Shadows

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. They don’t feel anything.”

“How do you know?” Amy challenged. “What if they hurt?”

“But they don’t,” Josh protested. “Dr. Engersol says—”

Amy’s sour look turned angry. “I don’t care what Dr. Engersol says. Everybody in the seminar acts as if he’s some kind of genius or something!”

“Well, he is!” Josh flared. “And if you had any brains—”

But once more Amy hadn’t let him finish. “I have as many brains as anybody else in that class,” she’d snapped. “And I won’t believe any old thing he tells me just because he says I should. Anyway, if he knows so much, how come he says everything we’re doing is experimental?”

Josh had decided there was no point in arguing with her. He dropped the subject. But now, as they mounted the steps to the building that housed the artificial intelligence lab, he gazed quizzically at her. “So what are you going to do? You can’t just quit.”

“Why not?” Amy asked. “Besides, Dr. Engersol wants me to be in some kind of experiment this afternoon, but he wouldn’t tell me what it is.”

Josh stopped short. “What kind of experiment?”

Amy’s eyes rolled impatiently. “Didn’t I just say he wouldn’t tell me? He only said it had to do with how people think. But if he won’t tell me what it is, how am I supposed to know if I want to do it?”

“Maybe that’s part of it,” Josh speculated. “Maybe if you know what it is beforehand, it does something to the results. You know, gives you too much time to think, or something.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Amy replied as she pulled the door open. “If he won’t tell me what it is, I don’t see why I should do it at all.”

They walked silently down the hall to the lab, where the rest of the class was already clustered around a cage. George Engersol peered up, fixing on them for a second, then glancing meaningfully toward the clock on the wall. “Congratulations,” he commented. “You made it with a full three seconds to spare. But since you did make it, why don’t you come over here so we can get started.”

Amy, stung by the director’s sarcastic tone, felt her eyes fill with tears, but managed to control them. Josh, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice the bite in Engersol’s words at all, for he had already joined the group around the lab table and was staring curiously at the animal in the cage.

It was a cat, and the fur was shaved off its head, which was bristling with tiny electrodes. The wires from the electrodes were bundled together and ran out through the bars of the cage to a computer.

The cage itself was divided into three sections, the largest of which held the cat. The other two, arranged side by side at one end of the cage, were separated from the cat by twin doors, each of which was triggered by a large colored button.

“The cat has already been conditioned,” Engersol explained. “A slight electrical charge can be transmitted through the floor of its cage. When the cat feels the charge, it can stop it by hitting either of the two buttons on the smaller compartments, which have also released a small quantity of food into the main cage.”

Amy, thinking of Tabby — who was even now curled up on the pillow on her bed — shuddered as she gazed at the grotesque-looking cat, its bald head sprouting a tangle of wires. It was prevented from pawing the wires away by a large, cone-shaped plastic collar around its neck. “It doesn’t look very happy,” she said, almost under her breath.

Engersol shrugged. “I don’t suppose it is. On the other hand, it’s not suffering at all, nor is the electrical charge enough to hurt it. It merely startles it into a conditioned response.”

“But where’s the food?” Jeff Aldrich asked, his eyes fixed on the empty spaces where the rewards for a proper response should have been.

Engersol smiled approvingly. “That,” he told the class, “is the whole point of today’s experiment. What we are going to do is offer the cat two negative experiences. Today, instead of releasing food and interrupting the electrical current, one of the buttons will trigger the snarl of a dog, while the other one will release a small amount of skunk musk. Neither of which,” he added, “is a cat’s favorite thing. Thus, the cat will have some choices to make. If it wants to stop the electrical charge, it must elect to face either the snarls of the dog or the smell of the skunk.”

Amy Carlson’s face set stubbornly. “I don’t think we ought to do it,” she said. “It’s cruel!”

Engersol offered her a reassuring smile. “The cat won’t be hurt, Amy. And since it’s being monitored by the computer, we should be able to find out a lot about the physical processes its brain goes through as it tries to come to a decision. It’s a Hobson’s choice experiment, in which any action results in a negative experience. Shall we begin?”

Without waiting for a reply from any of the kids, he threw a switch activating the electrical charge.

The cat’s body tensed, and it immediately reached out with a paw and took a swipe at the left hand button.

Instantly, a small speaker within the cage blared out the sound of a snarling dog.

Startled, the cat leaped back, and was once more subjected to the tingling of electricity. It reached out again, trying the other button.

Now, the area around the cage began to reek of skunk, causing the children to hold their noses, and the cat — only an inch from the nozzle spraying the redolent gas — to jerk reflexively back once again.

Amy, outraged by what she saw, grabbed her book bag from the table on which she’d dropped it only a few minutes earlier and started toward the door. “I’m leaving,” she said. “And I’m not coming back, either!”

Startled by her words, Josh turned away from the cage. “Come on, Amy, it’s not like we’re hurting it!”

“You are, too,” Amy insisted. “You’re torturing it, and I’m going to tell!”

A groan rose from the rest of the boys in the class. Amy turned scarlet, furious at what was being done to the hapless animal in the cage and at the reaction of her classmates as well. “I hate all of you!” she yelled. Then her right arm rose and she pointed an accusing finger at George Engersol. “You’re just as mean as they are!” Bursting into sobs, she fled from the room.

Josh started after her, but Engersol stopped him before he was halfway to the door. “Let her go,” the director of the Academy said. “It’s all right. Her reaction was a perfectly legitimate response to the experiment. And in a way, she’s right — what we’re doing isn’t very pleasant for the cat. It’s not suffering any long-term damage, at least not physically. But,” he went on, drawing the attention of the class back to the cage, “let’s take a look at what’s happening to its brain.”

Josh hesitated, torn between his urge to go after Amy and make sure she was all right, and his equally strong desire to watch the end of the experiment.

In the end, his curiosity won out. He rejoined the group of boys clustered around the lab table.

On the computer monitor the lines tracing the cat’s brain waves had gone crazy, jagging up and down in a chaotic pattern that clearly indicated its confusion.

And in the cage, the cat itself was frantically pacing back and forth, swiping first at one button, then at the other, each time shying instinctively away from the snarling dog or the odor of the skunk. In the end, it sank down, trembling, unable to continue its futile efforts to escape the unpleasant stimuli that seemed to come at it from nowhere.

At last Engersol switched off the electrical charge, and the cat, breathing hard, slowly began to settle down.

“As you can see,” Engersol told the seven boys gathered around the lab table, “the cat was unable to make a choice. Its intellectual limitations didn’t allow it to choose the lesser of two evils, tolerating either the snarling or the odor, rather than continuing to suffer the electrical shock. Instead, it simply oscillated back and forth, until finally it broke down.”

“Kind of like a computer going into a loop and crashing,” Jeff Aldrich observed.

Engersol nodded appreciatively. “Exactly. Which is the point of the whole experiment. Until we know the physical processes a brain goes through while making a choice between two negatives, we suspect that it will be impossible to program true artificial intelligence.”

“But what do we do now?” Josh asked, still uncertain exactly what they’d learned from the experiment, and with Amy’s words still fresh in his mind. If the experiment was over, it seemed to him that the torture of the cat had been pointless. All they’d seen was what the cat couldn’t do.

Engersol turned his approving gaze on Josh. “Now,” he said, “the real work begins. We’ve gathered a lot of data, which is stored in the computer. What we do next is begin analyzing that data. We’ll feed the recorded brain waves into the computer and have them analyzed, looking for patterns within what appears to be chaos.”

For the rest of the hour the boys tapped instructions into the computer, comparing the activities of each area of the cat’s brain to all the others. Within a few minutes Amy Carlson’s reaction to the experiment was all but forgotten.

Except by George Engersol.

For him, the experiment had gone off perfectly. Amy Carlson, for whose sole benefit the entire performance had been staged, had reacted exactly as he had hoped she would.

She was unhappy, and she was angry.

The pressure inside her was building.

Jeanette Aldrich stared glumly at her desk in the administrative office of the Barrington University psychology department and wondered if she really was ready to come back to work. The week she’d spent at home, with everything she saw or touched reminding her of Adam and tearing the scabs off the still bleeding wound of her grief, had done nothing to begin the healing process. Indeed, she had found that long days of inactivity only made the pain worse, for with nothing to fill her time, she had found herself doing nothing but dwelling on the loss of her son.

So this morning she had come back to the office, where things had not been much better. Everyone she met, it seemed, was treating her with kid gloves, either making no mention of Adam’s death at all or being oversolicitous to the point of making Jeanette feel like an invalid.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to help her.

Someone had made her a pot of coffee that morning, someone else had produced the morning doughnut from the student union.

Jennie Phelps, the teaching assistant who had filled in for Jeanette last week, had insisted on staying, at least for today.

And from almost everyone there had been the exact same words. Uttered in a hushed whisper, after the speaker had drawn Jeanette into a secluded corner, the question never varied. “How are you, Jeanette, really!”

As if each of them, through some mystic right Jeanette couldn’t comprehend, expected her to share her private grief, to admit to the speaker alone that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or felt like killing herself, or didn’t think she could survive Adam’s loss.

Each of which, at one moment or another, had been quite true, but none of which she felt was anyone’s business but hers and Chet’s. To each whispered inquiry, she’d replied with an answer as invariable as the question that was posed.

“Really, I’m fine. The best thing is for me to get back to work and start living my life again.”

The words, of course, were as empty as the way she felt, but they at least seemed to satisfy her interrogators, each of whom smiled with relief and assured her she was doing the right thing.

Now, with still an hour to go before lunch, she surveyed her cluttered desk, wondering what she could do to clear off the most clutter in the least amount of time.

Her eye fell instantly on a stack of half a dozen master’s theses that had trickled in over the summer, all of which were now waiting to be Xeroxed and distributed among their authors’ jurors.

Just the kind of idiot work she felt competent to do. And the steady, rhythmic sounds and motions of the copier had always been a soothing sensation to her, something she’d used to calm her nerves in the midst of hectic afternoons when students and professors seemed to come at her from every direction.

Scooping up the stack of theses, she retreated to the small room off her office where the copier stood waiting, its control panel glowing reassuringly.

Slipping the first thesis out of its ring binder, she dropped it into the feed tray, pushed the buttons that would order the machine to make and sort five copies of the document, and hit the start button.

The machine came to life, whisking the bottom sheet off the stack, feeding it onto the glass, then running five copies of it before spitting the paper back out again, now on top of the stack.

All Jeanette had to do was stand there, in the unlikely event that the machine chose to crush one of the originals or choke on a piece of copy paper.

The first thesis went through in five runs of thirty pages each, and when it was complete, Jeanette collated the stacks of copies, leaving them next to the binding machine, whose operation was another nearly mindless task that she thoroughly enjoyed.

And would save for after lunch.

She continued on through the stack, making five copies of each thesis, and eventually came to the next to the last one. As she set it on top of the copier in preparation for feeding it into the machine, her eyes fell on the title, and her breath caught:

The Gift of Death:

A Study of Suicide

Among Genius Children

Her hands trembling, she turned the title page and glanced at the précis of the thesis.

Her eyes swept over the words, which told her that the student who had authored the thesis had spent the last year carrying out research on the psychological evaluations of gifted children who had taken their own lives. The purpose of the thesis was to construct psychological profiles that could serve as an early warning system to identify suicide-prone children before it was too late.

Her hands trembling, Jeanette flipped quickly through the thesis.

She paused at a chapter heading halfway through:

Barrington Academy: Six Case Histories

As she began reading, she felt a chill in her blood. Was it really possible that six of the Academy’s students had killed themselves in the last five years?

Except that it wasn’t six.

It was seven now, for the research for the thesis had obviously been completed before Adam had died a little more than a week ago.

Jeanette stood quite still at the copier, a strange hollowness forming in her stomach.

She had to read the thesis, had to know what this graduate student had discovered, had to know whether, if she’d seen the thesis even two weeks ago, she might have saved her son.

And yet she couldn’t read it now, couldn’t even scan the chapters.

She waited until her hands steadied. When she had regained some semblance of calm, she began copying the thesis.

Instead of making the usual five copies, this time she made six.

One for each of the jurors on the student’s panel.

And one for herself. Though it violated the rules of the college, she would slip it into her purse and take it home with her that afternoon.

That night she would read it, and try to discover how the Academy could have lost so many students in so short a time.

Amy Carlson was sitting by herself at a corner table of the Academy’s dining room, facing the wall, struggling to force down her lunch. She’d ignored Josh MacCallum when he’d tried to coax her to sit at their regular table, refusing even to answer him as she walked past him with her tray gripped in her hands.

After she left the lab, she’d gone back to her room, slipping unnoticed into the house through the back door and scurrying up the stairs before Hildie Kramer or anyone else could spot her. Once in her room, she’d scooped Tabby up from her pillow, then flopped down on the bed, cradling the cat in her lap, petting it and talking to it as if by heaping affection on Tabby she could somehow make up for the pain that was being inflicted on the creature in the laboratory.

And there she’d stayed until lunchtime. skipping the rest of her morning classes.

But when noon came, she decided she’d better go down to the dining room, even though she didn’t feel like eating. Otherwise, someone — Josh, probably — would come looking for her, and she still didn’t want to talk to him, or anyone else.

So she’d gone down to the dining room, gotten her lunch, but ignored all the rest of the kids to sit by herself, facing the wall and staring at the uneaten food on her plate.

For the first time since she’d met Josh and decided to stay at the Academy, she wanted to go home, to go back to her own room in her own house, where her own cat was waiting for her.

Maybe this evening, after dinner, she’d call her mother and ask them to come and get her. Even going back to public school would be better than staying here, where they tortured little animals!

Amy felt a hand on her shoulder and jumped.

“Amy?” Hildie Kramer said. “What’s happened? Why are you sitting all by yourself?”

Amy stiffened. “I just want to.”

Hildie’s hand dropped away from Amy’s shoulder. For an instant the little girl thought the housemother might leave her alone.

Instead, Hildie sat down in the chair next to her.

“Well, I know something must be wrong,” Hildie said quietly, her voice soft enough so that no one but Amy could hear her. “Dr. Engersol wants to see you in his office before afternoon classes begin. And you didn’t go to any of your classes after the seminar, did you?”

Any licked her lower lip nervously and shook her head. “I–I didn’t stay in his class, either,” she admitted. “They were doing things to a kitty, and I left.”

“Oh, dear,” Hildie sighed. “So that’s why Dr. Engersol wants to see you, is it?”

“I guess.” Amy felt a flash of hope. “Is he going to send me home?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from sounding too eager.

Hildie chuckled. “Somehow I don’t think so. It’s not that easy to get expelled from the Academy. I suspect he just wants to explain what they were doing, and help you understand that the cat wasn’t really being hurt.”

“But it was!” Amy exclaimed, her indignation flooding back. “He was torturing it!”

Hildie’s brows rose. “Torturing it? I can’t believe Dr. Engersol would do something like that.”

“But it’s true!” Amy insisted. Doing her best not to exaggerate, she told Hildie about the experiment and what had happened to the cat. When she was done, Hildie’s expression was every bit as angry as her own.

“If that’s what happened,” she said, “I think it’s just as terrible as you do.”

“But it is what happened,” Amy cried. “Ask anyone, if you don’t believe me! Ask Josh! He saw it. All the boys did. But they didn’t care. They thought it was fun!”

Hildie shook her head sympathetically. “That’s boys for you. I’ll tell you what. I’ll go with you to talk to Dr. Engersol, and we’ll see what he has to say. And if he’s planning any more experiments like that, you and I will call the SPCA. We certainly won’t tolerate abuse of animals in our classes!”

Amy stared at the housemother. “You mean you didn’t know?” she asked.

“Of course not,” Hildie replied. “Now come on. Let’s the two of us go have a talk with Dr. Engersol.”

Her hand clutching the housemother’s, Amy left her untouched lunch where it was. Maybe, after all, things were going to be all right. She’d actually done what she’d said she was going to do, and told on Dr. Engersol, and instead of being mad at her, as she’d been expecting, Hildie was on her side!

But as they left the house and started toward Dr. Engersol’s office, another thought came into her mind.

With Hildie taking her side, wouldn’t Dr. Engersol be even madder at her than he already was?

When they reached his office, on the top floor of the building that housed the artificial intelligence laboratories, Dr. Engersol didn’t seem to be mad at her at all.

In fact, he appeared worried about her. He didn’t even seem angry when she told him she didn’t want to take the special seminar anymore.

“Everything we do seems like it’s being mean to the animals,” Amy said. “And I can’t even think about what we’re supposed to be doing. I just worry about the animals.”

“But, Amy,” George Engersol explained one more time. “We’re really not hurting them. Even the cat we were working with today is going to be just fine. In a month the fur on his head will be all grown out again and he’ll be just like he’s always been.”

Amy’s face set stubbornly. “It’s just not right to hurt poor little animals,” she declared. “And Hildie says I’m right.”

Engersol turned to his administrator. “Is that true?”

Hildie hesitated, then nodded. “I’m afraid it is, George. I had no idea you were wiring up cats in that seminar. You know how I feel about that kind of experimentation.” The two exchanged a long, probing look. “If it’s going to continue,” Hildie said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to resign.”

“And we’ll tell the SPCA on you, too,” Amy chimed in.

Engersol took a deep breath, then let it out. “Well, the two of you aren’t really leaving me much choice, are you? I don’t want to lose either one of you, and I suppose I can find other ways of teaching the class. So we won’t do any more animal experimentation. Agreed?”

Amy hesitated. “Then what will you do?”

Engersol smiled at her. “How’s this sound? Instead of trying to figure out how animals think, we’ll try to figure out how human beings think.”

“How?” Amy asked, her brows coming together suspiciously.

Now Engersol chuckled out loud. “I’ll tell you what. This afternoon, we’ll do the experiment I talked to you about last week, and then you’ll know.”

“But you didn’t tell me anything about it,” Amy protested.

“And I’m still not going to,” Engersol replied. “If I did, it wouldn’t be valid anymore. But I’ll promise you this. I won’t ask you to do anything you don’t want to do, and you can stop the experiment anytime you want. And we’ll have Hildie there, just to make sure no one tries to talk you into anything. Okay?”

Amy’s mind worked rapidly, searching for a trap. But if Hildie, who was on her side, were there, how could there be a trap? Finally she nodded. “All right. But I won’t do anything I don’t want to do!”

“And I won’t ask you to,” Engersol repeated.

A few minutes later Amy left the director’s office, once again unaware that she had been manipulated into doing exactly what George Engersol wanted her to do.

“What happened this morning?” Engersol asked when he was alone in his office with Hildie Kramer.

Hildie smiled, but without the warmth she always managed to summon up for the children. “She spent it alone in her room, and when she came down, she wouldn’t even talk to any of the other kids. Not even Josh MacCallum.”

Engersol nodded with satisfaction. “Then the last thing any of them remember is that she was very angry, and very upset?”

“And withdrawn,” Hildie added.

“Perfect,” Engersol murmured. “Just like Adam Aldrich.”