The boy was dwarfed by the hovering instrument that simultaneously clung to his exposed heart, pumped his lungs, jolted his brain, fed awakening substances to his blood. The needles on the indicator gauges began to flicker gently. Harker felt little of the earlier revulsion this sight had caused in him. Now he stared at the slim thin-limbed body of the boy, his skin mottled with the blue imprint of asphyxiation, and waited for the miracle to take place. Minutes passed. Once Thurman coughed and it was like a physical blow. Needles rose on dials, wavered, fell back as Vogel decreased power, stepped forward again as the delicate fingers nudged the rheostat a few fractions of an inch upward. "Watch the EEG indicator," Vogel murmured. The needle was tracing out an increasingly more agitated line. The calmness of sleep was ending. "Respiration approaching normal. I'm shutting off the lung manipulators." The heart-pump followed. Frowning, Vogel moistened his lips and yanked down on toggle-switches, finally drawing the main rheostat back to point zero. "Artificial controls are withdrawn," Vogel said. "The life process continues." The boy lived. Raymond said quietly to Harker, "The EEG patterns are normal ones. The boy's mind is okay. We did it." _We did it._ Harker felt a sharp sense of triumph, as if he personally had accomplished something. The senators would _have_ to react favorably to something like this, he thought. He glanced at Thurman. The old man was gray-faced, disturbed. Harker said, quietly, "Well, Senator? You've just seen a miracle." He wasn't prepared for the reply, when it came. Thurman shook his great head slowly from side to side like a dying bison and said, "Jim, this is nightmarish. In the name of all that's good, boy, why did you get mixed up in it?" CHAPTER XII Two hours later, the Senate committee had gone, but the gloom of their presence still hovered darkly over Harker. A delayed reaction having nothing to do with the visit of the senators had struck him. The old wounds of that day at the beach were open once again; once again he huddled Eva's cold little form against his. Somewhere else on the laboratory grounds, surgeons were working over a twelve-year-old boy, stitching together the surgical apertures that had been made to permit resuscitation. By tomorrow, the boy would be out of anesthesia. In a few weeks, he would be walking around, healthy, recalled to life after twenty hours of death. Eva had drowned. She had not been saved. "I don't understand it," Mart Raymond exclaimed vehemently. "It just doesn't make sense." Drawn for a moment from his painful memories, Harker said, "What doesn't make sense?" "Thurman. How can he stand there and watch a dead boy come to life, and end up twice as solid against us as he was before?"