Even more hellish than watching the slow ebb of life from a dying person, Harker thought, must be the wait while the hours pass after death, and the time for reanimation passes with them. New torments had been loosed upon the world, he saw. He felt like a man riding a tiger that grew larger with each day.
He picked up another one:
... you may remember I mentioned my wife, mother of our four children who was close to death from cancer. Well she died the night I wrote to you, and not having heard from you yet I suppose you cannot help me in this matter. I understand revival must be done on day of death, since she has now been gone two days I am arranging for her burial. Though I am unhappy and disappointed I do not hold bitterness in my heart against you, may God forgive you for having let Lucy die.
Harker remembered that one: Mikkelsen, from Minnesota. The implied accusation of murder, cloaked as it was by the prayer for God's forgiveness, chilled him. He put the letters away, phoned across the lab to Raymond, and said he was going home for the day.
"Good luck with that hearing tomorrow," Raymond said.
"Thanks."
The air was clean and warm as he stepped outside; at five in the afternoon of an almost-summer day, the sun was still bright, the sky blue and curiously transparent. Harker tried to blot away the network of human suffering whose vortex he had apparently become; he drew in a deep breath, expanded his chest, swung his arms loosely at his sides.
A yellow dart crossed the sky and was gone; after it came the abrupt blurp of sound. It was a southbound rocket to Florida. No doubt it would be landing in Miami before he had reached his own home.
He remembered the legal fight when rocket service had been instituted on a commercial basis, almost thirty years ago. The jet-lines had fought tooth and nail against introduction of rocket service; yet, today, both jets and rockets served the cause of transportation amicably enough.
There had been the Moon wrangle too, back in the trouble-wracked twentieth century. He had cut his legal teeth on the suits and countersuits; they were standard fare in every law-school. The Moon had been reached almost simultaneously by America and Russia in the early 1960's, during a period of international conflict and danger. The Socialist revolution in Russia in 1971 had ended the threat of atomic war, but even so it had not been until 1997 that the United States agreed to join forces with the Federated Socialist States in making the Moon base truly international in character.