The Theta Patient (5 page)

Bradburn watched how perfectly still the
patient was. “You can move, you know that, right?” he
said.

“
Yes.”

“
You just choose to remain
motionless?”

Leonard’s eyes moved toward the
doctor, focusing on Bradburn’s nametag, then on his face, then to
the wall-sized mirror.

“
Yes.”

“
You’ll be still when I give you
this shot?”

“
What does the shot
do?”

“
It helps you remain
calm.”

“
I’m already calm.”

Bradburn frowned. He wished he
could have formed relationships with all three men prior to having
to do something like this.

“
It’ll help you...” he tried to
think of another reason.

Leonard saw the way Bradburn glanced quickly
at the mirror, then said, “What’s it really do?”

“
Helps you be more forthcoming,”
the doctor said.

“
Do I have a choice if I get
it?”

Bradburn’s first instinct was to
turn back toward the mirror and the invisible Agent Cooper standing
on the other side of it.

“
I’m sorry, you don’t,” he said.
“Rules are rules.”

Leonard’s mouth closed, and
Bradburn could tell from the way the patient didn’t move anymore,
not even his eyes, that he would remain perfectly still until the
drugs took over.

One after another, Bradburn
watched as the drugs took hold of each man. The facial muscles in
Anthony Station’s cheeks became relaxed. His brow, which had been
furrowed and tight, relented. Half an hour later, when it was Logan
Ford’s turn, the patient who had been screaming and trying to
thrash his arms, bobbed forward slightly. If he hadn’t been
restrained, he might have fallen over completely. Instead of
yelling, Ford gave little grunts that were barely audible. Dewey
Leonard, who had been perfectly still before the injection,
remained that way. His eyelids were the indicator that he was under
the influence. They fluttered and closed, leaving Bradburn guessing
if the man was almost asleep or trying not to cry.

The black box, the idea that it
could scare someone into believing the Tyranny knew their thoughts,
was no where to be found during the second interview.

Bradburn sat across from each
patient. Even without the sheet of paper, he knew which questions
to ask.

“
Have you ever been to Burnley
Park before?” he said.

Anthony Station’s eyes were
downward, putting his unkempt hair on display.

“
Burnley Park?”

“
Yes.”

“
Burnley Park?”

“
Yes.”

The patient seemed more confused than anything
else, his lips moving and fingers tapping in incredibly slow
motion, but no words at first.

Then he said, “My parents took me
there when I was a kid.”

It was a completely different
answer—much more sane than being abducted by aliens—but it didn’t
mean anything, and Bradburn hoped Agent Cooper realized that as
well. Patients often went into and out of paranoid or delusional
states that could affect their line of thinking. A different answer
now could simply mean that Station had been in the middle of an
episode during the first interview whereas now he
wasn’t.

“
How about as an adult?” Bradburn
said.

“
Once, doc?” the patient mumbled,
but from the way he asked, Bradburn could tell he really didn’t
know.

Half an hour later, during Logan
Ford’s session, Bradburn re-asked the same question. Ford took a
deep breath. His blond eyebrows seemed to disappear in the ill-lit
room.

“
Have you ever been to Burnley
Park before?” Bradburn asked.

Ford’s hands were restrained by
his sides. The doctor could see, however, that Ford’s impulse to
rub his eyes was still taking control of some part of his mind.
From where they rested, the hands made slight circular movements as
if the patient didn’t realize that he wasn’t actually rubbing his
eyes the way he had been during the first interview.

“
More times than I can count,”
Ford mumbled, his words slurred. “Almost every day for the past two
decades.” After a pause he added, “I liked it more before the new
coffee shop was built. Too foo-foo.”

Another thirty minutes later, he
was asking the question of Dewey Leonard. After a day and a half of
being in the hospital, Leonard’s stubble had gone from looking
neatly trimmed and intentional to taking over too much of his face.
The result made him look gaunt and sickly. His eyes no longer
scanned the room. He didn’t look at anything except his hands,
which were resting on the edge of the table.

“
Yes,” the third patient said upon
being asked the same question.

“
When was the last
time?”

Leonard gave a slight groan. “Two days
ago.”

“
What were you doing?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
You still don’t know?” Bradburn
said, frowning.

A pause. Then, “No.”

Bradburn had followed up that question by
asking each patient if they believed in time travel.

“
Sure, doc,” Anthony Station said.
And then, a moment later, “But I also don’t.”

When Logan Ford was asked, it took
him an entire minute to answer. Bradburn thought the man might have
fallen asleep.

“
Of course,” Ford finally
said.

“
You do?”

“
I think so.” And then, barely
audible, almost unintelligible: “It’s all physics. They just need
to figure it out.”

“
Who is
they
?” Bradburn said,
expecting the response to be ‘Thinkers.’

Ford looked up and squinted at the
doctor. Even behind the stupor of drugs, a small part of the man
wanted to reach out and slap Bradburn for asking such a stupid
question.

Ford muttered, “Scientists, you
moron.”

Later, when he asked Dewey Leonard
the question, the third patient groaned again, but finally said
yes.

“
You do?”

“
Yes,” Leonard said
again.

Bradburn looked behind him at the
mirrored glass to see if Cooper wanted him to continue asking about
this topic. But instead of seeing an agent from the Tyranny, all he
saw was himself looking as confused as ever and in over his
head.

Bradburn asked each of the
patients if the world was a better place today than it was a
hundred years ago.

Station sighed and shook his head
slightly.

“
It’s always getting worse, doc.”
He looked as if he were going to go to sleep, then blinked and
said, “Every day, the aliens find better ways to torture us. Every
single freakin’ day.”

Ford said there was no way of
knowing if the world was a better place or not. Not only that, but
that it was pointless to ask the question. When he mumbled the
words, he sneered at Bradburn through the haze of chemicals in his
brain.

Dewey Leonard, his eyes shut,
paused for a while before saying the world was worse.

“
Why?”

“
Come on,” Leonard said, almost
whining, and Bradburn couldn’t be sure if he thought the answer was
obvious or if he didn’t want to have to field any more questions.
Then Leonard grumbled more words and the doctor knew. “War.
Suffering. It’s all too much.”

Bradburn had then asked each of them what
event they would change if they could go back in time.

Station’s hair bobbed slightly
when the man’s head fell forward and then, the patient waking up
again, snapped back.

“
That’s a good question, doc,” he
answered, the same as he had said before, except it took him three
times as long to pronounce the words that were whispered. “I don’t
know. I really don’t know.”

After being asked the same
question, Logan Ford’s hands moved in wider circles, still wanting
to rub his eyes, his wrists still tied to the arms of the chair he
was sitting in.

“
I would’ve killed the bastard who
made the printing press,” he said. A minute went by with Ford’s
lips moving but no sounds being offered, then the man began to sob
and he said, “All the hate that has been preserved on paper. All
the hate.”

Bradburn looked behind him at the
mirror, hoping Cooper was there, hoping he was as unamused as
Bradburn was by this spectacle.

When he asked the same question to
the third patient, he got a response he never expected. Dewey
Leonard groaned but remained silent. Bradburn repeated the
question. Half a minute went by before Leonard whispered something
that couldn’t be understood. The doctor repeated the question a
third time. Leonard groaned again. His eyes fluttered the entire
time.

Bradburn had seen the reaction before. The
patient had enough wherewithal to know his mind was under the
control of drugs but didn’t have the ability to do much about
it.

“
Dewey,” Bradburn said, “If you
could go back in time and change one event, what would it
be?”

He could see the little bit of the
real Leonard that was left, the part of him that was hidden away
deep behind the sway of the truth serum, fighting with all of his
might to resist the question. His version of fighting, though, was
merely staying quiet as long as he could, trying to keep his mind
focused.

Bradburn repeated the question
again.

Leonard gave a slight objection,
his hands shooing the question away. A single sob shook
him.

“
If you could go back in time and
change one event, what—”

“
Do you want to know what I’d do?”
the third patient mumbled. “I’d go all the way back to Adam and
Eve.” Even though his words were still slurred, his voice was
growing louder. “Before they ate the forbidden fruit.”

Bradburn breathed a sigh of relief, thinking
the man in front of him wanted to save the entire human
race.

But then Leonard said, “I’d take
an axe and chop down the entire damn tree.” He was almost yelling
now, even through the effects of the drugs. “I’d dare God to do the
worst thing he could possibly do because no matter what he did he
couldn’t do anything worse than what the Tyranny is
doing.”

And then the single sob turned into
crying.

The doctor slumped down in his
chair. The interview was over. There was no point asking the final
questions. Agent Cooper was probably already on his way into the
room to arrest the man.

As Dr. Bradburn watched, Dewey
Leonard was dragged away by two men from the Tyranny. He was unsure
if the men had just shown up or had always been waiting, lurking in
the shadows. Because of the drugs he had been given, Leonard’s legs
barely worked, and it took a man under either of his armpits to
pull him down the hallway.

Even though the patient’s body
wasn’t cooperating, he had his wits about him enough to know he was
being taken away by the Tyranny’s men. His worst nightmare was
coming true: he had risked his life to go back in time and change
history, and instead he had been captured by the Tyranny. Bradburn
heard the man offer groans and whimpers as he was carried down the
hallway.

“
That man,” the doctor whispered
to Cooper, “is from the future?”

“
It doesn’t matter if he’s from
our time or a different time. What matters is that we caught
another Thinker.”

“
I don’t understand,” Bradburn
said, unable to stop his next question. “Why would the Thinkers go
back in time to... now? Why not go back in time fifty years or a
hundred years if they actually wanted to make a
difference?”

Agent Cooper looked at the doctor without
speaking. As he did, the agent sucked on his bottom lip to show his
impatience.

Finally, he shrugged, leaned in
close so no one else nearby could hear, and whispered, “If you must
know, we suspect their experiment didn’t work the way they
intended. They must still be figuring out how the mechanics of time
travel actually work. They probably meant to send him back further
into the past, but what most likely happened was that he only went
back in time a few days or weeks by mistake.” And then, smiling and
rolling his eyes, he added, “I guess they aren’t so smart after
all.”

“
How did you know he was the
Thinker?”

“
It was easy,” Cooper said,
regaining the machismo that had been plastered all over his face
for the majority of the time he had been in Bradburn’s facility.
“He was at Burnley Park. He went out of his way to seem the
craziest when he was initially found. Smearing feces all over
himself? He had to know when the AeroCams caught up to him that he
would immediately be thought of as insane rather than a threat. And
his plan almost worked. But then, when you asked the first round of
questions, he gave himself away. The other two men really did seem
crazy. Our third patient”—he motioned down the hallway in the
direction Leonard had been taken—“suddenly didn’t want to say much
of anything. I already had my suspicions, but that sealed it for
me.”