Recalled to Life

Chapter XII

Two hours later, the Senate committee had gone, but the gloom of their presence still hovered darkly over Harker.

A delayed reaction having nothing to do with the visit of the senators had struck him. The old wounds of that day at the beach were open once again; once again he huddled Eva’s cold little form against his.

Somewhere else on the laboratory grounds, surgeons were working over a twelve-year-old boy, stitching together the surgical apertures that had been made to permit resuscitation. By tomorrow, the boy would be out of anesthesia. In a few weeks, he would be walking around, healthy, recalled to life after twenty hours of death.

Eva had drowned. She had not been saved.

“I don’t understand it,” Mart Raymond exclaimed vehemently. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Drawn for a moment from his painful memories, Harker said, “What doesn’t make sense?”

“Thurman. How can he stand there and watch a dead boy come to life, and end up twice as solid against us as he was before?”

Harker shrugged. “I wish I knew. I thought we won them over with that show—until Thurman spoke up. The old fossil is fogged up with age, I guess. He’s got some preconceived idea that it’s immoral to bring back the dead, and having it done right in front of him just solidified his thinking.”

The strain was showing on Raymond, Harker saw. His gray eyes were red-rimmed and bleary; his face had grown thin. He had given up a career in medical research to handle the job of running Beller Labs—and perhaps he was regretting that, now.

He said, “Thurman is supposed to be a Nat-Lib. I could understand those two Conservatives turning up their noses, but I thought—”

“Yeah. So did I. But Thurman’s an old man.”

“The Conservatives came out against reanimation today, didn’t they? Doesn’t he realize he’s helping the opposition if he fights us?”

“Maybe he doesn’t think of them as opposition any more,” Harker said. “He’s eighty-eight years old. He may look alert and bright-eyed, but that’s no guarantee against senility.”

“If he votes against us,” Raymond said, “we’re cooked. How can we win him over?”

“The hearings begin next Monday. We’ve got four days to figure out a line of attack. Maybe the old buzzard will die before Monday.” Harker reddened slightly as he spoke the words; the thought of a universe without Clyde Thurman in it was a mind-shaking concept for him.

He looked at his watch. Five minutes to three. Right on the button, Lurie stuck his head in and said, “Time for the press conference, Jim.”

Leadenly Harker nodded. “Okay. Send them in, Lurie.”

He ran through what he had to say in less than half an hour. He told them that the senatorial committee had been there and had—watched the successful reanimation of a twelve-year-old boy. He expressed a hope that the demonstration had impressed the senators favorably, and did not mention that Thurman’s remarks implied a negative reaction.

There was a brief session of sporadic questions; then Harker pleaded exhaustion and hustled the newsmen out. He felt tremendously weary, but at the same time there was the excitement of knowing he was in a fight, and a tough fight.

He phoned Lois and said he would be home in time for dinner. She was being cooperative beyond the call of wifely duty, he thought. He was hardly ever home these days, and when he did show up at Larchmont he was a pale, exhausted ghost of himself, with little energy left over for family life.

The evening papers came in about half past four. Marker had been preparing a plan of attack for the Senate hearings the next week; he looked up when Lurie silently dropped the stack on his desk.

There was a statement from Mitchison and Klaus in most of the papers, to the effect that the Beller Laboratories were in the hands of—approximately—power-hungry madmen, and that they should be stripped of control immediately.

“I wonder what they hope to gain by that?” Raymond asked. “Even if they do succeed in getting control of the labs, they’ll have thoroughly loused up the whole idea of reanimation.”

Harker nodded. “We’ll shut them up soon enough. I spoke to Gerhardt this morning and he said the hearing’s coming up soon.”

“How about this other thing you’re involved with? The Bryant case. When’s the hearing on that?”

“Tomorrow,” Harker said. “I’ll be tied up with that all day, I guess. But then I’ll be free to devote full time here.”

He skimmed through some of the other papers. More news of mob disturbance; this business of mobbing physicians because they either allegedly had been practicing reanimation or had refused to reanimate some newly-dead person was becoming disturbingly more frequent. There were three instances of it in the late editions—in Idaho, Missouri, and Louisiana. The mobs acted with fine impartiality, rioting on both sides of the question. Harker brooded for a while over that.

The editorial pages universally hailed the decision of the Senate to hold an immediate investigation; the papers seemed divided here too, the Conservative ones urging suppression of reanimation and the Nat-Lib papers pleading for sane consideration and government control.

By now everyone was getting into the act: philosophers, painters, athletes, ministers of foreign countries, were all quoted copiously pro and con reanimation. The Russians at last were heard from: Georgi Aksakov, President-General of the Federated Socialist States, sent a note of congratulations to President McComber on the American conquest of death, and extended hope that America would follow the time-honored custom of sharing its scientific developments with the other nations of the world.

By now word had reached the settlements on the Moon and under the Mars Dome, too; by wire came messages of enthusiasm from the two international colonies. It was only to be expected, Harker thought, that the space colonists would welcome the breakthrough with joy. There was no breeding-ground for hysterical anti-scientific reaction on an airless world where only scientific miracles daily insured survival.

It was fast becoming a contest between darkness and light, between education and ignorance—a contest complicated by the presence of educated, intelligent, utterly sincere fanatics in the camp of the opposition.

“We must have regard for the soul,” declared the spokesman for the Archbishop of Canterbury. “A limitation has been placed on the term of man’s life. We must proceed with care when we destroy a limitation of God.”

It was, Harker had to admit, a reasonable attitude—granted a framework of beliefs which he and much of the rest of the world did not share.

“The United States has always been the world pioneer,” declared Senator Marshall of Alabama, the elder statesman of the American-Conservatives. “We never show fear as we approach the boundary between the known and the unknown. But we must exert caution in this new step, and take care lest we move recklessly forward and unleash forces which can destroy the bonds of society.”

The medical societies had statements, too-sound ones. “The problem,” declared an A.M.A. spokesman, “is essentially a soul-searing one. If the Beller process is valid, every physician will have the power to return life to the dead. Shall he make use of this power whenever he can? Or will there be the danger of giving life indiscriminately, to those perhaps who do not merit a reprieve? What will happen if a dead man’s family refuses the right of reanimation? Can the physician proceed? And is he guilty of murder if he does not? Who will make the decisions? An entirely new code of medical ethics must be developed before any wide scale practice of reanimation can be permitted.”

These were sound viewpoints, and Harker had no issue with them. But there were other, more hysterical voices clamoring in the newspapers, and hundreds of vituperous letters had already descended on the Litchfield post office as well.

People who feared death feared reanimation more. There were those who assumed that reanimation might become the property of an aristocracy that would perpetuate itself over and over, while leaving the common people to death. There were those who dreaded the return to life of a loved one, who were unwilling to face again someone who had been “beyond” and returned.

Fear and ignorance, ignorance and fear. Harker read the letters in the newspapers, and his head swam. The ones received direct were even worse.

…you are violating the command of God brought on us by Adam’s fall, Harker. But you will rot in Hell for it…

…you Harker and Raymond and the others there should have been strangled in your cribs. Bringing the dead back from the grave is disgusting. You will fill the world with a race of undead zombies…

…I know what it is to have a loved one die, do you? (Yes, Harker thought.) But I would not want to touch the lips of one who was dead…

Harker paused a moment in thought as he read that last letter, wondering how he would feel had Eva been brought back to him there on the beach. He had assumed that he would welcome the idea, but now he remembered Lois’ doubtful answer to the question, and it seemed to him that he himself was doubtful too now. Would he be able to embrace a daughter who had died and had been reanimated. Could he—He shook his head in bitter self-contempt. I’m overtired, he thought. All this superstitious muck is contagious. The life process stops, it starts again—and is anything lost? Wake up, Harker. Of course you’d have hugged Eva if she had been brought back to life.

It had been a long day. He riffled through a few more letters, but the emotional impact was too great for him to bear after all the other conflicting events of the day. It was not easy to read letters from people who had pleaded for the re-animation of a loved one on Monday, and who now wrote bitterly to say that the period of grace had passed, and by their silence the reanimators had become murderers.

.... my fiancee Joan who was seventeen and electrocuted in a kitchen accident Sunday night could have been saved if you had been willing. But three days have gone by and now she is forever gone. . . .

Even more hellish than watching the slow ebb of life from a dying person, Harker thought, must be the wait while the hours pass after death, and the time for reanimadon passes with them. New torments had been loosed upon the world, he saw. He felt like a man riding a tiger that grew larger with each day.

He picked up another one:

.... you may remember I mentioned my wife mother of our four children who was close to death from cancer. Well she died the night I wrote to you, and not having heard from you yet I suppose you can not help me in this matter. I understand revival must be done on day of death, since she has now been gone two days I am arranging, for her burial. Though I am unhappy and disappointed I do not hold bitterness in my heart against you, may God forgive you for having let Lucy die. . . .

Harker remembered that one: Mikkelsen, from Minnesota. The implied accusation of murder, cloaked as it was by the prayer for God’s forgiveness, chilled him. He put the letters away, phoned across the lab to Raymond, and said he was going home for the day.

“Good luck with that hearing tomorrow,” Raymond said.

“Thanks.”

The air was clean and warm as he stepped outside; at five in the afternoon of an almost-summer day, the sun was still bright, the sky blue and curiously transparent. Harker tried to blot away the network of human suffering whose vortex he had apparently become; he drew in a deep breath, expanded his chest, swung his arms loosely at his sides.

A yellow dart crossed the sky and was gone; after it came the abrupt blurp of sound. It was a southbound rocket to Florida. No doubt it would be landing in Miami before he had reached his own home.

He remembered the legal fight when rocket service had been instituted on a commercial basis, almost thirty years ago. The jetlines had fought tooth and nail against introduction of rocket service; yet, today, both jets and rockets served the cause of transportation amicably enough.

There had been the Moon wrangle too, back in the trouble-wracked twentieth century. He had cut his legal teeth on the suits and countersuits; they were standard fare in every law-school. The Moon had been reached almost simultaneously by America and Russia in the early 1960’s, during a period of international conflict and danger, The Socialist revolution in Russia in 1971 had ended the threat of atomic war, but even so it had not been until 1997 that the United States agreed to join forces with the Federated Socialist States in making the Moon base truly international in character.

There, too, forces of reaction had fought the merger on grounds that seemed to them just and necessary. They had been defeated, ultimately—and now, the Moon base and its newer companion on Mars were hailed as triumphs of the harmony of mankind.

Now reanimation. The old struggle was joined again. Harker told himself that the force of history was on his side, that ultimate victory would be his. But what sacrifices would be made, what campaigns fiercely fought, before then?

He reached his home at six-fifteen. Lois had the video set on, and even as he stood in the doorway the words of a newscaster drifted toward him:

“Senator Thurman of New York and four colleagues today visited the Seller Laboratories and witnessed an actual human reanimation which was successful. Senator Thurman later commented, and I quote, There is no doubt that a restoration of life took place. What is in doubt is whether this power is one that mankind should permit to be used, end quote. Senator Thurman will head a committee to study the implications of reanimation. Hearings begin Monday in Washington—”

Thurman was chairman, and Thurman had already indicated opposition. It was not a good omen. Harker kissed his wife wearily and said to Chris, “Get me something strong to drink, lad. I’ve had a tough day.”