As had happened all their lives, Adam finally agreed to do what Jeff wanted him to do. Now, the project was working.
Except that Adam hadn’t been able to resist telling their mother he was still alive.
And for what? It wasn’t as if their parents had believed Adam! Well, his mother almost had, until his father had talked her out of it So now he, Jeff, was out of school and on his way home, and it was all Adam’s fault!
And how was he going to get out of it without giving away the whole thing?
That was when the idea had begun to take form in his mind.
It had developed slowly at first, until the middle of the afternoon, when his father had called him for the fifth time, just to make sure he was still in the house, and his eyes had happened to fall on the calendar his mother always kept on the kitchen counter next to the phone.
They had a date the next morning.
Tennis, it said. Brodys—6:00 A.M.
He’d stared at the entry while his father talked, listing once again the terms of his grounding. When his father finally ran out of steam, Jeff had asked, “What about tomorrow morning? Can I go play tennis with you?”
There had been a silence at the other end of the line, and then his father’s angry voice had come through loud and clear. “Going up to Stratford to play tennis on a private court doesn’t seem to me like it would fit in with a loss of privileges!”
“Jeez, Dad, I was just asking,” Jeff protested. When his father had finally hung up, the idea that had been simmering in the back of Jeff’s mind began to take shape. He went to the den and switched on his father’s Macintosh.
A minute later he was connected to Adam, his fingers flying as he typed in what he wanted his brother to do.
“Why?” Adam asked. “What are you going to do?”
“It’s a joke,” Jeff typed. “I’m going to play it on Mom and Dad.”
“It’s dangerous,” Adam shot back. “You could hurt them.”
“I’m not going to hurt them. I’m just going to scare them.”
When Adam made no reply, Jeff typed another message:
IF YOU DONT DO WHAT I WANT, I’LL TELL DR. E.
A few seconds went by, and Jeff wondered what had happened. Had Adam decided to ignore him? Or was he just trying to make up his mind? Just as he was about to type in another question, the printer next to the computer beeped softly.
Several seconds later a sheet of paper came out, followed by two more.
Jeff snatched them out of the printer, studied them, then typed a question into the computer.
WHERE DID YOU GET THESE?
A second later the answer appeared:
A COMPUTER IN WEST VIRGINIA. THAT’S WHERE THEY MAKE THE PART.
Jeff typed back:
CAN I DO WHAT I WANT?
Instantly, the reply appeared:
YES. BUT YOU NEED SOME THINGS.
The printer beeped again, and a few seconds later one more sheet of paper appeared, this one bearing a short list of parts.
Turning off the computer, Jeff took the first three sheets Adam had sent through the printer up to his room and hid them under the mattress of his bed.
Then, ignoring his father’s proscription against leaving the house, he went down to the village, where a branch of Radio Shack had opened last year.
The bill for the parts came to thirty-five dollars, which he paid for out of the fifty-dollar bill he’d taken from the small cache of emergency money his mother kept hidden in the bottom of the cedar chest at the foot of his parents’ bed.
The chance of her missing it this evening wasn’t big enough to worry about.
By tomorrow morning it wouldn’t matter at all.
Josh MacCallum sat by himself in the dining room that evening, nodding to everyone who spoke to him, but not asking anyone to sit with him, nor accepting Brad Hinshaw’s suggestion that he bring his tray to a table where two other kids were already eating.
Tonight he didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to answer any more questions about what it had been like to find Amy’s body, didn’t want to listen to all the other kids talk about how Steve Conners might have killed her.
Tonight he wanted to be by himself, for all day long he’d been trying to figure out what he should do. Though he’d tried to concentrate on his classes, it hadn’t worked. No matter how hard he tried to pay attention to what his teachers were saying, all he could think about was what had happened yesterday to Amy.
And what had happened to himself last night, when he’d put on the virtual reality mask and Adam Aldrich had suddenly appeared.
He’d been puzzling at it all day, trying to decide if what he had seen had been real or only some kind of computer trick; some kind of interactive program that was so complex it could respond to whatever he said.
But if the program was so good that he actually believed he was seeing Adam, and talking to him, then it was intelligent, wasn’t it? That was one of the tests of artificial intelligence. Yet Dr. Engersol had told them it didn’t exist, and never would. Besides, if what he’d seen was a program, how could he explain what had happened right at the end, when he’d heard Amy’s voice, calling out for help?
Then this morning Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich had come to the school and taken Jeff home. Josh had known right away that Jeff’s sudden departure had something to do with Adam. It had happened right at the beginning of first period, while they were waiting for Dr. Engersol, and when Hildie had told them the seminar wouldn’t be meeting that morning, and then taken Jeff upstairs to Dr. Engersol’s office, he’d been sure he knew what had happened.
Mrs. Aldrich must have gotten another message from Adam, and they’d blamed it on Jeff.
So now he didn’t even have Jeff to talk to about the confusion in his mind.
None of it made any sense, and it seemed as though the more he thought about it, the more confusing it got.
Except that if he assumed that what he’d seen last night was real, then it all fit together. And it meant that somewhere close by, Adam and Amy were still alive, their brains still working, even though their bodies were dead.
But where? Where was the computer Adam said he was inside?
And what would happen to him, Josh wondered, if he found out? Whatever was going on, it must be really secret if they wanted everyone to think that Adam and Amy were dead! And if he got caught trying to figure out the secret …
Maybe he should call his mother and tell her he wanted to come home.
But she’d want to know why.
What would she say if he told her that Adam and Amy weren’t dead at all, but were hidden away somewhere, inside a computer?
She’d say he was crazy and send him to see a psychiatrist.
Besides, he didn’t really want to go back to Eden, and have to sit in boring classes with kids who didn’t like him. And he certainly wanted to find out what had happened to Amy. If they’d done something to her, he wanted to find out who had done it, and make them sorry.
Finishing his dinner, Josh picked up his tray full of dirty dishes and took it to the butler’s pantry between the dining room and the kitchen.
His eyes fastened on the door to the basement, and he shivered as he remembered what had happened down there the night before last.
Remembered, and wondered.
In his mind’s eye he saw once more the mass of concrete that had looked like an elevator shaft, and heard once more the sound that seemed to pass right by him in the shaft and continue downward.