mouth opened then, a scream of terror bursting from his throat as he stumbled backward out into the corridor.
From up and down the hall he heard the sound of laughter. Instantly every door was thrown open. From inside his room another peal of laughter sounded, and then the grisly figure of Adam appeared at the door. Except that it was no longer Adam.
It was Jeff, his eyes sparkling with delight as he reveled in the fear on Josh’s face.
“I’m baa-aack!” he sang out. “I’m back, and I got you!”
For just a second a wave of anger swept over Josh, but then, as quickly as it came, it ebbed away, and Josh, too, joined in the laughter.
Later that night, though, as he lay in bed remembering the joke that had been played on him, he began to wonder.
How could Jeff have done it, so soon after his brother’s funeral?
Didn’t he miss Adam at all?
And then he remembered Jeff’s words, spoken only yesterday afternoon.
Maybe you’re right … maybe he isn’t dead at all … maybe he’ll come back some night, and tell you what really happened.
When the sun finally came up the next morning, Josh had barely slept at all.
15
“What’s wrong?” Josh asked Amy Carlson. It was a Monday morning, and the two of them were on their way to the artificial intelligence seminar. There was an autumn briskness in the air, presaging the end of summer. Only this morning Amy had been talking about how much she loved it when the leaves on the trees started changing colors and the weather turned cool, but now she was just trudging along, her head down, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead of her.
“Nothing, I guess,” she said a moment later when Josh’s question finally penetrated her reverie. “I guess I just don’t like the seminar very much, that’s all.”
“But it’s neat,” Josh replied. For the last week most of their time had been spent in the lab, working with rats and mice, as Dr. Engersol taught them the rudiments of how intelligence worked. They’d spent most of the time working with the rats, setting up mazes and baiting the small animals to work their way through them with rewards of food. Josh had found the experiments fascinating, and it had quickly become obvious that some of the rats learned more readily than others.
Some of them would master the original route relatively quickly, but when the maze was changed, would merely follow the single path they’d learned until they came to a dead end, where they would come to a standstill, sniffing at the new wall in frustration, scratching at it as they tried vainly to make their way through.
Others, though, would waste a little time at the unfamiliar obstacles, but then go on, moving through the maze along new routes, using their noses to guide them closer to the food. Even most of these, however, would eventually come to a halt, unwilling to move away from the food to explore new possibilities.
One or two of them—the brightest ones—quickly caught on to the maze and stopped wasting time altogether, turning away immediately from a newly blocked passage to follow new paths, never giving up until they finally came to the food.
“It’s the difference between intelligence and conditioned response,” Engersol had explained. “Essentially, the stupidest rats simply respond to the smell of food, proceeding directly toward it along the single path they know. Others won’t retreat from the scent, even if it means not getting to the source. But a few of them seem to have figured out that there is a route through, and if they can find it, they’ll be rewarded.”
The next day they’d attached electrodes to the brains of three of the rats, and been able to watch their brain activity as they passed through the mazes and dealt with the changes in the twisting pathways.
While the boys in the class had remained glued to their computer screens, talking excitedly as they spotted the changes in the rats’ brain-wave patterns, Amy had grown quieter and quieter.
At the end of the hour, as she and Josh had left the building and started toward their next class, she’d made a sour face. “I think it’s mean.”
“What is?” Josh had asked.
“Treating the rats that way. Sticking those electrodes in their heads and making them run through the mazes.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Josh asked. “If we don’t do experiments, we can’t learn anything. Besides, the rats don’t even know what’s happening to them.