“Uh… sir?” I dared to say.
His long crooked finger came up between us, but he didn’t look at me. “Timing is critical. I must focus. No prattling, please.”
I shut up again.
The old man had two electrical wires with exposed copper tips in his hand. One was red, the other was black. It looked like he was going to jump-start an old gas-powered tram or something.
The tank gurgled and swirled. Once, I saw a hand rise up from the soup and then slip back in.
“There it is, independent movement. The critical moment has arrived.”
He shoved the wires deep into the sludge, his arms widespread. I saw a spark, and his face registered pain. That kind of surprised me. One would have thought that he’d have put on insulated gloves, at least.
The electrical current kept going, and the old guy went rigid. His neck twisted and cranked around, like he was undergoing some kind of spastic reaction.
“Shit!” I said. “He’s electrocuting himself!”
I moved a step forward, but Floramel’s thin hands formed claws, and she tugged at my arm. It would have been nothing, of course, to rip free of her—but I looked at her instead. My mouth hung low, gaping.
“What is it?”
“There might be a method to his madness.”
I blinked. “Yeah… there usually is.”
We stepped closer, but we didn’t touch him. Slowly, over the next ninety seconds, maybe, the Investigator sagged. His body was in a rictus of pain, you could see that on his face, plain as day. My instinct was to give him a kick, dislodging him from those wires and that nasty pool of goop.
But I didn’t do it. Floramel stood with me, fascinated. Her hands were still locked on my arm. She didn’t look horrified—not exactly. She looked kind of entranced.
“I believe we’re witnessing something new. Just wait, James.”
I did, and I began to smell bad smells, the kinds of things a man stank of when his body had let go and no longer functioned.
At last, the old white-haired scientist slumped. His face touched the sludge-pool, and I couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Satisfied now? We might have saved him. Dammit girl, he was our best hope to save Etta.” I ripped the wires from his hands, and I pushed the body aside. The Investigator was stone dead.
“Just wait. I… think we’re about to see something miraculous.”
I snorted. “It’s a dead old guy. I’ve seen lots of those.”
“James… think. How old is the Investigator?”
“Uh… I don’t rightly know.”
“How old did he look when you first met him?”
Squinting, I tried to focus on her questions, but I barely cared. I was already thinking about how I could smuggle the crazy old bastard back to Earth for an illegal revive. Floramel was wanted back home, but I probably wasn’t. If I could get him breathing again, then…
“James! Look!”
A hand had risen out of the goop. I gaped at it. The hand was long-fingered and pale as a ghost.
“Help it. Help it sit up.”
I bared all my teeth at once, but I did it. I reached into the slime and pulled. The thing in the tank sat up, but it was all floppy-like. Floramel maneuvered to the other side, and she helped, too.
“This dude better not bite me,” I complained. “Remember Raash the last time?”
“Don’t remind me of that dark day.”
We messed around and found a hose. I sprayed off the muddy man in the tank. He wasn’t looking much better. He was tall, thin, and half-dead.
“James?” Floramel asked as we worked. “Answer my question?”
“Huh?”
“How old was the Investigator? Back during the Dust World campaign?”
“I don’t know. About the same age as he is now, I’d say. Maybe a little younger. He’s never been a normal guy.”
“I know. How old is Etta, James?”
“Uh… about thirty, right?”
She nodded.
Birthdays. I wasn’t good at birthdays. Just try living and dying over and over, birthdays will probably mean a lot less to you too, as the years roll by.
“Right,” Floramel said. “So you’re telling me the Investigator looked then about the same as he does now—but that was thirty years ago.”
I blinked a few times, thinking that over. “Huh… that’s a little weird, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but I think we now know why. Lift him out of the medium.”
“Uh… he is a he, isn’t he? Get him a towel or something.”
We sprayed him off, dried him with a towel… and I realized I knew who it was we’d just revived.
His face was the same as the man on the stone floor—or almost the same. He was definitely younger.
It was the Investigator, and he was breathing again.
-57-
“Your technique was poor,” the Investigator complained.
That was just like him. We’d saved his skinny ass, but here he was complaining right out of the hat.
“I would have thought,” he rasped, “that two people from the legions would be well-versed in the process of rebirth.”
“Well sir,” I said, “where I come from, we usually operate machines. This is… it’s kind of a ghetto-revive, if you know what I mean.”
He coughed and shook. We slapped him on the back, fed him water from canteens, and generally kissed his ass while he recovered. We didn’t have any fancy equipment to take medical measurements and suggest medical remedies. We just waited it out and kept him from falling over.
At last, he seemed to recover. He looked at the two of us with bleary eyes.
“It took you longer than I expected to come,” he said. “I almost had to do my entire rebirth myself. My usual assistants—they won’t come here any longer.”
Internally, I couldn’t blame them. The Investigator wasn’t only scary and more than half-insane, he was also kind of an
