“Not any longer.” Welles now stood, his own temper rising. His round face was reddening, and a sheen of sweat appeared on his brow. “You, sir, are a curiosity. A living science experiment. A man without a frame of reference or a shred of comprehension.”
“You are incorrect, sir! I comprehend all!”
“Tanner, you are fucking Rip Van Winkle. Get used to it.” And on that final pronouncement, Welles slammed closed the black notebook. Always with the damnable black notebook.
Tanner lunged forward, both arms outstretched to their full length, his wrists extended well past the cuffs of his hospital dressing gown. His rail-thin body skated lightly across the slick tabletop and right at the dumbfounded Welles.
“I have it!” he crowed triumphantly as both of his long-fingered hands clamped down on Welles’s notebook. Tanner snatched it boldly away, rolling, moving to one side on the table as Welles screeched in shock.
“Damn you, Tanner, give that back!” Welles sputtered. “Give it back or I’ll-”
“Hush, Welles, before you cause me to fall in gales of laughter at your schoolboy predicament,” Tanner soothed, his rich baritone taking the tone of a leisurely played bassoon. “Like all bullies, you cannot handle having the tables turned. You shall have your precious book, full of the damnable lies of my life and times as filtered through your own corruptive sieve of an intellect! Shall we begin with the first page of our meeting?”
Keeping the table between them, Doc opened the book and began to read.
‘”Patient appears confused, baffled, uncertain of his surroundings. Perhaps the decision in choosing subject was hasty, since he shows no signs of open-mindedness or creative thinking. He seems fixated on one subject, and one subject only-that being his family. His wife and children. This obsession must be circumvented before subject will be pliable enough for establishment of mission parameters.'”
“Tanner, you shouldn’t be reading that,” Welles warned.
“Subject. That’s all I was to you then, and all I remain now,” came back the response. “A subject. A test case. You could not even be bothered to write my name on these pages, nor the names of Emily or Rachel or dear little Jolyon. You could not even be bothered to remember the names of the lives you ruined, you despicable miscreant!”
“Now see here, Tanner, you settle down or I’ll have to call in security.”
“Call them, you elephantine pile of excrement! Show them all what an ineffectual dung heap you really are!” Tanner taunted as he happily tore one of the blue-lined pages from the book and crumpled it into a ball. He tossed the wadded paper and giggled darkly as it bounced off Welles’s fat damp forehead with a plop, landing on the tabletop.
“That is one,” he said, his voice starting to rise in timbre as he pulled out a second sheet of the notebook and began to crush it between long, elegant fingers. “I do hope you utilized one of those photocopying devices I have heard about to make a second, backup reproduction of your spurious observations and notes about me.”
Pushed into a raging silence, Welles turned and ran to the lounge door, thumbing a wall communicator and screaming for a security team.
The goon squad wasn’t long in coming, and the faceless men in their hooded white parkas and mirrored sunglasses made quick work subduing Tanner, who hadn’t bothered to offer any resistance beyond gales of booming resonant laughter. One of them easily retrieved Welles’s notebook from the smirking prisoner and handed it back stone-faced to the Chronos director.
“Your property, sir.”
Welles snatched it from the guard and gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Keep two on hand to subdue Tanner. The rest of you may go.”
Now that Tanner was helpless and held by the summoned security men, Welles got closer and screamed in his face.
“Your wife is dead! Your children are dead! All you knew is dead! These are the facts! This is the future!”
“No, sir, it is not,” Tanner replied. “Your future, perhaps. Not mine.”
“Take him out of here,” Welles ordered. “Take him out before I do something I’ll regret.”
EMILY TANNER WAS long dead, long buried. Her mortal remains had decayed into dust within the confines of the family vault, a great marble edifice, located high atop a steep hill among a smattering of trees-ancient trees with skeletal branches reaching for heaven, and settling instead for their positions of anguish, arms held high in sympathetic agony surrounding the burial chambers.