At last he made up his mind.
He went to the room next door, unlocked the drug cabinet and took out a vial of sodium Pentothal. Returning to the lab, he attached the vial to the artificial circulatory system that kept Amy’s brain supplied with blood, and opened a valve a fraction of a turn.
The drug would begin entering Amy’s brain in such minute amounts that she would never notice what was happening to her until it was too late.
Instantly, Amy’s voice filled the room.
“Turn it off!”
Engersol froze. How could she have known already? The Pentothal couldn’t have reached her brain yet.
As if she knew what he was thinking, Amy spoke again.
“I’m monitoring all my support systems, Dr. Engersol. I know what you’re doing. You’re adding Pentothal to my blood supply. Turn it off.”
Engersol stepped back and gazed at the monitor above Amy’s tank. She was there now, her eyes angry, her lips pressed together.
“I just told you, Amy. There’s nothing you can do. I’ve decided to put you to sleep.”
“Don’t,” Amy told him. “I’m busy, and I don’t want you to bother me. I don’t like you, and I don’t want to talk to you anymore! And if you don’t turn off the drug, I’m not going to just wreck your project. I’m going to wreck everything!”
Engersol hesitated. Wreck everything? What was she talking about?
Again, it was as if she knew what he was thinking. “I can do it, too. I can get into any computer anywhere. And if I can get into them, I can do anything I want with them. I won’t hurt anyone if you just leave me alone.”
Engersol hesitated, his mind racing. What was she doing? And what could she do before the drug took effect and she went to sleep?
He realized he didn’t know.
Nor, he suddenly knew, did he want to find out.
If it was true that she could reach into any computer anywhere — and he only now realized that it undoubtedly was true, given the sophistication of the Croyden’s communication systems — the damage she could cause was incalculable.
He turned the valve off and removed the vial from the circulatory apparatus.
“Thank you,” Amy said, instantly analyzing the change in the blood supply. “I really don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want you to leave me alone.”
“But why, Amy?” George Engersol asked. “What are you doing?”
On the monitor above her tank, Amy’s image smiled enigmatically. “I’m working on a project,” she said. “A project of my own.”
The speakers fell silent. Amy’s image disappeared.
25
Jeff 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.”