"Hubbard, L. Ron - Mission Earth 10 - Doomed Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbard L. Ron)

The crowd let out a savage roar. The warders fought to keep them out of the front of the hall.

Lord Turn looked like he himself was going to explode. "At last we have it!" he finally roared. "You blasted criminal! Jettero Heller was just doing what he was ordered to do. THAT doesn't make him a villain! He did nothing but do his duty! You can't find a man guilty for that! YOU have been impugning his character! You have been engaging in vicious inference!" In a rage, he shouted, "THAT ENDS THIS TRIAL! I-----"

The Gris attorneys were on their feet like a pack. "Your Lordship!" shouted the eldest one, "We have not completed our defense!"

"Nonsense!" howled Lord Turn. "You have been at it for weeks!"

The ex-Lord's executioner was waving madly toward a side door to get some laborers to come in.

The eldest Gris attorney cried, "Your Lordship! We have MUCH more evidence! We have only presented material collected by others AGAINST our client. We have NOT presented the evidence collected by our client himself!"
The laborers were rushing in carts absolutely groaning under their loads of boxes. Lord Turn and the crowd stared in amazement.

"This material," the eldest Gris attorney rushed on, "is all authentic. It was found in the office of the accused weeks ago and placed in our hands by a Fleet officer friend of Heller's! It also contains evidence that Fleet officer Bis, himself, has found. These are the very heart of our case. You cannot sentence the client after only hearing evidence collected against him. It would be unjust in the extreme not to hear evidence assembled FOR him."

"Does this have anything to do with bigamy?" said Turn.

"Oh, yes!" said the eldest Gris attorney. "By the rules of balanced testimony, you are bound by law to hear it!"

"Oh, Heavens," said Turn. Then, wearily, "Go ahead."

Madison was in a state of alarm. He had never been informed that there was other evidence. Already in shock at finding that his own client, Heller, seemed to be getting absolved, he was suddenly very nervous as to the fate of Gris. All of this was off the script: these confounded attorneys were writing in scenes that Madison had not okayed.

And somehow this was evidence that Heller himself had evidently ordered put in the hands of Gris's attorneys. What a weird twist of fate that would beЧHeller suddenly, behind the scenes, saving Gris's neck. Madison had the sick sensation that maybe, somehow from the side, Heller was reaching in to interfere with this PR program. It was eerie, like suddenly finding a tiger was

behind one's back when you thought he was on the other side of the mountains!

Then he relaxed a bit. After all, there wasn't any possible way this new evidence could affect the overall scene. And these attorneys didn't have the remotest prayer of getting Gris off. He stretched out his legs and yawned.

Things would go on, just as he had planned. After all, these people were only puppets dancing on the end of his strings. It was he who was the master of Earth PR, not them.

Chapter 4

Even Gris must have been surprised at the extent of the new evidence. He had been collecting it for years and stuffing it under the boards of his office. With camera and microphone and skillful burglaries, he had been amassing this hoard by day and by night as he roamed through his Apparatus career. While junior to his passion for shooting songbirds, it nevertheless amounted to a sort of hobby, collecting hidden information on his fellow Apparatus officers.

Probably, to advance his career, he had intended to use far more of it than he had. The blackmail on the Chief of the Provocation Section, who had murdered, at a party, the mistress of a senior in the Death Battalions, had been used in that way. But Gris also seemed to have been using it to amplify or illustrate points he had learned in Earth psychology and psychiatry, for some of

the notes on the edges of the evidence said, "Proves he was oral erotic" and "Typical sado-masochism" and "Using a Knife Section knife in that way definitely demonstrates penis envy" and other things of a like manner. Also it is possible that Gris, naturally lazy, never bothered to catalogue or sort what he collected, much less use it,

Well, it was all there now, the labors of ten years. They were the rewards for continuous snooping and prying into things that never could have been his concern. They also explained, to some degree, why he never had any friends: The names on those notes and photos and recorded strips read like an officer personnel roster of the whole Apparatus.

The attorneys or Bis or someone had alphabetized the names and brought some order to this mess. It became obvious, at once, that the whole thing, case by case, was going to be exhibited in nauseous detail to the court, for the very first one offered bepn with a name which, alphabetically, would be first on any roster, being the first Voltar letter repeated three times to form the cognomen.

The fellow was a major in the Apparatus light infantry. He had been told to interropte a village in Mistin. He began his "interrogation" by raping all the women. Then when this was objected to by the village men, he emasculated them in a gory bout of sadism. Thereafter he commanded the cripples to cohabit with their wives. When this impossible action was not done, he charged them all with willful defiance of orders, crowded them into the houses and burned the village down, leaving not one person alive.

Some of the audience retched at the details. The reporters present, grooved in too well by Madison as to

what was "hot news," rushed it into the papers without the slightest word to him. There went his otherwise-planned front pages.