was able to follow Tricks’s movements. Her soft fingers probed across his skull,
parting the leonine mane of long white hair to find areas of the scalp that she
marked with a stubby indelible pencil, licking the end and murmuring to herself
as she found the spots she was seeking.
She turned away, and Doc could hear her moving instruments on her workbench, the
clatter of metal and the soft curses as she sought one particular item.
She turned back, and he heard the buzz of electric clippers before he saw them
in her hand. Humming tunelessly to herself, she shaved away small portions of
his hair, making perfect circles of pink, exposed scalp around the small, purple
indelible crosses.
She switched off the clippers and headed back to the bench, returning to Doc
with a series of rubber-tipped electrodes, small pads attached to the ends.
“This won’t hurt, Dr. Tanner,” she said distractedly as she began to attach them
methodically to the exposed areas of scalp. “I’ve been reading up on you from
the material salvaged from the computer files. You really are a most remarkable
man. It’s interesting how your body seems to have taken the immense physical
strain. I wouldn’t have thought it would have manifested in such a fashion.
Still, you never stop learning, eh? There,” she added, standing back, “that’s
that done. There’s no way I’m going to open you up, but this should secure you
to the mainframe.”
With immense effort Doc managed to croak, “Why…others not like…this…?”
Dr. Tricks put a hand on her hip and struck a pose that would have had a
younger, less befuddled Doc Tanner thinking of his beloved Emily. Tricks’s
large, liquid brown eyes stared at him with an intensity that made him feel as
if he wanted to melt into them.
“It’s quite simple,” she said softly. “The original Moebius was made to last
longer than it has, really. With the correct maintenance, it could still be
going strong. Skydark changed all that. I’d guess the components were—shall we
say—coerced into taking part. The removal of part of the skull and the direct
inject was to make sure there was no going back. Seems to me that it wasn’t
strictly necessary, from a scientific point of view.”
Through the mist of the drug, Doc recalled the savagery of the whitecoats he had
encountered in the twentieth century, and made a small moan of agreement.
“You, on the other hand,” she continued without acknowledging him, “are another
matter entirely. I can’t risk chilling you, not with Wallace breathing down my
neck. I have to keep you alive, at least until Murphy gets his act together and
we can dismantle the useless projects and utilize our resources properly. So you
get the soft option…of sorts.”
She smiled, and it made Doc shiver, even through the narcotic haze.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He heard her turn and leave the room.
There was a mumbling of voices, too distant through the drug to be coherent.
With his eyes still closed, Doc heard footsteps into the room—the heavy clatter
of combat boots. For one delirious moment he hoped it may be Ryan and John
Barrymore, leading an attempt to free him.
A slim hope, which was dashed as he heard Murphy’s voice bark an order. The
chair was unbolted from the floor, slipped onto a frame that jarred him, and he
was wheeled out of the lab.
He opened his eyes to see the strip lighting of the corridor ceiling slowly
flash by above his head. He tried to look around, but his head felt too heavy
and stuffed with cotton wool to respond.
He was wheeled into an anteroom and left there. It could have been a few
seconds, or it could have been a few years. Time was elastic and without
meaning. Finally men in biohazard-suits entered the anteroom and sprayed him
with what he took to be some kind of antiseptic. That done, they wheeled him
into the main chamber.
Doc was positioned where the now-departed Marine officer had spent the past
century. He felt sharp pains in his hands and arms as the feeding tubes were