Collected Short Fiction, page 433
Harker shook his head slowly. “No, he said. “Not by a long shot.”
HE RODE uptown from the courthouse and stopped off at his law office for the first time in a week. The girls in the outer office stared at him strangely, as if he had undergone some frightening apotheosis and was no longer just the firm’s newest partner.
He crossed left and rapped on Bill Kelly’s door. The plump lawyer smiled at him as he entered, but without much warmth.
“Morning, Jim. Long time no see.”
“We been busy.”
“I know. I know all about it.” Harker ignored Kelly’s tone and said, “We just come from the Bryant hearing. Thought I’d let you know that it’s over. Poof: fifteen minutes!”
“The will was upheld?”
“What else? It was just a case of willful petty obstruction on the part of the Bryant family. They’re mean, twisted people, Bill. They’ve lived all their lives in the shadow of one great man—Rick Bryant—and I guess they chose this time to show him and everyone else just what Great Big Important Persons they really were,” He scowled.
There was a pained expression on Kelly’s face that seemed to have nothing to do with the Bryant affair. Slowly Kelly said, “Jim, this completes all the current work you’re doing here, isn’t that right?”
Harker nodded. “I turned over the Fuller and Heidell cases to Portobello. That was to leave me clear for—”
“Yes. I know.” Kelly’s face reddened even more than normally, and lie squirmed wretchedly in his inflated pneumatic desk-chair. We been following the papers, Jim. I’ve been following the whole thing.
“I warned you it was hot.”
“I know. I didn’t know how hot it was, though. Jim, this hurts me, Kelly said. “I’m going to ask a favor of you. It’s a lousy thing to ask, because it shows I don’t have guts or the courage of your convictions or something along those lines. But—
Harker said, “I’ll spare you the trouble of putting it into words. The answer is yes. If you think my presence on your firm letterhead will hurt the firm, Bill, I’ll resign.
A look of gratitude appeared on Kelly’s fleshy sweat-shiny face. Jim, I want you to understand—that is—look here, I asked you tocome in with me when your party booted you out, and don’t think I didn’t get my wrist slapped for it. But this reanimation thing is too big. I don’t want to get associated with it in any way. And so—well it seemed to Portobello and Klein and me—“Sure, Bill. Harker had a sudden dizzying vision of himself standing at the rim of a bottomless abyss, but he heard his voice saying, calmly, rock-steady, “I’ll draft a note informing you that I’m resigning because of the pressure of outside activities.
Hoarsely Kelly said, “Thanks, Jim. And if this thing blows over—if it all works out—we’ll have a spot for you here. Don’t forget that.
“I won’t. Not even because yon don’t menu it, Harker thought. It wasn’t possible for Kelly to mean it. It was just a formal ritualistic statement, this implication that lie could come back at a future time.
He was through here. Probably lie was through with private law practice forever. Kelly was a brave and intelligent man, but Kelly had been afraid to keep the hot potato named James Harker on his letterhead any longer. No one else would welcome him either. Beller Labs was the straw to which he had to ding now.
He stood up.
“Okay, Bill. Glad we got everything cleared up. Just thought I’d tell you about the wrap-up on the Bryant case. I’ll dear out my office next week.
“No hurry about it. Oh nearly forgot.” Kelly consulted a memo slip. “Leo Winstead’s office phoned here for you earlier today The Governor wants you to call him back between one-thirty and three o’clock this afternoon.
Harker frowned momentarily Winstead? What does he want with me? He said to Kelly, “Thanks, Bill. And so long.
He bought a noontime edition of the Star-Post and ate a gloomy little meal by himself in a nineteenth-floor automated restaurant overlooking the East River. He pushed the meal-selector buttons almost at random; the result was largely an assortment of cheap synthetics, but he hardly cared. He ate abstractedly, not looking at his food but at the increasingly more troubling news in the paper.
There was a new statement from Senator Thurman, more doggedly anti-reanimation than the last. Apparently Thurman’s views on the subject mounted in vitriol-content in hourly increments; now he said that “reanimation is of dubious value in mitigating human sorrow—a crude and unsatisfactory process that robs life of dignity.” Evidently he had read about the Janson suicide. And speaking of that—
Yes. The body had been found and identified, according to a story at the bottom of page one. Wayne Janson, 58, an unmarried industrialist. Listed as suicide; Jonathan Bryant identified body. Investigation now proceeding as a result of Bryant’s statement that Janson had recently undergone reanimation.
And a statement from David Klaus, too, evidently released by Mitchison: “The Janson case proves that the Beller technique can be a dangerous and destructive instrument in the wrong hands.” He recognized Mitchison’s blunt word-sense, the equating of technique and instrument.
At half past one he made his way to a public phonebooth, sealed himself in, snapped on the privacy-shield, and called the operator.
“I’d like to make a charge-account call to Albany.”
She took his name and home phone, assured him that the call would be billed to his account, and put him through to the Governor’s mansion. A relay of secretaries passed him along to Winstead.
The booth’s screen was small, a seven-incher, and definition was poor. Even with that handicap, though, Harker could see the rings around Winstead’s eyes. New York’s Governor obviously had had little sleep the night before.
“I got your message, Leo. What goes?”
Winstead said, “You know about Thurman and his stand on reanimation, don’t you?”
“Of course. Thurman visited the lab yesterday.”
“And then proceeded to issue a series of statements blasting your project,” Winstead said. The Governor looked like a man about to explode from conflicting tensions. In a tight-strung voice he said, “Jim, we held a caucus on the Thurman situation last night. First let me tell you that the Nat-Libs have decided to issue a public statement praising your outfit and asking for careful consideration of reanimation.”
Harker smiled. “It’s about time someone said he was on our side.”
“Don’t break your arm patting your back,” Winstead warned. “The Amer-Cons forced our hand. It took all night for us to agree to support you’. A lot of us aren’t in favor of reanimation at all.”
“And a lot of you aren’t in favor of anything I’m in favor of,” Harker said crisply. “But what’s this about Thurman, now?”
“He’s killing us! How can we come out pro-reanimation when the elder patriarch of our party is issuing statements condemning it?”
Harker shrugged. “I’ll admit you have a problem.
“Any such inconsistency would make us look silly,” Winstead said. “Jim, would you do us a favor?”
The idea of doing favors for the party leaders who had summarily expelled him less than a year ago did not appeal to him. But he said, in a cautious voice, “Maybe. What do you want?”
“We haven’t approached Thurman directly yet. We’d like you to do it.”
“Me?”
Winstead nodded. “Go down to Washington and appeal to the old gorilla’s sense of sentiment. Plead with him to come back to the fold. Thurman was once very high on you, Jim. Maybe he still is.”
Harker said, “I saw Thurman yesterday and he wasn’t running over with sentiment. He came, he saw, and he condemned. What more can I say to him?”
Winstead’s face grew agitated. Harker wondered what pressures had been exerted on the Governor to make this phone-call. “Jim, this is for your sake as well as ours. If you can win Thurman over, Congressional approval of reanimation’s a cinch! You’re just cutting your own throat by refusing to go down.”
“You know I’m not anxious to do favors for—”
“We understand that! But can’t you see you’ll be helping yourself as well? We’ll try to make things easier for you if you convince Thurman.”
Harker grinned pleasantly. It was fun to see Winstead squirm. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll go down to see Thurman first thing tomorrow morning.”
CHAPTER XIV
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 Capital’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 lie 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 w ill 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, NY.), who vanished from his home early last evening. The veteran lawmaker is slated to preside over the controversial re animation 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.”
