The newspapers moved fast. By nightfall the story had been promoted to the front pages, generally headed with something like Beller Man Chooses Death. The editorial pages of the Star-Post's evening edition had an interesting comment:
Natural Death or Suicide?
Yesterday Simeon Barchet, an executive of the now-famous Beller Laboratories, died suddenly of a heart attack. According to his colleagues at Beller, Mr. Barchet had been in a despondent frame of mind and left instructions that he was not to be reanimated.
The situation exposed a new facet of the already-explosive reanimation situation. Can willful refusal to undergo reanimation be considered suicide? According to time-honored principles of law, suicide or attempted suicide is an illegal act. In this case, the odd paradox arises of a man already dead committing what can only be termed suicide. Should reanimation be given the cachet of legal approval during the forthcoming Congressional hearings, then it is clear that a testament forbidding reanimation will reach beyond the grave to bind the dead man's survivors, counsel, and physicians in a conspiracy to abet suicide.
Obviously this is an impossible state of affairs. It demonstrates once again that the staggering Beller Laboratories success, which renders death in many cases merely temporary, will unavoidably bring about a massive revolution in our codes of legal and medical ethics, and indeed a change in our entire manner of life.
As he looked through the heap of newspapers, Harker began to feel that the tide was turning. The hysteria was dying down. Men were realizing that reanimation was no grisly joke, no hoax, but something real that had been developed and which could not be stamped out. There were relatively few cries for wholesale suppression of the process. A Fundamentalist minister from Kansas had got his name into the papers by demanding immediate destruction of all equipment and plans for reanimation apparatus, but his was an isolated voice.
The tone of the Star-Post editorial seemed to be the tone of the consensus. Men of intelligence were saying, Reanimation exists, for good or evil. Let's study it for a while and find out what it can do and how it will change society. Let's not scream for its suppression, but let's not unleash it entirely before we know what we're letting loose.
The most authoritative of the secular anti-reanimation voices had belonged to Clyde Thurman, and that voice now was stilled. The act had been one of colossal audacity and thoughtlessness, and even now Harker found it difficult to endure the memory of the noble old warrior's mindless eyes; but, he had to admit it, it had silenced a potent force for suppression.
Perhaps these were times for violence and audacity, Harker thought.
In that case I'm the wrong man for my job. But it's too late to help that now.