Read Jericho Johnson: The Gauntlet of Time Page 30
Dr. Cross pushed the stop button on the gauntlet’s touch screen and the recorded voice ceased speaking. Leaning back in his desk chair, he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Glasses weren’t something you saw someone wear most of the time in 2342 because technology had ways of fixing flat eyes permanently in just a few minutes but the rather young doctor had for some reason decided to not have the surgery done, to a lot of his staff’s astonishment considering he was the one who’s research in the field of human biology had resulted in the most major breakthroughs in the last decade with eyesight, among other things people took for granted with age.
Pressing a button on his desk strewn with info-tabs, Dr. Cross asked the question he’d asked a few hours prior to his nurse, Ritu, “Is he still alive?”
He waited while Ritu, after a few seconds delay, like she were checking to make sure, walked into view, her green hologram face appearing as she answered, “Yes, but barely. His body is rejecting most of our anesthetics and medications due to the abnormalities of his blood type, molecular structure and just about everything else. It’s like this person wasn’t even around for the mandatory city shots every year that keep people from being this way.”
Dr. Cross placed a finger to his lips in thought before saying, “Keep trying. If this patient dies, consider the blue tag that will go on his toe to also be your termination notice. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Ritu said before signing off.
Standing, Dr. Cross walked to the enormous window in his office that overlooked the city of Flagstaff from the fiftieth floor of the building dedicated to his research. Then a thought struck him.
“The shots, of course,” He muttered to himself, shaking his head that he hadn’t thought of it sooner. “Ritu.” He said as his nurse’s face appeared on the window in front of him, “I want you to give him the winter and summer shots but hold off on the spring shots until I get down there,” Dr. Cross said as he fingered out a combination of letters and numbers on the window, the amber colored digits spreading across the glass as he tapped away, “This dosage I’m sending is a weak mixture but I don’t want him going into cardiac arrest.”
“Yes, sir,” Ritu said. “Do you want me to file him?”
Dr. Cross hit a last button before swiping his hand and sending the combination sliding to the far side of the window, exposing the darkened city once again. The reason she was asking was most of the time files weren’t created for patients or test subjects that either were soon to die or had a large casualty rate.
“Make him a special file and send it to my office.” He said, sitting at his desk again in his dimly lit area that he spent most of his time. “File it under J two-zero-one-two.”
“J2012 will be on your desk shortly, sir.” Ritu said, “Anything else?”
Ritu was not only Dr. Cross’ best student in his rather large and rather selective university he’d built over the years, but she was also someone he considered a friend, or at least a confidant. He considered telling her that what was left of the man they pulled out of an explosion and had on life-support was in fact from another time.
“Not at the moment.” He said, picking the gauntlet up from his desk, “I have some more research to finish up here then I’ll be down.”
Ritu signed off and the doctor pushed play on the gauntlet and settled back in his chair to listen to the remainder of Jericho Johnson’s tale.
Who knew? Maybe the storyteller would still be alive after he’d finished.