Winstead's face grew agitated. Harker wondered what pressures had been exerted on the Governor to make this phone-call. "Jim, this is for your sake as well as ours. If you can win Thurman over, Congressional approval of reanimation's a cinch! You're just cutting your own throat by refusing to go down." "You know I'm not anxious to do favors for--" "We understand that! But can't you see you'll be helping yourself as well? We'll try to make things easier for you if you convince Thurman." Harker grinned pleasantly. It was fun to see Winstead squirm. "Okay," he said finally. "I'll go down to see Thurman first thing tomorrow morning." CHAPTER XIV Friday Morning. Ten-fifteen a.m., on the morning of May 24, 2033. James Harker stared out the round vitrin porthole at the fleecy whiteness of the clouds over Washington. The two-hundred-fifty-mile flight from Idlewild had taken about twenty minutes by short-range jet. Now the big passenger-ship plunged down toward the Capitol's jetport. Harker felt the faint drag of gravity against his body and thought that a spaceship landing must be something like this, only tremendously more taxing. The ship quivered as its speed dwindled, dropping from 700 mph to less than half that, and halving again, while the 150-passenger ship swooped down from its flight altitude of 40,000 feet. Harker was seeing Thurman at half-past-eleven, at the Senator's office. He rolled the phrases round in his mind once again: "_Mr. Thurman, you stuck by me long ago--_" "_You owe this to your party, sir--_" "_A forward step toward the bright utopia of tomorrow, Senator--_" None of the arguments sounded even remotely convincing. Thurman was a stubborn old man with a bee in his bonnet about reanimation; no amount of cajoling was going to get him to alter his stand. Still, Harker thought, he owed it to himself to try. The hearings began on Monday under Thurman's aegis. It would not hurt to have the patriarch sympathetically inclined. Nor would it be undesirable to have Leo Winstead and the whole Nat-Lib leadership beholden to him, Harker reasoned. The yellow light flashed and a soft voice emanating from a speaker next to Harker's ear murmured, "Please fasten your safety-belts. We'll be landing in a few minutes." Mechanically Harker guided the magnetic snaps together until he heard the proper _click!_ The ship broke through the thick layer of clouds that blanketed the sky at 20,000 feet, and the white, neat, oddly sterile-looking city of Washington appeared below. Harker hoped there would be no further difficulty over the Janson case while he was gone. Police investigators had arrived at the labs in mid-afternoon the day before, wanting to know if a reanimation had been carried out on the late industrialist. Raymond had flatly denied it, but at Harker's advice had refused to turn over the laboratory records to the police until subpoenaed to do so.