Robert Silverberg - Recalled to Life

“What kind?”

“New York State is short one senator right now. I have to appoint somebody to replace Thurman, I guess. And it seemed to me that you —”

Harker nearly let the phone drop. When he had recovered his poise he said, “I’m still a sick man, Leo. Don’t shock me like that.”

“Sorry if I did. But it’s a job I think you’re equipped to handle. Interested?”

“I sort of think I am,” Harker said wryly.

When he had finished talking to Winstead, he hung up the phone and looked at Mart Raymond. “That was Governor Winstead. He’s naming me to the Senate to fill the rest of Thurman’s term.”

“Wonderful!”

“I suppose it is,” Harker admitted.

He sent for Lois and told her about it, and she wept a little, partly for joy and partly, he suspected, because she did not want him to take on any new responsibilities.

Harker flicked the tears away. He stretched gently, mindful of his sutures.

Lois said, “It’s all finished, isn’t it? The struggling and the conniving, the plotting and scheming? Everything’s going to be all right now.”

He smiled at her. He was thinking that the stream of events could have come out much worse. He had taken a desperate gamble, and he and humanity both were that much the richer for it.

But the world as he had known it for forty-odd years was dead, and would not return to life. This was a new era—an era in which the darkest fact of existence, death, no longer loomed high over man.

Staggering tasks awaited mankind now. A new code of laws was needed, a new ethical system. The first chapter had closed, but the rest of the book remained to be written.

He squeezed her hand tightly. “No, Lois. It isn’t all finished. The hardest part of the job is just beginning. But everything’s going to be all right, now. Yes. Everything’s going to be all right.”