The important fact was reanimation—the defeat of death. The end of death’s dominion. That was his goal, and he would work toward it—and if he destroyed himself and those about him in the process, well, there had been martyrs in man’s history before. That Evas of tomorrow might live, Harker thought, I will go ahead.
“Larchmont, mister,” the driver called out. “Which way do I go?”
Harker gave him the directions. They reached his home a few minutes later; the fare was over $10, and Harker added a good tip to it.
The cab pulled away. Harker stood for a moment outside his home. The sitting-room lights were on, and one of the upstairs bedroom lights. It was shortly before ten, and since it was the weekend Chris would still be up, though young Paul had long since been tucked away.
And Lois probably sat before the video, waiting patiently for her husband to come home. Harker smiled gently, put his thumb to the identity-plate of the door, and waited for it to open.
Lois came to the door to meet him. She looked pale, tired; when she kissed him, it was purely mechanical, almost ritualistic.
“I was hoping you were in that cab, Jim. How’d everything go?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, Lois. I feel beat.”
“Come on inside. Tell me about your day.”
He followed her into the sitting-room. The autoknit stood to one side; she had been making socks, it seemed. The video blared some hideous popular song:
Harker jerked a thumb toward the screen. “Is this the sort of junk you’ve been watching?”
Lois smiled faintly. “It’s a good tranquilizer. I just let the sound bellow out and numb my mind.”
He thumbed the off-switch set in the table before the couch, and the singing died away, the image shrank to a spot of tri-colored light and then to nothing at all. His hand sought hers.
He found himself wishing she would get up on her back legs and yowl, just once. It would be good for both of them. But she was so wonderfully patient! She had said nothing, or little, when he had stubbornly defied the national committee and gone ahead with the reform program that could only have ended his political career, and did. She had barely objected when he told her of his new affiliation with the Beller people, and she had said nothing in these past ten days, when the pressure of conflicting cross-currents had kept him bottled up within himself, unloving, cold.
He tried to say something affectionate, something to repay her for the suffering he had caused, the lonely evenings, the tense breakfasts.
But she spoke first. “They still haven’t found Senator Thurman, Jim. I heard the nine-thirty newscast. Isn’t it terrible, an old man like that disappearing?”
Sudden coldness swept through him. “Still—haven’t found him?” he repeated inanely. “Well—I guess—ah—that old buzzard’s indestructible. He’ll turn up.”
“How do you think this will affect the hearing on Monday?”
Harker shrugged, only half-listening. He was thinking, You know damn well where Thurman is, and you’re afraid to tell her. Why don’t you speak up? Don’t you trust your own wife? He wet his dry lips. “I—I suppose they’ll choose a new chairman if something’s happened to Thurman. But—”
“Jim, are you all right? You look terrible!”
“Lois, I—want to tell you something. Today—”
He stopped, wondering how to go on. She was staring intently at him, curious but not overly curious, waiting to hear what he had to say.
The phone rang.
Grateful for the interruption, Harker sprang from the couch and darted around back to take the call on the visual set. He activated it; Mart Raymond’s face appeared on the screen.
“Well?” Harker said immediately, in a low voice. “Is the evidence all taken care of? ”
Raymond nodded agitatedly. “Yes. But that’s not what I called about. Barchet’s dead!”
“What? How?”
“It happened about five minutes ago. He was getting ready to leave, and we were discussing—you know, what happened tonight. He had a heart attack and just dropped. It must have been all the excitement. His heart was weak anyway, he once said.”
Harker could not repress the tide of relief that rose in him. Barchet had been the cause of half of his troubles—Mitchison and Klaus, for one, and the Thurman affair for another. Still, a man was dead, and that was no cause for rejoicing, he told himself coldly.
He said, “That’s too bad. Did he have a family?”
“Just a wife, but she died years ago. He was alone.”
Harker nodded. “You’d better notify the local police right away.”
“Jim, what’s the matter with you?” Raymond asked incredulously.
“What do you mean?”
“Barchet’s in the operating room now. Vogel’s getting ready to try a reanimation on him.”
“No!” Harker said instantly.
“No? Jim, we can’t just let him die like that!”
“Barchet was a troublemaker, Mart. He was the weak link in the organization. Now we’re rid of him; let him stay dead. It’s one less witness to the thing that happened today.”
In a shocked whisper Raymond said, “You can’t mean what you’re saying, Jim.”
“I mean exactly what you’re hearing. Barchet was unstable, Mart. He pressured you into doing all sorts of cockeyed things. If he lived, he’d end up revealing the Thurman business before long. Let him stay dead. That’s an order, Mart.”
Raymond seemed to shrink back from the screen. “It’s almost like committing murder, Jim! The man could be saved if we—”
“No,” Marker said, with a firmness he did not feel. “There’ll be trouble if you cross me, Mart. Good night.”
He broke the contact with a shaky hand.
Lois gasped when she saw him. “Jim! It must be bad news. You’re utterly white.”
He sat down heavily. “One of the Beller executives just had a heart attack. A man named Barchet—a runty little fellow who enjoyed sticking lead pipes between the spokes of smoothly running machines. I just ordered Mart Raymond not to attempt reanimation.”
His hands were quivering. Lois took them between hers. Harker said, “It’s like murder, isn’t it? To refuse to reanimate a man, when it’s possible to do so. But it’s better for everyone if Barchet stays dead. Nobody will miss him. God, I feel awful.”
“Remember the McDermott case, Jim?”
He frowned, then smiled at her. “Yes,” he said. McDermott had been a factory hand, an overgrown moron of 22 who had beaten his 70-year-old father to death one night shortly before Harker had become Governor of New York. The verdict had been speedy, the sentence one of execution. With the boy in the death house and the night of the execution at hand, his aged mother had relented, lost her vindictiveness, pleaded with the new Governor Harker to commute the sentence.
The boy had had a long criminal record. The court had found him guilty. He had murdered his father in cold blood, premeditatedly. He deserved the full penalty.
Harker had refused to commute. But then he had spent the rest of the evening staring at his watch, and at the stroke of midnight had burst into an attack of chills.
He nodded slowly now. “I refused to commute Barchet’s sentence. That’s all there is to it.”
Chapter XVI
The newspapers Saturday morning gave full play to the Thurman disappearance. Several of them ran biographies of the missing senator, tracing his political career from the early founding days of the National-Liberal Party to his present anti-reanimation stand.
The police and FBI statements were simply mechanical handouts, repeats of last night’s assurances that no stone would be left unturned. Harker read them with some amusement. He had slept well, and a good deal of last night’s tension had departed from him.