“Let me see, will you?” Josh demanded, pushing his way in between Jeff Aldrich and Brad Hinshaw so that he could more closely watch what Dr. Engersol was doing. All through breakfast he’d kept looking for Amy, hoping that somehow, after he’d fallen asleep in his chair, she might have miraculously returned to the Academy. When there was still no sign of her by the time breakfast was over, he’d almost gone to Hildie Kramer’s office to find out if anyone had heard anything. But then he’d changed his mind, because once he started talking about Amy, he was pretty sure he’d start talking about what had happened in the basement last night, when he’d gone looking for her. And the only person he wanted to talk to about the strange sounds he’d heard, and the funny shaft that seemed to go right through the basement floor, was Steve Conners.
For a while he’d thought about cutting Dr. Engersol’s seminar and going to find Steve, but in the end he’d decided to wait until after the English class.
Now, though, he sort of wished he’d decided to cut the special seminar. This morning they were going to do some more experiments on the same cat they’d been working with yesterday morning.
The cat was unconscious, and part of its skull had been cut away to expose the animal’s brain. As he stared at the convoluted mass of matter contained within the cat’s skull, Josh tried to keep his mind on what Dr. Engersol was saying, but he kept thinking about Amy and her objections to what had happened the day before.
If she’d been here this morning, she probably would have left already. Even as Dr. Engersol began telling him what they were going to do, Josh wasn’t sure he would be able to stay, either.
“We’re going to begin exploring the various parts of the brain today,” their teacher explained. “The cat, as you can see, is unconscious right now, but in a little while we’re going to wake him up. First, though, we’re going to immobilize him, not only so that he can’t hurt any of you, but so he can’t hurt himself, either.”
Carefully, aided by Jeff Aldrich, Engersol bound the cat’s four legs and torso to a wooden slab that sat on the tabletop, using nylon straps that had been designed for that specific purpose. When he was finished, even the cat’s head was held immobile.
“As most of you already know,” Engersol went on, “a great deal of the cat’s brain is used for coordinating the functions of its body and reacting to stimuli from the outside. This morning we’re going to begin identifying those areas of the brain, and start disabling some of them. And I want to assure you,” he said, his eyes fixing on Josh as if he knew what was going on in the boy’s mind, “that the cat will feel nothing. The brain itself has no pain sensors at all, and as I disable certain areas of the brain, I won’t be causing the animal any serious discomfort. It will undoubtedly be aware of certain false stimuli, but that will be all.”
Josh frowned. Whether the stimuli were real or not, the cat would still hurt, wouldn’t it? Before he could ask the question, Dr. Engersol had begun.
He slipped a needle into a vein on the animal’s left foreleg, pressed the plunger, and a few seconds later the cat began to stir. Then it came fully awake, and tensed as it realized it couldn’t move.
For a moment it struggled, but then, as if sensing there was no way it could escape its bonds, it relaxed under the restraints, its eyes narrowing to slits as it studied the faces of the boys gathered around the table.
“As you can see, the cat is now fully awake, and responds to various stimuli.” Engersol waved his hand in front of the cat’s eyes, and the animal tried to turn its head away.
Then he snapped his fingers by one of its ears. The cat’s body tensed as it tried to turn toward the sound.
When Engersol touched the tip of one of its ears with the probe in his hand, the ear twitched reflexively, as if flicking away an offending fly.
After Engersol had demonstrated the cat’s responses to various other stimuli, the real work began. Using a laser probe that was guided by a computer, he began focusing the instrument on a spot within the cortex of the cat’s brain. “First, I’m going to destroy the area of the brain that responds to visual stimuli,” he explained. “And I want you to watch the cat carefully. If any of you see any signs of pain, let me know immediately.”
As josh watched the cat, the computer adjusted the probe to an accuracy of less than a millimeter, and finally Dr. Engersol triggered the laser.
Nothing seemed to happen at all.
“Did you do it?” someone asked. “Didn’t it work?”
Engersol smiled. “Why don’t you wave your hand in front of the cat’s eyes?”
The boy did. There was no response at all.
Engersol refocused the laser and triggered it again. Now the cat was deaf as well as blind.
Yet as far as Josh could tell, it had exhibited no evidence that it was in any pain at all. Indeed, a few seconds after its eyesight had been disabled, it seemed to have decided that it was time to sleep, and its eyes had closed. But when he reached out and touched it, the eyes flicked open again and moved as if the cat was attempting to see despite its blindness.
Engersol kept working, and half an hour later removed the bonds from the cat’s limbs, body, and head. “As you can see,” he explained to them, “the cat is now totally helpless. It is deaf and blind, and has no sense of either smell or taste. Nor can it feel anything, for its pain centers, too, have been disabled. Yet you can see that it is far from dead. It still breathes, and its heart still beats, for all the normal functions that are carried out by the autonomic nervous system are still working perfectly. But I want you to look at what we’ve done.”
The boys shifted away from the lab table and gathered around a computer monitor that was currently displaying a highly detailed graphic image of the cat’s brain. “This is what it looks like under normal conditions. Now let’s feed the computer data about the areas of the brain we’ve destroyed, and see what happens.” He typed some instructions into the keyboard. Almost instantly the image began to change.
Certain areas of the brain — areas that had been burned away by the perfectly focused laser — turned red on the screen.
As Josh and his friends watched, the red stain spread through the image on the monitor, until surprisingly little of the brain was left its original white.
“Now let’s mark out the areas of the brain that are solely taken up with keeping the cat alive, with keeping its heart beating, its lungs breathing, and all the rest of its organs functioning.”
Now a blue stain began to spread through the brain, and soon there was little left of the original white color.
“What’s left,” Engersol told them, “is what the cat has to think with. As you can see, by far the majority of the creature’s brain is occupied with the simple tasks of accepting stimuli and maintaining bodily functions. Small wonder, then, that the lower animals aren’t known for their intelligence. They simply don’t have the available brain power. But can you imagine what would happen if you eliminated some things from the cat?”
His fingers flew over the keyboard once again, and the blue stains began to retreat.
“What I’ve done is eliminate the autonomic nervous system. Notice how much of the brain it occupied.”
“Yeah,” Brad Hinshaw replied. “But without it, the cat’s dead, isn’t it?”
Engersol nodded. “It certainly would be, yes. But as you can see, we’ve eliminated a lot of other things, and the cat is still surviving.”
“But it can’t eat,” Josh pointed out. “Didn’t you say it’s totally paralyzed now?”
“Yes, it is,” Engersol agreed. “We could feed it, however. It’s a simple matter of an IV tube. But the point is that destroying certain parts of the brain has not killed the cat.”
Josh frowned. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What does any of it have to do with intelligence? The cat isn’t any smarter, is it? All you did was cripple it.”
“Perhaps that is all we did,” Engersol agreed. “But we’ve also learned something. We’ve learned how much of the brain is used for things that have nothing to do with intelligence, or, if you will, with
Jeff Aldrich grinned. “We’d be a lot smarter,” he said.
Engersol beamed. “Exactly. And not only that, but—”
He was interrupted as the door to the lab was flung open and Jeanette Aldrich appeared, her face flushed, her hand quivering as she clutched a crumpled piece of paper.
“Come here, Jeff,” Jeanette commanded, her voice harsh. “I want to talk to you. Right now!”
