Two hours later, the Senate committee had gone, but the gloom of their
presence still hovered darkly over Harker.
A delayed reaction having nothing to do with the visit of the senators
had struck him. The old wounds of that day at the beach were open once
again; once again he huddled Eva's cold little form against his.
Somewhere else on the laboratory grounds, surgeons were working over a
twelve-year-old boy, stitching together the surgical apertures that had
been made to permit resuscitation. By tomorrow, the boy would be out
of anesthesia. In a few weeks, he would be walking around, healthy,
recalled to life after twenty hours of death.
Eva had drowned. She had not been saved.
"I don't understand it," Mart Raymond exclaimed vehemently. "It just
doesn't make sense."
Drawn for a moment from his painful memories, Harker said, "What
doesn't make sense?"
"Thurman. How can he stand there and watch a dead boy come to life, and
end up twice as solid against us as he was before?"
Harker shrugged. "I wish I knew. I thought we won them over with that
show--until Thurman spoke up. The old fossil is fogged up with age, I
guess. He's got some preconceived idea that it's immoral to bring back
the dead, and having it done right in front of him just solidified it."
The strain was showing on Raymond, Harker saw. His gray eyes were
red-rimmed and bleary; his face had grown thin. He had given up
a career in medical research to handle the job of running Beller
Labs--and perhaps he was regretting that, now.
He said, "Thurman is supposed to be a Nat-Lib. I could understand those
two Conservatives turning up their noses, but I thought--"
"Yeah. So did I. But Thurman's an old man."
"The Conservatives came out against reanimation today, didn't they?
Doesn't he realize he's helping the opposition if he fights us?"
"Maybe he doesn't think of them as opposition any more," Harker said.
"He's eighty-eight years old. He may _look_ alert and bright-eyed, but
that's no guarantee against senility."
"If he votes against us," Raymond said, "we're cooked. How can we win
him over?"
"The hearings begin next Monday. We've got four days to figure out a
line of attack. Maybe the old buzzard will die before Monday." Harker
reddened slightly as he spoke the words; the thought of a universe
without Clyde Thurman in it was a mind-shaking concept for him.
He looked at his watch. Five minutes to three. Right on the button,
Lurie stuck his head in and said, "Time for the press conference, Jim."
Leadenly Harker nodded. "Okay. Send them in, Lurie."
* * * * *
He ran through what he had to say in less than half an hour. He told
them that the senatorial committee had been there and had watched the
successful reanimation of a twelve-year-old boy. He expressed a hope
that the demonstration had impressed the senators favorably, and did
not mention that Thurman's remarks implied a negative reaction.
There was a brief session of sporadic questions; then Harker pleaded
exhaustion and hustled the newsmen out. He felt tremendously weary, but
at the same time there was the excitement of knowing he was in a fight,
and a tough fight.
He phoned Lois and said he would be home in time for dinner. She was
being cooperative beyond the call of wifely duty, he thought. He was
hardly ever home these days, and when he did show up at Larchmont he
was a pale, exhausted ghost of himself, with little energy left over
for family life.
The evening papers came in about half past four. Harker had been
preparing a plan of attack for the Senate hearings the next week; he
looked up when Lurie silently dropped the stack on his desk.
There was a statement from Mitchison and Klaus in most of the
papers, to the effect that the Beller Laboratories were in the hands
of--approximately--power-hungry madmen, and that they should be
stripped of control immediately.
"I wonder what they hope to gain by that?" Raymond asked. "Even if they
_do_ succeed in getting control of the labs, they'll have thoroughly
loused up the whole idea of reanimation."
Harker nodded. "We'll shut them up soon enough. I spoke to Gerhardt
this morning and he said the hearing's coming up soon."
"How about this other thing you're involved with? The Bryant case.
When's the hearing on that?"
"Tomorrow," Harker said. "I'll be tied up with that all day, I guess.
But then I'll be free to devote full time here."
He skimmed through some of the other papers. More news of mob
disturbance; this business of mobbing physicians because they either
allegedly had been practicing reanimation or had refused to reanimate
some newly-dead person was becoming disturbingly more frequent. There
were three instances of it in the late editions in Idaho, Missouri, and
Louisiana. The mobs acted with fine impartiality, rioting on both sides
of the question. Harker brooded for a while over that.
The editorial pages universally hailed the decision of the Senate to
hold an immediate investigation; the papers seemed divided here too,
the Conservative ones urging suppression of reanimation and the Nat-Lib
papers pleading for sane consideration and government control.
By now everyone was getting into the act: philosophers, painters,
athletes, ministers of foreign countries, were all quoted copiously
pro and con reanimation. The Russians at last were heard from: Georgi
Aksakov, President-General of the Federated Socialist States, sent a
note of congratulations to President McComber on the American conquest
of death, and extended hope that America would follow the time-honored
custom of sharing its scientific developments with the other nations of
the world.
By now word had reached the settlements on the Moon and under the
Mars Dome, too; by wire came messages of enthusiasm from the two
international colonies. It was only to be expected, Harker thought,
that the space colonists would welcome the breakthrough with joy. There
was no breeding-ground for hysterical anti-scientific reaction on an
airless world where only scientific miracles daily insured survival.
It was fast becoming a contest between darkness and light, between
education and ignorance--a contest complicated by the presence of
educated, intelligent, utterly sincere fanatics in the camp of the
opposition.
"We must have regard for the soul," declared the spokesman for the
Archbishop of Canterbury. "A limitation has been placed on the term of
man's life. We must proceed with care when we destroy a limitation of
God."
It was, Harker had to admit, a reasonable attitude--granted a
framework of beliefs which he and much of the rest of the world did not
share.
"The United States has always been the world pioneer," declared Senator
Marshall of Alabama, the elder statesman of the American Conservatives.
"We never show fear as we approach the boundary between the known and
the unknown. But we must exert caution in this new step, and take care
lest we move recklessly forward and unleash forces which can destroy
the bonds of society."
The medical societies had statements, too--sound ones. "The problem,"
declared an A.M.A. spokesman, "is essentially a soul-searing one. If
the Beller process is valid, every physician will have the power to
return life to the dead. Shall he make use of this power whenever he
can? Or will there be the danger of giving life indiscriminately,
to those perhaps who do not merit a reprieve? What will happen if a
dead man's family refuses the right of reanimation? Can the physician
proceed? And is he guilty of murder if he does not? Who will make the
decisions? An entirely new code of medical ethics must be developed
before any wide-scale practice of reanimation can be permitted."
These were sound viewpoints, and Harker had no issue with them. But
there were other, more hysterical voices clamoring in the newspapers,
and hundreds of vituperous letters had already descended on the
Litchfield post office as well.
People who feared death feared reanimation more. There were those who
assumed that reanimation might become the property of an aristocracy
that would perpetuate itself over and over, while leaving the common
people to death. There were those who dreaded the return to life of
a loved one, who were unwilling to face again someone who had been
"beyond" and returned.
Fear and ignorance, ignorance and fear. Harker read the letters in the
newspapers, and his head swam. The ones received direct were even worse.
... _you are violating the command of God brought on us by Adam's
fall, Harker. But you will rot in Hell for it._
... _you Harker and Raymond and the others there should have been
strangled in your cribs. Bringing the dead back from the grave is
disgusting. You will fill the world with a race of undead zombies._
... _I know what it is to have a loved one die, do you?_ (Yes,
Harker thought.) _But I would not want to touch the lips of one who
was dead._
Harker paused a moment in thought as he read that last letter,
wondering how he would feel had Eva been brought back to him there on
the beach. He had assumed that he would welcome the idea, but now he
remembered Lois' doubtful answer to the question, and it seemed to him
that he himself was doubtful too now. Would he be able to embrace a
daughter who had died and had been reanimated? Could he--
He shook his head in bitter self-contempt. _I'm overtired_, he thought.
_All this superstitious muck is contagious. The life-process stops, it
starts again--and is anything lost? Wake up, Harker. Of course you'd
have hugged Eva if she had been brought back to life._
It had been a long day. He riffled through a few more letters, but the
emotional impact was too great for him to bear after all the other
conflicting events of the day. It was not easy to read letters from
people who had pleaded for the reanimation of a loved one on Monday,
and who now wrote bitterly to say that the period of grace had passed,
and by their silence the reanimators had become murderers.
... _my fiancee Joan who was seventeen and electrocuted in a
kitchen accident Sunday night could have been saved if you had been
willing. But three days have gone by and now she is forever gone._
Even more hellish than watching the slow ebb of life from a dying
person, Harker thought, must be the wait while the hours pass after
death, and the time for reanimation passes with them. New torments had
been loosed upon the world, he saw. He felt like a man riding a tiger
that grew larger with each day.
He picked up another one:
... _you may remember I mentioned my wife, mother of our four
children who was close to death from cancer. Well she died the
night I wrote to you, and not having heard from you yet I suppose
you cannot help me in this matter. I understand revival must be
done on day of death, since she has now been gone two days I am
arranging for her burial. Though I am unhappy and disappointed I do
not hold bitterness in my heart against you, may God forgive you
for having let Lucy die._
Harker remembered that one: Mikkelsen, from Minnesota. The implied
accusation of murder, cloaked as it was by the prayer for God's
forgiveness, chilled him. He put the letters away, phoned across the
lab to Raymond, and said he was going home for the day.
"Good luck with that hearing tomorrow," Raymond said.
"Thanks."
The air was clean and warm as he stepped outside; at five in the
afternoon of an almost-summer day, the sun was still bright, the sky
blue and curiously transparent. Harker tried to blot away the network
of human suffering whose vortex he had apparently become; he drew in a
deep breath, expanded his chest, swung his arms loosely at his sides.
A yellow dart crossed the sky and was gone; after it came the abrupt
_blurp_ of sound. It was a southbound rocket to Florida. No doubt it
would be landing in Miami before he had reached his own home.
He remembered the legal fight when rocket service had been instituted
on a commercial basis, almost thirty years ago. The jet-lines had
fought tooth and nail against introduction of rocket service; yet,
today, both jets and rockets served the cause of transportation
amicably enough.
There had been the Moon wrangle too, back in the trouble-wracked
twentieth century. He had cut his legal teeth on the suits and
countersuits; they were standard fare in every law-school. The Moon
had been reached almost simultaneously by America and Russia in the
early 1960's, during a period of international conflict and danger. The
Socialist revolution in Russia in 1971 had ended the threat of atomic
war, but even so it had not been until 1997 that the United States
agreed to join forces with the Federated Socialist States in making
the Moon base truly international in character.
There, too, forces of reaction had fought the merger on grounds
that seemed to them just and necessary. They had been defeated,
ultimately--and now, the Moon base and its newer companion on Mars were
hailed as triumphs of the harmony of mankind.
Now reanimation. The old struggle was joined again. Harker told himself
that the force of history was on his side, that ultimate victory would
be his. But what sacrifices would be made, what campaigns fiercely
fought, before then?
He reached his home at six-fifteen. Lois had the video set on, and even
as he stood in the doorway the words of a newscaster drifted toward him:
_"Senator Thurman of New York and four colleagues today visited
the Beller Laboratories and witnessed an actual human reanimation
which was successful. Senator Thurman later commented, and I quote,
There is no doubt that a restoration of life took place. What is in
doubt is whether this power is one that mankind should permit to be
used, end quote. Senator Thurman will head a committee to study the
implications of reanimation. Hearings begin Monday in Washington."_
Thurman was chairman, and Thurman had already indicated opposition. It
was not a good omen. Harker kissed his wife wearily and said to Chris,
"Get me something strong to drink, lad. I've had a tough day."