Robert Silverberg - Recalled to Life

The idea of doing favors to the party leaders who had summarily expelled him less than a year ago did not appeal to him. But he said, in a cautious voice, “Maybe. What do you want?”

“We haven’t approached Thurman directly yet. We’d like you to do it.”

“Me?”

Winstead nodded. “Go down to Washington and appeal to the old gorilla’s sense of sentiment. Plead with him to come back to the fold. Thurman was once very high on you, Jim. Maybe he still is.”

Harker said, “I saw Thurman yesterday and he wasn’t running over with sentiment. He came, he saw, and he condemned. What more can I say to him?”

Winstead’s face grew agitated. Harker wondered what pressures had been exerted on the Governor to make this phone call. “Jim, this is for your sake as well as ours. If you can win Thurman over, Congressional approval of reanimation’s a cinch! You’re just cutting your own throat by refusing to go down.”

“You know I’m not anxious to do favors for—”

“We understand that! But can’t you see you’ll be helping yourself as well? We’ll try to make things easier for you if you convince Thurman.”

Harker grinned pleasantly. It was fun to see Winstead squirm. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll go down to see Thurman first thing tomorrow morning.”

Friday morning. Ten-fifteen a.m., on the morning of May 24, 2033.

James Marker stared out the round vitrin porthole at the fleecy whiteness of the clouds over Washington. The two-hundred-fifty-mile flight from Idlewild had taken about twenty minutes, by short-range jet.

Now the big passenger-ship plunged down toward the Capital’s jetport. Harker felt the faint drag of gravity against his body and thought that a spaceship landing must be something like this, only tremendously more taxing. The ship quivered as its speed dwindled, dropping from 700 mph to less than half that, and halving again, while the 150-passenger ship swooped down from its flight altitude of 40,000 feet.

Harker was seeing Thurman at half past eleven, at the Senator’s office. He rolled the phrases round in his mind once again:

“Mr. Thurman, you stuck by me long ago —”

“You owe this to your party, sir —”

“A forward step toward the bright Utopia of tomorrow, Senator —”

None of the arguments sounded even remotely convincing. Thurman was a stubborn old man with a bee in his bonnet about reanimation; no amount of cajoling was going to get him to alter his stand. Still, Marker thought, he owed it to himself to try. The hearings began on Monday, under Thurman’s aegis. It would not hurt to have the patriarch sympathetically inclined. Nor would it be undesirable to have Leo Winstead and the whole Nat-Lib leadership beholden to him, Barker reasoned.

The yellow light flashed and a soft voice emanating from a speaker next to Marker’s ear murmured, “Please fasten your safety belts. We’ll be landing in a few minutes.”

Mechanically Harker guided the magnetic snaps together until he heard the proper click. The ship broke through the thick layer of clouds that blanketed the sky at 20,000 feet, and the white, neat, oddly sterile-looking city of Washington appeared below.

Harker hoped there would be no further difficulty over the Janson case while he was gone. Police investigators had arrived at the labs in mid-afternoon the day before, wanting to know if a reanimation had been carried out on the late industrialist. Raymond had flatly denied it, but at Harker’s advice had refused to turn over the laboratory records to the police until subpoenaed to do so.

. The inspectors had left, making it clear that the matter was far from at an end. Harker smiled to himself about it; any comprehensive investigation was bound to prove that the whole affair had been staged by Bryant, taking advantage of his bachelor friend’s suicide declaration to smear the re-animators.

But the suicide was in the newspapers, and no amount of unmasking ever really cancels out unfavorable publicity. The public would—with some justice—now link reanimation with possible mental deficiency afterward. Harker longed to have Jonathan Bryant’s neck between his hands, just for a minute.

Troublemaker!

He leaned back and waited for the landing.

It took nearly half an hour for Harker to make the taxi-jaunt from the jetport to Capitol Hill, longer than the transit-time between New York and Washington. It was nearly eleven when he reached Senator Thurman’s suite of offices-imposing ones, as befitted a senator who not only represented the second most populous state in the Union but who had held office for nearly seven terms.

A pink-faced, well-starched secretary about two years out of law-school greeted Harker as he entered the oak-panelled antechamber.

“Sir?”

“I’m James Harker. I have an appointment with the Senator for half past eleven.”

The secretary looked troubled. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harker. The Senator appears to be ill.”

“Ill?”

“That’s right, sir. He hasn’t reported to his office yet today. He’s always here by nine sharp, and it’s almost eleven now, so we figure he must be sick.”

So far as Harker knew, Clyde Thurman had not known a day’s illness yet in the twenty-first century. It was strange that he should fall ill this day of days, when Harker had an appointment to see him.

But it was not like Thurman to run away from a knotty problem, either. Harker said, “Have you checked with his home?”

“No, sir.” The secretary appeared to resent Harker’s question. “The Senator’s private life is his own.”

“For all you know Thurman died this morning!”

A shrug. “We have not received word of any sort whatever.”

Harker paced up and down in the antechamber for fifteen minutes, sitting intermittently, fidgeting, glancing up nervously every time the big outer door opened to admit someone. He thought back thirty-odd years, to the time when eight-year-old Jimmy Harker was reported to his school principal for some obscure, forgotten offense. He had sat in just this manner in the anteroom of the principal’s office, waiting for the principal to come back from lunch to administer his punishment—his head popping around every time a clerk opened the big door, his stomach quivering in fear that this might be the principal this time.

In time, he recalled, the principal had come—and had not expelled him nor phoned for his father, merely reprimanded him and sent him back to his classroom. Perhaps the same thing might happen today, he thought, perhaps some miraculous change of heart on the part of old Thurman—

But no miracles took place. Eleven-fifteen went by, and eleven-thirty, and there was no sign of Thurman. Clerks serenely went about their routine duties, ignoring the tense, sweating man in the outer office.

At ten to twelve Harker rose and confronted the secretary again. “Any word from Thurman?”

“Not yet, sir,” was the bland reply.

Harker crooked his fingers impatiently. “Look here, why don’t you phone his home? Maybe he’s seriously ill.”

“We never disturb the Senator at home, sir.”

Harker glared at the man, exhaled exasperatedly, and growled, “I guess you won’t give me his home phone number, then.”

“Afraid not, sir.”

“Is there anything you will do? Suppose you phone the office of Senator Fletcher for me, then.”

Fletcher was the Senate Majority Leader, another veteran Nat-Lib who was likely to know where to reach Thurman if anyone was. A little to Harker’s surprise, the secretary said, “You can use the phone back here. Just pick up and tell the switchboard who you want.”

The phone was audio-only. A metallic voice said, “ Your party, please?” and Harker, resisting the temptation to ask for Thurman’s home number (it was probably restricted) said, “Would you connect me with Senator Fletcher’s office?”