Shadows (42 page)

The speakers fell silent. Amy’s image disappeared.

J
eff wasn’t sure exactly when the idea first came into his mind. Maybe it was this morning, when his parents made him go home from the Academy right from Dr. Engersol’s office, without even giving him a chance to go back to his room and get any of his stuff.

It was like he was a baby or something.

That’s how they’d started treating him; like some kind of baby, who’d spilled a glass of milk and now had to sit in a corner.

He hadn’t said a word on the way home, hadn’t even listened to much of what his father had been saying, since he’d already heard it in Dr. Engersol’s office.

“You’ll stay home and think about what you’ve done until you decide to tell us how you did it, and who helped you.”

Who’d
helped
him? How dumb were they? Nobody had helped him, because he hadn’t done anything. And even if he
had
pulled off that stunt last night, he wouldn’t have needed any help. All it would take was the right computer, and he knew exactly where that computer was.

But his father would never believe that it had actually been Adam on the tape—or at least an image that Adam himself had created—and now he was stuck.

Unless he told the truth.

But he couldn’t tell the truth, either, without sending the whole project down the tubes.

It was so stupid!

Why hadn’t he gone first? Why had they decided that Adam should go? But he already knew the answer to that. Adam wouldn’t have been able to keep his mouth shut. The first time their mother started crying, Adam would have spilled the beans. So the three of them—he, Dr. Engersol, and Adam—had decided that Adam would go first. At the time, Jeff had felt relieved. After all, what if it hadn’t worked? What if his brain had actually died while Dr. E was moving it from his head into the tank? Of course, he’d known it wouldn’t, since he’d actually seen the brains of the chimpanzees in the tanks into which Dr. E had put them.

The brains that were still alive after six months.

Alive, and healthy.

“It’s time to start working with a human brain,” Dr. E had told them that day last spring when he’d shown them the secret lab buried under the house. “It’s working perfectly—the brains of the chimps are functioning, receiving information from the Croyden. The problem is that the apes are simply not smart enough to realize where the information is coming from and what they can do with it. And they’re certainly not intelligent enough to actually interact with the computer.” His eyes had fixed on them then. “What we need is a very special mind. A mind that can not only grasp the importance of the project, but that also has the intelligence to comprehend an entirely new form of stimulation. Whoever is selected to be the first human to genuinely interact with a computer will have to have the intelligence to interpret data in a whole new way, a way I’m not sure even I can fully comprehend yet.”

He’d kept talking, describing the new world into which the first human being to take part in the project would venture. It was a world of unlimited knowledge, unimaginable possibilities. As Jeff had listened, his imagination had caught fire, for he’d immediately realized the possibilities of the project. No longer hindered by the physical confines of the body, the mind would be free to explore anything. Anything, and everything.

Dr. Engersol had talked to them for nearly an hour, entrancing them as he described the world into which the
human mind was about to enter. “It will be a whole new level of existence,” he told them, the excitement in his voice infecting both of them with his own fervor for the project. “But the first person to go into the project must be very special. He will be leading the way, exploring a place where no one else has ever been.”

And to whomever the honor fell, he went on, so also would fall a place in history.

Both Jeff and Adam had been mesmerized, and when Dr. Engersol told them that one of them could be the first to go into the project, they had looked at each other.

Jeff’s mind had raced.

If it worked, he would be the most famous person in the world.

But if it didn’t work, he would be dead.

“It should be Adam,” he’d said, carefully screening his sudden doubt from his voice. “He’s smarter than I am.” And then, in a moment of inspiration, it came to him. “Besides,” he went on, smiling, “his name is Adam. Doesn’t it seem like the first person in the new world should be named Adam?”

Adam himself had been uncertain, wavering between the excitement Engersol had instilled in him, and his own deep fears about what might happen to him.

Over the next weeks, it had fallen to Jeff to convince his brother. Late at night he had spent hours talking to Adam, weaving spellbinding fantasies of the world he would be the first to explore.

“B-But what if it doesn’t work?” Adam had finally asked one night, summoning up the courage to tell his brother his worst fear. “What if I die?”

It was the opportunity Jeff had been waiting for. “What if you do?” he’d countered. “It’s not like you’re real happy. You don’t have any friends except me, and you spend all your time with your computer. And after you’re inside the computer, you’re going to be famous. The way things are, everyone always pays a lot more attention to me than they do to you. But afterward you’re going to be the one everyone likes. Everyone will forget about me.”

As had happened all their lives, Adam finally agreed to
do what Jeff wanted him to do. Now, the project was working.

Except that Adam hadn’t been able to resist telling their mother he was still alive.

And for what? It wasn’t as if their parents had believed Adam! Well, his mother almost had, until his father had talked her out of it So now he, Jeff, was out of school and on his way home, and it was all Adam’s fault!

And how was he going to get out of it without giving away the whole thing?

That was when the idea had begun to take form in his mind.

It had developed slowly at first, until the middle of the afternoon, when his father had called him for the fifth time, just to make sure he was still in the house, and his eyes had happened to fall on the calendar his mother always kept on the kitchen counter next to the phone.

They had a date the next morning.

Tennis, it said. Brodys—6:00 A.M.

He’d stared at the entry while his father talked, listing once again the terms of his grounding. When his father finally ran out of steam, Jeff had asked, “What about tomorrow morning? Can I go play tennis with you?”

There had been a silence at the other end of the line, and then his father’s angry voice had come through loud and clear. “Going up to Stratford to play tennis on a private court doesn’t seem to me like it would fit in with a loss of privileges!”

“Jeez, Dad, I was just asking,” Jeff protested. When his father had finally hung up, the idea that had been simmering in the back of Jeff’s mind began to take shape. He went to the den and switched on his father’s Macintosh.

A minute later he was connected to Adam, his fingers flying as he typed in what he wanted his brother to do.

“Why?” Adam asked. “What are you going to do?”

“It’s a joke,” Jeff typed. “I’m going to play it on Mom and Dad.”

“It’s dangerous,” Adam shot back. “You could hurt them.”

“I’m not going to hurt them. I’m just going to scare them.”

When Adam made no reply, Jeff typed another message:

IF YOU DONT DO WHAT I WANT, I’LL TELL DR. E
.

A few seconds went by, and Jeff wondered what had happened. Had Adam decided to ignore him? Or was he just trying to make up his mind? Just as he was about to type in another question, the printer next to the computer beeped softly.

Several seconds later a sheet of paper came out, followed by two more.

Jeff snatched them out of the printer, studied them, then typed a question into the computer.

WHERE DID YOU GET THESE?

A second later the answer appeared:

A COMPUTER IN WEST VIRGINIA. THAT’S WHERE THEY MAKE THE PART
.

Jeff typed back:

CAN I DO WHAT I WANT?

Instantly, the reply appeared:

YES. BUT YOU NEED SOME THINGS
.

The printer beeped again, and a few seconds later one more sheet of paper appeared, this one bearing a short list of parts.

Turning off the computer, Jeff took the first three sheets Adam had sent through the printer up to his room and hid them under the mattress of his bed.

Then, ignoring his father’s proscription against leaving the house, he went down to the village, where a branch of Radio Shack had opened last year.

The bill for the parts came to thirty-five dollars, which he paid for out of the fifty-dollar bill he’d taken from the small cache of emergency money his mother kept hidden in the bottom of the cedar chest at the foot of his parents’ bed.

The chance of her missing it this evening wasn’t big enough to worry about.

By tomorrow morning it wouldn’t matter at all.

   Josh MacCallum sat by himself in the dining room that evening, nodding to everyone who spoke to him, but not asking anyone to sit with him, nor accepting Brad Hinshaw’s suggestion that he bring his tray to a table where two other kids were already eating.

Tonight he didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to answer any more questions about what it had been like to find Amy’s body, didn’t want to listen to all the other kids talk about how Steve Conners might have killed her.

Tonight he wanted to be by himself, for all day long he’d been trying to figure out what he should do. Though he’d tried to concentrate on his classes, it hadn’t worked. No matter how hard he tried to pay attention to what his teachers were saying, all he could think about was what had happened yesterday to Amy.

And what had happened to himself last night, when he’d put on the virtual reality mask and Adam Aldrich had suddenly appeared.

He’d been puzzling at it all day, trying to decide if what he had seen had been real or only some kind of computer trick; some kind of interactive program that was so complex it could respond to whatever he said.

But if the program was so good that he actually believed he was seeing Adam, and talking to him, then it was intelligent, wasn’t it? That was one of the tests of artificial intelligence. Yet Dr. Engersol had told them it didn’t exist, and never would. Besides, if what he’d seen was a program, how could he explain what had happened right at the end, when he’d heard Amy’s voice, calling out for help?

Then this morning Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich had come to the school and taken Jeff home. Josh had known right away
that Jeff’s sudden departure had something to do with Adam. It had happened right at the beginning of first period, while they were waiting for Dr. Engersol, and when Hildie had told them the seminar wouldn’t be meeting that morning, and then taken Jeff upstairs to Dr. Engersol’s office, he’d been sure he knew what had happened.

Mrs. Aldrich must have gotten another message from Adam, and they’d blamed it on Jeff.

So now he didn’t even have Jeff to talk to about the confusion in his mind.

None of it made any sense, and it seemed as though the more he thought about it, the more confusing it got.

Except that if he assumed that what he’d seen last night
was
real, then it all fit together. And it meant that somewhere close by, Adam and Amy were still alive, their brains still working, even though their bodies were dead.

But where? Where was the computer Adam said he was inside?

And what would happen to him, Josh wondered, if he found out? Whatever was going on, it must be really secret if they wanted everyone to think that Adam and Amy were dead! And if he got caught trying to figure out the secret …

Maybe he should call his mother and tell her he wanted to come home.

But she’d want to know why.

What would she say if he told her that Adam and Amy weren’t dead at all, but were hidden away somewhere, inside a computer?

She’d say he was crazy and send him to see a psychiatrist.

Besides, he didn’t really want to go back to Eden, and have to sit in boring classes with kids who didn’t like him. And he certainly wanted to find out what had happened to Amy. If they’d done something to her, he wanted to find out who had done it, and make them sorry.

Finishing his dinner, Josh picked up his tray full of dirty dishes and took it to the butler’s pantry between the dining room and the kitchen.

His eyes fastened on the door to the basement, and he
shivered as he remembered what had happened down there the night before last.

Remembered, and wondered.

In his mind’s eye he saw once more the mass of concrete that had looked like an elevator shaft, and heard once more the sound that seemed to pass right by him in the shaft and continue downward.

Under the house?

Could that be where Adam was, and Amy, too?

But how could he find out? And if there
was
something under the house, some kind of hidden laboratory, how could he get into it?

His heart raced as he began to speculate on the possibilities.

And he felt a chill of fear as he thought about once more going down into the dark maze of rooms that lay beneath his feet.

A voice broke through his reverie. A voice that made Josh freeze.

Hildie Kramer’s voice.

Forcing himself to control the panic the mere sound of the housemother’s voice instilled in him, he turned around.

“Josh?” Hildie asked, her eyes seeming to pin him to the wall. “What’s wrong? Don’t you feel weif?”

Josh felt cornered. Had she been watching him staring at the basement door? Did she know what he was thinking?

“I—I was just thinking about Amy, that’s all. I always ate with her, and—” His voice broke with a sob that was only half forced. “I just miss her, that’s all,” he finished.

The penetrating look in Hildie’s eyes softened. “I know,” she said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “We all miss her. But sometimes terrible things happen, and we have to learn to bear up under them. We have to go on living, no matter how hard it might seem.” She paused, and Josh had to steel himself not to duck away from the touch of her hand. “Would you like to talk about it?” Hildie asked. “We could go into my office.”