John Saul - Shadows

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.