The Theta Patient (4 page)

“
This was at Burnley
Park?”

“
The abduction was. The
experiments were in outer space.” Station said this last part as if
Bradburn were a complete idiot for thinking the experiments might
also have taken place at the park.

“
Next,” Agent Cooper
said.

Bradburn paused the interview, then brought up
the footage of the next one.

Logan Ford appeared on the screen,
behind the same chair Anthony Station had been sitting at. The man
had no hair on top of his head and only faint eyebrows to show the
hair he had once had was blond. Ford rubbed at his eyes as if a
part of them itched that he couldn’t quite reach.

“
Have you ever been to Burnley
Park before?” Bradburn’s voice could be heard to ask.

Ford stopped rubbing his eyes just
long enough to look up and make sure he had been asked a
question.

“
A million times,” the patient
said. “More than that. An infinite number of times. I was there
before Burnley Park was a park. I was there before these buildings
and these people. And I’ll be here after all of it’s
gone.”

“
Next,” Agent Cooper said, rolling
his eyes.

The screen changed to a middle-aged man with
stubble on his head and also for a beard. This was Dewey Leonard,
the man who had been found with his waste smeared all over
himself.

From off camera: “Have you ever
been to Burnley Park before?”

No part of Leonard’s body or face
moved except for his eyes, which swiveled slowly from left to right
before repeating the motion.

“
I don’t know,” the third patient
said.

“
You don’t know?”

“
No.”

Agent Cooper nodded. Bradburn
clicked back to the first patient so the next question could be
asked and the next three answers given.

“
Do you believe in time travel?”
the doctor said from off-camera.

“
Do
you
, doc?” Anthony
Station said, his eyes narrowing, his attention, previously all
over the place, focused entirely on Bradburn.

It was a response Bradburn was familiar with.
Paranoia, thinking everyone was out to get you.

“
I don’t,” Bradburn said. “Do
you?”

“
Have they gotten to you,” Station
said. “Did they already get to you?”

This line of questioning, accusing
his interviewer, went on for three minutes before Station finally
settled down.

When the screen changed and Logan Ford’s face
reappeared, the patient didn’t bother to stop rubbing at his eyes
when he heard the question and then answered it.

“
Of course I do.”

“
You do?”

“
Of course. I just travelled from
the past to the present. There! I just did it again. And again! I’m
always travelling through time, doctor.”

The screen switched again. Dewey
Leonard’s face reappeared. When he heard the question, his jaw
twitched—the only movement he had offered since the session began
other than the roaming back and forth of his eyes.

“
I don’t know,” he
said.

“
You don’t know?”

“
No, I don’t know.”

The next three questions were all fairly
innocuous. Did the patient know where they were? Did they know what
year it was? Did they know who the current Ruler was? Each man
answered correctly, and Bradburn knew it was the Tyranny’s way of
offering mundane questions before getting back to what they really
cared about.

From behind the camera, Bradburn
asked each patient, “Is the world a better place today than it was
a hundred years ago?”

Station said the world would never
be a better place until the aliens, who were posing as humans, were
caught so they would stop conducting experiments on people. Ford
said the question was illogical because time didn’t exist, then
told Bradburn that surely a man who was trained in medicine also
knew time was an illusion. Leonard, his eyes looking at the camera
briefly, then at Bradburn, then at the door, said he didn’t
know.

“
If you could go back in time and
change any event,” Bradburn said, moving onto the next question,
“what would you change?”

Station ran his fingers through
his dark hair. When his nails got to the scraggliness of his beard,
he seemed to forget where he was, causing Bradburn to ask the
question again.

“
That’s a good question, doc,” the
patient said. “I don’t know. My first response would be ‘Keep the
aliens away’ but they’ve been here as long as I can think of. I
guess I don’t know.”

Upon being asked the same question, Logan Ford
finally stopped rubbing his eyes. Without his hands obstructing
them, the camera picked up just how blue and shiny they
were.

“
I would murder whoever created
the printing press,” he said.

“
Really?”

“
Yes.”

The third patient’s eyes darted
down to the floor when he was asked the question. Just as quickly,
they rose to meet Bradburn, then looked to see if the questions on
Bradburn’s paper were large enough to read himself.

“
I don’t know.”

“
You don’t know of any event you
would change if you could go back in time?”

“
No,” Leonard said.

Back to the first patient: “What do you think
of the Tyranny?”

The first patient said the Rulers
were all lizards pretending to be humans and were responsible for
all the suffering on the planet. The second said he was his own
Ruler and his own Tyranny. He didn’t recognize anyone else as
having power over him. The third said he didn’t know.

There were three more questions, but none of
them were important because Agent Cooper motioned for the videos to
stop.

“
Well?” Cooper said.

“
Well, what?” Bradburn
said.

“
Now that you’ve had time to
consider it, which one is the Thinker?”

“
I really have no
idea.”

“
Come on now, doctor,” the
Tyranny’s man said. “You surprise me. And not in a good way. How is
the Tyranny supposed to have confidence in its institutions when
our doctors can’t tell which of the three men is a
Thinker?”

Bradburn opened his mouth to say something,
then thought better of it. There was no right way to answer a
question like this, not in the Tyranny’s eyes, and so he said
nothing.

Outside, another AeroCam hovered past. A
moment later, another. When the doctor looked back over at Agent
Cooper, the Tyranny’s man was still expecting an answer.

“
It’s easy for you. The truth
detector tells you when someone is lying,” Bradburn said, referring
to the pads each man had put over his fingertips.

Agent Cooper leaned back in the
chair and laughed. “That doesn’t do anything. It’s just for show,
just to get the people we’re questioning as nervous as
possible.”

“
It doesn’t work?” Bradburn said,
his jaw hanging open slightly.

“
Of course not. The Tyranny may
listen to everything you say and watch everything you do but we
aren’t mind readers!” He chuckled briefly. Then, when his amusement
wore off, he added, “It certainly would help if we were,
though.”

“
And that helped you figure out
which of the three men was the Thinker?”

“
Not in this case,” the agent
said. “I already knew which man was pretending. The answers only
confirmed my suspicion.”

“
I don’t understand,” Bradburn
said.

The Tyranny’s agent shrugged. “You don’t need
to understand.”

“
Which patient is it?”

Part of Bradburn was irritated at
himself for being a trained psychiatrist and not knowing which man
was pretending to be insane. The other part of him was irritated at
Cooper for not telling him.

The first patient had the craziest
answers. Perhaps, the doctor reasoned, Cooper thought he was
over-acting. The second patient had a history of being turned over
to hospitals. Maybe it was a case of the Thinker’s family trying to
save him from himself. The third didn’t say anything to make
Bradburn think he was crazy—hadn’t really said anything at all—and
yet he had been stark raving mad when they had found him. Did
Cooper view him as a suspect just because he had been found near
Burnley Park, where the light had or hadn’t appeared and where a
man had or hadn’t fallen out of it?

The doctor could only stare at the
agent and hope this would all be over soon enough. He had the
suspicion that the Tyranny was testing him to see if he would
indeed report having a Thinker at his hospital. The scary thing was
that he had no way of knowing, based on how all of this was going,
if he was passing or failing their test—if that’s what it
was.

He reminded himself that as long
as he kept his head down and did what the Tyranny wanted, he would
be fine. Sure, some of his staff had been dragged away and were
never seen or heard from again. And yes, others had their money
taken during checkpoint searches when they couldn’t prove it wasn’t
going to be used for some nefarious purpose. These things had never
happened to Dr. Bradburn, though, because the Tyranny only singled
out people it had a reason to single out. And as long as he didn’t
give them that reason, he knew he would be fine.

When Agent Cooper ignored the
previous question, Bradburn said, “Help me understand.” His
shoulders slumped as he spoke.

Agent Cooper took in a long
breath, carefully eyeing the doctor the entire time. Seeing a man
who wanted reassurance and not someone who was questioning him or
his authority, he exhaled and patted the doctor on the
shoulder.

“
Let’s conduct an experiment,” the
agent said.

“
What kind of
experiment?”

Cooper leaned to the side, opened
his briefcase, then withdrew a black leather pouch. Unzipping it,
he handed the doctor three small vials.

“
What is this?” Bradburn
said.

“
A truth serum,” Cooper said,
smiling. “Of sorts.”

It sounded more exotic than
Bradburn knew it actually was. The doctor sometimes used
psychoactive drugs to elicit feedback from patients. “Sodium
thiopental? Amobarbital?”

Cooper winked and said, “A
specialty blend, made by the Tyranny’s scientists.”

“
What do we do with
it?”

“
Give each patient a shot. Then go
through the questions with them again. You’ll see who the Thinker
is.”

Each patient reacted differently to being
given the shot. Anthony Station clenched both hands into fists and
held onto the curls of his bushy hair.

“
What’s this for, doc?” he asked,
not yet giving Bradburn permission to administer the
shot.

What the first patient didn’t
realize but that Bradburn knew was that Cooper was observing this
round of questioning from the other side of a reverse window. The
agent could see Bradburn and the patients, but they would only see
what looked like a mirror. What the patient also didn’t realize was
that he didn’t have a choice in whether or not he received a shot.
If he or either of the other two patients refused, Cooper would
either order Bradburn’s staff to restrain them so it could be
administered, or else he would claim a possible Thinker had become
belligerent, pull out his blaster, and end it all right
there.

“
It’ll help you relax during the
next round of questions,” Bradburn said.

“
Sure, doc, whatever you
say.”

While Station’s fists didn’t
unclench, the man seemed resigned to his fate, as if he had been
drugged and questioned many times before. If Bradburn had to guess,
the patient would say similar needles had injected various drugs
aboard alien spaceships right before they started probing
him.

Logan Ford, the second patient,
fidgeted so much after being told he would be given a shot that the
doctor thought there might be violence. With some manics it was
difficult to tell if they were just annoyed by something that was
going on or if they meant to do harm. With the knuckles of each
hand, Ford scraped at his eyes and moaned.

“
Are we going to be okay, Logan?”
Bradburn said in his calmest, most soothing voice.

“
What do you mean?”

“
Are you going to try and hurt
me?”

“
I don’t want to hurt
anyone.”

But even as he said it, he began
to scream and growl. A pair of muscular male nurses appeared on
either side of Bradburn before Ford could do anything else.
Bradburn glanced at the mirror, knowing Agent Cooper was probably
enjoying the show. A minute after the shot was given, Ford was
quiet.

With the exception of his jaw
twitching one time, Dewey Leonard, the third patient, had
previously only moved his eyes. When Bradburn told him he would
need to give the patient an injection, Leonard gripped the arms of
the chair he was sitting in.