Forty Leap (43 page)

The doctor came and leaned over me. He lifted
my arm and I saw that there was a patch over my vein in the crook
of my elbow. I supposed it was an IV.

“Can you talk?” the doctor asked.

I shook my head. My throat burned with every
swallow.

“Do you think you can drink something?”

I nodded as vigorously as I could.

The nurse produced what looked like a rubber
bladder filled with some amber liquid. He handed it to me. It was
cool to the touch and smooth without being slippery. I squeezed it
in the palm of my hand almost reflexively and a few drops of the
liquid seeped out onto my hand.

“Careful!” the doctor warned and helped me to
lift it to my mouth. I sucked on it and the liquid flowed through
the membrane and down my throat. It was not water. It went down
very smoothly, coating my sore throat and giving me strength. It
was gone too quickly.

“…more,” I managed to choke.

The doctor smiled and got a second bladder
from the nurse. This one, however, had just plain water in it. It
was good enough for me. Every sip brought me knew life and restored
my clarity of thought. I began to remember, in vivid detail, the
hours I had spent buried underground. The darkness. The smell. The
wounded man.

“…man…”

“What?” said the blonde headed fellow. “What
did he say?”

“He said, ‘man’,” the doctor told him. “What
man?”

“…wounded…”

“Oh!” cried the blonde headed fellow. “You
must mean the man who was in the bed. The one with the gunshot
wound?”

I nodded.

“Sorry to say that that poor fellow didn’t
make it.” As he said it his tone never changed. I could still sense
that bit of excitement underlying his words. “You are Mathew
Cristian, aren’t you?”

I froze. Had I gone from the frying pan into
the fire?

He shook his head. “Don’t worry. You’re safe
here. There’s been no aggression against Forty Leapers in well over
a hundred years. In fact, there have been hardly any Forty Leapers
at all.”

“…journal…”

He smiled and went back to his chair. There
was a bag underneath and he pulled out my battered and dusty
journal. “It’s fantastic,” he said as he handed it to me.

I don’t know what kind of darkness passed
over my features upon hearing that but he definitely sensed my
anger. His casual admission of having read my journal had left me
feeling violated. Many of my most private thoughts had gone into
that book and they were not for the eyes of some floppy headed
child.

“I didn’t mean to… I didn’t realize…”

The doctor broke in then. “Perhaps we should
let him get some more rest. We’ll bring you some food in a bit if
you think you can get it down.”

I nodded again, hugging my book protectively
to my chest.

“…pen…”

My greatest fear was that this advanced
civilization had forsaken both paper and pen but the doctor pulled
one from his white coat and handed it to me. “It would be better if
you slept.”

I took the pen and thanked him, glaring at
the platinum man as they all left the room.

The year was 2342 and it was April in New
York. The food they brought me was jello. I almost laughed when I
saw it. It was pink and tasted like the color of the nurse’s
scrubs. But it went down easy and further rejuvenated me.
Presently, I began to get my voice back. I was still restricted to
a hoarse whisper, but I could at least complete a sentence. The
blonde man returned, this time a bit more reserved. He started to
apologize again for reading my journal, but I waved him off. There
was nothing to be done about it now and whatever his interest in
me, it was clear that he had saved my life.

His name was Jefferny Smith and he was the
chairman and co-founder of an organization called FLASH (Forty
Leaper Analytical Historical Society). I was amused but didn’t
bother to mention the error in the acronym. He was actually quite a
bit older than I had thought, but that was what the miracles of
modern medicine will do for you. He was close to forty but he
described himself as a spoiled rich kid with nothing to do but use
his money to indulge his interests. That had prompted FLASH.

Jefferny related information in a quick and
jerking speech, using many words that I didn’t understand. The
English slang had changed over the years and I had spent so much
time in the company of other Forty Leapers that I had seen none of
the evolution of the language. I forced him to slow down but still
fell behind his oration. We spoke for several hours and I
questioned him frequently. He seemed tireless and with endless
patience. It was difficult to dislike him, his enthusiasm was so
great.

He had read about Forty Leapers in an old
book he had unearthed in someone’s estate. At the time, he’d been a
teenager. The whole concept appealed to him in a way that nothing
else had. Remarkably, there was little about us on the internet.
All of the data had been squirreled away somewhere or destroyed.
But Jefferny’s research had uncovered a vast amount of paperwork
and digital reports that were still in existence. Included were the
names and photos of dozens of leapers from different eras. In some
cases, he had even learned their leap routes. From what I could
understand of his speech, he had actually met a Forty Leaper some
years before while in Nigeria. Apparently, an African bushman had
been leaping through time since before the turn of the nineteenth
century. Jefferny couldn’t recall his name and the man had leaped
before any sort of real communication could be established, but
still Jefferny insisted that he had learned a lot from the
experience.

Thursday November 26
^th
, 2189 had
been a significant date in the history of Forty Leapers. The Forty
Leap Police had raided almost all of the Forty Leaper installations
across the globe. The maneuver had been set up to come in a
synchronized fashion. All of the installations were overtaken and
all of the Forty Leapers were either killed or leaped out of the
battle. With no way of determining just how many had been lost, the
installations were closed off in much the same way Rogers Clinton’s
headquarters had been. Anyone leaping back in would die of hunger
or thirst, buried alive. I shuddered to think of it.

The governments of that time, our enemy, had
done an excellent job of concealing those locations so that they
couldn’t be later uncovered. At the age of thirty, Jefferny had met
up with several other people, all interested in the Forty Leap
phenomenon. Some were scientists and others were historians. Most
of them were as rich as he was. Together they pooled their money
and created FLASH. The society was really nothing more than a front
for men at play. They took long trips to visit sites that were
either confirmed or suspected installation sites. Jefferny had
actually made three trips that had proven to be actual sites. The
artifacts found there had furthered their knowledge immensely. It
was interesting to hear about Forty Leaper experiences in other
countries. Rupert had told me about the experiences that had
brought him from England to America but that had been so long ago
that the foreign countries of this world may as well have been
other worlds entirely. Even my own country was foreign to me.

Eventually, Jefferny got to the part of the
story that concerned me. Of all of the sites they had explored the
one that was the largest and the most well known was the
headquarters from which I had been rescued. In Forty Leaper
circles, two names resounded among the masses. Rogers Clinton and
Mathew Cristian. When it became clear that both of us had leaped
from that particular installation, finding it had been made a
priority. But they had no way of discovering its exact location.
The information on it was so spotty, in fact, that no one was even
sure it was in Manhattan. The city had been remade and remade again
since I’d seen it last and there was much beneath the surface that
I had called familiar. I thought of my amazement at the sight of
Manhattan, rescued from United Arab control, rebuilt and
functioning. That beautiful city had been destroyed and rebuilt
again and again since then. Time was a match for anything, for
everything. Everything, that is, except a Forty Leaper.

Six months ago, Jefferny had received an
anonymous communication confirming that the site for which they had
so long searched was definitely located in midtown Manhattan. Since
they were used to receiving these kinds of communications, they
ignored it. But the communication kept coming, over and over. Only
when they replied that they had received the information did it
stop. FLASH was unaccustomed to accepting information anonymously.
They ignored it. A week later a new message arrived asking why they
hadn’t begun to investigate the site. Jefferny was adamant that
“midtown Manhattan” did not constitute a site. It was a region and
they couldn’t go tearing up a region.

In the end, more information had come through
and the members of FLASH could not help themselves from
investigating. The source was still anonymous but I suspected that
a Forty Leaper had either made it out of the headquarters during
the assault or had leaped out a few days prior to the assault and
had only just leaped back in. After learning of the battle and the
fate of the installation, any leaper would have come forward with
the information. Although, why remain anonymous? Then again, why
not? If I had leaped from a place of safety to a place of safety,
yet still unknown to me, I would have been reluctant to advertise
my condition as well. As far as I knew, the whole thing was a
complicated ploy to round us up and be done with us once and for
all.

It was only when Jefferny informed me that I
never need leap again that I started to hope. One of the major
pharmaceutical companies had created an adrenal inhibitor and
distributed it in pill form. The pill was to be taken daily and the
effects were near one hundred percent. The possible side effects
were drowsiness, lethargy, and muscle cramps. Occurrences of side
effects were low. Use as directed.

I was so directed.

Ironically, I was excited to be unburdened
with my disease. True, I was not cured. If I stopped taking the
pills for three days then my system would return to normal and I
would be at risk again. I began taking them as soon as I got out of
the hospital. Jefferny put me up in his home while an apartment was
made ready for me. I asked him about work so that I could support
myself and he smiled, telling me that it had all been arranged.

Jefferny’s bright idea was to turn the
headquarters into a museum. From mausoleum to museum. Of course,
the primary attraction would be me. I could give speeches and
answer questions. My journal, the parts of it that I didn’t
consider too terribly private, could be reproduced and displayed. I
didn’t so much object to the idea as I was unenthusiastic about it.
I told this to Jefferny one morning over breakfast. There were
still Forty Leapers out there, popping into and out of realities
completely unaware of the situation surrounding them. Most of them
had been persecuted and were afraid. They were coming through with
weapons which made them dangerous. Who knew who would pop into the
middle of speech and start shooting? That idea, by the way, seemed
to excite Jefferny. The lure of the possible leap was more than he
could bear.

I toyed with the last of my eggs. “But it
doesn’t help us,” I said.

This seemed to sober him. Despite his age, he
was such a boy. Certainly people lived much longer these days. The
average lifespan was in the upper nineties with fewer
debilitations. But the rate of maturity seemed to have been
retarded as well. Jefferny could not always see his way clear to
consequences without having it spelled out for him.

“How can we help?” he asked. More often now,
he was using less of the slang that was popular in New York these
days. He understood that it made no sense to me and hindered our
communication. English as a whole had changed. It had been melded
with Spanish to a certain extent, but was still the dominant
language. Spanish still existed but was rarely spoken in the United
States, which was still the United States. Jefferny never used the
word
water
. He always said
agua
. In fact, he was
totally unfamiliar with
water
as an expression. The look on
his face when I had used it had been priceless. It had given me a
good laugh which, for me, had always been rare events.

I pondered the question. Like many ideas
before, I hadn‘t really thought it through. The idea that we needed
to help leapers had occurred to me at that moment with no framework
of how to put it into place. As I reached for my pills, an idea
came to me.

“How about finding a cure?” I said. “These
inhibitors are effective, but I’m stuck on a drug for the rest of
my life. Besides which, I don’t feel one hundred percent like
myself. I can get excited, but there’s no adrenaline to accompany
it, or very little. The physical sensation of excitement is
missing. My enthusiasm for anything is disconnected.”

He thought about this. “I guess we could fund
some research. What else?”

I threw my arms in the air. “I don’t know.
Forty Leapers need a place to go when they come back into the time
stream. We come in lost and scared. We have no dinero and no idea
how much time has passed. The longer the leap, the more el mundo
has changed. We don’t know where we’re going find food or agua. We
don’t know where we’re going to sleep. We don’t know who’s going to
help us and who’s going to try and kill us.

“Maybe that’s what we should do. Forty
Leapers need a safe place to go. They need a place where all of
those things will be available to them while they are introduced to
el mundo nuevo. This place needs to be so public that everyone in
el mundo knows about it. If anyone leaps in, there’ll be a hundred
people who know just exactly who to call.”