Shadows (25 page)

Between the two of them, they’d managed to get it right.

By the time Josh got back to the Academy that night, the lights were out and the house, with only its porch light glowing softly, loomed eerily in the moonlight. As he pulled the Honda up in front of the building, Steve Conners glanced over at the boy sitting next to him.

“Want me to go in with you?”

Josh shook his head. “It’s okay. We told Hildie what time I’d be back, and we’re only ten minutes late.”

“If she’s waiting up for you, tell her it was my fault. Tell her I had a chocolate malt attack, and I was writhing on the sidewalk, begging for a fix.”

Josh giggled. “I’m not gonna tell her that!”

“Why not? Give her something to think about.”

“She’d never let me go to the movies with you again,” Josh said. Then, hearing his own words, he wished he hadn’t spoken them. After all, Mr. Conners hadn’t said anything about their going to another movie. Or doing anything else, either. What if he wasn’t going to say anything? “I—I had a really good time, Mr. Conners. And I didn’t mean to sound like I thought you should take me again.”

“Why wouldn’t I take you again?” Conners asked. “It isn’t any fun to go to movies by yourself.”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend?” Josh asked. Suddenly he realized that all through dinner, they’d been talking about him. And it had been nice. Everything he said, Mr. Conners seemed to understand.

Now Conners grinned at him. “Even if I had a girl-friend’—which I don’t right now—that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take you along sometimes, too.”

“What if your girlfriend didn’t like me?” Josh asked, only partly joking. As usual, Mr. Conners seemed to know he’d really meant the question, even though he’d tried to sound as if he didn’t.

“Then she wouldn’t be much of a girlfriend. So don’t worry about it, Josh. But right now, you’d better get inside before it gets any later. And don’t stay up studying all night. Promise?”

Josh grinned at the teacher. “I promise,” he said, but behind his back he had his fingers crossed, knowing he had a full math assignment still to do. Opening the door, he started to slide off the seat, but before he could climb out of the car, Conners spoke again.

“Hey, Josh? If we’re going to be friends, I think you better start calling me Steve. At least outside the classroom. ‘Mr. Conners’ makes me feel old. Okay?”

Josh’s grin broadened. “Okay!” He slammed the car door closed and hurried up the steps into the shadows of the loggia. At the front door he paused and looked back.

Mr. Conners—Steve—was still there, waiting for him to go into the house.

Making sure he was safe.

Like his father would have done.

His throat constricted and he felt his eyes get damp. Wiping them with the sleeve of his jacket, he waved to Steve once more, then opened the front door, closing it quickly behind him.

A moment later he heard the engine of Steve’s Honda rev and the tires spin in the gravel of the driveway as he pulled the car away. Only when the sound of the engine had faded did Josh finally cross the dimly lit foyer and start up the stairs.

He came to the second floor and paused to take off his
shoes, not wanting anyone to open his door and ask him how the movie had been. For all evening, even as he tried to watch the movie, the thoughts that had kept going through his mind were not about the film, but about the man who sat next to him, the man who seemed to understand what he was thinking and how he felt, and accept him just the way he was.

Like his father should have.

He crept down the hall, deciding that maybe he wouldn’t do his math after all.

Maybe he’d just get into bed and lie there in the moonlight, clinging as long as he could to the good feeling that had come over him.

He came to his room, turned the knob as silently as possible, and pushed the door open.

And froze.

Sitting at the desk in the near total darkness of the room, hunched over the computer’s keyboard, his eyes fixed on the glowing screen, was Adam Aldrich.

No.

It wasn’t possible!

Reaching out, Josh flicked the light switch, fully expecting the apparition to disappear in the glare of the light that was mounted in the center of the ceiling.

Instead, as the brilliance of the bulb filled the room, the figure at the computer turned to face him.

Blood covered Adam’s face and rivered over his neck in shiny crimson streams.

His shirt was drenched with blood, and one of the sleeves was torn away from the shoulder.

Josh’s eyes widened in horror as he stared at the figure. Then it rose, and one of its hands came up, a finger pointing at him.

“What are you doing in my room?”
Adam’s voice rasped.

Josh’s own mouth opened then, a scream of terror bursting from his throat as he stumbled backward out into the corridor.

From up and down the hall he heard the sound of laughter. Instantly every door was thrown open. From inside his room another peal of laughter sounded, and then
the grisly figure of Adam appeared at the door. Except that it was no longer Adam.

It was Jeff, his eyes sparkling with delight as he reveled in the fear on Josh’s face.

“I’m baa-aack!” he sang out. “I’m back, and I got you!”

For just a second a wave of anger swept over Josh, but then, as quickly as it came, it ebbed away, and Josh, too, joined in the laughter.

Later that night, though, as he lay in bed remembering the joke that had been played on him, he began to wonder.

How could Jeff have done it, so soon after his brother’s funeral?

Didn’t he miss Adam at all?

And then he remembered Jeff’s words, spoken only yesterday afternoon.

Maybe you’re right … maybe he isn’t dead at all … maybe he’ll come back some night, and tell you what really happened
.

When the sun finally came up the next morning, Josh had barely slept at all.

“W
hat’s wrong?” Josh asked Amy Carlson. It was a Monday morning, and the two of them were on their way to the artificial intelligence seminar. There was an autumn briskness in the air, presaging the end of summer. Only this morning Amy had been talking about how much she loved it when the leaves on the trees started changing colors and the weather turned cool, but now she was just trudging along, her head down, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead of her.

“Nothing, I guess,” she said a moment later when Josh’s question finally penetrated her reverie. “I guess I just don’t like the seminar very much, that’s all.”

“But it’s neat,” Josh replied. For the last week most of their time had been spent in the lab, working with rats and mice, as Dr. Engersol taught them the rudiments of how intelligence worked. They’d spent most of the time working with the rats, setting up mazes and baiting the small animals to work their way through them with rewards of food. Josh had found the experiments fascinating, and it had quickly become obvious that some of the rats learned more readily than others.

Some of them would master the original route relatively quickly, but when the maze was changed, would merely follow the single path they’d learned until they came to a dead end, where they would come to a standstill, sniffing at
the new wall in frustration, scratching at it as they tried vainly to make their way through.

Others, though, would waste a little time at the unfamiliar obstacles, but then go on, moving through the maze along new routes, using their noses to guide them closer to the food. Even most of these, however, would eventually come to a halt, unwilling to move away from the food to explore new possibilities.

One or two of them—the brightest ones—quickly caught on to the maze and stopped wasting time altogether, turning away immediately from a newly blocked passage to follow new paths, never giving up until they finally came to the food.

“It’s the difference between intelligence and conditioned response,” Engersol had explained. “Essentially, the stupidest rats simply respond to the smell of food, proceeding directly toward it along the single path they know. Others won’t retreat from the scent, even if it means not getting to the source. But a few of them seem to have figured out that there
is
a route through, and if they can find it, they’ll be rewarded.”

The next day they’d attached electrodes to the brains of three of the rats, and been able to watch their brain activity as they passed through the mazes and dealt with the changes in the twisting pathways.

While the boys in the class had remained glued to their computer screens, talking excitedly as they spotted the changes in the rats’ brain-wave patterns, Amy had grown quieter and quieter.

At the end of the hour, as she and Josh had left the building and started toward their next class, she’d made a sour face. “I think it’s mean.”

“What is?” Josh had asked.

“Treating the rats that way. Sticking those electrodes in their heads and making them run through the mazes.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Josh asked. “If we don’t do experiments, we can’t learn anything. Besides, the rats don’t even know what’s happening to them. They don’t feel anything.”

“How do you know?” Amy challenged. “What if they hurt?”

“But they don’t,” Josh protested. “Dr. Engersol says—”

Amy’s sour look turned angry. “I don’t care what Dr. Engersol says. Everybody in the seminar acts as if he’s some kind of genius or something!”

“Well, he is!” Josh flared. “And if you had any brains—”

But once more Amy hadn’t let him finish. “I have as many brains as anybody else in that class,” she’d snapped. “And I won’t believe any old thing he tells me just because he says I should. Anyway, if he knows so much, how come he says everything we’re doing is experimental?”

Josh had decided there was no point in arguing with her. He dropped the subject. But now, as they mounted the steps to the building that housed the artificial intelligence lab, he gazed quizzically at her. “So what are you going to do? You can’t just quit.”

“Why not?” Amy asked. “Besides, Dr. Engersol wants me to be in some kind of experiment this afternoon, but he wouldn’t tell me what it is.”

Josh stopped short. “What kind of experiment?”

Amy’s eyes rolled impatiently. “Didn’t I just say he wouldn’t tell me? He only said it had to do with how people think. But if he won’t tell me what it is, how am I supposed to know if I want to do it?”

“Maybe that’s part of it,” Josh speculated. “Maybe if you know what it is beforehand, it does something to the results. You know, gives you too much time to think, or something.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Amy replied as she pulled the door open. “If he won’t tell me what it is, I don’t see why I should do it at all.”

They walked silently down the hall to the lab, where the rest of the class was already clustered around a cage. George Engersol peered up, fixing on them for a second, then glancing meaningfully toward the clock on the wall. “Congratulations,” he commented. “You made it with a full three seconds to spare. But since you
did
make it, why don’t you come over here so we can get started.”

Amy, stung by the director’s sarcastic tone, felt her
eyes fill with tears, but managed to control them. Josh, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice the bite in Engersol’s words at all, for he had already joined the group around the lab table and was staring curiously at the animal in the cage.

It was a cat, and the fur was shaved off its head, which was bristling with tiny electrodes. The wires from the electrodes were bundled together and ran out through the bars of the cage to a computer.

The cage itself was divided into three sections, the largest of which held the cat. The other two, arranged side by side at one end of the cage, were separated from the cat by twin doors, each of which was triggered by a large colored button.

“The cat has already been conditioned,” Engersol explained. “A slight electrical charge can be transmitted through the floor of its cage. When the cat feels the charge, it can stop it by hitting either of the two buttons on the smaller compartments, which have also released a small quantity of food into the main cage.”

Amy, thinking of Tabby—who was even now curled up on the pillow on her bed—shuddered as she gazed at the grotesque-looking cat, its bald head sprouting a tangle of wires. It was prevented from pawing the wires away by a large, cone-shaped plastic collar around its neck. “It doesn’t look very happy,” she said, almost under her breath.

Engersol shrugged. “I don’t suppose it is. On the other hand, it’s not suffering at all, nor is the electrical charge enough to hurt it. It merely startles it into a conditioned response.”

“But where’s the food?” Jeff Aldrich asked, his eyes fixed on the empty spaces where the rewards for a proper response should have been.

Engersol smiled approvingly. “That,” he told the class, “is the whole point of today’s experiment. What we are going to do is offer the cat two negative experiences. Today, instead of releasing food and interrupting the electrical current, one of the buttons will trigger the snarl of a dog, while the other one will release a small amount of skunk musk. Neither of which,” he added, “is a cat’s favorite thing. Thus, the cat will have some choices to make. If it
wants to stop the electrical charge, it must elect to face either the snarls of the dog or the smell of the skunk.”

Amy Carlson’s face set stubbornly. “I don’t think we ought to do it,” she said. “It’s cruel!”

Engersol offered her a reassuring smile. “The cat won’t be hurt, Amy. And since it’s being monitored by the computer, we should be able to find out a lot about the physical processes its brain goes through as it tries to come to a decision. It’s a Hobson’s choice experiment, in which any action results in a negative experience. Shall we begin?”

Without waiting for a reply from any of the kids, he threw a switch activating the electrical charge.

The cat’s body tensed, and it immediately reached out with a paw and took a swipe at the left hand button.

Instantly, a small speaker within the cage blared out the sound of a snarling dog.