terror he felt when he awoke outside of his rat suit. This shows that the story has more intent rather than to just spook the reader.
Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing when he killed Paul and Bill. It’s doubtful if he had the ability to think at all then, only to tremble and struggle in his pitiful little rat body, with the automatic mechanisms of the robot acting from those frantic motions.
This shows that Adam, a literal rat, dealt with what he didn't understand by using violence, just the same as how the boys reacted when Adam bit Tony.
“By starting with a newborn animal and never letting it know what it is,” he said, “we can get a complete extension of the animal into the machine, in its orientation. So complete that if you took it out of the machine after it grew up, it would have no more idea of what had happened than–than your brain if it were taken out of your head and put on a table!”
See above annotation.
“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.”
This expresses the differences between learning a new thing and having a belief thrust upon you since childhood. The ladder seems like an objective truth about the world, while the former feels more variable, as if multiple possibilities to find the correct answer may exist. It is worth noting that at the time, the civil rights movement and the cold war were brewing. Beliefs about race and correct political ideology are much more frequently learned from birth, and feel like objective truths. For example, the majority of humans born today are taught that racism is a repulsive belief, whereas the majority of youths born before 1950 were taught that racism was just a part of life.
The following day Dr. MacNare was an hour and a half late coming home from the campus. He had been, he announced casually, to a pet store.
Purchasing of rats to use for McNare's Experiment.
The Rat in the Skull
There is a more well known play from 1984 that goes by the same name. However these two stories are unrelated.
Quickly, so as not to be bitten, he picked Adam up by the tip of the tail and slammed him forcefully against the top of the desk.
Adam is dealt with in a way that would imply he is nothing but a rat, not as a genius accomplishment of modern science. This is another commentary on how we as humans are ineffective when it comes to dealing with problems we don't understand. Adam is killed without mercy in the same way he killed the boys and his creators, showing that those who result to violence instead of dealing with the problem using compassion are no better than a rat with a human body.