The Dinosaur Chronicles by Erhardt Joseph

Author:Erhardt, Joseph [Erhardt, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-20T18:30:00+00:00

Afterword

One of Arthur C. Clarke’s three famous laws (look them up!) is, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I’ve always wanted to put a twist on that.

Now I have.

Letter of the Law

I followed the gurney as it was pushed down the hall. The doctors and nurses rolled it along, but not fast enough to suit me. They didn’t care. But if you work for the government, for the people’s money, you should always do the best you can. They’d forgotten that. I hadn’t. Besides, doing your best obligates people to you. It gives you power, juice, influence.

But I didn’t say anything. Kept my yap shut. Hooking him up would take just a minute, and there were two minutes left before Potter would suffer permanent brain damage from lack of oxygen.

At the entry to the Resuscitation Room there’s a little lip where the broken tiles of the hallway meet the broken tiles of the refurbished dispensary. They shoved the gurney across the lip with a significant hiccup, not caring at all about their cargo. They might as well have been rolling a six-foot salami.

I gritted my teeth. Didn’t they have any pride? I mean, you couldn’t even read their name tags, the way they wore them, unless you really looked. The older doctor hid his halfway under a lapel; the younger doctor partway into his armpit. Both nurses looked like they’d taken a scouring pad to theirs, to lighten up the lettering to the point of illegibility.

I didn’t care about their names anyway. To me, Potter was the only important name, and I was there to see that it didn’t wind up on a death certificate.

The younger doctor, an intern with shaggy locks stuffed under a green surgeon’s cap, attached the vital-signs sensors to Potter’s body and wedged the cardiopulmonary stimulator against the base of his sternum. The device forced heart and lung contractions through focused magnetic pulses. It would keep Potter going until true resuscitation was achieved.

The older doc checked the placement of the cup-sized stimulator and flipped a switch. Potter’s ribs began to rise and fall. Old Doc then checked the vital-signs monitor on the wall, using the opportunity to send me an unsolicited dirty look.

Hey, you sign up as a gov med provider and you get the occasional lousy job. You take the bad with the good, the grim with the gracious. It wasn’t my fault he opted to work for the state.

“We’ve got full CP support,” Old Doc announced, his words flat and cold. “Inject 10 cc’s lazarol.”

Of the two nurses, one had amber-colored hair and filled out her uniform in all the right spots—a condition my dad used to call “Easy on the Eyes.” The other was tall, big-boned and looked like she’d worked as a bouncer in one of the city’s no-star nightclubs.

On entering the Resus Room, the tall nurse had filled a syringe from a small brown bottle she’d taken from the medicine cooler. Now she muscled her frame to the side of

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