Chapter 12

“Did that pen just move by itself?” Alisha demanded.

“Of course not,” Jibben said. “In all likelihood, another lightning strike created a faint vibration that propelled it. Something too subtle for us to feel that was amplified by the stainless steel table. If any of us had been touching the table at the time—”

“Okay, fine, Mr. Wizard,” I said, already annoyed. Maybe I was getting hangry. “We got it. No self-moving pens.”

But Alisha wasn’t convinced. She backed away from the pen as if it might jump up and bite her…then jerked around, looking at the floor in accusation. “What the hell?”

I shone my flashlight down where she was looking and saw a long, murky puddle snaking out from one of the crates.

“Step aside,” I told her.

“What is that?” Jacob asked.

But Jibben didn’t know. “I’d have to check the manifest.”

Jacob locked eyes with me and said, “It could be anything.” Meaning, it’s probably something really messed up. “And Alisha stepped in it. We need to get the boots off her.”

Those office chairs we’d retrieved were coming in awfully handy. Alisha sat herself down and immediately got to shucking off her steel-toed work boots. No clue what she’d stepped into, but at least she wasn’t wearing flip-flops.

Gingerly, I picked up the boots and set them aside well away from the rest of us. Then, as Jibben flipped furiously through the manifest to try and identify what could possibly leak, Jacob crouched down beside the puddle.

I said, “Don’t you dare even think of touching it, mister.”

There must have been something in my tone. Alisha looked at me sharply. “You two know each other pretty good?”

“Oh, you could say that.”

I flashed her my wedding band, and understanding dawned. “Okay,” she said, as if the situation had only just now progressed into super weird territory.

“This is bad,” Jibben said. “Very bad.”

“Am I gonna lose my foot?” Alisha cried.

Jibben waved it off. “I’m sure your foot is fine. But if we can’t contain whatever’s leaking out of there, it will evaporate before we have a chance to study it! That crate needs to be unboxed, ASAP.”

The rest of us looked at him like he was nuts.

“Fine. I’ll do it myself.” He one-foot-wheeled himself over to a cabinet and pulled out a white plastic packet the size of a small throw pillow and shoved one toward each of us. “But if we’re going to expose the artifacts, we’ll all need to suit up so you don’t contaminate them.”

The packet contained a single-use hazmat suit. Not that I’m any kind of fashion plate, but normally, I’d tell him where he could shove his white plastic outfit. But since they would likely protect us as much as they did the so-called “artifacts,” I figured I should probably swallow my pride and don the jumpsuit.

Jacob seemed even less thrilled with the prospect of wearing a clean suit than I was. At least there were protective booties included, so Alisha didn’t have to go around in just her socks.

I fully intended to sit this one out. But when Jibben wheeled over to the crate and started struggling with it, he was so pathetic I couldn’t help but go over there and put him out of his misery.

“Here,” I said, “hold it steady.” Our crowbar would have been helpful, but given that it was lying out there next to Darnell’s dead body, I didn’t point that out. But we were able to dredge up some basic tools from one of the cabinets—a box cutter, a small pry bar, a screwdriver—and get to work.

Soon, it was pretty obvious that Jibben was just in the way. I was none too eager to pop open that crate myself and be sprayed with mysterious fifty-year-old fluid. But at least I could get out of the way quicker without tripping over him.

“Go read the manifest,” I said. “We got this.”

He wheeled himself back to the table and took up the manifest. Meanwhile, Jacob eased up to me and met my eyes. Speaking low, he said, “There could be anything in here.”

“But it’s the Argus Institute,” I said, semi-hopefully. “Probably nothing worse than a broken fish tank.” Because it would have been totally normal for someone to pack a fish tank, complete with water.

Jacob quirked an eyebrow, but didn’t indulge in any snappy comebacks.

We futzed with it for a while, but the seams on the crate were tight. I was about to suggest searching for a sledgehammer when finally, Jacob managed to wiggle the screwdriver into a crack. With a loud creak, the side of the crate popped open.

Jacob and I held our breath as we peered inside, and Alisha hurried over to hold the light—probably more out of curiosity than any desire to help. At first, it looked like a jumble of junk inside—a few rusted tools, some ancient wiring, and what looked like a broken radio. “Be careful,” Jacob said. “If there’s a leaking battery, it could be acid.”

I lifted out a box vaguely marked as “Samples,” and then a stunningly old computer (that probably cost more than my car, back in the day) that I set carefully aside. There were dozens of boxes of floppy discs, a lot lighter than I expected, and a weirdly shaped desk fan with no power cord, an overlong neck, and too many fan blades. Eventually, when we got to the bottom….

“It is a fish tank,” I said. You can’t make this shit up.

“Not a fish tank.” Jibben wheeled over to see for himself. “According to the manifest, it’s a Saline Transference Environment.”

“So, a saltwater fish tank,” Alisha said.

Loftily, Jibben said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Dr. Hinman theorized that a saline environment could amplify the range and dynamics of telekinetic ability.”

“Dr. Hinman?” Alisha repeated. “You mean the old white dude with the crazy sideburns?”

Jibben was surprised. “You’ve heard of him?”

“Everyone’s heard of him. He was on every other episode of Psychic Mysteries.” She frowned. “Okay, maybe more like once or twice a season. But those sideburns….” She shuddered dramatically.

Jibben twitched, too—and then Jacob got in on the act, chafing the back of his neck.

Apparently the heebie-jeebies were contagious. Kind of like yawning.

“So, what about the puddle?” I asked.

Jibben scrounged a swab from one of the cabinets. “Obviously, I can’t run it through a spectrometer without any power.” He swabbed and gave it a sniff. “But I suspect it’s just saline—tainted with five decades of corrosion. But bag it up, all the same, I’ll need to run it through several tests—and it’s evaporating even as we speak.”

Even with half the juice leaked out, the tank was still pretty heavy—plus, neither Jacob nor I was eager to spill something on ourselves that turned out to be full of hungry flesh-eating 70’s nanobots…or, more likely, dysentery.

Once we wrangled it into a giant plastic bag and sealed it up tight, Jibben said defensively, “Dr. Hinman’s public appearances were a necessary evil. TV paid well for the right experts, and there was no government funding for this type of research.”

I dunno about that. Uncle Sam probably had Dr. Kamal and his crew on the payroll—not that there’d be any paper trail left behind to prove it.

Jibben went on. “Dr. Hinman was a true pioneer, mark my words. Interviews can be spliced to say whatever the media wants them to say. So take anything you’ve seen on those garbage documentary shows with a hefty grain of salt.”

“I like those garbage documentary shows.” Alisha crossed her arms in annoyance and turned away from him, and her gaze fell on the goofy fan. “Hold up, now. Is this the…whaddayacallit? Wait, don’t say. It’ll come to me.”

“I highly doubt it,” Jibben said.

Alisha swung the full force of the emergency lantern at the fan. “It will. I seen it before. In the episode where they were trying to see if that spoon-bending guy was legit. He showed how it was supposed to move when it picked up on psychic shit going on.” She snapped her fingers a few times, then looked back at Jibben triumphantly. “Rotational Indicator. See? Not so garbage now.”

Huh. It all looked like a big pile of junk to me. Clearly, I needed to watch more TV.

The cupboards in containment were as well stocked as the rest of the lab—since lack of government funding was no longer an issue like it was in Hinman’s time. We were able to soak up the leaked fluid with a weird gelatinous sheet, which we then tucked away in yet another bag. It was a lot like collecting evidence. And while the Chicago PD left it to the experts to run through a crime scene with a fine-toothed comb, I was versed enough in collection basics, in case I arrived at a scene full of transient evidence and had to grab what I could before something important was lost.

I thought we did a pretty good job with the cleanup, but Jibben wasn’t satisfied. “Who knows what else might’ve been damaged when the shipment fell.” When he pulled it over monkeying around with it, to be precise. “We need to inventory the whole crate.”

“We need to get out of here,” Jacob said.

But since his plan for getting out of there involved spelunking in an electrified elevator shaft, I had to side with the annoying scientist. It was a prime opportunity to give Jacob something to do—something that didn’t require a resin cutter, a safety harness, and a frantic Hail Mary—so I gave Jibben’s plan my vote. “We all decided we would stay put. So we might as well keep ourselves busy.”

We got to work taking inventory of the crate, using the manifest to identify the items we pulled out. We proceeded carefully, careful to document each item and its condition. There were no more specialized gizmos that made an appearance on a sensationalistic pre-Ganzfeld-Report TV show. Just stacks of file folders and ledgers crammed with yellowed papers, and a bunch of archaic phones from a putty-colored multi-line office phone system that was doubtlessly ultramodern at the time.

I’ve heard most kids these days who grew up with cellphones are incapable of operating an actual telephone…though maybe that’s just rotary. Would Clayton take it into his head to start monkeying around with our landline? And wasn’t it possible for lightning to travel through the wires?

Normally, I would have thought that notion was beyond paranoid. But after watching what happened when a strike traveled through a steel doorframe and a crowbar, I wasn’t so sure anymore. The thought of finding the kid sprawled on the kitchen floor, staring up at the ceiling with half his face blackened was enough to make me hope that porn was the only thing he snooped into.

Generally, Clayton was a fairly incurious kid, and was happy enough to sit and play Xbox while the grownups did grownup things. So hopefully he wasn’t overcome by the sudden urge to master a new phone.

Unless he thought it might get through to us when his cell phone didn’t.

I pulled out my cell and thumbed in a message. We’re running late. Just hang tight. Not that I thought he’d actually receive it. But the call from Alisha’s kid came through, so you never know. A gap in the clouds might align just right and let my tiny, inadequate text wing its way to the cannery.

Unfortunately, constantly searching for a signal that didn’t exist was doing a real number on my battery—and I hadn’t even been using the flashlight app. I’d started the day fully charged but was already more than halfway down.

Alisha, meanwhile, was thumbing through one of the binders from the crate when a photo slipped out and fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and turned it this way and that. “Look at these old farts,” she chuckled, holding the photo out for me to see.

I caught a glance of very 70’s looking middle-aged guys in stark white lab coats and oversized safety goggles.

But before I could take a closer look, Jibben rocketed over on his office chair and snatched the picture from her hands. “This is classified information,” he huffed, as he crammed the photograph back into the binder. “Not TV Guide.”

She said, “How can it be classified if it’s all on Psychic Mysteries for everyone to see?”

Jibben held the binder close, wheeling backwards with one foot as if he thought Alisha might fight him for it. “Dr. Hinman did important work. Historically significant work. Never mistake it for a trashy, sensationalist documentary designed for mass consumption.”

Alisha turned to Jacob. “You’re in charge. You gonna let him talk to me like that?”

“Look, both of you. We’re all in this together, and it’s important we treat each other respectfully and work like a team.”

“Fine,” said Jibben. “Then use that teamwork to put everything back in the crate. And, respectfully…try not to break anything.”