Shadows (45 page)

“I don’t think that should become necessary,” Hildie told him. “I think either Chet or Jeanette has family in the city, and I’ll be in touch with them this morning. I doubt whether the social service people will have to get involved.”

“We’ll have to see what the family has to say,” Dover replied noncommittally, “and I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you for some ID. Not that I don’t believe you are who you say you are, but—”

“Of course,” Hildie agreed, burrowing into the large bag that she’d dropped on a chair as she’d passed through the living room a few minutes earlier. Dover glanced perfunctorily at both her driver’s license and her university identification, then handed them back to her.

“I can reach you at the same phone number I used this morning?”

“Or the university switchboard,” Hildie replied. “You can usually get me more easily that way during the day. The other number is in my apartment at the Academy. I’m the housemother there.”

Five minutes later she and Jeff were in her car, heading back to the Academy. They drove in silence for more than a full minute. Then Hildie spoke. “I’m sorry about your parents, Jeff,” she said. “I know how hard it’s going to be for you.”

For a moment she wasn’t sure if Jeff had heard her or not, but then he turned to look at her.

“Dr. Engersol is going to have to let me go with Adam now,” he said. “If the police find out what I did, they’re going to come and arrest me, aren’t they?”

Hildie, her hands tightening around the steering wheel, said nothing.

   For nearly half an hour Josh had been puzzling out the machinery that was concealed behind the concrete block wall. When he opened the door and switched on the light, he knew instantly that he’d found what he was looking for.

Bolted to the floor were two large motors, each of which was geared to a reel.

One of the motors was old, its brass casing black with grease, its copper-wrapped coils clearly visible through the ornately embossed grillwork that ventilated it.

The second one, though, looked much newer. Yet Josh could still see the footprint of a twin to the older one, clearly visible around the smaller base of the more modern motor.

Had one of the old ones broken down? But if it had, why hadn’t they replaced both of them at once?

His mind still puzzling at the question, he examined the reels, both of which held cable that was thicker than Josh’s forefinger.

On the reel attached to the older motor, only a few turns of cable were wrapped around the drum.

The same was true of the reel attached to the newer
motor. But the reel itself was much larger, though the cables were of the same diameter.

With his eyes Josh traced the cables that came off the reels, turned around heavy pulleys bolted into the concrete floor, then crossed the floor itself, to turn on two more pulleys. From there the cables went straight up, disappearing into twin shafts that appeared to lead up through the walls of the house.

In his mind’s eye he pictured them continuing upward through the walls to two more pulleys, which would turn them back toward the shaft in the center of the basement. The last two pulleys would be directly over the two shafts themselves.

It took Josh only a moment to figure out which motor operated which elevator.

The old motor, attached to the smaller of the two reels, must run the brass cage he saw every day, and which he knew was now sitting on the main floor, most of its cable wound off the reel.

Which meant the newer motor, and its much bigger reel, operated the hidden elevator. But that reel, too, was nearly empty, which meant that the second car, like the first, must be all the way down.

But how much farther down than the other one?

His eyes scanned the walls of the room, and a second later he spotted the controllers for the two elevators.

As with the motors themselves, one of the controllers looked as though it had been in place since the house was built.

But the controller attached to the second motor was as new as the motor itself. And from its black metal case, running parallel to the coiled metal electrical conduit, emerged the plastic tube that had branched off from the large pipe clinging to the elevator shaft.

The hidden elevator, then, was controlled by a computer.

While the older one, the one that everyone saw, was still operated by the system that had been installed when Mr. Barrington built the house.

A sudden loud clank made Josh jump back from the
controllers. Panic flooded him for a second as he thought he’d been caught in the basement, but a moment later it eased as he realized that what he’d heard was nothing more than one of the elevators starting.

He turned and watched the smaller of the two reels turn slowly, winding up its cable. Josh held his breath, unconsciously counting the seconds as the reel kept turning, the old motor and gear system rattling noisily as they worked. Almost thirty seconds later the reel was full and the motor clanked to a stop.

Josh remained where he was, rooted to the spot. A moment later the other motor came to life. The second reel began to turn, much faster, and with barely a sound. Once again Josh counted the seconds.

This time it was only twenty seconds before the elevator came to a stop, but Josh was certain the reel had been turning at least twice as fast as the older one. No more than five seconds later, the elevator began running again.

Someone, Josh realized, had taken the antique elevator to the fourth floor, called the hidden one, then ridden it down to wherever it led.

Hildie?

Had she come back? How long had he been in the basement? He didn’t know. But if it was Hildie, he could get back upstairs now, while she was still down in whatever was below the basement. Turning off lights as he went, Josh hurried back through the cellar to the foot of the stairs, his mind already working out what he would do next.

If the hidden elevator was run by a computer somewhere deep under the mansion, there had to be a way to get to that computer! And if he could get to it …

His mind churned with ideas as he climbed up the stairs, switched off the last of the lights, and pushed the door to the butler’s pantry open, nearly knocking a tray out of the hands of someone who was carrying food from the kitchen to the dining room.

“Jesus!”

Josh stared up at the boy he’d hit with the door. It was one of the university students who worked part-time in the Academy’s kitchen, and he was glaring angrily at Josh.

“What the hell are you doing, kid?” the boy demanded.

“I—I was just putting my suitcase down there,” Josh stammered.

The boy rolled his eyes. “Well, watch it, okay?” Then, brushing past Josh, he went on into the dining room. Josh followed after him, threading his way through the crowd of children who were now gathered around the buffet, and went into the foyer. He was at the bottom of the stairs when Brad Hinshaw came barreling down.

“Josh! I’ve been looking all over for you!”

“I was putting my suitcase—” Josh began, but Brad cut him off.

“Jeff’s back! Can you believe it? Only one night, and he’s back already!”

“Jeff?” Jash echoed, the strange message he’d seen on the computer last night suddenly coming back into his mind.

“Yeah! I just saw him come in with Hildie!”

Josh’s heart skipped a beat. “W-Where are they?” he breathed.

Brad pointed upward. “Up in Dr. E’s apartment. I saw them in the elevator a couple of minutes ago! Come on—we’ll get a table and save a place for Jeff. I can hardly wait to find out how he talked his folks into letting him come back this time.”

But Josh wasn’t listening anymore, for he knew that Jeff and Hildie weren’t in Dr. Engersol’s apartment at all.

They were somewhere under the building.

Why?

Turning away from Brad, he started up the stairs toward the second floor, and his room.

His room, and his computer.

J
eff stared up at the image of his brother on the monitor above the tank that contained Adam’s brain.

Weird!

Although he was seeing it with his own eyes, Jeff could still barely believe it. Adam was still alive. And it was even better than he’d thought it would be. Adam could see, and hear, and talk, all through the massive complex of electronic circuitry in the big Croyden computer in the next room.

He could even see the frustrated fury in Adam’s eyes, as clearly as if it were Adam himself on the screen, rather than a graphic image that his brother had created, and which the Croyden had produced for the monitor.

“I didn’t
mean
for Mom and Dad to die,” he said, his own voice now tinged with the same anger he’d just heard when Adam had accused him of deliberately killing their parents. “I told you, I just wanted to scare them!”

“Don’t lie, Jeff.” Adam’s voice was cold, and held a strength Jeff had never heard before. “I shouldn’t have helped you. But you said—”

“What was I supposed to do?” Jeff challenged, his tone truculent. “Just let them ground me? If you could’ve kept your big mouth shut, everything would have been okay. But you had to go start talking to Mom!”

“I just didn’t want her to be sad!” Adam shot back. On
the screen his eyes glinted with anger. “She was my mom! I loved her!”

George Engersol watched it all, fascinated. It was exactly as if Adam’s brain were still in his body. His emotions, his reactions, all perfect! Even his facial expressions were shifting constantly as his mind reacted to his brother’s words. Emotions rose up inside him and were instantly translated into the graphic display on the monitor.

True animation, in its most perfect form; a picture the boy was using to reflect the state of his emotional being.

At the same time Adam was using part of his mind to create the image on the screen, other parts of his brain were busy firing the electronic impulses that the computer was converting into speech, translating the stimuli it was receiving into brain-recognizable sound, all the while thinking and reacting.

Adam had sight, as well, for whenever any of the four cameras mounted in the corners of the room to record everything that went on here was functioning, the images it recorded were converted by the Croyden into digital data, which Adam could interpret in his mind into images as sharp and clear as if his eyes were still intact.

Incredible! Engersol thought. The two most important senses, hearing and sight, still functioning perfectly, despite the loss of the external organs to support them.

Already Engersol was certain that he had been right. Since being removed from his skull, Adam’s brain had begun developing new ways to use the areas that were no longer needed to maintain his body.

He seemed to have reprogrammed parts of his autonomic nervous system so that the functions of hearing and sight were no longer something he had to think about. The data were simply collected from the Croyden, translated into the proper form, and sent to stimulate the optic and aural areas of Adam’s brain.*

To him, the sights and sounds he experienced must be as real as if he’d experienced them directly.

But what about Amy?

While the argument between Adam and Jeff went on, the computer recording every change within Adam’s brain as he
vacillated between grief for his parents and fury toward his brother, Engersol shifted his attention to the monitors attached to Amy Carlson’s brain.

There was activity—he could see it by the graphic displays of her brain waves. Since yesterday, however, she’d refused to respond to him at all, though he was certain she was aware that he wanted to communicate with her.

He’d decided now what he was going to do.

Adam had confirmed that she’d planted viruses in the Croyden, viruses that would be activated in the event the equipment monitoring her brain detected anything out of the ordinary.

Tampering with Amy’s brain, or disconnecting it from the system, would activate the viruses.

Adam had found hundreds of them already, but it had become clear late last night that there was no way for him to find all of them. While Amy could plant them anywhere—not just in the Croyden, but in any computer she could reach, which Adam confirmed included nearly every large computer in the world—Adam had to search every directory in every computer, one by one.

The task was impossible, for already it was far too late for him to catch up with Amy.

She had to be stopped, but until a few hours ago, it had appeared that the very act of stopping her would send the viruses into action, each of them activating more, until—

Engersol shuddered as he contemplated the possibility of every major computer in the country failing, or even simply being contaminated, at the same time.

The answer had come to him at two o’clock that morning, when he’d realized that the computer could be fooled.

A tape of Amy’s brain responses could be made, a tape mimicking all her normal functions and reactions.

A tape that could be looped to repeat itself endlessly, feeding the proper data into the computers, so that it would appear that Amy was still there, her brain still functioning normally.

And as the computer processed the recorded data, he would disconnect Amy’s brain from its support systems and destroy it.

Meanwhile Adam, working with the combined speed of his own mind and the Croyden computer, could begin searching the memory banks of every computer Amy Carlson might have contaminated.

And when it was over, when Adam confirmed that he’d found and destroyed every one of the viruses, Engersol would isolate the lab, cutting off the Croyden—and the project—from every outside source until he found a way to keep the minds of his children under control.

Though he hadn’t yet explained to Hildie Kramer the full ramifications of what Amy was doing, he himself was all too aware of what had happened.

He’d opened Pandora’s box, and the contents were rapidly spilling out.

“If we can stop her from creating new ones,” Adam had told him this morning, “I can get the triggering viruses in a few hours. Once they’re disarmed, the rest won’t matter. They can stay wherever they are, because they’ll never go off. And I can use Amy’s own data to find the triggers.”