Collected Short Fiction, page 431
“But you were a former Nat-Lib governor, Mr. Harker. Doesn’t that make you a major figure in the party hierarchy?” Scripps-Howard-Caudwell asked.
It was a loaded question, Harker mopped the sweat from his forehead, glared straight into the eye of the video camera, and said, I still vote Nat-Lib, if that’s what you mean. But exgovernors are just ex-governors, period.
“How about the claim of Cal Mitchison and David Klaus that there have been unethical practices in this lab?” Transcontinental W asked slyly.
Harker said, “I hardly think that’s worth talking about. Mitchison and Klaus are former employees who didn’t perform competently and who were discharged. It’s as simple as that.”
“You were the lawyer for the late Richard Bryant,” said the Times man. “Did you make any attempts to have Mr. Bryant resuscitated?”
“I did not. The family issued a statement expressing no desire to have Mr. Bryant revivified, and at no time did anyone here suggest that he should be. The movement to revive Richard Bryant was strictly unofficial.
Harker was starting to weary under the barrage of questions. He looked at his watch; the half-hour he allotted to these conferences had elapsed. He felt as if lie were wrung dry.
“I’ll have to ask you to cut it short now, he said. “Unless there are any other very urgent questions, well stop here.”
Times said, “One question, Mr. Harker. Have any reanimations taken place since the announcement of the process yesterday morning?”
Harker shook his head. “The answer is no. Until the legal status of reanimation is settled, we’re not proceeding with further experiments on human beings”—he regretted the unfortunate word experiments as soon as it passed his lips, but by then it was too late—“although we’re continuing with other phases of our research. We’ve been bombarded with requests for reanimations, but we don’t intend to attempt any. Obviously a legal decision on the validity of our process is needed first. The death-certificate laws, for instance; they’ll have to be considered. And a host of other things. Well, gentlemen, I think our time is just about up.”
The fearsome blaze of the video cameras died away, and the newsmen packed up their pocket recorders and left. Harker sank down wearily behind the desk and looked at Mart Raymond.
The scientist smiled admiringly, “Jim, I don’t know how you do it. Stand up to those eagles, I mean. The pressure doesn’t let up for a second.”
“I’m used to it,” Harker said with forced casualness. His stomach felt knotted, tight; his throat was dry and seemed to be covered with hundreds of small blisters. His legs, under the desk, quivered of their own volition.
Gradually, as the minutes passed, he recovered his poise. The press conference had been a sort of purgative; he had put forth all the thoughts that had been boiling within him during the day.
The battle, he saw now, would be fought on a number of fronts—but the essential standpoint was a politico-legal one. They had to secure Congressional approval for the process. And they had to win friends and influence people in a hurry, before the various splintered opponents of reanimation, the Beller Labs, and James Harker could join forces and provide a united front.
What would happen if reanimation lost? No doubt the technique would survive, no matter what the legal verdict was. But it would become an undercover, furtive activity, as abortion had been before the permissive laws of the late twentieth century. And undercover meant dangerous; illegal equated with deadly. The tools of medicine are always deadly in unskilled hands.
No doubt about it, the fight was on. It was, thought Harker, the old, old struggle—the battle to give humanity something it craved, despite the obstacles provided by fear, greed, and ignorance. The essential fact—that of the conquest of death—could easily be clouded over by half-truths, distortions, and the well-meant fanaticism of self-righteous pressure groups.
I fought this fight once before, Harker thought. And I let myself be beaten. But this time I’m not giving up. There’s too much at stake.
CHAPTER XI
THE NEXT morning—Wednesday—Harker found a neatly typed note sitting on his desk when he reached his office in Dormitory A. It was from Raymond. It said simply, We got a call from Washington at 0800. Investigating committee headed by Thurman is on its way north to snoop around the lab. They’re arriving noon today.
Methodically Harker destroyed the note and turned his attention to the morning papers. He felt tense, but not unduly so; the Senatorial investigation could be the beginning of success in their campaign, and in any event it would put an end to these days of doubt. He would know at least how the reanimation project stood in the eyes of the Senate.
On this, the third morning of the Era of Reanimation, almost the entire front page of every paper was given over to a discussion of the subject. His press conference had been given a great deal of space, and as usual the Times had printed the full text. He read the other articles with a queasy sense of expanding confusion.
Manhattan—The late Richard Bryant was cremated here today despite a demonstration urging his reanimation. At least fifty banner-waving demonstrators attempted to interfere with the ceremony, but police maintained order.
“We are sure Father would never have approved of such an awakening,” declared Jonathan Bryant, 42, oldest son of the space hero—
Montreal (UP)—A mob destroyed the home and office of Dr. Joseph Pronovost this afternoon after he refused to resuscitate a 9-year-old girl who had died the night before. Dr. Pronovost. 58, a general practitioner, claimed to have no knowledge of the Seller re animation technique announced Monday. Despite his statement, relatives of Nancy St Leger, a victim of leukemia, broke into the doctor’s home and attacked him.
Dr. Pronovost was reported to be in good condition at Sacred Heart Hospital—
Corpus Christi, Tex. (AP)—Four men and two women suffered injuries here this evening as a result of a rumor that a Beller reanimation was taking place at a local funeral home.
More than thirty persons entered the Burr Funeral Parlors in an attempt to prevent the reanimation. A funeral service was in progress, and the injuries resulted when guests turned back the intruders. The funeral continued as scheduled after the disturbance.
There were other similar stories elsewhere in the newspapers: violence on both sides of the controversy, angry and ill-informed people trying to present or to bring about reanimations. Harker gloomily put the papers aside.
Dark forces were being unleashed. He suspected there was violence yet to come. The fabric of society had been unbound; anything might happen now.
At twenty minutes to twelve, Benedict Lurie stuck his head through Harker’s door and said, “A helicopter full of senators just landed outside. Raymond’s talking to them right now.”
“How many?”
Lurie shrugged. “There were ten in the copter. I couldn’t tell you how many are senators.”
“I’ll be right out,” Harker said.
He filed away the newspapers, cleaned his desk, and self-consciously straightened his clothing before lie went outside. A little group stood in the clearing formed by the area between the three main buildings. Harker saw Mart Raymond, Vogel, Barchet, and Dr. Smathers, and they were talking to—among others—Senator Clyde Thurman.
Harker joined them. Thurman was the first to notice him; he stared at Harker glintingly and rumbled, “Ah—Harker. Hello, there.”
“How are you, Senator?”
“Never better. Harker, you know these men? Senators Brewster of Iowa, Vorys of South Carolina, Dixon of Wyoming, Westmore of California. Gentlemen, you know Mr. Harker—former Governor of New York, of course.”
Harker shook hands all around. He knew most of the senators at least casually; Dixon and Westmore represented the Far West branch of the Nat-Libs, while Brewster and Vorys were arch-Conservatives.
Thurman was the chairman of the committee, and would have the deciding vote in case of a tie. Harker felt apprehensive of that. The venerable Senator was ostensibly a Nat-Lib; at least he was elected every six years under that label. But in the past decade he had been trending increasingly toward conservative ways of thinking, and away from the party he had helped to found forty years earlier, in the great political upheaval and reshuffling of the 1990’s.
Each of the senators was accompanied by a staff assistant. That made ten in all.
Thurman said, “The hearings will begin next week, Mr. Harker. We’re here for a preliminary look-see, you understand.
“Of course. Harker glanced at Raymond and said, “Mart, have you been introduced?”
Raymond nodded.
Harker went on, “Mr. Raymond is the director of the labs. He’ll conduct you wherever you would like to go, on the premises.”
Raymond looked worried; Harker had seen the faint harried expression growing on the dapper lab director’s face in the past few days. It troubled Harker. Raymond was a good organizer, a level-headed scientist—but he was showing alarming signs of crumbling under the sudden pressure brought about by Mitchison’s treasonous press release.
Harker edged close to him and murmured, “What’s on the schedule for the senators?”
Through tight lips Raymond replied, “The main event’s a cadaver.”
“You’re going to risk it?”
Raymond shrugged. Worry-lines tightened his cheeks. “We’ll have to do it-sooner or later. Why not now?”
Harker made no reply. Attempting a human reanimation in front of the senators was a long-shot gamble, even with odds of five to one in favor of success.
If the experiment succeeded, they had gained very little; if it failed, they had lost everything right at the start. The odds of five to one were highly deceptive. But Harker decided to go along with Raymond, just this one time.
He said, “Shall we begin our tour, gentlemen?”
RAYMOND had evidently been working frantically all morning to set things up. The labs were spotlessly clean, everything well-ordered and well-dusted. The researchers had received their instructions, too; every one of them looked Constructively busy, doing something scientific-looking no matter how trivial. In reality, most of them spent a good half their time staring into space, making doodles on scrap paper, or thumbing through textbooks—but senators could never be expected to believe that such idle acts were part of genuine scientific research.
The tour began with a rapid and exhausting general survey of the labs; Raymond served as guide, giving forth bristling scientific terminology at every possible opportunity. The senators looked impressed.
The senators also looked increasingly weary—all except Thurman, who strode along next to Raymond and Harker and put forth a never-ending string of questions, some of them pointless and others embarrassingly perceptive.
As he struggled to keep pace with Thurman, Harker felt a surge of new admiration for the Nat-Lib patriarch. Thurman was a ruggedly built man, well over six feet tall and still erect of bearing; his face was a craggy affair dominated by massive snowy-white eyebrows and a thatch of silver hair, and his voice was a commanding rumble.
It was Thurman who had completed the destruction of the old Democratic and Republican parties by serving as organizer for the National-Liberal Party that carried the 1990 congressional elections; he had then persuaded the incumbent President Morrison to run for re-election on the Nat-Lib, rather than Democratic ticket, in ’92—and, by ’91, the obsolete political parties had vanished, replaced by a more logical alignment of liberal against conservative.
Now, Harker thought, the party lines were blurring again; perhaps it was an inevitable force at work. There were liberals in the American-Conservatives, and some early Nat-Libs, especially Thurman, were with increasing regularity voting for Conservative-sponsored measures. Perhaps in another fifty years’ time a further re-organization would be needed; it seemed to be necessary about once a century, judging by past performance.
As they explored the enzyme lab and watched the big centrifuge at work in the serotinin room, Harker wondered how he stood with Thurman now. Fifteen years ago, he had virtually been a son to the Senator, serving for a while as his private secretary before being tapped for prominence in the New York Nat-Lib organization. Thurman had guided him up through the Mayoralty, saw him into the governor’s mansion in Albany—and then, when the party decided to ostracize him, Thurman had not said a word in his defense. It was more than a year since he had spoken to the veteran legislator.
“These dogs, Senator Vorys said as Raymond and Vogel demonstrated reanimation on a pair of spaniels, “they feel no pain?” Vorys was a waspish, bald little man, with seemingly a lifetime tenure as American-Conservative Senator from South Carolina.
“Absolutely none,” Raymond assured him.
“Animal experiments are legal, remarked Senator Westmore, the Californian Nat-Lib. “No grounds for objecting there.”
“I wasn’t objecting,” snapped Vorys. “Merely inquiring.”
Harker smiled to himself.
The dogs were cleared away in due time; Harker saw the tension-lines reassert themselves on Raymond’s face, and he knew the main event was about to begin.
When Raymond spoke, his voice was thin and strained. “Gentlemen, I know you’ve come here for one main purpose—to see if human life can be restored. The time has come for us to demonstrate our technique.
Raymond licked his lips. Tension mounted in the lab room. The senators stirred in anticipation; the five staff men scribbled notes furiously. Harker felt dry fingers clutching at his windpipe. It was a sensation he remembered having felt on two election nights, at that moment just after the polls had closed—when, with the die irretrievably cast, there was nothing to do but wait until the electronic counters had done their job and announced the winner.
He waited now. Two white-smocked assistants rolled in an operating-table on which a covered cadaver lay.
In a harsh, edgy voice Raymond said, “We secure most of our experimental cadavers from local hospitals. We have permits for this. The body here is approximately the one hundredth we have used in our work, and the seventy-second since the first successful reanimation.”
The covers were peeled back. Harker flinched slightly; the body was that of a boy of about twelve or thirteen, and it was not a pretty sight.
“This boy drowned late yesterday afternoon in a nearby lake, Raymond said hoarsely. “All conventional methods of resuscitation were tried without success.”
“You mean artificial respiration, heart massage, and things like that?” Senator Dixon said.
“Yes. The boy was worked over for nearly eight hours, and pronounced dead early this morning. When I phoned the hospital to arrange for a demonstration specimen for you gentlemen, I was allowed to speak to the boy’s father, who gave permission for this experiment.”
Five minirecorders on five secretarial wrists drank in Raymond’s words. Harker felt growing anxiety; still, he had to admit that using a boy for the experiment was a good touch—if the experiment worked.
He was not afraid of total failure; that could always be explained away and accepted tolerantly.
It was the one-out-of-six chance that frightened him, the worse-than-failure of restoring the boy’s body and not his mind.
Raymond nodded to Vogel, who again was presiding over the reanimation. The bearded surgeon clamped the electrodes to the boy’s temples and wrists, and lowered the great hooded bulk of the reanimator.
“The initial attack will come simultaneously through the electrodes and through hormone injections, Raymond said droningly. Heart massage will follow, as well as artificial operation of the lungs. Keep your eyes on these instruments; they measure heartbeat, respiration, and the electrical activity of the brain.
The room was terribly silent. Vogel moved swiftly and smoothly, confidently, without tension. He threw three switches. The archaic light-bulbs overhead dimmed slightly at the instant of power-drain.
Driblets of sweat rolled down Harker’s face. The five senators watched eagerly; he wondered what they were thinking now, how they were reacting as electrical currents rippled through a dead brain and hormones raced through a stilled bloodstream.
The boy was dwarfed by the hovering instrument that simultaneously clung to his exposed heart, pumped his lungs, jolted his brain, fed awakening substances to his blood. The needles on the indicator gauges began to flicker gently.
Harker felt little of the earlier revulsion this sight had caused in him. Now he stared at the slim thin-limbed body of the boy, his skin mottled with the blue imprint of asphyxiation, and waited for the miracle to take place.
Minutes passed. Once Thurman coughed and it was like a physical blow. Needles rose on dials, wavered, fell back as Vogel decreased power, stepped forward again as the delicate fingers nudged the rheostat a few fractions of an inch upward.
“Watch the EEG indicator, Vogel murmured.
The needle was tracing out an increasingly more agitated line. The calmness of sleep was ending.
“Respiration approaching normal. I’m shutting off the lung manipulators.
The heart-pump followed. Frowning, Vogel moistened his lips and yanked down on toggle-switches, finally drawing the main rheostat back to point zero.
Artificial controls are withdrawn, Vogel said. “The life process continues.
The boy lived. Raymond said quietly to Harker, “The EEG patterns are normal ones. The boy’s mind is okay. We did it.
We did it. Harker felt a sharp sense of triumph, as if he personally had accomplished something. The senators would have to react favorably to something like this, he thought.
He glanced at Thurman. The old man was gray-faced, disturbed. Harker said, quietly, “Well, Senator? You’ve just seen a miracle.
