There was no gentleness taken with the prisoner.
After the removal of his suit, he was lifted high by the six security men and thrown bodily into the matter-transfer room, where he came crashing down painfully on his left shoulder. Doc landed on one of the steel floor disks, but also felt the jab of some object poking into his body.
As he rolled over to his side, he found beneath his aching form two round spheroids, test objects used in previous jump experiments. Doc reached across the disk and picked up the perfectly metal balls from the tiled floor.
“Didn’t want to send you off without what you came in with,” Welles called out from the open ar-maglass chamber door, then threw in a double armload of clothing-a black frock coat, a pair of tan britches, two thigh-high black boots and other pieces of the apparel Doc had been wearing when trawled two years earlier. Apparently the clothing had been kept in storage after being studied by researchers of the project.
The bundle hit the floor and scattered lifelessly next to the aching Doc, and he spied a button on the sleeve of the shirt he remembered Emily had sewed on a lifetime ago.
“No,” he whispered, even as the air began to thicken and his brain began to shut down. Struggling to his feet, the skinny man staggered to the chamber door like a drunken mantis and used the metal sphere he held in his right hand to begin pounding on the unbreakable surface of the armaglass. Again and again, he raised his arm and brought it smashing down.
“Wasting his strength on such a futile show,” the silver-haired man with the raspberry-purple necktie calmly observed from control, watching Doc on a wall monitor, the picture beamed from an interior security camera hidden inside the armaglass chamber. “He should sit down and compose himself or he’ll never survive the trawl.”
“I don’t think Dr. Welles wants him to survive, Mr. Burr,” Chan said from a nearby station, his own prior conflict with Doc now put aside as he, too, stood back and watched what was about to occur. Burr shot Chan a withering glare, and the technician fell silent, choosing to no longer peer at the live video monitor. Instead, he sat and focused on the readings coming in on his computer screen.
The tragedy of the biography he’d been reading scant moments ago still fresh in his mind, Doc cursed them from within the armaglass prison. “By the three Kennedys, a plague upon your houses, you white-coated malcontents!” he bellowed, swinging the metal balls with all of his fading strength even as the mists fell upon him, swirling into his brain.
“Jackbooted thugs! Blind thoughtless cretins! Gibbering jackanapes! Rapists of family members and small children!” recited the agonized voice from behind the armaglass, even as the rights within raced up to an unbearable brightness.
As Chan had before, the other people in the gateway control room without safety goggles were forced to turn their heads and look away from the video monitors. Many of them had already done so when Doc’s fate became inescapable and apparent.
An unworldly humming like a thousand alien hives raced through the chamber, the anteroom and into the control area of the mat-trans gateway. Just when the sound became almost unbearable, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was gone in a puff of smoke, vanished in the fog. He was a missing person once more, taken away a second time as if he had never existed.
Welles strode to the armaglass chamber through the security of the adjoining anteroom and wrenched open the heavy gateway door. Inside, there was nothing left except the nostril-tickling stench of burnt ozone. The heat from the mat-trans unit filtered out and wafted across his body, sending fresh trickles of sweat running down from his armpits.
“He’s away, Director Welles,” a technician informed him over the intercom system, her eyes scanning the readouts on the oversized computer console on her observation station. “We’re showing a ninety-eight-percent probability of a successful matter transfer via temporal annex, but have no way of tracking or knowing the exact destination.”
“Do you think he made it, sir?” Chan asked, his reedy voice coming over the intercom.