Robert Silverberg - Recalled to Life

“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.”

At three minutes past two on Friday afternoon Marker’s secretary buzzed him to let him know Dr. Lurie had arrived. Harker felt momentary apprehension. Cautious, even a little conservative by nature, he felt uneasy about paying a visit to a laboratory of—for all he knew—mad scientists.

He turned on an amiable grin when Lurie arrived. The scientist looked less gawky than before, more sure of himself; he wore what seemed to be the same rumpled clothing.

“The car’s downstairs,” Lurie said.

Harker left word at the front desk that he was leaving for the day, telling the girl to refer all calls to one of the other partners in the firm. He followed Lurie into the gravshaft.

The car idled in the temporary-parking area outside—a long, low, thrumming ’33 turbo-job, sleekly black and coming with a $9000 pricetag at the least. There were three men inside. Lurie touched a knob; the back door peeled back, and he and Harker got in. Harker looked around.

They were looking at him, too. Minutely.

The men at the wheel was a fleshy, hearty-looking fellow in his late fifties, who swivelled in a full circle to peer unabashedly at Harker. Next to him was a thin, pale, intense young man with affectedly thick glasses (no reason why he couldn’t wear contacts instead, Harker thought) and sitting at the far side in back was the third, a coolly self-possessed individual in black clothes.

The fleshy man at the wheel said, “How do you do, Governor Harker. I’m Cal Mitchison—no scientist I, heh-heh! I’m public-liaison man for Seller Labs.”

Harker smiled relatively courteously.

Mitchison said, “Man next to me is Dr. David Klaus, one of Beller’s bright young men. Specialty is enzyme research.”

“H-h-hello,” Klaus said with difficulty. Harker smiled in reply.

“And to your left is Dr. Martin Raymond. Mart’s the Director of Beller Labs,” Mitchison said.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Raymond. His voice was deep, well-modulated, even. Harker sensed that this was a man of tremendous inner strength and purpose. Raymond was a type Harker had seen before, and respected: the quietly intense sort that remained in the background, accumulating intensity like a tightening mainspring, capable of displaying any amount of energy or drive when it was needed.

“And you already know Ben Lurie, of course,” Mitchison said. “So we might as well get on our way.”

The trip took a little over an hour, with Mitchison making a crosstown hop via the 125th Street Overpass, then ducking downtown to 110th Street and taking the Cathedral Avenue rivertube across the Hudson into New Jersey. The Village of Litchfield turned out to be one of those Jersey towns of a thousand souls or so that look just like every other small Jersey town: a railroad siding, a block or two of shopping center, bank, post office, then a string of old split-levels rambling away from the highway in every direction.

Mitchison, handling his big car with an almost sensuous delight, drove on through the main part of town, into the open country again, and about a mile and a half past the heart of the village suddenly turned up a small road prominently labelled PRIVATE: KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTUED.

The road wound inward through a thick stand of close-packed spruce for more than a thousand feet, at which point a roadblock became evident. Two apparently armed men stood guard at either side of the road.

Mitchison opened the doors and the five occupants of the car got out. Harker took a deep breath. The air out here was sweet and pure, and not with the mechanical purity of Manhattan’s strained and filtered atmosphere. He liked the feel of fresh air against his nostrils and throat.

Lurie said to the guards, “This is Mr. James Harker. We’ve brought him here to visit the labs.”