Harker had an appointment with old Richard Bryant at three that
afternoon. He was not looking forward to it. Since Bryant was confined
to his home by doctor's orders, it meant that Harker would have to
visit the old man, and that meant entering a house where death seemed
to hang heavy over the threshold, a house filled with graspingly
impatient relatives of the venerable hero of space travel's infancy.
At half past two Harker notified his secretary that he was leaving; he
gathered up the portfolio of relevant papers, locked his office, and
took the gravshaft down to street level. He emerged on First Avenue,
and walked quickly downtown toward 125th Street.
It was a bright, warmish, cloudless May afternoon. A bubble of
advertising was the only blot on the otherwise flawless sky. The
Manhattan air was clean, tingling, fresh. Harker never breathed it in
without thinking of the vast dynamos of the puritron stations every
ten blocks apart, gulping in tons and tons of city soot each second.
In his second year as Mayor, the entire Brooklyn puritron assembly had
"accidentally" conked out for four hours, thanks to some half-forgotten
labor squabble. Harker remembered the uproar _that_ had caused.
At 125th Street he boarded the crosstown monorail and moments later
found himself disembarking at the Riverside Drive exit. He signaled for
a cab; while he waited, a bleary-eyed old man shuffled over to him,
shoved a gaudy pamphlet in his hands, greeted him by name, and shuffled
away.
He looked at it. It was one of the many official organs of the
Watchtower Society. As he stuffed it in the corner disposal-bin, he
smiled in recollection of that organization's motto: _Millions now
living will never die._
Gravely he proposed a substitute: _Millions now dead will live again._
The attendant images effectively choked off the mood of good humor
that had been stealing over him. He remembered that in only two days
he would be journeying across the Hudson to see whether the Beller
Laboratories people had actually hit on something or not.
The cab drew up. Harker slid into the back seat and said,
"Seventy-ninth and West End, driver."
The house was a massive, heavily-chromed representative of late
twentieth-century architecture, settling now into respectable middle
age. Harker had visited it on three separate occasions, and each time
his discomfort had increased.
It had no gravshaft; he rode up in a human-operated elevator. The
operator said, "I guess you're going to visit Mr. Bryant, eh, Mr.
Harker?"
"That's right."
"The old gentleman's been poorish lately, sir. Ah, it'll be a sad thing
when he goes, won't it?"
"He's one of our greatest," Harker agreed. "Many people up there today?"
"The usual lot," the operator said, halting the car and opening
the door. It opened immediately into the foyer of the huge Bryant
apartment. Almost at once, Harker found himself staring at the fishy,
cold-eyed face of Jonathan Bryant, the old man's eldest son.
"Good afternoon, Jonathan."
"Hello, Harker." The reply was sullenly brusque. "You're here to see my
father?"
"I didn't come for tea," Harker snapped. "Will you invite me in, or
should I just push past you?"
Jonathan muttered something and gave ground, allowing Harker to enter.
The living room was crowded: half-a-dozen miscellaneous Bryants, plus
two or three whom Harker did not know but who bore the familiar Bryant
features. A horde of vultures, Harker thought. He nodded to them with
professional courtesy and passed on, through the inner rooms, to the
old man's sick room.
The place was lined with trophies--one room, Harker knew, consisted
of the cockpit of the _Mars One_, that slender needle of a ship that
had borne Rick Bryant to the red planet nearly fifty years ago, an
epoch-making flight that still stood large in the annals of space
travel. Trophy cases in the halls held medals, souvenir watches,
testimonial dinner menus. Old Bryant had been a prodigious collector of
souvenirs.
His doctor, a tiny man with the look of an irritated penguin, met him
at the door to the sick room. "I'll have to ask you to limit your stay
to thirty minutes, Mr. Harker. He's very low today."
"I'll be as brief as I can," Harker promised. He stepped around the
barricade and entered.
Helen Bryant, oldest of the daughters, sat solicitously by her father's
bedside, glaring at him with the tender expression of a predatory
harpy.
Harker said, "If you'll excuse me, Miss Bryant, your father and I have
some important business to discuss."
"I'm his daughter. Can't I--"
"I'm afraid not," Harker said coldly. He waited while she made her
proud retreat, then took her seat at the side of the bed.
"Afternoon, Harker," Bryant said in a tomblike croak.
He was not a pretty sight. He was seventy-three, and could easily
pass for twice that age--a shrunken, leathery little man with rheumy,
cataracted eyes and a flat, drooping face. There was little about him
that was heroic, now. He was just a dying old man.
The needles of an intravenous feed-line penetrated his body at various
points. He no longer had the strength to swallow or to digest. It
was difficult to believe that this man had made the first successful
round-trip flight to another planet, back in 1984, and that from his
early thirties until his stroke four years ago he had been a figure of
world importance, whose words were eagerly rushed into print whenever
he cared to make a statement.
He said, "How does it look for next Thursday?"
Harker's jaws tightened. "Pretty good. I hope to be able to swing it."
"How have you set it up?"
Harker drew the papers from his portfolio. "Twenty million is to be
established as a trust fund for your grandchildren and for the children
of your grandson Frederick. Thirty million is to be granted to the
Bryant Foundation for Astronautical Research. Fifty thousand is to be
divided among your children, ten thousand to each."
"Is that last bit necessary?" Bryant asked with sudden ferocity.
"I'm afraid it is."
"I wanted to cut those five jackals off without a penny!" he thundered.
Then, subsiding, he coughed and said, "Why must you give them so much?"
"There are legal reasons. It makes it harder for them to overthrow the
will, you see."
The old man was reluctant to accept the idea of giving his children
anything, and in a way Harker could see the justice of that. They
were a hateful bunch. Bryant had garnered millions from his space
journey, and had invested the money wisely and well; there had been an
undignified scramble for the old hero's wealth when a stroke appeared
to have killed him in '28. He had confounded them all by recovering,
and by cutting most of them out of his revised will--a document that
was being contested in the courts even while the old man still lived.
At three-thirty, the penguinish doctor knocked discreetly at the
bedchamber door, poked his head in, and said, "I hope you're almost
through, Mr. Harker."
At that moment old Bryant was trying to sign a power-of-attorney Harker
had prepared; his palsied hand could barely manage the signature, but
in time he completed it. Harker looked at it: a wavy scrawl that looked
like a random pattern on a seismograph drum.
"I'm leaving now," Harker told the doctor.
Bryant quavered, "What time is the hearing next Thursday, Harker?"
"Half-past-eleven."
"Be sure to call me when it's finished."
"Of course. You just relax, Mr. Bryant. Legally they can't trouble you
at all."
He reaped a harvest of sour glances as he made his way through the
trophy-cluttered halls to the elevator. It was a depressing place, and
the sight of the shattered hero always clouded his mind with gloom. He
was glad to get away.
* * * * *
Riding a cab downtown to Grand Central, he boarded the 4:13 express
to Larchmont, and eleven minutes later was leaving the Larchmont tube
depot and heading in a local cab toward his home. At quarter to five,
he stepped through the front door.
Lois was in the front room, standing on a chair and doing something to
the ceiling mobile. Silently Harker crept in; standing with arms akimbo
at the door, he said, "It's high time we junked that antique, darling."
She nearly fell off the chair in surprise. "_Jim!_ What are you--"
"Home early," Harker said. "Had an appointment with old Bryant and the
medics tossed me out quick, so I came home. Gah! Filthy business, that
Bryant deal."
He slipped out of his jacket and loosened his throat-ribbon. He paused
for a moment at the mirror, staring at himself: the fine, strong
features, the prematurely iron-gray hair, the searching blue eyes. It
was the face of a natural leader, an embryo President. But there was
something else in it now--a coldness around the eyes, a way of quirking
the corners of his mouth--that showed a defeated man, a man who has
climbed to the top of his string and toppled back to the ground. With
forty years of active life ahead of him.
"Hello, Dad. Want a drink?"
It was the already-deepening voice of twelve-year-old Chris that drew
him away from his reverie. In recent months he had let the boy prepare
his homecoming cocktail for him. But today he shook his head. "Sorry,
son. I don't happen to be thirsty tonight."
Disappointment flashed briefly in the boy's handsome face; then it
faded. Minor setbacks like this meant little to a boy who had expected
once to live in the White House, and who knew now it wouldn't be
happening.
"Where's Paul?" Harker asked.
"Upstairs doing his homework," Chris said. He snorted. "The ninny's
learning long division. Having fits with it, too."
Harker stared at his son strangely for a moment; then he said, "Chris,
go upstairs and give him some help. I want to talk to Mum."
"Sure, Dad."
When the boy had gone, Harker turned to his wife. Lois at forty--three
years his junior--was still slim and attractive; her blonde hair had
lost its sheen and soon would be shading into gray, but she seemed to
welcome rather than fear the imprint of age.
She said, "Jim, why did you look at Chris that way?"
In answer, Harker crossed to the table near the window and his fingers
sought out the tri-dim of dead Eva, its bright colors losing some of
their sharpness now after nine years. "I was trying to picture him as a
teen-age girl," he said heavily. "Eva would have been fifteen soon."
Her only outward reaction was a momentary twitch of the lower lip.
"You haven't thought of her for a long time."
"I know. I try not to think of her. But I thought of her today. I was
thinking that she didn't have to be dead, Lois."
"Of course not, dear. But it happened, and there was no help for it."
He shook his head. Replacing Eva's picture, he picked up instead a
tiny bit of bric-a-brac, a kaleidoscopic crystal in whose depths were
swirling streaks of red and gold and dark black. He shook it; the
color-patterns changed. "I mean," he said carefully, "that Eva might
have been saved, even after the accident."
"They tried to revive her. The pulmotor--"
"No. Lois, I had a--a person visit me this morning. A certain Dr.
Lurie, from a certain research laboratory in New Jersey. He claims
they've developed a technique for bringing the dead back to life, and
he wants me to handle promotion and legal aspects. For a fat fee, may I
add."
She frowned uncertainly. "Reviving the dead? What kind of crazy joke is
that?"
"I don't know. But I'm not treating it as a joke; not until I've seen
the evidence, anyway. I made an appointment to go out to Jersey and
visit their lab on Friday."
"And you'll take the job, if they've really hit on something?"
Harker nodded. "Sure I'll take it. It's risky, of course, and there's
sure to be a lot of public clamor in both directions--"
"And haven't we had enough of that? Weren't you satisfied when you
tried to reform the state government, and wound up being read out of
the party? Jim, do you have to be Quixote all the time?"
Her words had barbs. Harker thought bleakly that being able always to
see both sides of a question, as he could, was a devil-granted gift.
Wearily he said, "All right. I tried to do something I thought was
right, and I got my head chopped off as a result. Well, here's my
second chance--maybe. For all I know they're a bunch of lunatics over
there. I owe it to myself and to the world to find out--and to help
them, if I can."
He pointed at the tri-dim of Eva. "Suppose that happened _now_--Eva,
I mean. Wouldn't you want to save her? Or," he said, making his words
deliberately harsh, "suppose Paul dies. Wouldn't you want to be able to
call him back from--from wherever he had gone?"
For a moment there was silence.
"Well? Wouldn't you?"
Lois shrugged, turning her hands palm outward. "Jim, I don't know. I
just honestly don't know."