Again there was a silence, but this time it only lasted for a few seconds. The screen above Amy’s monitor came to life, and a list of file names began scrolling up the screen, moving so quickly that neither Engersol nor Hildie Kramer could read them.
“Do you know what these are?” Amy’s voice asked from the speaker. Her voice had now taken on the same faintly patronizing tone and rhythm that Engersol had used only a moment ago when he’d threatened to kill her. “These are all your programs, Dr. Engersol. All the programs that make this project work. If I die, all these programs are going to be erased. Do you know what will happen then, Dr. Engersol? Adam will die, too, and everything will be wrecked.”
“It won’t work that way, Amy,” he said. “All you’ll do is kill Adam. But the files can be restored, and the program will go on.”
The screen above Amy’s tank suddenly went blank. A moment later a new image appeared.
An image of Amy, but it was no longer shimmering, no longer swimming on the screen. Now it was sharp and clear, and Amy’s eyes seemed to focus directly on George Engersol.
“You shouldn’t have done this to me, Dr. Engersol,” she said, her voice crackling over the speaker. “I told you I didn’t want to be part of your class anymore. But you wouldn’t let me go. You should have, though, because all you’ve done by putting me here is make me smarter than I ever was before.” She paused, the image on the screen changing to reflect the anger in her mind. Her eyes narrowed and her demeanor hardened. “I’m smarter than you are, Dr. Engersol. And I’ve learned how to use the computer. So don’t try to do anything to me, because you don’t know what will happen if I die.”
Engersol was perfectly still for a moment, then quickly typed a command into the computer, turning off the sound system. He turned to Hildie Kramer. “Well?”
Hildie’s eyes flicked to the monitor, where Amy’s image still covered the screen, looking down upon them as if she were watching every move they made. “Can she hear us?”
Engersol shook his head. “I’ve deactivated the microphone.”
“Can she actually do what she threatened to do?”
“I’m not sure,” Engersol admitted, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what Amy Carlson’s mind might be capable of. “I suppose it might be possible, but—”
Without warning, the speaker in the ceiling came alive again, and Amy’s voice filled the room.
“It is possible,” she said. “I can do anything I want to do.”
George Engersol and Hildie Kramer stared at each other as both of them realized what had happened.
Amy Carlson, acting only with the power of her mind and the computer to which it was wired, had reactivated the microphone.
She was listening to them.
At one-thirty in the morning Jeanette Aldrich sat numbly on the sofa in the den. On the television an old movie was playing on the university’s cable channel, but Jeanette was paying no attention to it.
The chaos of the day still threatened to overwhelm her. Her first instinct when she’d heard about Amy Carlson’s death was to withdraw Jeff from the Academy immediately.
That instinct, of course, had been based on her instant assumption that Amy had committed suicide. When she learned the truth—or at least what bits and pieces of the truth the police knew—she had decided to wait, at least until she learned exactly what had happened to Amy.
Besides, Jeff’s words that morning had kept echoing in her mind.
If you make me leave the Academy, I’ll do what Adam did!
When he’d uttered them, his face twisted with anger and his fists clenched as if he was about to hit her, the words had slammed into her mind like bullets into her body, searing her, shocking her so deeply she hadn’t been able to return to work at all. Instead she’d come home, sitting alone in this very room, staring out the window, wondering how it had happened that one of her children had died and the other one seemed to have slipped totally beyond her control.
Would he really do it?
At last she’d dug the thesis she’d copied the day before out of the depths of her bag and begun searching its pages for clues. As she read the case histories of the children who had killed themselves at the