Recalled to Life

Chapter XV

For a moment, no one spoke.

Harker stood some five feet from the operating table, looking away from the creature under the machine, thinking, These people are like small boys with a new shiny toy. I should never have trusted them alone. I should never have gotten involved in this.

“What do we do know?” Lurie asked. The gangling biologist was nearing a state of hysteria. Sweat-drops beaded his forehead. “The man’s mind is gone.”

“Permanently?” Harker asked. “There’s no way of restoring it?”

Raymond shook his head. “None. The EEG indicates permanent damage to the brain.”

Harker took a deep breath. “In that case, there’s nothing for us to do but kill him again and dispose of the body.”

The suggestion seemed to shock them. Barchet reacted first: “But that’s murder!”

“Exactly. And what did you think you were committing the first time you killed Thurman?” There was no answer, so he went on. “According to the present law of the land, you were all guilty of murder the moment you put the chloroform-mask over Thurman’s face. The law needs fixing, now, but that’s irrelevant. You made yourselves subject to the death penalty when you abducted him, incidentally.”

“How about you?” Barchet snapped. “You seem to be counting yourself out.”

Harker resisted the impulse to lash out at the little man who had caused so much trouble. “As a matter of fact, technically I’m innocent,” he said. “The kidnapping and murder both were carried out without my knowledge or consent. But there isn’t a court in the world that would believe me, so I guess I’m in this boat with you. At the moment we all stand guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder. I’m simply suggesting we get rid of the evidence and proceed as if nothing had happened. Either that or call the police right now.”

Raymond said, “I think you’re right.” The lab director’s face was green with fear; like the rest of them, he was awakening slowly to the magnitude of their act. “We did this thing because we thought we were serving our goal. We were wrong. But the only way we can continue to serve our goal is to commit another crime. We’ll have to dispose of the body.”

“That won’t be hard,” Vogel said. “We dispose of bodies pretty frequently around here. I’ll do a routine dissection and then we’ll just make sure the parts get pretty widely scattered through the usual channels.”

Raymond nodded. He seemed to be growing calmer now. “Better begin at once. Chloroform him again and do the job in the autopsy lab. Make it the most comprehensive damn autopsy you ever carried out.”

Silently Vogel and the other surgeon wheeled the body out, with Lurie following along behind. In the empty operating room, Harker glared at Raymond and Barchet. He felt no fear, no apprehension—merely a kind of dull hopeless pain.

“Well done,” he said finally. “I wish I could tell you exactly how I feel now.”

Raymond pursed his lips nervously. “I think I know. You’d like to strangle us, wouldn’t you?”

“Something like that,” Harker admitted. “Why did you have to do it? Why?”

“We thought it would help us,” said Barchet.

“Help? To kidnap and kill a United States Senator? But—oh, what’s the use. Just remember now that there are six of us who know about this. The first one who cracks and talks not only sends all six of us to the gas chamber but finishes reanimation permanently.”

Suddenly he did not want to be with them. He said, “I’m going to my office to get some papers, and then I’m going home. Can I trust you irresponsible lunatics for an entire weekend?”

Raymond looked boyishly at his shoes; Barchet tried to glare at Harker, but there was something sickly and unconvincing about the expression. Harker turned and headed out.

He made the long journey from the lab to his home by taxi, an extravagance that he did not often permit himself. Tonight it seemed necessary. He had no heart for facing other people in a public jet, for buying tickets at a terminal, for doing anything else but sitting in the back of a cab, with the driver shrouded off by his compartment wall, sitting alone and staring out at the bright night city lights as he rode home.

Friday, May 24, 2033. Harker thought back to the morning when Lurie had first come to him. That had been a Wednesday; May 8, it had been. Two weeks and two days ago, and in that time so much had happened to him, so many unexpected things.

He had lost his affiliation with the law firm. He had re-entered public life, this time as publicity agent, legal adviser, and general champion of a weird and controversial cause. He had become a stranger to his family, a man bound up entirely in the many-levelled conflicts arising out of the simple announcement that a successful reanimation technique had been developed.

He had watched two dogs and two human beings, both of them dead, return to the ranks of the living. He had watched a third man, a great man, a former idol of his, suffer death in the name of this strange cause.

He had become a murderer and a kidnapper. Unintentionally, true, and after the fact; but his guilt was as sure as that of the man who had lowered the chloroform.

Forces ranked themselves against him: Mitchison, Klaus, Jonathan Bryant—petty little men, those three, but they could cause trouble. Barchet, who was on their side and still managed to hurt them with everything he did. The Church; the American-Conservative Party; the ignorant, fearful people of the world, swayed by whatever hysteria happened to be in the air at the moment.

Had it been worth it?

He thought back, putting himself in the shoes of that James Harker of May 8, 2033 who had made the decision to go ahead. The bait had been the image of Eva, drowned, beyond his grasp. Eva might have lived.

Yes, he thought, it’s worth it.

Abruptly the gloom began to lift from him. He realized that none of the things that had happened to him mattered—not the dismissal by Kelly, nor the crimes for which he had assumed the burden, nor the inner turmoil which was exhausting him. How transient everything was!

The important fact was reanimation—the defeat of death. The end of death’s dominion. That was his goal, and he would work toward it—and if he destroyed himself and those about him in the process, well, there had been martyrs in man’s history before. That Evas of tomorrow might live, Harker thought, I will go ahead.

“Larchmont, mister,” the driver called out. “Which way do I go?”

Harker gave him the directions. They reached his home a few minutes later; the fare was over $10, and Harker added a good tip to it.

The cab pulled away. Harker stood for a moment outside his home. The sitting-room lights were on, and one of the upstairs bedroom lights. It was shortly before ten, and since it was the weekend Chris would still be up, though young Paul had long since been tucked away.

And Lois probably sat before the video, waiting patiently for her husband to come home. Harker smiled gently, put his thumb to the identity-plate of the door, and waited for it to open.

Lois came to the door to meet him. She looked pale, tired; when she kissed him, it was purely mechanical, almost ritualistic.

“I was hoping you were in that cab, Jim. How’d everything go?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, Lois. I feel beat.”

“Come on inside. Tell me about your day.”

He followed her into the sitting-room. The autoknit stood to one side; she had been making socks, it seemed. The video blared some hideous popular song:

Harker jerked a thumb toward the screen. “Is this the sort of junk you’ve been watching?”

Lois smiled faintly. “It’s a good tranquilizer. I just let the sound bellow out and numb my mind.”

He thumbed the off-switch set in the table before the couch, and the singing died away, the image shrank to a spot of tri-colored light and then to nothing at all. His hand sought hers.

He found himself wishing she would get up on her back legs and yowl, just once. It would be good for both of them. But she was so wonderfully patient! She had said nothing, or little, when he had stubbornly defied the national committee and gone ahead with the reform program that could only have ended his political career, and did. She had barely objected when he told her of his new affiliation with the Beller people, and she had said nothing in these past ten days, when the pressure of conflicting cross-currents had kept him bottled up within himself, unloving, cold.

He tried to say something affectionate, something to repay her for the suffering he had caused, the lonely evenings, the tense breakfasts.

But she spoke first. “They still haven’t found Senator Thurman, Jim. I heard the nine-thirty newscast. Isn’t it terrible, an old man like that disappearing?”

Sudden coldness swept through him. “Still—haven’t found him?” he repeated inanely. “Well—I guess—ah—that old buzzard’s indestructible. He’ll turn up.”

“How do you think this will affect the hearing on Monday?”

Harker shrugged, only half-listening. He was thinking, You know damn well where Thurman is, and you’re afraid to tell her. Why don’t you speak up? Don’t you trust your own wife? He wet his dry lips. “I—I suppose they’ll choose a new chairman if something’s happened to Thurman. But—”

“Jim, are you all right? You look terrible!”

“Lois, I—want to tell you something. Today—”

He stopped, wondering how to go on. She was staring intently at him, curious but not overly curious, waiting to hear what he had to say.

The phone rang.

Grateful for the interruption, Harker sprang from the couch and darted around back to take the call on the visual set. He activated it; Mart Raymond’s face appeared on the screen.

“Well?” Harker said immediately, in a low voice. “Is the evidence all taken care of? ”

Raymond nodded agitatedly. “Yes. But that’s not what I called about. Barchet’s dead!”

“What? How?”

“It happened about five minutes ago. He was getting ready to leave, and we were discussing—you know, what happened tonight. He had a heart attack and just dropped. It must have been all the excitement. His heart was weak anyway, he once said.”

Harker could not repress the tide of relief that rose in him. Barchet had been the cause of half of his troubles—Mitchison and Klaus, for one, and the Thurman affair for another. Still, a man was dead, and that was no cause for rejoicing, he told himself coldly.

He said, “That’s too bad. Did he have a family?”

“Just a wife, but she died years ago. He was alone.”

Harker nodded. “You’d better notify the local police right away.”

“Jim, what’s the matter with you?” Raymond asked incredulously.

“What do you mean?”

“Barchet’s in the operating room now. Vogel’s getting ready to try a reanimation on him.”

“No!” Harker said instantly.

“No? Jim, we can’t just let him die like that!”

“Barchet was a troublemaker, Mart. He was the weak link in the organization. Now we’re rid of him; let him stay dead. It’s one less witness to the thing that happened today.”

In a shocked whisper Raymond said, “You can’t mean what you’re saying, Jim.”

“I mean exactly what you’re hearing. Barchet was unstable, Mart. He pressured you into doing all sorts of cockeyed things. If he lived, he’d end up revealing the Thurman business before long. Let him stay dead. That’s an order, Mart.”

Raymond seemed to shrink back from the screen. “It’s almost like committing murder, Jim! The man could be saved if we—”

“No,” Marker said, with a firmness he did not feel. “There’ll be trouble if you cross me, Mart. Good night.”

He broke the contact with a shaky hand.

Lois gasped when she saw him. “Jim! It must be bad news. You’re utterly white.”

He sat down heavily. “One of the Beller executives just had a heart attack. A man named Barchet—a runty little fellow who enjoyed sticking lead pipes between the spokes of smoothly running machines. I just ordered Mart Raymond not to attempt reanimation.”

His hands were quivering. Lois took them between hers. Harker said, “It’s like murder, isn’t it? To refuse to reanimate a man, when it’s possible to do so. But it’s better for everyone if Barchet stays dead. Nobody will miss him. God, I feel awful.”

“Remember the McDermott case, Jim?”

He frowned, then smiled at her. “Yes,” he said. McDermott had been a factory hand, an overgrown moron of 22 who had beaten his 70-year-old father to death one night shortly before Harker had become Governor of New York. The verdict had been speedy, the sentence one of execution. With the boy in the death house and the night of the execution at hand, his aged mother had relented, lost her vindictiveness, pleaded with the new Governor Harker to commute the sentence.

The boy had had a long criminal record. The court had found him guilty. He had murdered his father in cold blood, premeditatedly. He deserved the full penalty.

Harker had refused to commute. But then he had spent the rest of the evening staring at his watch, and at the stroke of midnight had burst into an attack of chills.

He nodded slowly now. “I refused to commute Barchet’s sentence. That’s all there is to it.”