Recalled to Life

Chapter XIX

At litchfteld again, the next day, Harker was reading through a lab report, comprehending not very much of it, when a diffident knock sounded outside his door.

Probably Lurie with the papers, he thought. “Come in!”

A slim figure in ecclesiastical robes entered. Harker blinked and said, “I didn’t expect to see you here, Father Carteret.”

“Nor I. But I thought I would make the trip.”

“Sit down,” Harker urged. “What’s on your mind?”

“Jim, I asked you to come to me if you ever had any troubles. You have them now. I thought I’d stop over and find out if I could be of any help.”

Harker felt faintly irritated. He liked the priest, but he felt no desire for unasked advice. “Father, if you’ve come to tell me I ought to quit this outfit while I still have my soul, forget it.”

“The time for telling you that is past.”

Harker stared at the priest coolly. “Then why are you here?”

“To help you. I have a suggestion for you—a rather strange one. But first: let me tell you that the Church is reconsidering its stand.”

“What?”

Carteret smiled gently. “The Church moves slowly; don’t anticipate anything for the next several years. But I have it on good understanding that as soon as your technique is perfect—that is, as soon as you can restore body and mind every time—the Church will no longer withold its approval from reanimation.”

Harker chuckled. “I’d say that bet was pretty well coppered. The if there is a pretty big one.”

“I know. But a necessary one. I’m praying for your success, Jim.”

“You? But you warned me away from this thing!”

Carteret nodded. “You took the step, anyway. And perhaps I made an original error in judgement.”

“Well, that’s neither here nor there. Reanimation is going to be squashed by Congress anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply that the defect in the process has aroused such public horror that Congress is afraid to legislate in our favor.”

“And you don’t expect to overcome that defect?”

“Not immediately. Another six months, maybe—but by that time it’ll be too late.”

Carteret steepled his long thin fingers reflectively. “You tell me, then, that your real problem is a failure of public relations. If you could sell your product to the people, Congress would follow along.”

“In a word, that’s it.”

“I thought so.”

“You said you had a suggestion to make,” Harker reminded the priest.

“I did. It’s an idea for capturing the stream of public opinion. I’m anxious to see your project succeed, Jim. It may sound strange, coming from my lips, but that’s the truth. I suffered to reach this opinion.”

“And what’s your idea?”

An odd smile appeared on Carteret’s thin face. “It’s one that bears the test of time, Jim. Our Savior went meekly to the Cross, and on the third day he rose. It was an act that has captured the imaginations and hearts of men for two thousand years.”

Harker frowned. “I don’t quite see—”

He stopped. Abruptly the deeper meaning of the priest’s words was borne in on him, and he stared at Carteret aghast, wondering.

“Would you do something like that?” he asked.

“If I had faith in my cause,” Carteret said. “Do you have faith in yours?”

Hesitantly Harker said, “I—think so.”

“Therein lies the answer, Jim. Think about it a while. Don’t rush yourself. I’ll leave you now, and let you get used to the idea.”

Alone, Harker stared through the office window at the dark, rain-streaked sky outside. Summer lightning crackled suddenly across the darkness; moments later thunder came rolling down from the hills.

A cold sweat came over him as he revolved Carteret’s words in his mind: Our Savior went meekly to the Cross, and on the third day he rose.

Do I dare, he wondered?

It was, he knew without doubt, the act that would settle the fate of reanimation for good. With success would come triumph; failure for him unquestionably meant the downfall of the project.

Shall I risk it?

Do I dare?

He thought back over a life that had lasted forty-three years, a comfortable life, most of it spent in easy circumstances as he rose through law school to political prominence, then down the other side of the curves into a shortlived obscurity. He had never known real danger in his life. There had been enemies, of course—political ones, who had worked his downfall. But that was a gentle kind of strife, a chess-game more than a pitched war.

This was different.

This was life or death, on the line—and for what? For a cause. He had never known a cause he might be willing to risk death for. Now that the risk presented itself, he wondered if he had the courage to submit to it.

Harker sat quietly for perhaps half an hour, thinking. Then he reached for the phone and dialed his home number. Lois answered. In a calm, level voice, he told her exactly what he was going to do.

She was silent for a moment; then she said simply, “Jim, why do you have to do this thing? ”

How can I explain? he wondered. How can I show her that a moment can come when you stand between life and death, and the choice is entirely yours?

He said, “I think it’s the only way, Lois. It’ll prove to the world that reanimation can be trusted.”

“But the awful risk, Jim—”

One chance out of six for idiocy, he thought bleakly. “I wouldn’t do it if I thought it was risky, Lois. The whole point is that it isn’t risky. You think I want to be a goddam martyr?”

“Sometimes I think you do, Jim,” she said very quietly.

He chuckled harshly. “Well, maybe. But I know what I’m doing. It’ll hammer home reanimation the way no amount of talking ever could.”

After a long pause she said, “When—when would you do this thing?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to discuss it with the others here first. And we’d need to arrange for proper publicity. Unless the whole world finds out about it, there’s no sense doing it.”

Forty-three years of life converging toward one moment of decision in a bare little room on a rain-soaked New Jersey hill, Harker thought. And this is probably the weirdest motive for suicide in the history of the human species.

Lois said, “Do you have that much faith in those men?”

“Yes. How can we expect the people to trust us, if we don’t trust ourselves?”

“All right,” she said. Her voice held undertones of quiet resignation. “I guess I ought to fight and cry and tell you not to do it, but I know you too well, Jim. Go ahead, if you think you have to do this thing. I—I guess you might as well have my permission, because I know you’ll go ahead and do it anyway.”

There was the hint of a crack in her voice. Harker smiled palely, thankful that the roughly-furnished office he had here did not have a visual pickup on the phone. He did not want her to see his face now, for he knew his face was that of a frightened man.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he told her, and broke the contact.

It was still raining. He pulled a waterproof from the closet, slung it over his shoulders, and dashed across the clearing to Mart Raymond’s office. The sky was dark, gray, bleak.

Raymond was working on records when Harker entered—proceeding mechanically, with the air of a man marking time. They were all marking time, waiting for the Congressional decision.

Harker said, “Mart, tell me something.”

“Go ahead.”

“How close are you to ironing out the business of loss of mind?”

Raymond shrugged. “I told you. A month’s more work, maybe. A little less, if we’re lucky.”

Nodding, Harker said quietly, “Look here, Mart: I’m going to pull a Mitchison.” “’Huh?”

“I mean, I’m going to jump the gun and announce that you’ve already straightened things up, and that from now on reanimation will work every time, provided no vital organs are damaged and that decay hasn’t begun.”

“What’s the point of doing that? It isn’t so.”

“It will be so, sooner or later. Sooner, I hope. But I have an idea for a sort of publicity stunt, a grandstand play that should clinch the idea of reanimation’s safety. Or else finish us altogether.”

Harker walked to the window and stared out. Raymond Mid, “Jim, what the dickens are you talking about?”

Harker turned sharply. “Very simple. We’re going to give a public demonstration of reanimation, sometime in the next couple of days. In order to prove the absolute safety of the process, I’m going to allow you to kill me under laboratory conditions and bring me back to life.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Desperate. It’s not quite the same thing.”

“But suppose it doesn’t work? What if—you remember how Thurman looked?”

“I do. I’ll take my chances. If it doesn’t work, then we’re not much worse off than we are now.” Harker turned again and stared out the window.

The rain had stopped; the sun was out. A rainbow arched proudly across the low hills, a many-colored ribbon stretching out to the horizon.

Harker drafted two press releases during the afternoon, and by nightfall they had reached print in the newspapers. Both caused sensations.

At seven that evening he tuned in the video at one of the laboratory dorm lounges, and heard a news commentator say, “Exciting news from the Seller Research Laboratories of New Jersey today. The last technical flaw in the reanimation process has been licked, according to lab director Martin Raymond. The Seller Lab statement declared that from now on reanimation will be virtually foolproof, with no risk of possible insanity as before.

“As if to drive home the importance of this new development, a simultaneous statement comes from James Harker, who of course is closely affiliated with the reanimation researchers. Harker let it be known this afternoon that he is suffering from a rare heart ailment, one which has been hitherto impossible to correct because the necessary surgery cannot be performed on a living man.

“Harker declared that he is so confident of the Bellar technique’s results that he will submit to the operation, necessitating temporary ‘death’ and then will be reanimated at the conclusion of the operation.”

Harker listened soberly to this largely ficticious news broadcast. He had no heart ailment; the last technical flaw had not been eliminated.

But never mind, he thought. The essential fact was the last—the reanimation. The rest was camouflage.

One chance out of six. He felt oddly calm about his decision. At last he had found a cause in which he had faith, and he did not expect to be let down.