Robert Silverberg - Recalled to Life

“Absolutely none,” Raymond assured him.

“Animal experiments are legal,” remarked Senator West—more, the Californian Nat-Lib. “No grounds for objecting there.”

“I wasn’t objecting,” snapped Vorys. “Merely inquiring.”

Harker smiled to himself.

The dogs were cleared away in due time; Harker saw the tension-lines reassert themselves on Raymond’s face, and he knew the main event was about to begin.

When Raymond spoke, his voice was thin and strained. “Gentlemen, I know you’ve come here for one main purpose—to see if human life can be restored. The time has come for us to demonstrate our technique.”

Raymond licked his lips. Tension mounted in the lab room. The senators stirred in anticipation; the five staff men scribbled notes furiously. Harker felt dry fingers clutching at his windpipe. It was a feeling he remembered having felt on two election nights, at that moment just after the polls had closed—when, with the die irretrievably cast, there was nothing to do but wait until the electronic counters had done their job and announced the winner.

He waited now. Two white-smocked assistants rolled in an operating-table on which a covered cadaver lay.

In a harsh, edgy voice Raymond said, “We secure most of our experimental cadavers from local hospitals. We have permits for this. The body here is approximately the one hundredth we have used in our work, and the seventy-second since the first successful reanimation.”

The covers were peeled back. Harker flinched slightly; the body was that of a boy of about twelve or thirteen, and it was not a pretty sight.

“This boy drowned late yesterday afternoon in a nearby lake,” Raymond said hoarsely. “All conventional methods of resuscitation were tried without success.”

“You mean artificial respiration, heart massage, and things like that?” Senator Dixon said.

“Yes. The boy was worked over for nearly eight hours, and pronounced dead early this morning. When I phoned the hospital to arrange for a demonstration specimen for you gentlemen, I was allowed to speak to the boy’s father, who gave permission for this experiment.”

Five mimirecorders on five secretarial wrists drank in Raymond’s words. Harker felt growing anxiety; still, he had to admit that using a boy for the experiment was a good touch—if the experiment worked.

He was not afraid of total failure; that could always be explained away and accepted tolerantly. It was the one-out-of-six chance that frightened him, the worse-than-failure of restoring the boy’s body and not his mind.

Raymond nodded to Vogel, who again was presiding over the reanimation. The bearded surgeon clamped the electrodes to the boy’s temples and wrists, and lowered the great hooded bulk of the reanimator.

“The initial attack will come simultaneously through the electrodes and through hormone injections,” Raymond said droningly. “Heart massage will follow, as well as artificial operation of the lungs. Keep your eyes on these instruments; they measure heartbeat, respiration, and the electrical activity of the brain.”

The room was terribly silent. Vogel moved swiftly and smoothly, confidently, without tension. He threw three switches. The archaic light-bulbs overhead dimmed slightly at the instant of power-drain.

Driblets of sweat rolled down Marker’s face. The five senators watched eagerly; he wondered what they were thinking now, how they were reacting as electrical currents rippled through a dead brain and hormones raced through a stilled bloodstream.

The boy was dwarfed by the hovering instrument that simultaneously clung to his exposed heart, pumped his lungs, jolted his brain, fed awakening substances to his blood. The needles on the indicator gauges began to flicker gently.

Harker felt little of the earlier revulsion this sight had caused in him. Now he stared at the slim thin-limbed body of the boy, his skin mottled with the blue imprint of asphyxiation, and waited for the miracle to take place.

Minutes passed. Once Thurman coughed and it was like a physical blow. Needles rose on dials, wavered, fell back as Vogel decreased power, stepped forward again as the delicate fingers nudged the rheostat a few fractions of an inch upward.

“Watch the EEG indicator,” Vogel murmured.

The needle was tracing out an increasingly more agitated line. The calmness of sleep was ending.

“Respiration approaching normal. I’m shutting off the lung manipulators.”

The heart-pump followed. Frowning, Vogel moistened his lips and yanked down on toggle-switches, finally drawing the main rheostat back to point zero.

“Artificial controls are withdrawn,” Vogel said. “The life-process continues.”

The boy lived. Raymond said quietly to Harker, “The EEG patterns are normal ones. The boy’s mind is okay. We did it.”

We did it. Harker felt a sharp sense of triumph, as if he personally had accomplished something. The senators would have to react favorably to something like this, he thought.

He glanced at Thurman. The old man was gray-faced, disturbed. Harker said, quietly, “Well, Senator? You’ve just seen a miracle.”

He wasn’t prepared for the reply, when it came. Thurman shook his great head slowly from side to side like a dying bison and said, “Jim, this is nightmarish. In the name of all that’s good, boy, why did you get mixed up in it?”

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.