“Take a look. You don’t remember it at all?”
Alex gazed at the crude construction. “Should I?”
“You built it,” Landry said. “Last year. It was your project, and you finished it just before the accident.”
Alex walked over to examine the plywood construction. It was a simple maze, but apparently he’d made each piece separately, so that the maze could be easily and quickly changed into a myriad of different patterns. “What was I doing?”
“Figure it out,” Landry challenged. “From what Eisenberg tells me, it shouldn’t take you more than a minute.”
Alex glanced at his watch, then went back to the box. At one end was a runway leading to a cage containing three rats, and at the other was a food dispenser. Built into the front of the box was a timer. Forty-five seconds later, Alex nodded. “It must have been a retraining project. I must have wanted to be able to time the rate at which the rats learned each new configuration of the maze. But it looks pretty simpleminded.”
“That’s not what you thought last year. You thought it was pretty sophisticated.”
Alex shrugged disinterestedly, then lifted the gate that allowed the rats to run into the maze. One by one, with no mistakes, they made their way directly to the food and began eating. “How come it’s still here?”
Landry shrugged. “I guess I just thought you might want it. And since I was teaching summer school this year, it wasn’t any trouble to keep it.”
It was then, as he watched the rats, that the idea suddenly came into Alex’s mind. “What about the rats?” he asked. “Are they mine too?”
When Landry nodded, Alex removed the glass and picked up one of the large white rats. It wriggled for a moment, then relaxed when Alex put it back in its cage. A minute later, the other two had joined the first. “Can I take them home?” Alex asked.
“Just the rats? What about the box?”
“I don’t need it,” Alex replied. “It doesn’t look like it’s worth anything. But I’ll take the rats home.”
Landry hesitated. “Mind telling me why?”
“I have an idea,” Alex said. “I want to try an experiment with them, that’s all.”
There was something in Alex’s tone that struck Landry as strange, and then he realized what it was. There was nothing about Alex of his former openness and eagerness to please. Now he was cold, and, though he hated to use the word, arrogant.
“It’s fine with me,” he finally said. “Like I said, they’re your rats. But if you don’t want the box, leave it there. You may think it’s pretty simpleminded—which, incidentally, it is—but it still demonstrates a few things. I’ve been using it for my class.” He grinned. “And I’ve also been telling my kids that this project would have earned the brilliant Alex Lonsdale a genuine C-minus. Even last year, you could have done better work than that, Alex.”
“Maybe so,” Alex replied, picking up the rat cage and heading toward the door. “And maybe I would have, if you’d been a better teacher.”
Then he was gone, and Paul Landry was left alone, trying to reconcile the Alex he’d just talked to with the Alex he’d known the year before. He couldn’t, for there was simply no comparison. The Alex he’d known last year had disappeared without a trace. In his place was someone else, and Landry was grateful that whoever he was, he wasn’t in his class this year. Before he left that day, he took Alex’s project and threw it into the dumpster.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The kitchen door slammed, and despite herself, Ellen jumped. “Alex?” she called. “Is that you? Do you know what time it—” And then, as Alex came into the living room, she fell silent, her eyes fixed on the cage he held in his right hand. “What on earth have you got there?”
“Rats,” Alex told her. “The ones from my science project last year. Mr. Landry still had them.”
Ellen eyed the little creatures with revulsion. “You’re not going to keep them, are you?”
“I’ve figured out an experiment,” Alex told her. “They’ll be gone in a couple of days.”
“Good. Now, let’s go, or we’ll be late. In fact,” she added, her eyes moving to the clock, “we already are. And you know how Dr. Torres feels about punctuality.”
Alex started toward the stairs. “Dad and I aren’t sure I ought to keep going to Dr. Torres.”
Ellen, in the midst of struggling into a light coat, froze. “Alex, what are you talking about?”
Alex’s face remained impassive as he regarded her. “Dad and I had a talk last night, and we think maybe something’s wrong with me.”
“I don’t understand,” Ellen breathed, although she was afraid she understood all too well. She and Marsh had barely spoken to each other this morning, and today he had, for the first time in her memory, failed to call her even once. And now, apparently, he was going to use Alex as a pawn in their battle. Except that she wasn’t going to tolerate it, particularly when she knew that in the end, the loser would not be her, but Alex himself.
“I’ve been doing some reading,” she heard Alex saying.
“Stop!” Ellen said, her voice sharper than she’d intended. “I don’t care what you’ve been reading, and I don’t care what your father and you have decided. You’re still a patient of Raymond Torres’s, and you have an appointment for this afternoon, which you’re going to keep, whether you want to or not.”
Alex hesitated only a split second before he nodded. “Can I at least take this up to my room?” he asked, raising the cage.
“No. Leave it outside on the patio.”
As they drove down to Palo Alto, neither of them spoke.
“I thought your husband was coming today, Ellen.” Raymond Torres remained seated behind his desk, but gestured to the two chairs that Ellen and Alex normally occupied.
“He’s not,” Ellen replied. “And I think we’d better talk about it.” Her eyes shifted slightly toward Alex. Torres immediately picked up her message.
“I don’t think the lab’s quite ready for you yet,” he told Alex. “Why don’t you wait in Peter’s office while he sets up?”
Wordlessly Alex left Torres’s office, and when he was gone, Ellen finally sat down and began telling the doctor what had happened between herself and her husband the night before. “And now,” she finished, “he’s apparently convinced Alex that something’s wrong, too.”
Torres’s fingers drummed on the desktop for a moment, then began the elaborate ritual of packing and lighting his pipe. Only when the first thick cloud of smoke had begun drifting toward the ceiling did he speak.
“The problem, of course, is that he’s right,” he finally observed. “In fact, today I was going to tell him that I want to check Alex back into the Institute.”
Ellen suddenly felt numb. “What … what do you mean?” she stammered. “I thought … well, I thought everything was going very well.”
“Of course you would,” Torres said. “And for the most part, it is. But there’s something going on that I don’t quite understand.” His head turned slightly, and his gaze fixed on Ellen. “So Alex will come back here until I know what’s happening, and have decided what to do about it.”
Ellen closed her eyes for a moment, as if by the action she could shut out the thoughts that were suddenly crowding in on her. How could she handle Marsh now? If she left Alex at the Institute, as she knew Raymond was going to insist upon, what could she say to Marsh? That he’d been right, that something was, indeed, wrong with Alex, and that she’d left him with a doctor who had apparently made a mistake? But then she realized that that wasn’t what Torres had said. All he’d said was that something was wrong.
“Can you tell me just exactly what’s wrong?” she asked, unable to control the trembling in her voice.
“Nothing too serious,” Torres assured her, his voice soothing while his eyes remained locked to hers. “In fact, perhaps nothing at all. But until I know just what it is, I’ll want Alex here.”
Ellen found herself nervously twisti
ng her wedding ring, knowing that if he insisted, she would inevitably give in. “I don’t know if Alex will agree to that,” she said so softly the words were almost whispered.
“But Alex doesn’t have anything to say about it, does he?” Torres pointed out. “Nor, for that matter, does your husband.” Then, when Ellen still hesitated, he spoke once more. “Ellen, you know that what I’m doing is in Alex’s best interests.”
Ellen hesitated only slightly before nodding. “But can’t it wait a day?” she pleaded. “Can’t I at least have a day to try to convince Marsh? If I go home without Alex this afternoon, I hate even to think what he might do.”
Raymond Torres turned it over in his mind, briefly reviewing once again what his lawyer had told him only that morning: “Yes, in the long run the release will probably hold up. But don’t forget that Marshall Lonsdale is not only the boy’s father, but a doctor as well. He’ll be able to get an injunction, and keep the boy until the issue is decided in the courts. And by then, it’ll be too late. I know you hate it, Raymond, but in this instance, I suggest you try to negotiate. If you don’t try to take the boy, perhaps they’ll give him to you.”
“All right,” he said. “For today, I’ll just take some tests, but tomorrow I want you to bring Alex back. You have twenty-four hours to convince your husband.”
Alex had been in Peter Bloch’s office next door to the test lab for almost five minutes before he saw the stack of orders on the technician’s desk.
On the top of the stack, he found Torres’s neatly typed orders relating to himself. He scanned the single page, trying to translate the various abbreviations in his mind, but none of it meant anything to him.
And then his eyes fell onto a line near the bottom of the page: “Anesthesia: SPTL.”
He stared at the four letters for several seconds, then his eyes moved to the old IBM Selectric II that sat on the desk’s return. The idea formed in his head instantly, and almost as quickly, he made up his mind. He inserted the page into the carriage, and carefully lined up the letters with the red guidemarks on the cardholder. Thirty seconds later he was finished, and the line near the bottom of the page was changed.
“Anesthesia: NONE.”
When Peter Bloch came in a few minutes later, Alex was sitting in a chair next to the door, thumbing through a catalog of lab equipment. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the technician go to the desk and pick up the thin stack of orders.
“Hunh,” Bloch grunted. “Finally talked him into it, did you?”
Alex looked up, laying the catalog aside. “Talked him into what?”
Bloch made a sour face, then shrugged. “Never mind. But if you don’t like what happens today, don’t blame me. Blame yourself and Dr. Brilliant. Come on, let’s get started.”
Twenty minutes later Alex was strapped securely to the table, and the electrodes had all been connected to his skull. “Hope you don’t decide you want to change your mind,” Bloch said. “I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen to you, but I can practically guarantee you it isn’t going to be pleasant.” Leaving Alex’s side, he stepped to the panel and began adjusting its myriad controls.
The first thing Alex noticed was a strange odor in the room. At first it was like vanilla, sweet and pleasant, but slowly it began mutating into something else. The sweetness faded away, and was replaced by an acrid odor, and Alex’s first thought was that something in the lab must be burning. Then the smoky scent turned sour, and Alex’s nostrils suddenly seemed to fill with the stench of rotting garbage.
It’s in my mind, Alex told himself. It’s all in my mind, and I’m not really smelling anything.
And then the sounds began, and with them the physical sensations.
The room was heating up, and he could feel himself beginning to sweat as a shrill screaming noise cut through his eardrums and slashed into his mind.
The heat increased, and suddenly centered in his groin.
A hot poker.
Someone was pressing into his genitalia with a white-hot poker.
He could smell the sickly sweetness of burning flesh, and he writhed helplessly against the bonds that held him to the table.
The sound in his mind was his own voice screaming in agony.
The burning stopped, and he was suddenly cold. Slowly, reluctantly, he opened his eyes, but saw nothing except the blinding whiteness of snowflakes swirling around him, while the wind whistled and moaned in his ears.
Suddenly there was pressure on his left leg.
It was gentle at first, as if something were there, touching him every few seconds.
Then, its yellow eyes glaring at him through the blizzard, its fangs dripping saliva, he saw the face of the wolf.
The image disappeared, and as the beast’s hungry snarl drifted high over the wailings of the wind, he felt its jaws close on his leg.
His flesh was being torn to shreds, and in the strength of the wolf’s jaws, his bones gave way. His lower leg went numb, but he could sense his blood spurting from the severed artery below his knee.
All around him, the blizzard shrieked.
Suddenly the sounds began fading away, and with it the pain. The blinding whiteness of the blizzard began taking on tinges of color, and soon he was surrounded by a sea of soft blue. He felt the warm waters laving his skin, and a cool breeze wafted over his face.
He floated peacefully, rocked gently by the motion of the water, and then began to feel something else in the back reaches of his mind.
It was indistinct at first, but as he began to focus on it, it became clearer.
Energy.
It was as if pure energy were flowing directly into his mind.
And then it stopped, and the cool breezes died out. The waters around him were no longer moving, and the blueness in front of his eyes gave way slowly until he was once more staring at the ceiling of the laboratory. Peter Bloch loomed over him.
“I almost shut you down,” the technician said. “You started screaming, and twisting around until I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself.”
Alex said nothing for a moment, but kept his eyes anchored steadily on the lamp above his head as he fixed everything that had happened in his memory.
“Nothing happened,” he said at last.
“Horseshit,” Peter Bloch replied. “You damned near went crazy! What the hell’s Torres trying to prove now?”
“Nothing,” Alex repeated. “Nothing happened to me, and he’s not trying to prove anything.”
Bloch shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe nothing happened, but I’ll bet you thought something was happening. Want to tell me about it?”
Alex’s eyes finally shifted to the lab technician. “Don’t you know?”
“You think Torres tells me anything?” Peter countered. “I know we’re stimulating your brain. But what it’s all about, I don’t know.”
“But that is what it’s about,” Alex said quietly. “It’s about what gets into my brain, and how my brain reacts.” Then his expression twisted into a strange smile. “Except that it’s not my brain anymore, is it?” When Peter Bloch made no answer, Alex answered his own question.
“It’s not my brain anymore. Ever since I woke up from the operation, it’s been Dr. Torres’s brain.”
Raymond Torres wordlessly took Alex’s test reports from Peter Bloch’s hands and began flipping through them. He frowned slightly, then the frown deepened into a scowl.
“You must have made a mistake,” he said finally, tossing the thin sheaf of papers onto the desk as he faced his head technician. “None of these results make any sense at all. These are what you’d get from a brain that was awake, not asleep.”
“Then there’s no mistake,” Bloch replied, his face set into a mask of forced unconcern, As always when dealing with Raymond Torres, he would have preferred to roll the test results up tight and shove them down the man’s arrogant throat. But the money was too good and the work too light to throw it away over something as trivial as his d
islike of his employer, who, he noticed, was now glowering at him.
“What do you mean, no mistake? Are you telling me that Alex Lonsdale was awake during this?”
Peter Bloch felt as if the floor had just tilted. “Of course he was,” he said as forcefully as he could, though he was suddenly certain he knew exactly what had happened. “You wrote the order yourself.”
“Indeed I did,” Torres replied. “And I have a copy of it right here.” He opened his bottom desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of pink paper, which he silently handed to Bloch. There, near the bottom of the page, were the words: “Anesthesia: SPTL.”
Once more, Peter pictured Alex Lonsdale, his face impassive, sitting thumbing through a catalog.
And watching him.
How long had he been there? Apparently, long enough.
“I thought … I thought it was highly unusual, sir,” he mumbled.
“Unusual?” Torres demanded, his voice crackling with harsh sarcasm. “You thought it was unusual to put a patient out with Sodium Pentothal while inducing hallucinations in his brain?”
“No, sir,” the technician muttered, thoroughly cowed. “I thought it was unusual not to. I should … well, I should have called.”
Torres was fairly trembling with rage now. “What, exactly, are you talking about?”
Exactly three minutes and twenty-two seconds later, when Bloch had returned to his office, Torres knew. His eyes fixed on the altered anesthesia prescription for several long seconds, then shifted slowly to the technician.
“And you didn’t think you ought to call me about this?” he asked, his voice deceptively low.
“I … well, the kid told me a long time ago he wanted to take the test without the Pentothal. I thought he’d finally talked you into letting him try.”
Raymond Torres rose to his feet, and leaned across the desk so that his face was close to Peter Bloch’s. When he spoke, he made no attempt to keep his fury under control. “Talked me into it?” he shouted. “We never even discussed such a thing! Do you have any idea of exactly what goes on in those tests?”