The inspectors had left, making it clear that the matter was far from at an end. Harker smiled to himself about it; any comprehensive investigation was bound to prove that the whole affair had been staged by Bryant, taking advantage of his bachelor friend's suicide declaration to smear the reanimators in public. But the suicide was in the newspapers, and no amount of unmasking ever really cancels out unfavorable publicity. The public would--with some justice--now link reanimation with possible mental deficiency afterward. Harker longed to have Jonathan Bryant's neck between his hands, just for a minute. _Troublemaker!_ He leaned back and waited for the landing. It took nearly half an hour for Harker to make the taxi-jaunt from the jetport to Capitol Hill, longer than the transit-time between New York and Washington. It was nearly eleven when he reached Senator Thurman's suite of offices--imposing ones, as befitted a senator who not only represented the second most populous state in the Union but who had held office for nearly seven terms. A pink-faced, well-starched secretary about two years out of law school greeted Harker as he entered the oak-panelled antechamber. "Sir?" "I'm James Harker. I have an appointment with the Senator for half-past-eleven." The secretary looked troubled. "I'm sorry, Mr. Harker. The Senator appears to be ill." "Ill?" "That's right, sir. He hasn't reported to his office yet today. He's always here by nine sharp, and it's almost eleven now, so we figure he must be sick." So far as Harker knew, Clyde Thurman had not known a day's illness yet in the twenty-first century. It was strange that he should fall ill this day of days, when Harker had an appointment to see him. But it was not like Thurman to run away from a knotty problem, either. Harker said, "Have you checked with his home?" "No, sir." The secretary appeared to resent Harker's question. "The Senator's private life is his own." "For all you know Thurman died this morning!" A shrug. "We have not received word of any sort whatever." Harker paced up and down in the antechamber for fifteen minutes, sitting intermittently, fidgeting, glancing up nervously every time the big outer door opened to admit someone. He thought back thirty-odd years, to the time when eight-year-old Jimmy Harker was reported to his school principal for some obscure, forgotten offense. He had sat in just this manner in the anteroom of the principal's office, waiting for the principal to come back from lunch to administer his punishment--his head popping around every time a clerk opened the big door, his stomach quivering in fear that this might be the principal this time. In time, he recalled, the principal _had_ come--and had not expelled him nor phoned for his father, merely reprimanded him and sent him back to his classroom. Perhaps the same thing might happen today, he thought, perhaps some miraculous change of heart on the part of old Thurman--