While Vogel worked over the cadaver, Raymond went on, "The process is essentially compounded out of techniques used for decades with varying success—that is, a combination of pulmotor respiration, artificial heart massage, hormone injection, and electrochemical stimulation. The last two are the keys to the process: you can massage a heart for days and keep it pumping blood, but that isn't restoration of life."
"Not unless the heart can continue on its own when you remove the artificial stimulus?"
"Exactly. We've done careful hormone research here, with some of the best men in the nation. A hormone, you know, is a kind of chemical messenger. We've synthesized the hormones that tell the body it's alive. Of course, the electrochemical stimulation is important: the brain's activity is essentially electrical in nature, you know. And so we devised techniques which—"
"Ready, Dr. Raymond."
Harker compelled himself to watch. Needles plunged into the dead man's skin; electrodes fastened to the scalp discharged suddenly. It was weird, vaguely terrifying, laden with burdensome implications for the future. All that seemed missing was the eery blue glow that characterized the evil experiments of stereotyped mad scientists.
He told himself that these men were not mad. He told himself that what they were doing was a natural outgrowth of the scientific techniques of the past century, that it was no more terrifying to restore life than it was to preserve it with antibiotics or serums. But he sensed a conflict within himself: he knew that if he accepted this assignment, he could embrace the idea intellectually but that somewhere in the moist jungle-areas of his subconscious mind he would feel disturbed and repelled.
"Watch the needles," Raymond whispered. "Heartbeat's beginning now. Respiration. The electro-encephalograph is recording brain currents again."