Lois gasped when she saw him. "Jim! It must be bad news. You're utterly white." He sat down heavily. "One of the Beller executives just had a heart attack. A man named Barchet--a runty little fellow who enjoyed sticking lead pipes between the spokes of smoothly running machines. I just ordered Mart Raymond not to attempt reanimation." His hands were quivering. Lois took them between hers. Harker said, "It's like murder, isn't it? To refuse to reanimate a man, when it's possible to do so. But it's better for everyone if Barchet stays dead. Nobody will miss him. God, I feel awful." "Remember the McDermott case, Jim?" He frowned, then smiled at her. "Yes," he said. McDermott had been a factory hand, an overgrown moron of 22 who had beaten his 70-year-old father to death one night shortly before Harker had become Governor of New York. The verdict had been speedy, the sentence one of execution. With the boy in the death house and the night of the execution at hand, his aged mother had relented, lost her vindictiveness, pleaded with the new Governor Harker to commute the sentence. The boy had had a long criminal record. The court had found him guilty. He had murdered his father in cold blood, premeditatively. He deserved the full penalty. Harker had refused to commute. But then he had spent the rest of the evening staring at his watch, and at the stroke of midnight had burst into an attack of chills. He nodded slowly now. "I refused to commute Barchet's sentence. That's all there is to it." CHAPTER XVI The newspapers Saturday morning gave full play to the Thurman disappearance. Several of them ran biographies of the missing Senator, tracing his political career from the early founding days of the National-Liberal Party to his present anti-reanimation stand. The police and FBI statements were simply mechanical handouts, repeats of last night's assurances that no stone would be left unturned. Harker read them with some amusement. He had slept well, and a good deal of last night's tension had departed from him. He had come to a calming conclusion: Raymond and Barchet had done a violent thing, but these were violent times. Somehow he would have to forget about the shocking Thurman affair and continue along the path already entered upon. The obituary pages contained one item worth note: SIMEON BARCHET _Simeon Barchet of 201 Princeton Road, Rockville Centre, L.I., treasurer of the Beller Research Laboratories, died of a heart attack at the Beller office in Litchfield, New Jersey, yesterday. His age was 61._ _Mr. Barchet joined the organization of the late oil operator D. F. Beller in 2014, after serving as a vice-president of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Upon Mr. Beller's death ten years later, he became a trustee of the Beller Fund and participated actively in the operation of the laboratory in Litchfield._