Harker was starting to weary under the barrage of questions. He looked at his watch; the half-hour he allotted to these conferences had elapsed. He felt as if he were wrung dry.
"I'll have to ask you to cut it short now," he said. "Unless there are any other very urgent questions, we'll stop here."
Times said, "One question, Mr. Harker. Have any reanimations taken place since the announcement of the process yesterday morning?"
Harker shook his head. "The answer is no. Until the legal status of reanimation is settled, we're not proceeding with further experiments on human beings"—he regretted the unfortunate word experiments as soon as it passed his lips, but by then it was too late—"although we're continuing with other phases of our research. We've been bombarded with requests for reanimations, but we don't intend to attempt any. Obviously a legal decision on the validity of our process is needed first. The death-certificate laws, for instance; they'll have to be considered. And a host of other things. Well, gentlemen, I think our time is just about up."
The fearsome blaze of the video cameras died away, and the newsmen packed up their pocket recorders and left. Harker sank down wearily behind the desk and looked at Mart Raymond.
The scientist smiled admiringly. "Jim, I don't know how you do it. Stand up to those eagles, I mean. The pressure doesn't let up for a second."
"I'm used to it," Harker said with forced casualness. His stomach felt knotted, tight; his throat was dry and seemed to be covered with hundreds of small blisters. His legs, under the desk, quivered of their own volition.
Gradually, as the minutes passed, he recovered his poise. The press conference had been a sort of purgative; he had put forth all the thoughts that had been boiling within him during the day.
The battle, he saw now, would be fought on a number of fronts—but the essential standpoint was a politico-legal one. They had to secure Congressional approval for the process. And they had to win friends and influence people in a hurry, before the various splintered opponents of reanimation, the Beller Labs, and James Harker could join forces and provide a united front.
What would happen if reanimation lost? No doubt the technique would survive, no matter what the legal verdict was. But it would become an undercover, furtive activity, as abortion had been before the permissive laws of the late twentieth century. And undercover meant dangerous; illegal equated with deadly. The tools of medicine are always deadly in unskilled hands.