CHAPTER XIV
Friday Morning. Ten-fifteen a.m., on the morning of May 24, 2033.
James Harker stared out the round vitrin porthole at the fleecy whiteness of the clouds over Washington. The two-hundred-fifty-mile flight from Idlewild had taken about twenty minutes by short-range jet.
Now the big passenger-ship plunged down toward the Capitol's jetport. Harker felt the faint drag of gravity against his body and thought that a spaceship landing must be something like this, only tremendously more taxing. The ship quivered as its speed dwindled, dropping from 700 mph to less than half that, and halving again, while the 150-passenger ship swooped down from its flight altitude of 40,000 feet.
Harker was seeing Thurman at half-past-eleven, at the Senator's office. He rolled the phrases round in his mind once again:
"Mr. Thurman, you stuck by me long ago—"
"You owe this to your party, sir—"
"A forward step toward the bright utopia of tomorrow, Senator—"
None of the arguments sounded even remotely convincing. Thurman was a stubborn old man with a bee in his bonnet about reanimation; no amount of cajoling was going to get him to alter his stand. Still, Harker thought, he owed it to himself to try. The hearings began on Monday under Thurman's aegis. It would not hurt to have the patriarch sympathetically inclined. Nor would it be undesirable to have Leo Winstead and the whole Nat-Lib leadership beholden to him, Harker reasoned.