As they rode downward in the gravshaft toward the hotel dining room, Harker said, "Exactly how close are you to getting the bugs out of the process?"
Raymond looked vague. "A week, a month, maybe a year. We know what causes the mental breakdown—most of the time. It's a matter of hormone impurity, generally. Of course, in some cases the brain suffers severe damage in the process of dying, and we'll never be able to lick that any more than we can revive a man who's been blown apart by dynamite. But I'm pretty sure we can lick the defects in our own system soon."
"And what probability of success would you predict after that?"
Raymond shrugged and said, "Who knows? Nine out of ten successes? Ninety-seven out of a hundred? Until we have ten or twenty thousand case histories behind us, our statistics don't mean a hoot."
Harker nodded thoughtfully. The meal was a quiet one; neither man said much. Harker was going back over the morning's session, trying to pick out the phrases the press would leap on.
He hoped he had discredited the Mitchison-Klaus combine and Bryant by his refutation. Surely the public would see that Mitchison and Klaus were vengeful power-seekers and nothing more, and that the whole Janson affair was nothing but a malicious hoax.
But he overestimated the public's ability to distinguish truth from slung mud, it seemed. The early afternoon papers were already on sale by the time the hearing resumed for the afternoon.
The headline on the Star-Post was, Klaus Says Harker Fired Him; Charges Beller 'Bad Faith.'
The story, slanted heavily in Klaus' direction, implied that the enzyme man had been on the verge of a brilliant discovery when Harker maliciously sacked him. As for the Janson case, it referred to Harker's "uncomfortable evasions."
The tide was turning. The public fancy had seized on the one fact, grotesque and horrifying enough, that in a few cases reanimation resulted in dreadful mindlessness. On that slim base, a massive movement aimed at the total suppression of reanimation was beginning to take form and grow in strength.