FLETCHER’S NOT IN the mood to debate names. “Mr. Lamont Cranston” is what it said on the intake sheet. That’s all he knows. So I decide not to push it. All Fletcher cares about right now is bringing this guy back into the land of the living. In fact, he looks a little obsessed.

“Okay. How do we do it?” I ask.

“‘We’?” says Fletcher. “Do you have a medical degree?”

“I get straight-As in science,” I say. “How many bodies have you brought back to life?”

“Actually,” he says, “this would be my first.”

“All right then, let’s call us even. What’s the process?”

Fletcher steps out into the main room and comes back with a stack of old binders and notebooks. Really old. Torn and falling-apart old.

“It’s all in here,” he says. “Theoretically.” He points to his head. “And in here.”

“And the theory is…?” I ask.

I think Fletcher has probably spent so much time alone in this temple of doom that he likes having somebody he can lecture to. He starts flipping through the binders and notebooks, looking back and forth. As he flips, he talks—like he’s been waiting forever to spill it out.

“When Mr. Cranston arrived in 1937, he was dying from ingestion of an erabutoxin, possibly derived from sea snake venom. Incredibly destructive. So before he was clinically dead, his body was cryogenically cooled.”

“He was frozen?”

“Supercooled,” says Fletcher. “Human cells can’t survive actual freezing. Ice crystal formation ruptures the cell membranes. There’s no way you could thaw a fully frozen organism and expect a positive result.”

He points to the IV tube running into the guy’s ankle, right above his rolled-down sock. “He’s been suffused with a vitrification solution to keep his cells viable at low temperature.”

“Like antifreeze?” I ask.

“A bit more complex than that, but yes, similar notion. Under cryogenic deceleration, his heart has been pumping. His blood has been flowing. His cells have been regenerating. But barely. In a hundred and fifty years, he’s probably aged ten.” He taps one of the old notebooks. “If the solution reacts with an electrical charge in the right way, it should restore function.”

“You’re going to electrocute him?”

“Yes,” says Fletcher. “Very gently.”