INTRODUCTION

"Ratman" was my first sale. After years of detailed rejection slips from John W. Campbell, editor of Analog, I finally broke the barrier: A check from Conde Nast for $375 arrived in the mail. A nickel a word and no comment from Campbell. Just a check. Typical. He was the kind of guy who liked to argue. If he disagreed with you, he could go on for pages. If he agreed, he had nothing to say. The check said it all.

I was a first-year medical student at the time, with a wife, no job, no money, and a baby on the way. You can't imagine how $375 looked to us.

"Ratman" grew out of the psychopharmacological research I did at CIBA between pre-med and med school. Day in, day out, we dosed white rats with new drugs and placed them in Skinner boxes. Lots of times I felt sorry for the rats. But there were times when I thought they might be doing a number on us fellows in the white coats. After all, intraperitoneal injections of amphetamine were part of the protocol.

(Please forgive the size of the computers mentioned here. "Ratman" was written in 1970, years before Steve Jobs began playing with microchips.)