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 anch.o.r.ed steadily on the lamp above his head as he fixed everything that had happened in his memory.

"Nothing happened," he said at last.

"Horses.h.i.t," Peter Bloch replied. "You d.a.m.ned near went crazy! What the h.e.l.l'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 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. 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 dislike 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 impa.s.sive, 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 not to. I should...well, I should have called." 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?"

"Yes, sir," Peter Bloch managed.

"Yes, sir," Torres mimicked, his tone icy. "We deliberately induce pain, Mr. Bloch. We induce physical pain, and mental pain, and of the worst sort. The only thing that makes it tolerable at all is that the patient is unconscious. Without the anesthetic, we are at risk of driving a patient insane."

"He's...he seems to be all right," Bloch stammered, but Torres froze him with a look.

"And perhaps he is," Torres agreed. "But if if he is, it is only because the boy has no emotions. Or, as you have so inelegantly put it in the past, because he's a 'zombie.'" he is, it is only because the boy has no emotions. Or, as you have so inelegantly put it in the past, because he's a 'zombie.'"

Bloch flinched, but stood his ground. "I was going to shut it off," he insisted. "I was watching him carefully, and if it looked like it was getting too bad, I was going to shut it off in spite of your orders."

"Not good enough," Torres replied. "If you had any questions about those orders, you should have called me immediately. You didn't. Well, perhaps you will do this: go to your lab and begin packing anything that is personally yours. Then you will wait there for a security guard to come and escort you out of the building. Your check will be sent to you. Is that clear?"

"Sir-"

"Is that clear?" Torres repeated, his voice rising to drown out the other man.

"Yes, sir," Bloch whispered. A moment later he was gone, and Raymond Torres seated himself once more, then waited until his breathing had returned to its normal rhythm before picking up the sheaf of test results.

Perhaps, he reflected, it will be all right after all. The boy hadn't cracked under the battering his brain had absorbed. With any luck at all, Alex's brain had been so busy dealing with the chaos of stimulation that he hadn't consciously noticed what else had been happening.

Or had he?

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

"But he didn't say what was wrong, did he?" Marsh asked. He folded his napkin precisely-a gesture Ellen immediately recognized as a sign that his mind was irrevocably made up-and placed it on the table next to his coffee cup.

"That's why he wants Alex back," Ellen said for the third time. Why, she wondered, couldn't Marsh understand that there was nothing sinister in Raymond's wanting Alex to come back to the Inst.i.tute for a few days? "Besides," she went on, "if he thought it was anything serious, he wouldn't have let Alex come home with me this afternoon. He could have just kept him there."

"And I would have had an injunction by tomorrow morning," Marsh pointed out. "Which I'm sure he knows. In spite of that release, I'm still his father, and unless he tells us the details of the surgery, and tells us exactly what he thinks has gone wrong, Alex doesn't go back there again." He pushed his chair back and stood up, and though Ellen wanted to argue with him further, she knew it was useless. She would just have to do what she knew was best for Alex, and deal with Marsh after she'd done it. As Marsh left the dining room, she began clearing the dishes from the table and loading them into the dishwasher.

Marsh found Alex in his room. He was at his desk, one of Marsh's medical texts in front of him, opened to the anatomy of the human brain, while one of the white rats poked inquisitively around among the clutter that surrounded the book.

"Anything I can help you with?"

Alex looked up. "I don't think so."

"Try me," Marsh challenged. When Alex still hesitated, he picked up the rat and scratched it around its ears. The little animal wriggled with pleasure. "Mind telling me what you're going to use to dissect this little fellow's brain with?"

Alex's eyes met his father's. "How did you know?"

"I may not be a genius," Marsh replied, "but last night you told me that considering the damage that was done to your brain, you ought to be dead. Now I find you studying the anatomy of the brain, and white rats are not exactly unheard of as subjects for dissection."

"All right," Alex said. "I want to see what happens to the rat if I cut as far into its brain as Dr. Torres had to cut into mine."

"You mean you want to see if it dies," Marsh replied. His son nodded. "Then I think we'd better go down to the Center, and I think you'd better let me help you."

"You mean you will?" Alex asked.

"If I don't, your rats won't survive the first cut."

When they came downstairs a few minutes later, Ellen glanced at them from her place at the kitchen sink, then, seeing the rat cage, smiled appreciatively. "Well, at least we agree that the house is no place for those things," she offered, hoping to break the tension that had spoiled dinner.

"We're taking them down to the lab," Marsh told her. "And we may hang around awhile, if anything interesting's going on."

Ellen frowned. "Interesting? What could be interesting in the lab at this hour? There won't even be anyone there."

"Well be there," Marsh replied. Then, while Ellen wondered what was going on, her husband and son disappeared into the patio. A moment later she heard the gate slam closed.

The fluorescent lamps over the lab table cast a shadowless light, and as Marsh prepared to inject the anesthesia into the rat's vein, he suddenly wondered if the creature somehow knew what was about to happen. Its little eyes seemed wary, and he could feel it trembling in his hand. He glanced at Alex, who stood at the other side of the table, looking on impa.s.sively. "It won't survive this, you know," Marsh told his son.

"I know," Alex replied in the emotionless voice Marsh knew he would never get used to. "Go ahead."

Marsh slid the needle under the rat's skin and pressed the plunger. The rat struggled for a few seconds, then gradually went limp, and Marsh began fastening it to the dissecting board. When he was done, he studied the ill.u.s.tration he'd found in one of the lab books, then deftly used a scalpel to cut the skin away from the rat's skull, starting just behind the left eye and slicing neatly around to the opposite position behind the right eye, then folding the loose flap of skin forward. Then, using a tiny saw, he began removing the top of the skull itself. He worked slowly. When he was done, the rat's brain lay exposed to the light, but its heartbeat and breathing were still unaffected.

"This probably isn't going to work," Marsh said. "We should have much smaller tools, and proportionally, much more of a rat's brain than a human's is used to keep its vital functions going."

"Then let's just cut away a little bit at a time, and see how deep we can go."

Marsh hesitated, then nodded. Using the smallest scalpel he had been able to find, he began peeling away the cortex of the rat's brain.

An hour later, all three of the rats were dead. In none of them had Marsh succeeded in reaching the inner structures of the brain before their heartbeats had ceased.

"But they didn't have to die," he pointed out. "I could have gone in with a probe, and destroyed part of the limbic system without doing much damage to anything else."

Alex shook his head. "It wouldn't have meant anything, Dad. When you cut away their brains the way Torres had to cut away mine, the rats died. So why didn't I?"

"I don't know," Marsh confessed. "All I know is that you didn't die."

Alex was silent for a long time, staring at the three small corpses on the lab table. "Maybe I did," he said at last. "Maybe I'm really dead."

Valerie Benson looked up from her knitting. Across the room, Kate Lewis was curled up on the sofa, her eyes on the television set, but Valerie was almost sure she wasn't watching the program.

"Want to talk about it?" she asked. Kate's eyes remained on the television.

"Talk about what?"

"Everything that's bothering you."

"Nothing's bothering me," Kate replied. "I'm okay."

"No," Valerie replied, "you're not okay." She put her knitting aside, then got up and turned off the television set. "Are you planning to go back to school tomorrow?"

"I...I don't know."

I should have had children, Valerie thought. If I'd had children of my own, I'd know what to do. Or would she? Would she really know what to say to a teenage girl whose father had killed her mother? What was there to say? And yet, Kate couldn't just go on sitting in front of the television set all day and all evening, moping.

"Well, I think it's time you went back," Valerie ventured. Then, sure she knew what was really going on in Kate's mind, she went on: "What happened wasn't your fault, Kate, and none of the kids are going to hold it against you."

Kate turned to stare at Valerie. "Is that what you think?" she asked. "That I'm afraid of what the kids might think?"

"Isn't it?"

Kate slowly shook her head. "Everybody knew all about Dad," she said so quietly Valerie had to strain to hear her. "I always talked about what a drunk he is so no one else could do it first."

Valerie went to the sofa and sat close to Kate. "That couldn't have been easy."

"It was better than having everybody gossip." Her eyes met Valerie's for the first time. "But he didn't kill Mom," she said. "I don't care how it looks, and I don't care if he doesn't remember what happened after I left. All I know is they used to fight every time he got drunk, but he never hit her. He yelled at her, and sometimes he threatened her, but he never hit her. In the end, he always let her take him to the hospital."

"Then you should be out with your friends, letting them know exactly what you think."

Kate shook her head silently, and her eyes filled with tears. "I...I'm scared," she whispered.

"Scared? Scared of what?"

"I'm afraid of what might happen if I leave. I'm afraid I might come back and find you...find you..." Unable to say the words, Kate began sobbing softly, and Valerie held her close.

"Oh, honey, you don't have to worry about me. What on earth could happen to me?"

"But someone killed Mom," Kate sobbed. "She was by herself, and someone came in and...and..."

Your father killed her, Valerie thought, but she knew she wouldn't say it out loud. If Kate didn't want to believe the evidence, she wouldn't try to force her to, at least not yet. But after the trial, after Alan Lewis was convicted...She cut the thought off, telling herself that she should at least try to keep an open mind. "No one's going to do anything to me," she said. "I've been living by myself in this house for five years now, and there's never been any trouble at all. And I'm not going to let you become a prisoner here." She stood up briskly, went to pick up the telephone that sat on the table next to her chair, and brought it to the coffee table in front of the sofa. "Now you call Bob Carey and tell him you want to go out for a pizza or something."

Kate hesitated. "I can't do that-"

"Of course you can," Valerie told her. "He comes by every day and drops off your homework, doesn't he? So why wouldn't he want to take you out?" She picked up the phone. "What's his number?"

Kate blurted it out before she could think, and Valerie promptly punched the numbers. When Bob himself answered, she said only, "I have someone here who wants to talk to you," and handed the phone to Kate. Kate sniffled, but took the phone.

Forty-five minutes later, Valerie stood at the front door. "And no matter what she says, I don't want her back a minute before eleven," she told Bob Carey. "She's been cooped up too long, and she needs a good time." When Bob's car had disappeared down the hill, she closed the door, then went back to her knitting.

Ellen was about to call the Medical Center when she heard the patio gate slam once more. Then the door opened, and her husband and son came in. She dropped the receiver back on the hook just as the dial tone switched over to the angry whine of a forgotten phone, and didn't try to conceal the irritation she was feeling. "You might have told me how long you were going to be gone. What on earth have you been doing?"

"Killing rats," Alex said.