But Dr. Engersol had told Amy she wouldn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to, either. And then he’d not only scared her to death, but humiliated her in front of all her friends, too.
Maybe he could catch up with her outside the gym, when she came out of the locker room. He moved away from the group gathered around the computer monitor, but Dr. Engersol, as if understanding what he was going to do, stopped him.
“Let Hildie take care of Amy, Josh,” he said. “She’ll be all right — she just needs a few minutes to calm down.”
“But she’s crying—”Josh objected.
“Yes, she is,” Engersol agreed, his voice carrying no more emotion than if he’d been commenting on one of the graphs displayed on the monitor. “It was a perfectly predictable response to the experiment. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t. In fact, if you’ll take a look at this, you can see exactly when the crying response began.”
Josh hesitated, torn by his urge to go after his friend and tell her everything was going to be all right, that nobody was going to call her chicken, and his equally strong desire to join the rest of his class around the monitor and see exactly what Amy had gone through. Only when Hildie Kramer started toward the locker room did he make up his mind. Amy liked Hildie, and the housemother would know what to say to her better than he would. His mind still half on Amy, he slipped in next to Jeff Aldrich and gazed raptly at the screen while Dr. Engersol explained what the graphs meant.
“You can see it all right here,” the Academy’s director told them. “Here her respirations became irregular, and these peaks represent constrictions of her throat. And here’s her heartbeat, increasing and growing slightly irregular, too, when she first understood the choice she had to make.” His fingers tapped rapidly at the keyboard, and the display on the monitor changed. “I want you to pay close attention to this. These are her brain waves, and though they don’t look much different from those of the cat this morning, I think we’ll find a lot of differences when we analyze them. The cat, you see, was responding much more to instinctive behavior and conditioned response, while Amy was trying to make an intellectual decision.”
Engersol’s analysis of what had happened inside Amy’s brain went on, and the graphic displays on the monitor kept changing. Soon Josh was caught up along with the rest of his classmates in the digitized display of the myriad processes that Amy’s body, as well as her mind, had gone through during the few short minutes the experiment had lasted.
“For the rest of the week,” Engersol finished half an hour later, “we’ll continue working with this data, and by Friday we should have a pretty good understanding of just exactly what parts of Amy’s brain came into play during the experiment, and what processes they went through.”
“But what about Amy?” Josh asked when Engersol was finally finished. “What about how she feels?”
Engersol’s eyes fixed on Josh, and there was an emptiness in them that sent a chill down the boy’s spine. “I’m sure she’s just fine,” he said. “After all, we didn’t hurt her, did we?”
As the rest of the class started out of the pool area, still buzzing amongst themselves about the results of the experiment, Josh stayed where he was, staring at the display on the computer monitor.
It was nothing but a series of zigzag lines crossing and recrossing each other, showing what had happened inside Amy’s brain.
But it didn’t show anything about what had happened to Amy
Hadn’t anyone else cared?
With a last glance at the equipment that had so terrified his friend, he turned away, another icy chill running through him as he once more imagined how Amy must have felt when she’d sat alone in the chair, with all the cameras and people watching her.
Like the cat, he thought. She must have felt like the cat in the cage.
Suddenly wanting to be away from the pool, he hurried across the concrete decking and almost ran through the men’s showers and locker room. As he burst out of the gym door into the afternoon sunlight, he looked around, half expecting Amy to be waiting for him.
All he saw was the usual peaceful scene of the college campus, with a few people wandering across the lawns or sitting under the trees, talking or studying.
Amy was nowhere to be seen.
Chet Aldrich pulled into the garage at exactly five o’clock, surprised to see Jeanette’s car already there. Usually she didn’t leave the campus until five-thirty, and by the time she got home, he’d already gone through the unvarying twenty minutes of aerobics he was using in a so far highly effective effort to stave off the creeping processes of age. He’d begun the exercises a year ago, was pleased with the results, and the workout even allowed him to convince himself that the 400 calories in the single glass of wine he permitted himself each evening had already been burned up before he even consumed them.
Today, the first day both of them had been back at work since Adam’s funeral, he’d been looking forward to getting back into the ritual of the afternoon. But when he saw Jeanette’s car parked in the garage, he knew instantly that it was not to be. He parked his own car next to hers and let himself in through the back door that led directly to the kitchen.
“Jeanette? Honey, I’m home!”
There was no answer. Chefs growing trepidation that something had happened at work that day heightened as he moved through the dining room into the living room at the front of the house.
Jeanette was sitting on the sofa, her coat still on, her purse on her lap. Her eyes seemed to be focused on the television set, but as soon as he saw her, he knew she wasn’t watching anything that might have been on the screen, even had it been turned on. Rather, her whole expression was that of someone who had just received some kind of terrible shock.
“Jeanette?” he repeated, going to sit next to her on the sofa. “Honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”
Jeanette, her lips tight, turned to face him. “Nothing, probably. Just someone’s idea of a bad joke. In fact, I suppose I should be over it by now, but I can’t seem to forget it.”
Chefs brow furrowed. “Joke? What kind of joke?”
Choosing her words carefully, not wanting to lend the incident more importance than it deserved, Jeanette told him what had happened. When she finally repeated the message that had appeared on the screen, he groaned softly.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “What would make anyone do something like that?”
“I don’t know,” Jeanette sighed. Pulling herself together, she rose from the sofa and went to the sideboard in the dining room, where she poured herself a shot of brandy. “It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that Adam did exactly the same thing last spring. He hacked into my computer at work, and all of a sudden a message popped up on the screen. Almost exactly the same words. ‘Hi, Mom. It’s me. It’s Adam!’ ” She chuckled, a hollow sound that she quickly cut short. “I gave him a talking-to, but in a way, I thought it was pretty funny, you know? But today …” Her voice trailed off as she remembered once more the shock that had gone through her when she’d read the words on the screen. “I just can’t believe anyone would do something like that, even as a joke.”
“And it’s not hard to figure out who did it, either, is it?” Chet asked. Angry now, he was already back on his feet, his hand in his pocket as he fished for his car keys.
Jeanette stared at him blankly.
“Don’t you see?” Chet asked. “It was Jeff! It had to be!”
“Jeff?” Jeanette repeated. “Chet, why would Jeff do something like that? He knows how hard it’s been for me the last week—”
“He did it because he could,” Chet replied, his voice heavy. “I can tell you exactly what happened. Adam told him what he’d done, and Jeff didn’t forget. He doesn’t forget anything, remember? He’s a genius! So today he’s got some time on his hands, and what does he do? He decides to play a joke on his mother, and it never occurs to him how it might affect you. Well, I think I’m just going to go over to the Academy and have a little talk with him. If he thinks he’s going to get off scot-free, he’s about to find out he’s wrong.”
Jeanette was barely listening. It couldn’t have been Jeff — not her own son, and not so soon after his own brother’s death! It was impossible! It had to be someone else. “I’m going with you,” she told him. “If it was him, I
