of focusing on the computer monitor, for as soon as he’d seen the dangling knotted rope and the diving board, he’d understood exactly what she was going through.
How could Dr. Engersol have done it to her? Didn’t he know how frightened she was of heights?
And then Josh understood. It was exactly the point of the experiment—to see how Amy would react when she had to choose between two things that terrified her.
But it was mean. Even meaner than what had been done to the cat this morning. In fact, when Amy had left the classroom, Josh hadn’t really understood what she was so mad about. After all, the cat hadn’t been in any pain. Dr. Engersol had told them so, hadn’t he?
But Dr. Engersol had told Amy she wouldn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to, either. And then he’d not only scared her to death, but humiliated her in front of all her friends, too.
Maybe he could catch up with her outside the gym, when she came out of the locker room. He moved away from the group gathered around the computer monitor, but Dr. Engersol, as if understanding what he was going to do, stopped him.
“Let Hildie take care of Amy, Josh,” he said. “She’ll be all right—she just needs a few minutes to calm down.”
“But she’s crying—”Josh objected.
“Yes, she is,” Engersol agreed, his voice carrying no more emotion than if he’d been commenting on one of the graphs displayed on the monitor. “It was a perfectly predictable response to the experiment. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t. In fact, if you’ll take a look at this, you can see exactly when the crying response began.”
Josh hesitated, torn by his urge to go after his friend and tell her everything was going to be all right, that nobody was going to call her chicken, and his equally strong desire to join the rest of his class around the monitor and see exactly what Amy had gone through. Only when Hildie Kramer started toward the locker room did he make up his mind. Amy liked Hildie, and the housemother would know what to say to her better than he would. His mind still half on Amy, he slipped in next to Jeff Aldrich and gazed raptly at the screen while Dr. Engersol explained what the graphs meant.
“You can see it all right here,” the Academy’s director told them. “Here her respirations became irregular, and these peaks represent constrictions of her throat. And here’s her heartbeat, increasing and growing slightly irregular, too, when she first understood the choice she had to make.” His fingers tapped rapidly at the keyboard, and the display on the monitor changed. “I want you to pay close attention to this. These are her brain waves, and though they don’t look much different from those of the cat this morning, I think we’ll find a lot of differences when we analyze them. The cat, you see, was responding much more to instinctive behavior and conditioned response, while Amy was trying to make an intellectual decision.”
Engersol’s analysis of what had happened inside Amy’s brain went on, and the graphic displays on the monitor kept changing. Soon Josh was caught up along with the rest of his classmates in the digitized display of the myriad processes that Amy’s body, as well as her mind, had gone through during the few short minutes the experiment had lasted.
“For the rest of the week,” Engersol finished half an hour later, “we’ll continue working with this data, and by Friday we should have a pretty good understanding of just exactly what parts of Amy’s brain came into play during the experiment, and what processes they went through.”
“But what about Amy?” Josh asked when Engersol was finally finished. “What about how she feels?”
Engersol’s eyes fixed on Josh, and there was an emptiness in them that sent a chill down the boy’s spine. “I’m sure she’s just fine,” he said. “After all, we didn’t hurt her, did we?”
As the rest of the class started out of the pool area, still buzzing amongst themselves about the results of the experiment, Josh stayed where he was, staring at the display on the computer monitor.
It was nothing but a series of zigzag lines crossing and recrossing each other, showing what had happened inside Amy’s brain.
But it didn’t show anything about what had happened to Amy herself, Josh thought. Hadn’t anyone else seen the look on her face? Hadn’t they seen how scared she was, not only