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.
“Dear Sirs,
You will probably throw this letter in the waste-basket but I beg you to consider it sincerely. My wife age 29 and the mother of our four children is sick in the Hospital with cancer and the Dr. says she will not live more than 1 more week.
We have all been praying for her but so far she shows no sign of getting well and does not recognize us. I read of your miracle discovery in this morning’s paper and hope now you can bring my Lucy back to life when she is gone. 1 enclose a self-addressed envelope so you can let me know if such would be possible, 1 will immediately upon her death bring her to you so you can give her. back to me. 1 speak for our children Charles age 6 Peggy age 4 Clara age almost 3 and Betsy age fourteen months. May God bless all of you and keep you from suffering what 1 have been suffering, and 1 will live in hope of hearing from you.
Yours gratefully,
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?”
Chapter X
Barker looked up the phone number of Gerhardt’s New York office, called, and spoke briefly with the lawyer. It was not a very pleasant conversation. Gerhardt seemed almost offensively bubbling with confidence, gloating as he informed Harker that it was only a matter of days before the court tossed Raymond and Harker out of control of Beller Labs and reinstated Klaus and Mitchison. No, Harker was told, he would not be given the present whereabouts of the two dismissed employees. And yes, the suit had already been filed-control of the labs and $1,000,000 in punitive damages.
“Okay,” Harker said. “I’ll prepare a counter-suit against your clients on grounds of malfeasance, insubordination, and half a dozen other things. I don’t mind fighting, Gerhardt.”
He hung up. After a moment’s thought he pulled a sheet of notepaper from a desk drawer and started to jot down notes for the counteroffensive. This was an additional nuisance; things grew more complicated by the moment.
And Gerhardt was a prominent member of the American-Conservative Party’s national committee. Harker could see the battle-lines beginning to form—with Klaus and Mitchison, Gerhardt, the American-Conservatives, the organized churches, Jonathan Bryant, and Senator Thurman on one side, and, at the moment, nobody but Harker, Raymond, and the staff of Beller Labs on the other.
During the day tension rose at the Litchfield headquarters. The phone rang constantly; from time to time the mail-truck arrived with more letters, and Harker found it necessary to clear out one of the less important lab rooms to store them.
“Have a couple of men start going through them,” he told Lurie. The gangling biologist had slipped easily into the role of messenger-boy and general go-between. “Have all the letters pleading for revivification of long-dead relatives burned immediately. Likewise the ones asking for miracles we can’t perform, like that cancer business.”
“How about the abusive ones?”
“Save those,” Harker said. “It helps to know who our enemies are.”
The afternoon papers again devoted most of their frontpage space to the news, and the Times in addition ran a well-handled four-page symposium in which many noted scientists discussed the entire concept of reanimation with varying degrees of insight. Harker skimmed through it rapidly and paled when he came across a comment by Dr. Louis F. Santangelo of Johns Hopkins. He read it aloud to Raymond:
“There is the distinct possibility that death causes Irremediable damage to the brain. So far the Better researchers have been extremely silent on the subject of the mental aftereffects of reanimation. We must consider the chance that the process may produce living but mindless bodies—in short, walking corpses, or the zombies of legend.”
Raymond looked up, troubled. “Santangelo’s a brain surgeon, and a good one. Too damn good, Jim. He’s smack on the nose.”
Harker shook his head. “I don’t like this for two reasons. One is that it happens to be accurate; two is that it puts the ‘zombie’ stigma again, this time thanks to a reputable scientist.” He reached for a fresh sheet of notepaper. “Mart, give me the figures on human reanimations so far, will you?”
“To date seventy-one attempts. Successful resuscitation in sixty-seven cases.”
“Uh-huh. And how many of your sixty-seven suffered no mental aftereffects?”
“Sixty-one,” Raymond said.
“Which leaves six zombies.” Harker felt a sudden chill. The frenzy of the first few days of publicity had left him no time to discover some of the vital information about the laboratory. “What did you do with the six? ”
“What could we do? We chloroformed them and returned them to the source. It was the merciful thing to do—and it’s no crime to kill a man who’s already been pronounced dead.”
“Where’d you get these seventy-one?”
Raymond looked evasive. “Locally. We got a few from a hospital in Jersey City. That’s where we got the man you saw revived. Some came from auto accidents in the neighborhood. Medical supply houses, too. Three of the bodies were of staff-men at the labs who died naturally.”
“And where are the sixty-one successful revivees?” Harker asked.
“It’s all in the records. Twelve of them are in hospitals, recuperating. Death really jolts the nervous system, you know. It takes two or three months to make a full recovery. Twenty have returned to normal life. Six of these don’t even know they were dead, incidentally. We keep careful watch over them.”