Recalled to Life

Chapter IX

Barker held his first news-conference at three-thirty that afternoon, in the hastily-rigged room that was now his Litchfield office.

By that time, it had occurred to him that he had become, not only the legal adviser of the laboratories, but the public spokesman, publicity director, and chairman of the board as well. Everyone, Raymond included, seemed perfectly willing to delegate responsibility to him.

He made a list of eight selected media representatives—three newspapers, both press services, two video networks and one radio network, and invited them to send men to his conference. No others were allowed in.

He told them very concisely what the Beller technique was, how it had been developed, and what it could do. He used a few technical terms that he had picked up from his weekend reading. He did not mention the fact that the technique was not without flaws.

When he had finished his explanation, he called for questions. Surprisingly few were forthcoming. The news seemed to have stilled the tongues of even these veteran reporters.

At the close of the conference he said, “Headquarters for further Beller news will be right here. I’ll try to make myself available for comment about the same time every afternoon.”

He watched them go. He wondered how much of what he had said would reach the public undistorted, and how much would emerge in garbled and sensationalized form.

Toward evening, he started finding out.

Harker reached his home in Larchmont about seven that evening, utterly exhausted. Lois was at the door, anxious-faced, tense.

“Jim! I’ve been listening to the news all day. So have the boys. Your name’s been mentioned every time.”

“That’s nice,” Harker said wearily. He unsnapped his shoes and nodded hello to his sons, who stared at him strangely as if he had undergone some strange transformation during the day.

“I’ll be spending most of my time at Litchfield until things get calmer,” he said. “I may even have to sleep out there for a while.”

The phone rang suddenly. Harker started to go for it, then changed his mind and said, “Find out who it is, first. If it’s anybody official tell them I’m not home yet. Except Raymond.”

Lois nodded and glided off toward the phone alcove. When she returned, she looked even more pale, more tense.

“Who was it?”

“Some—some crank. There’ve been a lot of those calls today, Jim.”

He tightened his lips. “I’ll have the number changed tomorrow. Nuisances.”

The late editions of two of the New York papers lay on the hassock near his chair. He picked up the Seventh Edition of the Star-Post. A red-inked banner said, CAN LIFE BE RESTORED? READ NOBEL WINNER’S OPINION!

Harker glanced at the article. It was by Carlos Rodriguez, the Peruvian poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018. Evidently it was a philosophical discussion of man’s right to bring back the dead. Harker read about three paragraphs, then abruptly lost interest when another headline at the lower right-hand corner caught his eye. It said:

Harker looked up.

“Listen to this hogwash, Lois!” He read her the article, bearing down with sardonic malice on Jonathan’s more cynical remarks.

She nodded. “I heard about it before. Seems some people got up a quick petition to bring old Bryant back to life. Jonathan’s statement was broadcast about five this afternoon.”

Scowling, Harker said, “You can bet they’ll rush him off to the crematorium in a hurry, now. They waited four years for him to die, and they’d be damned before they let him be brought back to life!”

The phone rang again. Lois slipped away to answer it, while Harker busied himself with the papers. She returned in a moment, looking puzzled, and said, “It’s a Father Carteret. He begged me to let him talk to you. What should I tell him?”

“Never mind. I’ll talk to him.”

He picked it up in the foyer, where the phone was audio-only. “Father Carteret? Jim Harker speaking.”

“Hello there, Jim.” Carteret sounded troubled. “I—I guess you meant what you said, that day you saw me. It’s all over the papers.”

“I know. Some knucklehead sprang the thing prematurely, and we’re stuck with it now.”

“I thought I’d let you know that ecclesiastic circles are in a dither,” Carteret said. “The Archbishop’s been on the phone to Rome half the day.”

Harker’s throat tightened. “Any news?”

“Afraid so. The Vatican has issued a hands-off order: no Catholic is to go near your process in any way whatever until the Church has had ample time to explore the implications. Which means a few months or a few centuries; there’s no telling.”

“So it’s a condemnation, then?”

“Pretty much so,” Carteret agreed softly. “Until it’s determined whether or not reanimation is sinful, no Catholic can let a member of his family be reanimated—or even work in your laboratories. I hope everything works out for you, Jim. There’s nothing you can do now but stick to your guns, is there?”

“No,” Harker said. “I guess not.”

He thanked the priest for the advance information and hung up. Storm-clouds were beginning to gather already. His earlier mood of gloom and desperation had washed away, he found, much to his surprise.

He knew why. The battle had been joined. No more behind-the-scenes skulking; he was out in the open as the standard-bearer of Beller Labs. It promised to be a rough fight, but that didn’t scare him.

“This is my second chance,” he said to Lois.

She smiled palely. “I don’t understand, Jim.”

“I was elected Governor of New York on a reform platform that nobody in the party organization took seriously except me. I waded in and started to make reforms, and I got my teeth rammed down my throat for it. Okay. I lost Round One. But now I’m in the thick of the fight again, fighting against ignorance and fear and hysteria. Maybe I’ll lose again—but at least I’ll have tried.”

She touched his arm, almost timidly. Harker realized that he had never really seen into his wife before: seen the contradictions in her, the caution, the timidity, and the core of toughness that was there too.

“This time you’ll win, Jim,” she said simply.

It didn’t look that way in the morning.

THURMAN SPEARHEADS REANIMATION INQUIRY, the Times announced, and the story revealed that Senator Clyde Thurman (N-L, N.Y.) had urged immediate Congressional investigation of the claims of Beller Research Laboratories, and from the tone of Thurman’s statements it was obvious that he was hostile to the whole idea of reanimation. “Sinful . . . possibly a menace to the fabric of society. . . .” were two of the terms quoted in the newspaper.

The Times also printed a full page of extracts from editorials of other newspapers throughout the country, plus a few comments from overseas papers that had arrived in time for the early editions.

The prevailing newspaper sentiment was one of caution. The East Coast papers generally suggested that careful scrutiny be applied to die alleged statements of Beller Labs before such a process be used on any wide scale. The Far West papers called for immediate scientific study of the Beller achievement, and most of them implied that it would be a tremendous boon to humanity if the claims were found to be true.

The Midwest papers, though, took a different approach, in general. The Chicago Tribune declared: “We fear that this new advance of science may instead be a step backward, that it may sound the trumpet-call for the decline of civilization as we know it. A society without the fear of death is one without the fear of God”—and so on for nearly a full column.

The overseas notices were mixed: the Manchester Guardian offered cautious approval, the London Daily Mirror ringing condemnation. From France came puzzled admiration for American scientific prowess; the Germans applauded the discovery, while no word was forthcoming from Russia at the moment. The Vatican statement was about what Carteret had predicted it would be.

He reached the Litchfield headquarters about quarter past ten that morning. There was the usual gaggle of newsmen cluttering up the highway, even though the skies held a definite threat of rain. However someone had had enough sense to rope off the approach to the laboratory grounds, and so he had no trouble getting past the gauntlet of reporters and into the area.

Raymond and Lurie were in the office when Harker got there. They had a huge pile of newspapers spread out all over the floor.

“Makes interesting reading,” Harker said amiably.

Raymond looked up. “We never expected this, Jim. We never expected anything like this.”

Harker shrugged. “Death is the most important word in the language, right after birth. What comes in between is immaterial; everybody goes through his days remembering that all his life is just a preparation for the moment of his death. You’ve changed all that. Did you expect the world to take.it calmly?”

Lurie said, “Show him the letters, Mart.”

Raymond sprang to his feet and shoved a thick file-folder at Harker. “Take a look at these, will you? It’s enough to break your heart.”

“They come in truckloads,” Lurie said. “The Litchfield postmaster is running hourly deliveries down to us because he doesn’t have room for the stuff up there.”

Harker reached into the folder and pulled out a letter at random. It was written painstakingly by hand on blue-lined yellow paper. He read it.

Harker put the letter down, feeling a strange sense of bitter compassion. He said nothing.

Raymond said, “We have hundreds like that. Some of the damndest things, too. People with relatives dead ten years want to dig them up and bring them to us.”

Harker shook his head. “There’s no chance you can help any of these people? How about this woman?”

“The cancer one? Not a chance. If it’s as bad as he says it is, the malignancy has probably metastasized right up and down her body by now. Maybe we could bring her back to life, but we couldn’t keep her alive afterward.”

“I see. How about other diseases?”

Raymond shrugged. “If the organic damage is beyond repair, we can’t do a thing. But if it’s reparable, you can figure a good chance of success. Take a patient with cardiac tissue scarred by repeated attacks. One more attack will finish him—and so would any operation to correct the condition. But now we can ‘kill’ him ourselves, install an artificial heart, and reanimate. He could live another thirty years that way.”

“In other words—”

The phone rang. Raymond swivelled around and scooped it lightly off its cradle without activating the video. He frowned, then said, “Yes. Yes. I get you. No, we won’t make any such concessions. Go ahead, then. Sue, if you like. We’ll countersue.”

He hung up.

“What the blazes was that?” Harker demanded.

“Do you know a lawyer named Phil Gerhardt?”

Harker thought for a moment, then said, “Sure. He’s a flashy lawsuit man, about as honest as snow in the Sahara. What about him?”

“He just called,” Raymond said, scratching the lobe of one ear thoughtfully. “Seems he’s representing Mitchison and Klaus. They got their dismissal notices and they’re suing for a million bucks plus control of the Labs. Isn’t that lovely?”