Recalled to Life

Chapter XIV

Friday morning. Ten-fifteen a.m., on the morning of May 24, 2033.

James Marker 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, Marker 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, Barker reasoned.

The yellow light flashed and a soft voice emanating from a speaker next to Marker’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 re-animators.

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, then.”

“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 at the Capital. 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!

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 Idle-wild; 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 Seller 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. Marker. If you’re going in, be sure to keep quiet.”

Marker tiptoed past.

Inside, he saw a tense group clustered around the operating table: Raymond, Vogel, Lurie, little Barchet, and a surgeon Marker did not know. There was a figure on the table. Marker 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?” Marker whispered.

“Experiment,” Raymond said, shivering. “God, I wish we hadn’t started this.”

Raymond seemed close to collapse. Puzzled, Marker 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 Marker studied the exposed face of the cadaver on the table, while billowing shock-waves 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 people 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, Marker 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,” Marker said tonelessly. “I’t’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—”

“Kidnaping, 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 at 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 round 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.