Shadows

24

Jeanette Aldrich hesitated in front of George Engersol’s office. “Are you sure we should be doing this?” she asked Chet for at least the fourth time that morning. “Maybe we should talk to Jeff first—”

“I’m not talking to him until I know how something like this could have happened,” Chet replied, remnants of last night’s fury still evident in his voice. “If Engersol can’t tell me, then I think we both know what has to happen.” Without giving Jeanette time to argue, he pulled the door open and led her inside.

Half an hour later, George Engersol sat behind his desk watching the tape for the second time. When the Aldriches had arrived — unannounced, and interrupting a discussion neither he nor Hildie had been happy to postpone — he’d listened patiently to them as they explained what had happened early that morning. At first he had assumed it would take no more than a few minutes to brush off what had happened last night as another of Jeff’s pranks. After watching the tape and instantly realizing what Adam had done, he turned to Chet and Jeanette. “I can’t imagine what Jeff was thinking of,” he said smoothly, his face a seamless mask of concern. “I know our youngsters have thought up some pretty sophisticated stunts, but this…” He let his voice trail off into a disapproving hiss, then turned to Hildie. “I think you’d better bring young Jeff up here,” he told her.

“The faster we deal with this, the better for all of us, don’t you think?”

Hildie had hesitated for a split second, but the look in Engersol’s eyes had told her not to argue with him, and she’d started out of his office. Even before she’d passed through the doorway, he stopped her. “And Hildie, I think you’d probably better tell the rest of my seminar that we won’t be meeting this morning. Tell them they may have the hour off, and then bring Jeff up here.”

Though her face had flushed when he’d spoken to her as if she were no more than one of his staff — and not a particularly important one, at that — Hildie had nonetheless accepted his orders in silence.

She hadn’t been gone long, since the seminar was meeting just a floor below his office, and when she came back with Jeff Aldrich in tow, the boy looked angry.

“How come you’re mad at me?” he’d demanded as soon as Hildie had brought him into the office. He’d planted himself just inside the door and glared at his father. “I didn’t do anything!”

“Don’t lie to me, Jeff,” Chet had replied, his voice sharp enough that the boy had taken an uncertain step backward. “Play the tape again, Dr. Engersol. He might as well see that this time he’s been caught.”

Wordlessly, George Engersol had rewound the tape and started playing it again. This time, as he played the tape, he watched Jeff Aldrich’s face. No more than a few seconds into the tape, Jeff’s eyes had darted toward him and an unspoken message had passed between them.

Jeff, too, had immediately understood what had happened. But how would he handle it?

The tape came to an end. A heavy silence hung over the room, a silence that Chet finally broke.

“Well?”

The word made Jeff turn to look at his father. His eyes narrowed. “Where’d that come from?” he asked.

Though his face remained impassive, George Engersol felt himself relax. There was just the right amount of defensiveness in Jeff’s voice, just the right amount of guilt. And Chet Aldrich had heard it, too.

“You know damned well where it came from. Jeff,” Chet said. “The question is, how did you do it?”

Jeff hesitated just long enough before he replied. “Do what? I don’t know anything about that. It looked like Mam, didn’t it?”

Jeanette, sitting on a sofa opposite Jeff, shrank away from her son’s words. “Jeff, why are you doing this to me?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“Aw, come on, Mom,” Jeff groaned. “How am I going to do something like that? What do you think I did? Got dressed up in Adam’s clothes and sat in front of a video camera or something?”

“I think that’s exactly what you did, Jeff,” Chet replied before Jeanette could say anything. “We all know you’re an expert computer hacker. And you’re going to tell us exactly how you managed to get that tape onto the cable coming into our house.”

Now Jeff’s expression turned belligerent. “What if I don’t?” he demanded. “What if I don’t know anything about it at all?”

“But you do,” Chet said. “And since you’ve asked the question, I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m going to do. You’re going to go home, Jeff. You’re going to be taken out of school right now. Not this afternoon, not tomorrow. Right now. You’re going home, and you’ll stay there — totally grounded — until you decide to tell us how you did this.”

“Aw, Jeez, Dad,” Jeff groaned. “That’s not fair! I didn’t do anything!”

Chet stood up abruptly. “All right, Jeff, that’s it. Come on.” Jeff’s mouth opened, but before he could speak, Chet silenced him with a gesture. “And I don’t want to hear any veiled threats of suicide, either. You hurt your mother with that line yesterday, but it won’t work with me. I know you, Jeff. You’re just not like Mam. Mam kept everything in, and never felt like he was pleasing anyone. But you’re just the opposite. You think you’ve got the world by the tail and everyone’s crazy about you. Well, right now, I’m not crazy about you at all. Got that?”

Jeff’s face tightened into a mask of fury. He turned to George Engersol, his back to his parents. “Are you going to let them do that?” he demanded. “Are you just going to let them pull me out of school?”

Engersol shrugged helplessly. “They’re your parents, Jeff. They have the right to take you home. And you might have thought of that before you decided to pull that stunt last night. I’m sorry,” he said, standing up. “I think it might be a good thing for you to go home for a while and think about what you’ve done. And think about what you want to do next.”

Jeff stood still for a moment, his face still contorted with anger. But just before he turned away from Engersol, he winked.

It was a wink that Chet and Jeanette Aldrich couldn’t see, but George Engersol understood the gesture perfectly.

Jeff would play his part.

As soon as the Aldriches were gone, Engersol accompanied Hildie Kramer back to her office. Then he rode the clattering brass elevator up to his apartment, let himself in, and immediately released the hidden catch on the bookcase. Stepping into the concealed elevator, he pulled the bookcase closed and descended to the laboratory buried deep beneath the basement. Scanning the monitors that displayed every aspect of the physical condition of the two brains submerged in their twin tanks, he stopped for a moment to admire the organs themselves.

They looked almost artificial in their perfection, the folds of their lobes twisting over upon themselves, expanding their surfaces tenfold over what they might have been without the folds.

Both brains, released now from the confines of the skulls they had so perfectly filled, seemed to be expanding, the folds loosening slightly, the surface area increasing.

Adam’s brain, larger than Amy’s, seemed to Engersol to have grown overnight. When he checked its displacement factor in the tank, he found he was right, though the growth wasn’t quite as much as he’d hoped for. Still, Adam’s brain was expanding rapidly, and Amy’s was beginning to grow as well.

What would happen as the organs continued to grow? Would the intelligence of the two personalities contained within the organs increase, too?

And what would happen to the personalities themselves? Would they be affected?

But how could they not, given the circumstances under which they now lived?

He tried to imagine what it would be like to live without a body, to exist in the world as pure intellect, freed forever from the everyday inconveniences of maintaining a body.

In a way, he almost wished that he himself could go into one of the tanks, be done with all the annoyances that distracted him from his work all but a few hours a day. But right now it was impossible. Until he’d watched these two brains, and the ones that soon would join them, and understood exactly how they functioned in the artificial environment he had created for them, he dared not risk it.

After all, these two brains — and possibly many more to follow — might yet die. Indeed, there was a good possibility that he might have to kill Amy Carlson this very afternoon.

He’d been thinking about the problem of Amy all night, getting only an hour or two of sleep just before dawn, then awakening in the bright sunlight with the answer in his mind.

By now, undoubtedly, she had calmed down. She was one of the most intelligent children who had ever come to the Academy. Certainly by this morning she would understand that there was nothing she could do about her situation.

Nor could he, or anyone else.

It was one thing to remove a living brain from its skull and keep it alive in the nutrient solution.

It was quite another to put it back into its host body, for the body, of course, had died the moment the brain was removed.

Surely Amy had figured that out by now, and come to accept her circumstances. Her choice was simple — either cooperate with him, or die.

And die she would, for he had already devised a method to circumvent the sabotage she’d planned.

It was simply a matter of putting her to sleep.

First, though, he was going to have to deal with Adam Aldrich. He tapped instructions into the keyboard, instructions that would activate the sound system.

A message appeared on the screen:

SOUND SYSTEM ALREADY ACTIVATED.

Engersol frowned. He was certain he’d turned the sound off last night. He and Hildie had been discussing things neither of them wanted Adam or Amy to hear.

But now it was on.

How long had it been on?

“Adam,” he said, his voice quiet, but heavy with the anger he was feeling toward the boy. “I want to talk to you.”

Instantly the monitor above Adam’s tank flashed on and an image of the boy appeared. His eyes were wide, his expression worried. “Y-You found out, didn’t you?” he asked. “Dad told you what I did.”

“Yes, he did. And if Jeff hadn’t acted guilty, you could have jeopardized the entire project Do you understand that?”

“Y-Yes,” Adam stammered. “Are you really mad at me?”

“Of course I am,” Dr. Engersol replied. “You’ve gotten your brother into a lot of trouble, and you might have gotten all of us into a lot of trouble.”

On the monitor above the screen, Adam’s chin quivered. “I didn’t mean to get Jeff in—” he began, but Engersol didn’t let him finish.

“I need Jeff here, Adam. I need him for the project, and he wants to be part of it. I don’t expect you to do anything else to jeopardize it Is that clear?”

On the screen, Adam’s image nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“I expect that you’ll be hearing from Jeff soon,” Engersol went on. “I want you to do whatever he asks you to do.”

“But what if—” Adam began, but once again Engersol didn’t let him finish.

“Did I make a mistake, Adam?” he asked. “Should I start all over again? I’m sure Jeff would be more than willing to take your place in the project.”

Adam was silent for a moment as his mind absorbed Engersol’s words. At last, his voice shaking, he spoke once more. “Ill do whatever Jeff wants,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“Good,” Engersol agreed. “I’m sure Jeff doesn’t want to hurt anyone anymore than the rest of us do. He simply wants to be part of the project, that’s all. Do we understand each other?”

On the monitor, Adam’s image nodded in assent.

“Very well, then,” Engersol went on. “You may go back to whatever you were doing.” As Adam’s image faded away from the monitor, Engersol turned his attention to the one above the other tank. “Amy!” he said sharply. “Can you hear me?”

Instantly a blip appeared on the graph reflecting Amy’s alpha waves. Though the blip disappeared almost as quickly as it had come, it wasn’t fast enough. “All right, Amy,” George Engersol continued. “I know you’re listening, and I think we should have a talk.”

He studied the graphs on Amy’s monitor, then glanced at the screen above the tank. Despite whatever efforts she might be putting forth to suppress them, he could see the graphic displays of her various brain waves reacting to his words almost as clearly as if she still had a face. But on the screen above her tank, Amy was showing nothing.

He suspected she was pretending to be asleep.

“I know you’re listening to me, Amy, and I suspect I know what’s going on in your head. You’re angry. And I suppose you have a right to be. Perhaps I was wrong to include you in the project at all. But it’s done now, and there’s nothing either you or I can do about it. And I think you know that destroying the project won’t accomplish anything. Nor, for that matter, will your trying to tell anyone about it. Don’t you see? No one will believe you. Even if someone does, and comes looking for you, you’ll be long gone. Both you and Adam will be dead, and all that will be down here is the Croyden computer, which I’m using in my very well-publicized search for artificial intelligence. The lab will be inspected, as will the chimpanzees’ brains that will have replaced yours in the tanks, and that will be that. The files will be restored, and the research will continue. Which means that you have a choice. You can either be part of it, or you can remain silent, and sulk.” His voice changed, taking on a hard edge. “I don’t like sulky children, Amy. Do you understand that?”

There was no reply from Amy at all. The speakers in the ceiling remained silent; the monitor above her tank remained blank. Engersol waited a few minutes. He was certain she had heard every word he spoke, equally certain that it had been Amy herself who had turned the sound system back on after he had turned it off last night.

At last he made up his mind.

He went to the room next door, unlocked the drug cabinet and took out a vial of sodium Pentothal. Returning to the lab, he attached the vial to the artificial circulatory system that kept Amy’s brain supplied with blood, and opened a valve a fraction of a turn.

The drug would begin entering Amy’s brain in such minute amounts that she would never notice what was happening to her until it was too late.

Instantly, Amy’s voice filled the room.

“Turn it off!”

Engersol froze. How could she have known already? The Pentothal couldn’t have reached her brain yet.

As if she knew what he was thinking, Amy spoke again.

“I’m monitoring all my support systems, Dr. Engersol. I know what you’re doing. You’re adding Pentothal to my blood supply. Turn it off.”

Engersol stepped back and gazed at the monitor above Amy’s tank. She was there now, her eyes angry, her lips pressed together.

“I just told you, Amy. There’s nothing you can do. I’ve decided to put you to sleep.”

“Don’t,” Amy told him. “I’m busy, and I don’t want you to bother me. I don’t like you, and I don’t want to talk to you anymore! And if you don’t turn off the drug, I’m not going to just wreck your project. I’m going to wreck everything!”

Engersol hesitated. Wreck everything? What was she talking about?

Again, it was as if she knew what he was thinking. “I can do it, too. I can get into any computer anywhere. And if I can get into them, I can do anything I want with them. I won’t hurt anyone if you just leave me alone.”

Engersol hesitated, his mind racing. What was she doing? And what could she do before the drug took effect and she went to sleep?

He realized he didn’t know.

Nor, he suddenly knew, did he want to find out.

If it was true that she could reach into any computer anywhere — and he only now realized that it undoubtedly was true, given the sophistication of the Croyden’s communication systems — the damage she could cause was incalculable.

He turned the valve off and removed the vial from the circulatory apparatus.

“Thank you,” Amy said, instantly analyzing the change in the blood supply. “I really don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want you to leave me alone.”

“But why, Amy?” George Engersol asked. “What are you doing?”

On the monitor above her tank, Amy’s image smiled enigmatically. “I’m working on a project,” she said. “A project of my own.”

The speakers fell silent. Amy’s image disappeared.