The Theta Patient Read Online Free Page B

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