Friday Morning. Ten-fifteen a.m., on the morning of May 24, 2033.
James Harker stared out the round vitrin porthole at the fleecy
whiteness of the clouds over Washington. The two-hundred-fifty-mile
flight from Idlewild had taken about twenty minutes by short-range jet.
Now the big passenger-ship plunged down toward the Capitol's jetport.
Harker felt the faint drag of gravity against his body and thought that
a spaceship landing must be something like this, only tremendously more
taxing. The ship quivered as its speed dwindled, dropping from 700 mph
to less than half that, and halving again, while the 150-passenger ship
swooped down from its flight altitude of 40,000 feet.
Harker was seeing Thurman at half-past-eleven, at the Senator's office.
He rolled the phrases round in his mind once again:
"_Mr. Thurman, you stuck by me long ago--_"
"_You owe this to your party, sir--_"
"_A forward step toward the bright utopia of tomorrow, Senator--_"
None of the arguments sounded even remotely convincing. Thurman was
a stubborn old man with a bee in his bonnet about reanimation; no
amount of cajoling was going to get him to alter his stand. Still,
Harker thought, he owed it to himself to try. The hearings began on
Monday under Thurman's aegis. It would not hurt to have the patriarch
sympathetically inclined. Nor would it be undesirable to have Leo
Winstead and the whole Nat-Lib leadership beholden to him, Harker
reasoned.
The yellow light flashed and a soft voice emanating from a speaker next
to Harker's ear murmured, "Please fasten your safety-belts. We'll be
landing in a few minutes."
Mechanically Harker guided the magnetic snaps together until he heard
the proper _click!_ The ship broke through the thick layer of clouds
that blanketed the sky at 20,000 feet, and the white, neat, oddly
sterile-looking city of Washington appeared below.
Harker hoped there would be no further difficulty over the Janson case
while he was gone. Police investigators had arrived at the labs in
mid-afternoon the day before, wanting to know if a reanimation had been
carried out on the late industrialist. Raymond had flatly denied it,
but at Harker's advice had refused to turn over the laboratory records
to the police until subpoenaed to do so.
The inspectors had left, making it clear that the matter was far
from at an end. Harker smiled to himself about it; any comprehensive
investigation was bound to prove that the whole affair had been
staged by Bryant, taking advantage of his bachelor friend's suicide
declaration to smear the reanimators in public.
But the suicide was in the newspapers, and no amount of unmasking
ever really cancels out unfavorable publicity. The public would--with
some justice--now link reanimation with possible mental deficiency
afterward. Harker longed to have Jonathan Bryant's neck between his
hands, just for a minute.
_Troublemaker!_
He leaned back and waited for the landing.
It took nearly half an hour for Harker to make the taxi-jaunt from the
jetport to Capitol Hill, longer than the transit-time between New York
and Washington. It was nearly eleven when he reached Senator Thurman's
suite of offices--imposing ones, as befitted a senator who not only
represented the second most populous state in the Union but who had
held office for nearly seven terms.
A pink-faced, well-starched secretary about two years out of law school
greeted Harker as he entered the oak-panelled antechamber.
"Sir?"
"I'm James Harker. I have an appointment with the Senator for
half-past-eleven."
The secretary looked troubled. "I'm sorry, Mr. Harker. The Senator
appears to be ill."
"Ill?"
"That's right, sir. He hasn't reported to his office yet today. He's
always here by nine sharp, and it's almost eleven now, so we figure he
must be sick."
So far as Harker knew, Clyde Thurman had not known a day's illness yet
in the twenty-first century. It was strange that he should fall ill
this day of days, when Harker had an appointment to see him.
But it was not like Thurman to run away from a knotty problem, either.
Harker said, "Have you checked with his home?"
"No, sir." The secretary appeared to resent Harker's question. "The
Senator's private life is his own."
"For all you know Thurman died this morning!"
A shrug. "We have not received word of any sort whatever."
Harker paced up and down in the antechamber for fifteen minutes,
sitting intermittently, fidgeting, glancing up nervously every time
the big outer door opened to admit someone. He thought back thirty-odd
years, to the time when eight-year-old Jimmy Harker was reported to his
school principal for some obscure, forgotten offense. He had sat in
just this manner in the anteroom of the principal's office, waiting for
the principal to come back from lunch to administer his punishment--his
head popping around every time a clerk opened the big door, his
stomach quivering in fear that this might be the principal this time.
In time, he recalled, the principal _had_ come--and had not expelled
him nor phoned for his father, merely reprimanded him and sent him
back to his classroom. Perhaps the same thing might happen today, he
thought, perhaps some miraculous change of heart on the part of old
Thurman--
But no miracles took place. Eleven-fifteen went by, and eleven-thirty,
and there was no sign of Thurman. Clerks serenely went about their
routine duties, ignoring the tense, sweating man in the outer office.
At ten-to-twelve Harker rose and confronted the secretary again. "Any
word from Thurman?"
"Not yet, sir," was the bland reply.
Harker crooked his fingers impatiently. "Look here, why don't you phone
his home? Maybe he's seriously ill."
"We never disturb the Senator at home, sir."
Harker glared at the man, exhaled exasperatedly, and growled, "I guess
you won't give me his home phone number."
"Afraid not, sir."
"Is there anything you _will_ do? Suppose you phone the office of
Senator Fletcher for me, then."
Fletcher was the Senate Majority Leader, another veteran Nat-Lib who
was likely to know where to reach Thurman if anyone was. A little to
Harker's surprise, the secretary said, "You can use the phone back
here. Just pick up and tell the switchboard who you want."
The phone was audio-only. A metallic voice said, "_Your party please?_"
and Harker, resisting the temptation to ask for Thurman's home number
(it was probably restricted) said, "Would you connect me with Senator
Fletcher's office?"
Four secretaries later, Harker heard the deep, confident voice of
Pennsylvania's Fletcher say, "What can I do for you, Harker? Heard you
were in town."
"I'm here to see Senator Thurman," Harker said. "Do you know where--"
"Thurman? Where are you now, Harker?"
"At the Senator's office. He isn't here, and I thought you might know--"
"Me? Harker, if I knew where Thurman was I'd be talking to him and not
to you. I'm looking for him myself."
Harker's hopes sank. "Have you phoned his home?"
"Yes. Nobody there has seen him since early last evening. If you get
any word, Harker, call me back."
The line went dead. Harker stared at the phone thoughtfully a moment,
then replaced the receiver. He walked over to the smug secretary and
said casually, "You better start looking for a new job. Senator Thurman
hasn't been seen since some time last night.
"What? But--"
Interrupting the agitated reply, Harker said, "You better make some
quick phone-calls. I'll be back later if the Senator turns up."
* * * * *
The next two hours were hectic ones in the Capitol. Harker picked up
an early afternoon newspaper when he saw the huge scare-head reading
WHERE IS SENATOR THURMAN? The article simply said that the
88-year-old Senator had last been seen at his huge bachelor home in
nearby Alexandria shortly after dark the previous night, and that
nothing had been heard of him since.
Secret Service men were combing Washington and the outlying districts.
The three-thirty headlines screamed, THURMAN STILL MISSING!
_No word has been received yet of the whereabouts of Senator Clyde
Thurman (N-L, N.Y.), who vanished from his home early last evening.
The veteran lawmaker is slated to preside over the controversial
reanimation hearings beginning Monday, if--_
At four o'clock there was still no sign of the missing Senator. Harker
phoned the jetport, made reservations for a four-thirty flight back to
New York. At five, he was at Idlewild; he phoned Lois from there, told
her what had happened, and said he was going straight out to Litchfield
and would be home later, after supper.
The New York evening papers were full of the Thurman disappearance.
Harker thought of phoning Winstead, then changed his mind; the Governor
was well aware by now that Harker could not have kept his appointment
with Thurman. Instead he rented a cab and travelled quickly out to the
Beller Laboratories.
He got there shortly after six. The place was oddly empty; evidently
the reporters had grown tired of clustering around the entrance to the
dirt road. Three guards, fully armed, stood by the blockade in the
yellow-brown light of very late afternoon.
"Hello, Mr. Harker. You can go in."
"Where's Raymond?"
"Main operating lab," the guard said.
Frowning, Harker moved past and headed across the clearing to the lab
building. A late-spring breeze whistled down through the spruces,
chilling him momentarily; the sun was a dying swollen reddish ball
hovering near the horizon. Harker felt a strange foreboding sense of
fear.
Three white-garbed medics guarded the lab entrance. Harker started to
go past; one of them shook his head and said, "Very delicate work going
on in there, Mr. Harker. If you're going in, be sure to keep quiet."
Harker tiptoed past.
Inside, he saw a tense group clustered around the operating-table:
Raymond, Vogel, Lurie, little Barchet, and a surgeon Harker did not
know. There was a figure on the table. Harker could not see it.
Raymond detached himself from the group and came toward him. The lab
director's face was pale, almost clammy; his lips hung slack with
tension, and his eyes bulged. He looked frightened half into catatonia.
"What's going on?" Harker whispered.
"Ex-ex-pe-riment," Raymond said, shivering. "God, I wish we hadn't
started this."
Raymond seemed close to collapse. Puzzled, Harker edged closer to
the table, shunting Barchet to one side to get a better view. Five
guilt-shadowed faces turned uneasily to stare at him.
For a long moment Harker studied the exposed face of the cadaver on the
table, while billowing shockwaves clouded his mind, numbed his body.
The enormity of what had been done left him almost incapable of speech
for a few seconds.
Finally he looked at Raymond and said, "What have you idiots done?"
"We--we thought--"
Raymond stopped. Barchet said, "We all agreed on it after you left
yesterday. We would bring him here and try--try to convince him that we
were right. But he had a heart attack and d-died. So--"
In the yellow light of the unshielded incandescents the lie stood
out in bold relief on Barchet's face. It was Lurie who said finally,
"We might as well tell the truth. We had Thurman kidnapped and we
chloroformed him. Now we're going to revive him and tell him he died of
natural causes but was reanimated. We figure he'll support us if--"
Wobbly-legged, Harker groped for a lab stool and sat down heavily,
cradling his suddenly pounding head in his hands. The monstrosity of
what had been done behind his back stunned him. To kidnap Thurman, kill
him, hope that in reviving him he would be converted to their cause--
"All right," Harker said tonelessly. "It's too late for saying no, I
guess. You realize you've condemned all of us to death."
"Jim," Raymond began, "do you really think--"
"Kidnapping, murder, illegal scientific experimentation--oh, I could
strangle you!" Harker felt like bursting into tears. "Don't you see
that when you revive him he's bound to throw the book at us? Why did
you have to do this when I was gone?"
"We planned it a long time ago," Barchet said. "We didn't think you'd
be back in time to see us doing it."
Vogel said, "Perhaps if we don't carry out the resuscitation, and
merely dispose of the body--"
"No!" Harker said, half-sobbing. "We'll reanimate him. And that'll be
the end of this grand crusade. Finish." He looked down on Thurman's
massive head, imposing even in death. His voice was a harsh hissing
thing as he said, "Go on! Get started!"
He watched, numb-brained, as if dream-fogged, while Vogel and the other
surgeon prepared the complex reanimating instrument. His heart pounded
steadily, booming as if it wanted to burst through his ribcage.
He felt very tired. But now, thanks to this one master blunder, all
their striving was at an end. Thurman, awakened, would denounce them
for what they had done. After that, they ceased to be scientists and
would be mere criminals in the eyes of humanity.
Harker listened to the murmured instructions being passed back and
forth over the table, watched the needles entering the flesh, the
electrodes being clamped in place. Minutes passed. Vogel's thin hand
grasped the controlling rheostat. Power surged into the dead man's body.
After a while Harker rose and joined the group around the table.
Needles wavered and leaped high, indicating that life had returned.
But--
"Look at the EEG graph," Raymond said hollowly.
The graph held no meaning for Harker. But he did not need to look there
to see what had happened.
The eyes of the body on the table had opened, and were staring toward
the ceiling. They were not the beady, alert, eager eyes of Senator
Thurman. They were the dull, glazed, slack-muscled eyes of an idiot.