THEY STOPPED WHISPERING at the door, turned right, and ascended
to the bench, bearing themselves like images in a procession, Ruiz
first, then himself and then Janiver. They turned to the screen so
that the public whom they served might see the faces of the judges,
and then sat down. The court crier began his chant. They could
almost feel the tension in the courtroom. Yves Janiver whispered to
them:
“They all know about it.”
As soon as the crier had stopped, Max Fane approached the bench,
his face blankly expressionless.
“Your Honors, I am ashamed to have reported that the
defendant, Leonard Kellogg, cannot be produced in court. He is
dead; he committed suicide in his cell last night. While in my
custody,” he added bitterly.
The stir that went through the courtroom was not shocked
surprise, it was a sigh of fulfilled expectation. They all knew
about it.
“How did this happen, Marshal?” he asked, almost
conversationally.
“The prisoner was put in a cell by himself; there was a
pickup eye, and one of the deputies was keeping him under
observation by screen.” Fane spoke in a toneless, almost
robot-like voice. “At twenty-two thirty, the prisoner went to bed,
still wearing his shirt. He pulled the blankets up over his head.
The deputy observing him thought nothing of that; many prisoners do
that, on account of the light. He tossed about for a while, and
then appeared to fall asleep.
“When a guard went in to rouse him this morning, the cot,
under the blanket, was found saturated with blood. Kellogg had cut
his throat, by sawing the zipper track of his shirt back and forth
till he severed his jugular vein. He was dead.”
“Good heavens, Marshal!” He was shocked. The way
he’d heard it, Kellogg had hidden a penknife, and he was
prepared to be severe with Fane about it. But a thing like this! He
found himself fingering the toothed track of this own jacket
zipper. “I don’t believe you can be at all censured for
not anticipating a thing like that. It isn’t a thing anybody
would expect.”
Janiver and Ruiz spoke briefly in agreement. Marshal Fane bowed
slightly and went off to one side.
Leslie Coombes, who seemed to be making a very considerable
effort to look grieved and shocked, rose.
“Your Honors, I find myself here without a client,”
he said. “ In fact, I find myself here without any business
at all; the case against Mr. Holloway is absolutely insupportable.
He shot a man who was trying to kill him, and that’s all
there is to it. I therefore pray your Honors to dismiss the case
against him and discharge him from custody.”
Captain Greibenfeld bounded to his feet.
“Your Honors, I fully realized that the defendant is now
beyond the jurisdiction of this court, but let me point out that I
and my associates are here participating in this case in the hope
that the classification of this planet may be determined, and some
adequate definition of sapience established. These are most serious
questions, your Honors.”
“But, your Honors,” Coombes protested, “we
can’t go through the farce of trying a dead man.”
“People of the Colony of Baphomet versus Jamshar Singh,
Deceased, charge of arson and sabotage, A.E. 604,” the
Honorable Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard interrupted.
Yes, you could find a precedent in colonial law for almost
anything.
Jack Holloway was on his feet, a Fuzzy cradled in the crook of
his left arm, his white mustache bristling truculently.
“I am not a dead man, your Honors, and I am on trial here.
The reason I’m not dead is why I am on trial. My defense is
that I shot Kurt Borch while he was aiding and abetting in the
killing of a Fuzzy. I want it established in this court that it is
murder to kill a Fuzzy.”
The judge nodded slowly. “I will not dismiss the charges
against Mr. Holloway,” he said. “Mr. Holloway had been
arraigned on a charge of murder; if he is not guilty, he is
entitled to the vindication of an acquittal. I am afraid, Mr.
Coombes, that you will have to go on prosecuting him.”
Another brief stir, like a breath of wind over a grain field,
ran through the courtroom. The show was going on after all.
ALL THE FUZZIES were in court this morning: Jack’s six,
and the five from the constabulary post, and Ben’s Flora and
Fauna, and the four Ruth Ortheris claimed. There was too much
discussion going on for anybody to keep an eye on them. Finally one
the constabulary Fuzzies, either Dillinger or Dr. Crippen, and Ben
Rainsford’s Flora and Fauna, came sauntering out into the
open space between the tables and the bench dragging the hose of a
vacuum-duster. Ahmed Khadra ducked under a table and tried to get
it away from them. This was wonderful; screaming in delight, they
all laid hold of the other end, and Mike and Mitzi and Superego and
Complex ran to help them. The seven of them dragged Khadra about
ten feet before he gave up and let go. At the same time, an
incipient fight broke out on either side of the arc of tables
between the head of the language department of Mallorysport Academy
and a spinsterish amateur phoneticist. At this point, Judge
Pendarvis, deciding that if you can’t prevent it, relax and
enjoy it, rapped a few times with his gavel, and announced that
court was recessed.
“You will all please remain here; this is not an
adjournment, and if any of the various groups who seem to be
discussing different aspects of the problem reach any conclusion
they feel should be presented in evidence, will they please notify
the bench so that court can be reconvened. In any case, we will
reconvene at eleven thirty.”
Somebody wanted to know if smoking would be permitted during the
recess. The Chief Justice said that it would. He got out a cigar
and lit it. Mamma Fuzzy wanted a puff: she didn’t like it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mike and Mitzi, Flora and
Fauna scampering around and up the steps behind the bench. When he
looked again, they were all up on it, and Mitzi was showing the
court what she had in her shoulder bag.
He got up, with Mamma and Baby, and crossed to where Leslie
Coombes was sitting. By this time, somebody was bringing in a
coffee urn from the cafeteria. Fuzzies ought to happen oftener in
court.
THE GAVEL TAPPED slowly. Little Fuzzy scrambled up onto Jack
Holloway’s lap. After five days in court, they had all
learned that the gavel meant for Fuzzies and other people to be
quiet. It might be a good idea, Jack thought, to make a little
gavel, when he got home, and keep it on the table in the living
room for when the family got too boisterous. Baby, who wasn’t
gavel-trained yet, started out onto the floor; Mamma dashed after
him and brought him back under the table.
The place looked like a courtroom again. The tables were ranged
in a neat row facing the bench, and the witness chair and the jury
box were back where they belonged. The ashtrays and the coffee urn
and the ice tubs for beer and soft drinks had vanished. It looked
like the party was over. He was almost regretful; it had been fun.
Especially for seventeen Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy and a little
black-and-white kitten.
There was one unusual feature; there was now a fourth man on the
bench, in gold-braided Navy black; sitting a little apart from the
judges, trying to look as though he weren’t there at
all—Space Commodore Alex Napier.
Judge Pendarvis laid down his gavel. “Ladies and gentlemen
are you ready to present the opinions you have reached?” he
asked.
Lieutenant Ybarra, the Navy psychologist, rose. There was a
reading screen in front of him; he snapped it on.
“Your Honors,” he began, “there still exists
considerable difference of opinion on matters of detail but we are
in agreement on all major points. This is quite a lengthy report,
and it has already been incorporated into the permanent record.
Have I the court’s permission to summarize it?”
The court told him he had. Ybarra glanced down at the screen in
front of him and continued:
“It is our opinion,” he said, “that sapience
may be defined as differing from nonsapience in that it is
characterized by conscious thought, by ability to think in logical
sequence and by ability to think in terms other than mere sense
data. We—meaning every member of every sapient race—think
consciously, and we know what we are thinking. This is not to say
that all our mental activity is conscious. The science of
psychology is based, to a large extent, upon our realization that
only a small portion of our mental activity occurs above the level
of consciousness, and for centuries we have been diagramming the
mind as an iceberg, one-tenth exposed and nine-tenths submerged.
The art of psychiatry consists largely in bringing into
consciousness some of the content of this submerged nine-tenths,
and as a practitioner I can testify to its difficulty and
uncertainty.
“We are so habituated to conscious thought that when we
reach some conclusion by any nonconscious process, we speak of it
as a ‘hunch,’ or an ‘intuition,’ and
question its validity. We are so habituated to acting upon
consciously formed decisions that we must laboriously acquire, by
systematic drill, those automatic responses upon which we depend
for survival in combat or other emergencies. And we are by nature
so unaware of this vast submerged mental area that it was not until
the first century Pre-Atomic that its existence was more than
vaguely suspected, and its nature is still the subject of
acrimonious professional disputes.”
There had been a few of those, off and on, during the past four
days, too.
“If we depict sapient mentation as an iceberg, we might
depict nonsapient mentation as the sunlight reflected from its
surface. This is a considerably less exact analogy; while the
nonsapient mind deals, consciously, with nothing but present sense
data, there is a considerable absorption and reemission of
subconscious memories. Also, there are occasional flashes of what
must be conscious mental activity, in dealing with some novel
situation. Dr. van Riebeek, who is especially interested in the
evolutionary aspect of the question, suggests that the introduction
of novelty because of drastic environmental changes may have force
nonsapient beings into more or less sustained conscious thinking
and so initiated mental habits that, in time, gave rise to true
sapience.
“The sapient mind not only thinks consciously by habit,
but it thinks in connected sequence. It associates one thing with
another. It reasons logically, and forms conclusions, and uses
those conclusions as premises from which to arrive at further
conclusions. It groups associations together, and generalizes. Here
we pass completely beyond any comparison with nonsapience. This is
not merely more consciousness, or more thinking; it is thinking of
a radically different kind. The nonsapient mind deals exclusively
with crude sensory material. The sapient mind translates sense
impressions into ideas, and then forms ideas of ideas, in ascending
orders of abstraction, almost without limit.
“This, finally, brings us to one of the recognized overt
manifestations of sapience. The sapient being is a symbol user. The
nonsapient being cannot symbolize, because the nonsapient mind is
incapable of concepts beyond mere sense images.”
Ybarra drank some water, and twisted the dial of his reading
screen with the other hand.
“The sapient being,” he continued, “can do one
other thing. It is a combination of the three abilities already
enumerated, but combining them creates something much greater than
the mere sum of the parts. The sapient being can imagine. He can
conceive of something which has no existence whatever in the
sense-available world of reality, and then he can work and plan
toward making it part of reality. He can not only imagine, but he
can also create.”
He paused for a moment. “This is our definition of
sapience. When we encounter any being whose mentation includes
these characteristics, we may know him for a sapient brother. It is
the considered opinion of all of us that the beings called Fuzzies
are such beings.”
Jack hugged the small sapient one on his lap, and Little Fuzzy
looked up and murmured, “Heinta?”
“You’re in, kid,” he whispered. “You
just joined the people.”
Ybarra was saying, “They think consciously and
continuously. We know that by instrumental analysis of their
electroencephalographic patterns, which compare closely to those of
an intelligent human child of ten. They think in connected
sequence; I invite consideration of all the different logical steps
involved in the invention, designing and making of their
prawn-killing weapons, and in the development of tools with which
to make them. We have abundant evidence of their ability to think
beyond present sense data, to associate, to generalize, to abstract
and to symbolize.
“And above all, they can imagine, not only a new
implement, but a new way of life. We see this in the first human
contact with the race which, I submit, should be designated as
Fuzzy sapiens. Little Fuzzy found a strange and wonderful place in
the forest, a place unlike anything he had ever seen, in which
lived a powerful being. He imagined himself living in this place,
enjoying the friendship and protection of this mysterious being. So
he slipped inside, made friends with Jack Holloway and lived with
him. And then he imagined his family sharing this precious comfort
and companionship with him, and he went and found them and brought
them back with him. Like so many other sapient beings, Little Fuzzy
had a beautiful dream; like a fortunate few, he made it
real.”
The Chief Justice allowed the applause to run on for a few
minutes before using his gavel to silence it. There was a brief
colloquy among the three judges, and then the Chief Justice rapped
again. Little Fuzzy looked perplexed. Everybody had been quiet
after he did it the first time, hadn’t they?
“It is the unanimous decision of the court to accept the
report already entered into the record and just summarized by
Lieutenant Ybarra, TFN, and to thank him and all who have been
associated with him.
“It is now the ruling of this court that the species known
as Fuzzy fuzzy holloway zarathustra is in fact a race of sapient
beings, entitled to the respect of all other sapient beings and to
the full protection of the law of the Terran Federation.” He
rapped again, slowly, pounding the decision into the legal
framework.
Space Commodore Napier leaned over and whispered; all three of
the judges nodded emphatically. The naval officer rose.
“Lieutenant Ybarra, on behalf of the Service and of the
Federation, I thank you and those associated with you for a lucid
and excellent report, the culmination of work which reflects credit
upon all who participated in it. I also wish to state that a
suggestion made to me by Lieutenant Ybarra regarding possible
instrumental detection of sapient mentation is being credited to
him in my own report, with the recommendation that it be given
important priority by the Bureau of Research and Development.
Perhaps the next time we find people who speak beyond the range of
human audition, who have fur and live in a mild climate, and who
like their food raw, we’ll know what they are from the
beginning.”
Bet Ybarra gets another stripe, and a good job out of this. Jack
hoped so. Then Pendarvis was pounding again.
“I had almost forgotten; this is a criminal trial,”
he confessed. “It is the verdict of this court that the
defendant, Jack Holloway, is not guilty as here charged. He is
herewith discharged from custody. If he or his attorney will step
up here, the bail bond will be refunded.” He puzzled Little
Fuzzy by hammering again with his gavel to adjourn court.
This time, instead of keeping quiet, everybody made all the
noise they could, and Uncle Gus was holding him high over his head
and shouting:
“The winnah! By unanimous decision!”
THEY STOPPED WHISPERING at the door, turned right, and ascended
to the bench, bearing themselves like images in a procession, Ruiz
first, then himself and then Janiver. They turned to the screen so
that the public whom they served might see the faces of the judges,
and then sat down. The court crier began his chant. They could
almost feel the tension in the courtroom. Yves Janiver whispered to
them:
“They all know about it.”
As soon as the crier had stopped, Max Fane approached the bench,
his face blankly expressionless.
“Your Honors, I am ashamed to have reported that the
defendant, Leonard Kellogg, cannot be produced in court. He is
dead; he committed suicide in his cell last night. While in my
custody,” he added bitterly.
The stir that went through the courtroom was not shocked
surprise, it was a sigh of fulfilled expectation. They all knew
about it.
“How did this happen, Marshal?” he asked, almost
conversationally.
“The prisoner was put in a cell by himself; there was a
pickup eye, and one of the deputies was keeping him under
observation by screen.” Fane spoke in a toneless, almost
robot-like voice. “At twenty-two thirty, the prisoner went to bed,
still wearing his shirt. He pulled the blankets up over his head.
The deputy observing him thought nothing of that; many prisoners do
that, on account of the light. He tossed about for a while, and
then appeared to fall asleep.
“When a guard went in to rouse him this morning, the cot,
under the blanket, was found saturated with blood. Kellogg had cut
his throat, by sawing the zipper track of his shirt back and forth
till he severed his jugular vein. He was dead.”
“Good heavens, Marshal!” He was shocked. The way
he’d heard it, Kellogg had hidden a penknife, and he was
prepared to be severe with Fane about it. But a thing like this! He
found himself fingering the toothed track of this own jacket
zipper. “I don’t believe you can be at all censured for
not anticipating a thing like that. It isn’t a thing anybody
would expect.”
Janiver and Ruiz spoke briefly in agreement. Marshal Fane bowed
slightly and went off to one side.
Leslie Coombes, who seemed to be making a very considerable
effort to look grieved and shocked, rose.
“Your Honors, I find myself here without a client,”
he said. “ In fact, I find myself here without any business
at all; the case against Mr. Holloway is absolutely insupportable.
He shot a man who was trying to kill him, and that’s all
there is to it. I therefore pray your Honors to dismiss the case
against him and discharge him from custody.”
Captain Greibenfeld bounded to his feet.
“Your Honors, I fully realized that the defendant is now
beyond the jurisdiction of this court, but let me point out that I
and my associates are here participating in this case in the hope
that the classification of this planet may be determined, and some
adequate definition of sapience established. These are most serious
questions, your Honors.”
“But, your Honors,” Coombes protested, “we
can’t go through the farce of trying a dead man.”
“People of the Colony of Baphomet versus Jamshar Singh,
Deceased, charge of arson and sabotage, A.E. 604,” the
Honorable Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard interrupted.
Yes, you could find a precedent in colonial law for almost
anything.
Jack Holloway was on his feet, a Fuzzy cradled in the crook of
his left arm, his white mustache bristling truculently.
“I am not a dead man, your Honors, and I am on trial here.
The reason I’m not dead is why I am on trial. My defense is
that I shot Kurt Borch while he was aiding and abetting in the
killing of a Fuzzy. I want it established in this court that it is
murder to kill a Fuzzy.”
The judge nodded slowly. “I will not dismiss the charges
against Mr. Holloway,” he said. “Mr. Holloway had been
arraigned on a charge of murder; if he is not guilty, he is
entitled to the vindication of an acquittal. I am afraid, Mr.
Coombes, that you will have to go on prosecuting him.”
Another brief stir, like a breath of wind over a grain field,
ran through the courtroom. The show was going on after all.
ALL THE FUZZIES were in court this morning: Jack’s six,
and the five from the constabulary post, and Ben’s Flora and
Fauna, and the four Ruth Ortheris claimed. There was too much
discussion going on for anybody to keep an eye on them. Finally one
the constabulary Fuzzies, either Dillinger or Dr. Crippen, and Ben
Rainsford’s Flora and Fauna, came sauntering out into the
open space between the tables and the bench dragging the hose of a
vacuum-duster. Ahmed Khadra ducked under a table and tried to get
it away from them. This was wonderful; screaming in delight, they
all laid hold of the other end, and Mike and Mitzi and Superego and
Complex ran to help them. The seven of them dragged Khadra about
ten feet before he gave up and let go. At the same time, an
incipient fight broke out on either side of the arc of tables
between the head of the language department of Mallorysport Academy
and a spinsterish amateur phoneticist. At this point, Judge
Pendarvis, deciding that if you can’t prevent it, relax and
enjoy it, rapped a few times with his gavel, and announced that
court was recessed.
“You will all please remain here; this is not an
adjournment, and if any of the various groups who seem to be
discussing different aspects of the problem reach any conclusion
they feel should be presented in evidence, will they please notify
the bench so that court can be reconvened. In any case, we will
reconvene at eleven thirty.”
Somebody wanted to know if smoking would be permitted during the
recess. The Chief Justice said that it would. He got out a cigar
and lit it. Mamma Fuzzy wanted a puff: she didn’t like it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mike and Mitzi, Flora and
Fauna scampering around and up the steps behind the bench. When he
looked again, they were all up on it, and Mitzi was showing the
court what she had in her shoulder bag.
He got up, with Mamma and Baby, and crossed to where Leslie
Coombes was sitting. By this time, somebody was bringing in a
coffee urn from the cafeteria. Fuzzies ought to happen oftener in
court.
THE GAVEL TAPPED slowly. Little Fuzzy scrambled up onto Jack
Holloway’s lap. After five days in court, they had all
learned that the gavel meant for Fuzzies and other people to be
quiet. It might be a good idea, Jack thought, to make a little
gavel, when he got home, and keep it on the table in the living
room for when the family got too boisterous. Baby, who wasn’t
gavel-trained yet, started out onto the floor; Mamma dashed after
him and brought him back under the table.
The place looked like a courtroom again. The tables were ranged
in a neat row facing the bench, and the witness chair and the jury
box were back where they belonged. The ashtrays and the coffee urn
and the ice tubs for beer and soft drinks had vanished. It looked
like the party was over. He was almost regretful; it had been fun.
Especially for seventeen Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy and a little
black-and-white kitten.
There was one unusual feature; there was now a fourth man on the
bench, in gold-braided Navy black; sitting a little apart from the
judges, trying to look as though he weren’t there at
all—Space Commodore Alex Napier.
Judge Pendarvis laid down his gavel. “Ladies and gentlemen
are you ready to present the opinions you have reached?” he
asked.
Lieutenant Ybarra, the Navy psychologist, rose. There was a
reading screen in front of him; he snapped it on.
“Your Honors,” he began, “there still exists
considerable difference of opinion on matters of detail but we are
in agreement on all major points. This is quite a lengthy report,
and it has already been incorporated into the permanent record.
Have I the court’s permission to summarize it?”
The court told him he had. Ybarra glanced down at the screen in
front of him and continued:
“It is our opinion,” he said, “that sapience
may be defined as differing from nonsapience in that it is
characterized by conscious thought, by ability to think in logical
sequence and by ability to think in terms other than mere sense
data. We—meaning every member of every sapient race—think
consciously, and we know what we are thinking. This is not to say
that all our mental activity is conscious. The science of
psychology is based, to a large extent, upon our realization that
only a small portion of our mental activity occurs above the level
of consciousness, and for centuries we have been diagramming the
mind as an iceberg, one-tenth exposed and nine-tenths submerged.
The art of psychiatry consists largely in bringing into
consciousness some of the content of this submerged nine-tenths,
and as a practitioner I can testify to its difficulty and
uncertainty.
“We are so habituated to conscious thought that when we
reach some conclusion by any nonconscious process, we speak of it
as a ‘hunch,’ or an ‘intuition,’ and
question its validity. We are so habituated to acting upon
consciously formed decisions that we must laboriously acquire, by
systematic drill, those automatic responses upon which we depend
for survival in combat or other emergencies. And we are by nature
so unaware of this vast submerged mental area that it was not until
the first century Pre-Atomic that its existence was more than
vaguely suspected, and its nature is still the subject of
acrimonious professional disputes.”
There had been a few of those, off and on, during the past four
days, too.
“If we depict sapient mentation as an iceberg, we might
depict nonsapient mentation as the sunlight reflected from its
surface. This is a considerably less exact analogy; while the
nonsapient mind deals, consciously, with nothing but present sense
data, there is a considerable absorption and reemission of
subconscious memories. Also, there are occasional flashes of what
must be conscious mental activity, in dealing with some novel
situation. Dr. van Riebeek, who is especially interested in the
evolutionary aspect of the question, suggests that the introduction
of novelty because of drastic environmental changes may have force
nonsapient beings into more or less sustained conscious thinking
and so initiated mental habits that, in time, gave rise to true
sapience.
“The sapient mind not only thinks consciously by habit,
but it thinks in connected sequence. It associates one thing with
another. It reasons logically, and forms conclusions, and uses
those conclusions as premises from which to arrive at further
conclusions. It groups associations together, and generalizes. Here
we pass completely beyond any comparison with nonsapience. This is
not merely more consciousness, or more thinking; it is thinking of
a radically different kind. The nonsapient mind deals exclusively
with crude sensory material. The sapient mind translates sense
impressions into ideas, and then forms ideas of ideas, in ascending
orders of abstraction, almost without limit.
“This, finally, brings us to one of the recognized overt
manifestations of sapience. The sapient being is a symbol user. The
nonsapient being cannot symbolize, because the nonsapient mind is
incapable of concepts beyond mere sense images.”
Ybarra drank some water, and twisted the dial of his reading
screen with the other hand.
“The sapient being,” he continued, “can do one
other thing. It is a combination of the three abilities already
enumerated, but combining them creates something much greater than
the mere sum of the parts. The sapient being can imagine. He can
conceive of something which has no existence whatever in the
sense-available world of reality, and then he can work and plan
toward making it part of reality. He can not only imagine, but he
can also create.”
He paused for a moment. “This is our definition of
sapience. When we encounter any being whose mentation includes
these characteristics, we may know him for a sapient brother. It is
the considered opinion of all of us that the beings called Fuzzies
are such beings.”
Jack hugged the small sapient one on his lap, and Little Fuzzy
looked up and murmured, “Heinta?”
“You’re in, kid,” he whispered. “You
just joined the people.”
Ybarra was saying, “They think consciously and
continuously. We know that by instrumental analysis of their
electroencephalographic patterns, which compare closely to those of
an intelligent human child of ten. They think in connected
sequence; I invite consideration of all the different logical steps
involved in the invention, designing and making of their
prawn-killing weapons, and in the development of tools with which
to make them. We have abundant evidence of their ability to think
beyond present sense data, to associate, to generalize, to abstract
and to symbolize.
“And above all, they can imagine, not only a new
implement, but a new way of life. We see this in the first human
contact with the race which, I submit, should be designated as
Fuzzy sapiens. Little Fuzzy found a strange and wonderful place in
the forest, a place unlike anything he had ever seen, in which
lived a powerful being. He imagined himself living in this place,
enjoying the friendship and protection of this mysterious being. So
he slipped inside, made friends with Jack Holloway and lived with
him. And then he imagined his family sharing this precious comfort
and companionship with him, and he went and found them and brought
them back with him. Like so many other sapient beings, Little Fuzzy
had a beautiful dream; like a fortunate few, he made it
real.”
The Chief Justice allowed the applause to run on for a few
minutes before using his gavel to silence it. There was a brief
colloquy among the three judges, and then the Chief Justice rapped
again. Little Fuzzy looked perplexed. Everybody had been quiet
after he did it the first time, hadn’t they?
“It is the unanimous decision of the court to accept the
report already entered into the record and just summarized by
Lieutenant Ybarra, TFN, and to thank him and all who have been
associated with him.
“It is now the ruling of this court that the species known
as Fuzzy fuzzy holloway zarathustra is in fact a race of sapient
beings, entitled to the respect of all other sapient beings and to
the full protection of the law of the Terran Federation.” He
rapped again, slowly, pounding the decision into the legal
framework.
Space Commodore Napier leaned over and whispered; all three of
the judges nodded emphatically. The naval officer rose.
“Lieutenant Ybarra, on behalf of the Service and of the
Federation, I thank you and those associated with you for a lucid
and excellent report, the culmination of work which reflects credit
upon all who participated in it. I also wish to state that a
suggestion made to me by Lieutenant Ybarra regarding possible
instrumental detection of sapient mentation is being credited to
him in my own report, with the recommendation that it be given
important priority by the Bureau of Research and Development.
Perhaps the next time we find people who speak beyond the range of
human audition, who have fur and live in a mild climate, and who
like their food raw, we’ll know what they are from the
beginning.”
Bet Ybarra gets another stripe, and a good job out of this. Jack
hoped so. Then Pendarvis was pounding again.
“I had almost forgotten; this is a criminal trial,”
he confessed. “It is the verdict of this court that the
defendant, Jack Holloway, is not guilty as here charged. He is
herewith discharged from custody. If he or his attorney will step
up here, the bail bond will be refunded.” He puzzled Little
Fuzzy by hammering again with his gavel to adjourn court.
This time, instead of keeping quiet, everybody made all the
noise they could, and Uncle Gus was holding him high over his head
and shouting:
“The winnah! By unanimous decision!”