As the operator at the other end listened incredulously, Josh blurted out his story.
• • •
Jeff Aldrich stared at the image on the monitor over the tank. The face that was etched there no longer looked like the brother he remembered, the soft-eyed boy who would do anything he was told. Was this really Adam?
His eyes moved to the mass of tissue within the tank itself.
A brain.
That’s all his brother was now. Just a lump of gray tissue in a tank of nutrient solution. Not a person.
Not a person at all.
And that’s what he would have become, too, if he’d been the one to go first
Adam had gone crazy, just like Amy had.
“You can’t do anything to us,” Jeff said, his voice etched with contempt. “You’re dead, remember? All that’s left of you is a piece of tissue in a tank!”
Adam’s rage congealed into hatred as he heard his brother’s words. Finally, he understood Jeff. Jeff didn’t care about him — had never cared about him. Any more than he’d cared about their parents. “You thought I was going to die, didn’t you, Jeff? You thought I’d die, and Dr. Engersol would figure out what had gone wrong, so when you went, you’d survive. That’s why you killed Mom and Dad, isn’t it? So you could come back and go into the tank, too?”
Jeff’s lips twisted into a sneer. “And wind up like you? Man, you are nuts! Who’d want to be where you are?” He turned and started out of the lab.
“You can’t leave,” Adam said.
Jeff stopped, turning around. “Yeah? Who’s going to stop me?”
He turned away again, starting once more toward the elevator, when he felt George Engersol’s hand on his shoulder. “No! That’s what he wants us to do. Hell do to us what Amy did to Hildie. Come on!”
Pulling Jeff with him, Engersol started back toward the lab.
He paused as he heard a sound from one of the other rooms.
The sound of a generator starting up.
Dropping Jeff’s arm, he punched his code into the security pad on one of the doors.
Nothing happened. Instantly he realized that Adam had used the computer to change the codes, locking him out.
He peered through the small glass window set at eye level in the door.
Inside, he could see that the emergency generator, which he himself had caused to be installed down here to keep the computers and life supports functioning in case of a power outage, was now running.
But why? What could Adam hope to accomplish?
Then he thought he understood. If the police were coming, and discovered what was happening down here, they might cut off the power to the building. Without the generator, Adam would die.
He moved on into the lab.
“It won’t work, Adam,” he said. “Sooner or later, they’ll find you.”
“It’s not for me,” Adam said. In startling contrast to the fury of only a moment ago, his voice was now placid. “It’s for you. Don’t you smell anything?”
Engersol frowned, then sniffed at the air.
Exhaust! But that was impossible — the generator room had its own ventilating system, automatically controlled.
“I’ve been experimenting with the ducts,” Adam explained in the same conversational tone he’d used a moment ago. “It wasn’t very hard, really. All I had to do was close two of them, and open two others.”
Engersol stared at the image of the boy above the tank. Behind him, Jeff Aldrich was already coughing and choking, and Engersol, too, was starting to feel the effects of the carbon monoxide that was quickly replacing the oxygen in the room.
Grabbing Jeff’s arm again, he ran back toward the elevator, but before he was halfway there, the doors slid closed, and didn’t respond as he frantically pressed the button next to them.
“No!” he bellowed. “You can’t do this to me!” Dropping Jeff’s arm, he lurched back to the lab, fury — and panic-building inside him. He tried to hold his breath, refusing to inhale any more of the deadly fumes. Eyes darting frantically about, his mind working furiously, he tried to think of some means of escape, sickened with the realization that these rooms, for so long his favorite retreat, had suddenly become his execution chamber.
Reason!
He had to reason with Adam!
He glowered at the image of the boy, who seemed to be watching him, a look of contempt in his eyes. “No!” he gasped, his carefully controlled breath bursting from his lungs in a rush. “Don’t you understand? What you are is what I made you! You belong to me!”
“I don’t,” Adam said quietly. “I don’t belong to anybody. Not any more. Not after what you and Jeff have done. Now I can do anything I want to do.”
Engersol lurched backward, his lungs filling once more with the poisonous gas. A wave of dizziness washed over him as the carbon monoxide seeped inexorably into his brain, and he began feeling the will to fight slip away from him as the first drowsiness of impending death enfolded him in its arms.
He stumbled against the desk, then turned.
He saw the monitor that had refused to obey him when he’d tried to turn off the life support system. Battling against the specter of death that now loomed uppermost in his fading consciousness, Engersol marshaled his fury for one last attempt to save himself. A hot surge of adrenaline flowed through him, and with the strength the chemical lent his failing body, he picked up the monitor, jerking it free of the wires that connected it to the keyboard. Turning, he hurled it at the tank that contained Adam Aldrich’s brain.
“No!” Adam screamed over the speaker a split second before the glass of his tank shattered.
As George Engersol collapsed to the floor, nearly overcome by the carbon monoxide that was at last overwhelming his system, the nutrients gushed out of Adam’s tank. His brain, no longer floating in its supportive milieu, moved with the rushing fluid, rolling out of the tank, a shard of glass slicing deep into its cortex.
As it dropped to the floor, the leads connecting it to the computer were ripped away.
But it didn’t matter, for the instant that razor-sharp spear of broken glass had slashed through the brain that was his entire existence, Adam Aldrich died.
Died, just as Timmy Evans had died a year ago. Timmy Evans, as far as George Engersol knew, had never regained consciousness at all. Adam, at least, had awakened, his brain still functioning in the tank, proving that despite all his failures, in the end Engersol had been proved right.
Right — and even more brilliant than the children he taught.
But now it was over, not only for Adam Aldrich, but for George Engersol himself. Gasping for breath, his vision fading, the last image George Engersol fixed on before he died was the tank Adam had lived in, now as shattered as Engersol’s own dream.
A moment later, Jeff, who had watched Adam’s death with no emotion whatsoever, also collapsed to the floor.
Except for the throbbing of the generator, the laboratory was silent.
30
Alan Dover had been on his way back from the Aldriches’ house to the police department when the call had come through diverting him up to the Academy adjoining the university grounds. What the dispatcher had told him sounded crazy — Adam Aldrich and Amy Carlson still alive? Impossible. Dover had seen their bodies himself.
Still, though he was sure it was a crank call, maybe one of those Academy kids pulling off a weird practical joke, he wanted to talk to Jeff Aldrich anyway. He’d found some papers hidden in the boy’s room. Though he couldn’t read them very well, they were clearly electronics diagrams for the same model car the boy’s parents had died in that morning. Was it possible that the boy had actually killed his own parents? Of course, he knew it was possible — younger children than Jeff Aldrich had committed such crimes. Dover shook his head as he pulled up in front of the Academy, wondering once more at the kind of world that could produce such kids.