Recalled to Life

Chapter II

BARKER HAD an appointment to visit old Richard Bryant at three that afternoon. He was not looking forward to it. Since Bryant was confined to his home by doctor’s orders, it meant that Harker would have to visit the old man, and that meant entering a house where death seemed to hang heavy over the threshold, a house filled with graspingly impatient relatives of the venerable hero of space-travel’s infancy.

At half past two Harker notified his secretary that he was leaving; he gathered up the portfolio of relevant papers, locked his office, and took the gravshaft down to street level. He emerged on First Avenue, and walked quickly downtown toward 125th Street.

It was a bright, warmish, cloudless May afternoon. A bubble of advertising was the only blot on the otherwise flawless sky. The Manhattan air was clean, tingling, fresh. Harker never breathed it in without thinking of the vast dynamos of the puritron stations every ten blocks apart, gulping in tons and tons of city soot each second. In his second year as Mayor, the entire Brooklyn puritron assembly had “accidentally” conked out for four hours, thanks to some half-forgotten labor squabble. Harker remembered the uproar that had caused.

At 125th Street he boarded the crosstown monorail and moments later found himself disembarking at the Riverside Drive exit. He signalled for a cab; while he waited, a bleary-eyed old man shuffled over to him, shoved a gaudy pamphlet in his hands, greeted him by name, and shuffled away.

He looked at it. It was one of the many official organs of the Watchtower Society. As he stuffed it in the corner disposal-bin, he smiled in recollection of that organization’s motto: MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE.

Gravely he proposed a substitute: MILLIONS NOW DEAD WILL LIVE AGAIN.

The attendant images effectively choked off the mood of good humor that had been stealing over him. He remembered that in only two days he would be journeying across the Hudson to see whether the Beller Laboratories people had actually hit on something or not.

The cab drew up. Harker slid into the back seat and said, “Seventy-ninth and West End, driver.”

The house was a massive, heavily-chromed representative of late twentieth-century architecture, settling now into respectable middle age. Harker had visited it on three separate occasions, and each time his discomfort had increased.

It had no gravshaft; he rode up in a human-operated elevator. The operator said, “I guess you’re going to visit Mr. Bryant, eh, Mr. Harker?”

“That’s right.”

“The old gentleman’s been poorish lately, sir. Ah, it’ll be a sad thing when he goes, won’t it?”

“He’s one of our greatest,” Harker agreed. “Many people up there today? ”

“The usual lot,” the operator said, halting the car and opening the door. It opened immediately into the foyer of the huge Bryant apartment. Almost at once, Harker found himself staring at the fishy, cold-eyed face of Jonathan Bryant, the old man’s eldest son.

“Good afternoon, Jonathan.”

“Hello, Harker.” The reply was sullenly brusque. “You’re here to see my father?”

“I didn’t come for tea,” Harker snapped. “Will you invite me in, or should I just push past you?”

Jonathan muttered something and gave ground, allowing Harker to enter. The livingroom was crowded: half-a-dozen miscellaneous Bryants, plus two or three whom Harker did not know but who bore the familiar Bryant features. A horde of vultures, Harker thought. He nodded to them with professional courtesy and passed on, through the inner rooms, to the old man’s sickroom.

The place was lined with trophies—one room, Harker knew, consisted of the cockpit of the Mars One, that slender needle of a ship that had borne Rick Bryant to the red planet nearly fifty years ago, an epoch-making flight that still stood large in the annals of space-travel. Trophy-cases in the halls held medals, souvenir watches, testimonial dinner-menus. Old Bryant had been a prodigious collector of souvenirs.

His doctor, a tiny man with the look of an irritated penguin, met him at the door to the sickroom. “I’ll have to ask you to limit your stay to thirty minutes, Mr. Harker. He’s very low today.”

“I’ll be as brief as I can,” Harker promised. He stepped around the barricade and entered.

Helen Bryant, oldest of the daughters, sat solicitously by her father’s bedside, glaring at him with the tender expression of a predatory harpy.

Harker said, “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Bryant, your father and I have some important business to discuss.”

“I’m his daughter. Can’t I—”

“I’m afraid not,” Harker said coldly. He waited while she made her proud retreat, then took her seat at the side of the bed.

“Afternoon, Harker,” Bryant said in a tomb-like croak.

He was not a pretty sight. He was seventy-three, and could easily pass for twice that age—a shrunken, leathery little man with rheumy, cataracted eyes and a flat, drooping face. There was little about him that was heroic, now. He was just a dying old man.

The needles of an intravenous feed-line penetrated his body at various points. He no longer had the strength to swallow or to digest. It was difficult to believe that this man had made the first successful round-trip flight to another planet, back in 1984, and that from his early thirties until his stroke four years ago he had been a figure of world importance, whose words were eagerly rushed into print whenever he cared to make a statement.

He said, “How does it look for next Thursday?”

Harker’s jaws tightened. “Pretty good. I hope to be able to swing it.”

“How have you set it up?”

Harker drew the papers from his portfolio. “Twenty million is to be established as a trust fund for your grandchildren and for the children of your grandson Frederick. Thirty million is to be granted to the Bryant Foundation for Astronautical Research. Fifty thousand is to be divided among your children, ten thousand to each.”

“Is that last bit necessary?” Bryant asked with sudden ferocity.

“I’m afraid it is.”

“I wanted to cut those five jackals off without a penny!” he thundered. Then, subsiding, he coughed and said, “Why must you give them so much?”

“There are legal reasons. It makes it harder for them to overthrow the will, you see.”

The old man was reluctant to accept the idea of giving his children anything, and in a way Harker could see the justice of that. They were a hateful bunch. Bryant had garnered millions from his space-journey, and had invested the money wisely and well; there had been an undignified scramble for the old hero’s wealth when a stroke appeared to have killed him in ’28. He had confounded them all by recovering, and by cutting most of them out of his revised will—a document that was being contested in the courts even while the old man still lived.

At three-thirty, the penguinish doctor knocked discreetly at the bedchamber door, poked his head in, and said, “I hope you’re almost through, Mr. Harker.”

At that moment old Bryant was trying to sign a power-of-attorney Harker had prepared; his palsied hand could barely manage the signature, but in time he completed it. Harker looked at it: a wavy scrawl that looked like a random pattern on a seismograph drum.

“I’m leaving now,” Harker told the doctor.

Bryant quavered, “What time is the hearing next Thursday, Harker?”

“Half past eleven.”

“Be sure to call me when it’s finished.”

“Of course. You just relax, Mr. Bryant. Legally they can’t trouble you at all.”

He reaped a harvest of sour glances as he made his way through the trophy-cluttered halls to the elevator. It was a depressing place, and the sight of the shattered hero always clouded his mind with gloom. He was glad to get away.

Riding a cab downtown to Grand Central, he boarded the 4:13 express to Larchmont, and eleven minutes later was leaving the Larchmont tube depot and heading in a local cab toward his home. At quarter to five, he stepped through the front door.

Lois was in the front room, standing on a chair and doing something to the ceiling mobile. Silently Harker crept in; standing with arms akimbo at the door, he said, “It’s high time we junked that antique, darling.”

She nearly fell off the chair in surprise. “Jim! What are you—”

“Home early,” Harker said. “Had an appointment with old Bryant and the medics tossed me out quick, so I came home. Gah! Filthy business, that Bryant deal.”

He slipped out of his jacket and loosened his throat-ribbon. He paused for a moment at the mirror, staring at himself: the fine, strong features, the prematurely iron-gray hair, the searching blue eyes. It was the face of a natural leader, an embryo President. But there was something else in it now—a coldness around the eyes, a way of quirking the corners of his mouth—that showed a defeated man, a man who has climbed to the top of his string and toppled back to the ground. With forty years of active life ahead of him.

“Hello, Dad. Want a drink?”

It was the already-deepening voice of twelve-year-old Chris that drew him away from his reverie. In recent months he had let the boy prepare his homecoming cocktail for him. But today he shook his head. “Sorry, son. I don’t happen to be thirsty tonight.”

Disappointment flashed briefly in the boy’s handsome face; then it faded. Minor setbacks like this meant little to a boy who had expected once to live in the White House, and who knew now it wouldn’t be happening.

“Where’s Paul?” Harker asked.

“Upstairs doing his homework,” Chris said. He snorted. “The ninny’s learning long division. Having fits with it, too.”

Harker stared at his son strangely for a moment; then he said, “Chris, go upstairs and give him some help. I want to talk to Mum.”

“Sure, Dad.”

When the boy had gone, Harker turned to his wife. Lois at forty-three years his junior—was still slim and attractive; her blonde hair had lost its sheen and soon would be shading into gray, but she seemed to welcome rather than fear the imprint of age.

She said, “Jim, why did you look at Chris that way?”

In answer, Harker crossed to the table near the window and his fingers sought out the tridim of dead Eva, its bright colors losing some of their sharpness now after nine years. “I was trying to picture him as a teenage girl,” he said heavily. “Eva would have been fifteen soon.”

Her only outward reaction was a momentary twitch of the lower lip. “You haven’t thought of her for a long time.”

“I know. I try not to think of her. But I thought of her today. I was thinking that she didn’t have to be dead, Lois.”

“Of course not, dear. But it happened, and there was no help for it.”

He shook his head. Replacing Eva’s picture, he picked up instead a tiny bit of bric-a-brac, a kaleidoscopic crystal in whose depths were swirling streaks of red and gold and dark black. He shook it; the color-patterns changed. “I mean,” he said carefully, “that Eva might have been saved, even after the accident.”

“They tried to revive her. The pulmotor—”

“No. Lois, I had a—a person visit me this morning. A certain Dr. Lurie, from a certain research laboratory in New Jersey. He claims they’ve developed a technique for bringing the dead back to life, and he wants me to handle promotion and legal aspects. For a fat fee, I might add.”

She frowned uncertainly. “Reviving the dead? What kind of crazy joke is that?”

“I don’t know. But I’m not treating it as a joke; not until I’ve seen the evidence, anyway. I made an appointment to go out to Jersey and visit their lab on Friday.”

“And you’ll take the job, if they’ve really hit on something?”

Harker nodded. “Sure I’ll take it. It’s risky, of course, and there’s sure to be a lot of public clamor in both directions—”

“And haven’t we had enough of that? Weren’t you satisfied when you tried to reform the state government, and wound up being read out of the party? Jim, do you have to be Quixote all the time?”

Her words had barbs. Harker thought bleakly that being able always to see both sides of a question, as he could, was a devil-granted gift. Wearily he said, “All right. I tried to do something I thought was right, and I got my head chopped off as a result. Well, here’s my second chance—maybe. For all I know they’re a bunch of lunatics over there. I owe it to myself and to the world to find out—and to help them, if I can.”

He pointed at the tridim of Eva. “Suppose that happened now—Eva, I mean. Wouldn’t you want to save her? Or,” he said, making his words deliberately harsh, “suppose Paul dies. Wouldn’t you want to be able to call him back from—from wherever he had gone?”

For a moment there was silence.

“Well? Wouldn’t you?”

Lois shrugged, turning her hands palm outward. “Jim, I don’t know. I don’t know.”