JACK HOLLOWAY HAD been out on bail before, but never for quite
so much. It was almost worth it, though, to see Leslie
Coombes’s eyes widen and Mohammed Ali O’Brien’s
jaw drop when he dumped the bag of sunstones, blazing with the heat
of the day and of his body, on George Lunt’s magisterial
bench and invited George to pick out twenty-five thousand
sols’ worth. Especially after the production Coombes had made
of posting Kellogg’s bail with one of those precertified
Company checks.
He looked at the whisky bottle in his hand, and then reached
into the cupboard for another one. One for Gus Brannhard, and one
for the rest of them. There was a widespread belief that that was
why Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard was practicing sporadic law out
here in the boon docks of a boon-dock planet, defending gun
fighters and veldbeest rustlers. It wasn’t. Nobody on
Zarathustra knew the reason, but it wasn’t whisky. Whisky was
only the weapon with which Gus Brannhard fought off the memory of
the reason.
He was in the biggest chair in the living room, which was none
too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown
hair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. He
wore a faded and grimy bush jacket with clips of rifle cartridges
on the breast, no shirt and a torn undershirt over a shag of
gray-brown chest hair. Between the bottoms of his shorts and the
tops of his ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were covered with
hair. Baby Fuzzy was sitting on his head, and Mamma Fuzzy was on
his lap. Mike and Mitzi sat one on either knee. The Fuzzies had
taken instantly to Gus. Bet they thought he was a Big Fuzzy.
“Aaaah!” he rumbled, as the bottle and glass were
placed beside him. “Been staying alive for hours hoping for
this.”
“Well, don’t let any of the kids get at it. Little
Fuzzy trying to smoke pipes is bad enough; I don’t want any
dipsos in the family, too.”
Gus filled the glass. To be on the safe side, he promptly
emptied it into himself.
“You got a nice family, Jack. Make a wonderful impression
in court—as long as Baby doesn’t try to sit on the
judge’s head. Any jury that sees them and hears that Ortheris
girl’s story will acquit you from the box, with a vote of
censure for not shooting Kellogg, too.”
“I’m not worried about that. What I want is Kellogg
convicted.”
“You better worry, Jack,” Rainsford said. “You
saw the combination against us at the hearing.”
Leslie Coombes, the Company’s top attorney, had come out
from Mallorysport in a yacht rated at Mach 6, and he must have
crowded it to the limit all the way. With him, almost on a leash,
had come Mohammed Ali O’Brien, the Colonial Attorney General,
who doubled as Chief Prosecutor. They had both tried to get the
whole thing dismissed—self-defense for Holloway, and killing an
unprotected wild animal for Kellogg. When that had failed, they had
teamed in flagrant collusion to fight the inclusion of any evidence
about the Fuzzies. After all it was only a complaint court;
Lieutenant Lunt, as a police magistrate, had only the most limited
powers.
“You saw how far they got, didn’t you?”
“I hope we don’t wish they’d succeeded,”
Rainsford said gloomily.
“What do you mean, Ben?” Brannhard asked.
“What do you think they’ll do?”
“I don’t know. That’s what worries me.
We’re threatening the Zarathustra Company, and the
Company’s too big to be threatened safely,” Rainsford
replied. “They’ll try to frame something on
Jack.”
“With veridication? That’s ridiculous,
Ben.”
“Don’t you think we can prove sapience?” Gerd
van Riebeek demanded.
“Who’s going to define sapience? And how?”
Rainsford asked. “Why, between them, Coombes and
O’Brien can even agree to accept the talk-and-build-a-fire
rule.”
“Huh-uh!” Brannhard was positive. “Court
ruling on that, about forty years ago, on Vishnu. Infanticide case,
woman charged with murder in the death of her infant child. Her
lawyer moved for dismissal on the grounds that murder is defined as
the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is defined as one
that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do
neither. Motion denied; the court ruled that while ability to speak
and produce fire is positive proof of sapience, inability to do
either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience. If
O’Brien doesn’t know that, and I doubt if he does,
Coombes will.” Brannhard poured another drink and gulped it
before the sapient beings around him could get at it. “You
know what? I will make a small wager, and I will even give odds,
that the first thing Ham O’Brien does when he gets back to
Mallorysport will be to enter nolle prosequi on both charges. What
I’d like would be for him to nol. pros. Kellogg and let the
charge against Jack go to court. He would be dumb enough to do that
himself, but Leslie Coombes wouldn’t let him.”
“But if he throws out the Kellogg case, that’s
it,” Gerd van Riebeek said. “When Jack comes to trial,
nobody’ll say a mumblin’ word about
sapience.”
“I will, and I will not mumble it. You all know colonial
law on homicide. In the case of any person killed while in
commission of a felony, no prosecution may be brought in any
degree, against anybody. I’m going to contend that Leonard
Kellogg was murdering a sapient being, that Jack Holloway acted
lawfully in attempting to stop it and that when Kurt Borch
attempted to come to Kellogg’s assistance he, himself, was
guilty of felony, and consequently any prosecution against Jack
Holloway is illegal. And to make that contention stick, I shall
have to say a great many words, and produce a great deal of
testimony, about the sapience of Fuzzies.”
“It’ll have to be expert testimony,” Rainsford
said. “The testimony of psychologists. I suppose you know
that the only psychologists on this planet are employed by the
chartered Zarathustra Company.” He drank what was left of his
highball, looked at the bits of ice in the bottom of his glass and
then rose to mix another one. “I’d have done the same
as you did, Jack, but I still wish this hadn’t
happened.”
“Huh!” Mamma Fuzzy looked up, startled by the
exclamation. “What do you think Victor Grego’s wishing,
right now?”
VICTOR GREGO REPLACED the hand-phone. “Leslie, on
the yacht,” he said. “They’re coming in now.
They’ll stop at the hospital to drop Kellogg, and then
they’re coming here.”
Nick Emmert nibbled a canape. He had reddish hair, pale eyes and
a wide; bovine face.
“Holloway must have done him up pretty badly,” he
said.
“I wish Holloway’d killed him!” He blurted it
angrily, and saw the Resident General’s shocked
expression.
“You don’t really mean that, Victor?”
“The devil I don’t!” He gestured at the
recorder-player, which had just finished the tape of the hearing,
transmitted from the yacht at sixty-speed. “That’s only
a teaser to what’ll come out at the trial. You know what the
Company’s epitaph will be? Kicked to death, along with a
Fuzzy, by Leonard Kellogg.”
Everything would have worked out perfectly if Kellogg had only
kept his head and avoided collision with Holloway. Why, even the
killing of the Fuzzy and the shooting of Borch, inexcusable as that
had been, wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been
for that asinine murder complaint. That was what had provoked
Holloway’s counter complaint, which was what had done the
damage.
And, now that he thought of it, it had been one of
Kellogg’s people, van Riebeek, who had touched off the
explosion in the first place. He didn’t know van Riebeek
himself, but Kellogg should have, and he had handled him the wrong
way. He should have known what van Riebeek would go along with and
what he wouldn’t.
“But, Victor, they won’t convict Leonard of
murder,” Emmert was saying. “Not for killing one of
those little things.”
“ ‘Murder shall consist of the deliberate and
unjustified killing of any sapient being, of any
race,’ ” he quoted. “That’s the law. If they
can prove in court that the Fuzzies are sapient beings . . . ”
Then, some morning, a couple of deputy marshals would take
Leonard Kellogg out in the jail yard and put a bullet through the
back of his head, which, in itself, would be no loss. The trouble
was, they would also be shooting an irreparable hole in the
Zarathustra Company’s charter. Maybe Kellogg could be kept
out of that court, at that. There wasn’t a ship blasted off
from Darius without a couple of drunken spacemen being hustled
aboard at the last moment; with the job Holloway must have done,
Kellogg should look just right as a drunken spaceman. The
twenty-five thousand sols’ bond could be written off; that
was pennies to the Company. No, that would still leave them stuck
with the Holloway trial.
“You want me out of here when the others come,
Victor?” Emmert asked, popping another canape into his
mouth.
“No, no; sit still. This will be the last chance
we’ll have to get everybody together; after this, we’ll
have to avoid anything that’ll look like
collusion.”
“Well, anything I can do to help; you know that,
Victor,” Emmert said.
Yes, he knew that. If worst came to utter worst and the Company
charter were invalidated, he could still hang on here, doing what
he could to salvage something out of the wreckage—if not for the
Company, then for Victor Grego. But if Zarathustra were
reclassified, Nick would be finished. His title, his social
position, his sinecure, his grafts and perquisites, his alias-shrouded Company expense account—all out the airlock. Nick would be
counted upon to do anything he could, however much that would
be.
He looked across the room at the levitated globe, revolving
imperceptibly in the orange spotlight. It was full dark on Beta
Continent now, where Leonard Kellogg had killed a Fuzzy named
Goldilocks and Jack Holloway had killed a gunman named Kurt Borch.
That angered him, too; hell of a gunman! Clear shot at the broad of
a man’s back, and still got himself killed. Borch
hadn’t been any better choice than Kellogg himself. What was
the matter with him; couldn’t he pick men for jobs anymore?
And Ham O’Brien! No, he didn’t have to blame himself
for O’Brien. O’Brien was one of Nick Emmert’s
boys. And he hadn’t picked Nick, either.
The squawk-box on the desk made a premonitory noise, and a
feminine voice advised him that Mr. Coombes and his party had
arrived.
“All right; show them in.”
Coombes entered first, tall, suavely elegant, with a calm,
untroubled face. Leslie Coombes would wear the same serene
expression in the midst of a bombardment or an earthquake. He had
chosen Coombes for chief attorney, and thinking of that made him
feel better. Mohammed Ali O’Brien was neither tall, elegant
nor calm. His skin was almost black—he’d been born on Agni,
under a hot B3 sun. His bald head glistened, and a big nose peeped
over the ambuscade of a bushy white mustache. What was it they said
about him? Only man on Zarathustra who could strut sitting down.
And behind them, the remnant of the expedition to Beta Continent,
Ernst Mallin, Juan Jimenez and Ruth Ortheris. Mallin was saying
that it was a pity Dr. Kellogg wasn’t with them.
“I question that. Well, please be seated. We have a great
deal to discuss, I’m afraid.”
MR CHIEF JUSTICE Frederic Pendarvis moved the ashtray a few
inches to the right and the slender vase with the spray of
starflowers a few inches to the left. He set the framed photograph
of the gentle-faced, white-haired woman directly in front of him.
Then he took a thin cigar from the silver box, carefully punctured
the end and lit it. Then, unable to think of further delaying
tactics, he drew the two bulky loose-leaf books toward him and
opened the red one, the criminal-case docket.
Something would have to be done about this; he always told
himself so at this hour. Shoveling all this stuff onto Central
Courts had been all right when Mallorysport had a population of
less than five thousand and nothing else on the planet had had more
than five hundred, but that time was ten years past. The Chief
Justice of a planetary colony shouldn’t have to wade through
all this to see who had been accused of blotting the brand on a
veldbeest calf or who’d taken a shot at whom in a barroom.
Well, at least he’d managed to get a few misdemeanor and
small-claims courts established; that was something.
The first case, of course, was homicide. It usually was. From
Beta, Constabulary Fifteen, Lieutenant George Lunt. Jack
Holloway—so old Jack had cut another notch on his gun—Cold Creek
Valley, Federation citizen, race Terran human; willful killing of a
sapient being, to wit Kurt Borch, Mallorysport, Federation citizen,
race Terran human. Complainant, Leonard Kellogg, the same. Attorney
of record for the defendant, Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard. The last
time Jack Holloway had killed anybody, it had been a couple of
thugs who’d tried to steal his sunstones; it hadn’t
even gotten into complaint court. This time he might be in trouble.
Kellogg was a Company executive. He decided he’d better try
the case himself. The Company might try to exert pressure.
The next charge was also homicide, from Constabulary, Beta
Fifteen. He read it and blinked. Leonard Kellogg, willful killing
of a sapient being, to wit, Jane Doe alias Goldilocks, aborigine,
race Zarathustran Fuzzy; complainant, Jack Holloway,
defendant’s attorney of record, Leslie Coombes. In spite of
the outrageous frivolity of the charge, he began to laugh. It was
obviously an attempt to ridicule Kellogg’s own complaint out
of court. Every judicial jurisdiction ought to have at least one
Gus Brannhard to liven things up a little. Race Zarathustran
Fuzzy!
Then he stopped laughing suddenly and became deadly serious,
like an engineer who finds a cataclysmite cartridge lying around
primed and connected to a discharger. He reached out to the screen
panel and began punching a combination. A spectacled young man
appeared and greeted him deferentially.
“Good morning, Mr. Wilkins,” he replied. “A
couple of homicides at the head of this morning’s
docket—Holloway and Kellogg, both from Beta Fifteen. What is known
about them?”
The young man began to laugh. “Oh, your Honor,
they’re both a lot of nonsense. Dr. Kellogg killed some pet
belonging to old Jack Holloway, the sunstone digger, and in the
ensuing unpleasantness—Holloway can be very unpleasant, if he feels
he has to—this man Borch, who seems to have been Kellogg’s
bodyguard, made the suicidal error of trying to draw a gun on
Holloway. I’m surprised at Lieuenant Lunt for letting either
of those charges get past hearing court. Mr. O’Brien has
entered nolle prosequi on both of them, so the whole thing can be
disregarded.”
Mohammed O’Brien knew a charge of cataclysmite when he saw
one, too. His impulse had been to pull the detonator. Well, maybe
this charge ought to be shot, just to see what it would bring
down.
“I haven’t approved the nolle prosequi yet, Mr.
Wilkins,” he mentioned gently. “Would you please
transmit to me the hearing tapes on these cases, at sixty-speed?
I’ll take them on the recorder of this screen. Thank
you.”
He reached out and made the necessary adjustments. Wilkins, the
Clerk of the Courts, left the screen, and returned. There was a
wavering scream for a minute and a half. Going to take more time
than he had expected. Well . . .
THERE WASN’T ENOUGH ice in the glass, and Leonard Kellogg
put more in. Then there was too much, and he added more brandy. He
shouldn’t have started drinking this early, be drunk by
dinnertime if he kept it up, but what else was there to do? He
couldn’t go out, not with his face like this. In any case, he
wasn’t sure he wanted to.
They were all down on him. Ernst Mallin, and Ruth Ortheris, and
even Juan Jimenez. At the constabulary post, Coombes and
O’Brien had treated him like an idiot child who had to be
hushed in front of company and coming back to Mallorysport they had
ignored him completely. He drank quickly, and then there was too
much ice in the glass again. Victor Grego had told him he’d
better take a vacation till the trial was over, and put Mallin in
charge of the division. Said he oughtn’t to be in charge
while the division was working on defense evidence. Well, maybe; it
looked like the first step toward shoving him completely out of the
Company.
He dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette. It tasted badly,
and after a few puffs he crushed it out. Well, what else could he
have done? After they’d found that little grave, he had to
make Gerd understand what it would mean to the Company. Juan and
Ruth had been all right, but Gerd—The things Gerd had called him;
the things he’d said about the Company. And then that call
from Holloway, and the humiliation of being ordered out like a
tramp.
And then that disgusting little beast had come pulling at his
clothes; and he had pushed it away—well, kicked it maybe—and it had
struck at him with the little spear it was carrying. Nobody but a
lunatic would give a thing like that to an animal anyhow. And he
had kicked it again, and it had screamed . . .
The communication screen in the next room was buzzing. Maybe
that was Victor. He gulped the brandy left in the glass and hurried
to it.
It was Leslie Coombes, his face remotely expressionless.
“Oh, hello, Leslie.”
“Good afternoon, Dr. Kellogg.” The formality of
address was studiously rebuking. “The Chief Prosecutor just
called me; Judge Pendarvis has denied the nolle prosequi he entered
in your case and in Mr. Holloway’s, and ordered both cases to
trial.”
“You mean they’re actually taking this
seriously?”
“It is serious. If you’re convicted, the
Company’s charter will be almost automatically voided. And,
although this is important only to you personally, you might, very
probably, be sentenced to be shot.” He shrugged that off, and
continued: “Now, I’ll want to talk to you about your
defense, for which I am responsible. Say ten-thirty tomorrow, at my
office. I should, by that time, know what sort of evidence is going
to be used against you. I will be expecting you, Dr.
Kellogg.”
He must have said more than that, but that was all that
registered. Leonard wasn’t really conscious of going back to
the other room, until he realized that he was sitting in his
relaxer chair, filling the glass with brandy. There was only a
little ice in it, but he didn’t care.
They were going to try him for murder for killing that little
animal, and Ham O’Brien had said they wouldn’t,
he’d promised he’d keep the case from trial and he
hadn’t, they were going to try him anyhow and if they
convicted him they would take him out and shoot him for just
killing a silly little animal he had killed it he kicked it and
jumped on it he could still hear it screaming and feel the horrible
soft crunching under his feet . . .
He gulped what was left in the glass and poured and gulped more.
Then he staggered to his feet and stumbled over to the couch and
threw himself onto it, face down, among the cushions.
Leslie Coombes found Nick Emmert with Victor Grego in the
latter’s office when he entered. They both rose to greet him,
and Grego said “You’ve heard?”
“Yes. O’Brien called me immediately. I called my
client—my client of record, that is—and told him. I’m afraid
it was rather a shock to him.”
“It wasn’t any shock to me,” Grego said as
they sat down. “When Ham O’Brien’s as positive
about anything as he was about that, I always expect the
worst.”
“Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert
said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but
what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s
throat?”
“He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company
either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with
native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a
Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet,
he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s
a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered.
It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic
Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You
never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”
They were both silent for a while after he had finished. Grego
was looking at the globe, and he realized, now, that while he was
proud of it, his pride was the pride in a paste jewel that stands
for a real one in a blank vault. Now he was afraid that the real
jewel was going to be stolen from him. Nick Emmert was just
afraid.
“You were right yesterday, Victor. I wish Holloway’d
killed that son of a Khooghra. Maybe it’s not too
late—”
“Yes, it is, Nick. It’s too late to do anything like
that. It’s too late to do anything but win the case in
court.” He turned to Grego. “What are your people
doing?”
Grego took his eyes from the globe. “Ernst Mallin’s
studying all the filmed evidence we have and all the descriptions
of Fuzzy behavior, and trying to prove that none of it is the
result of sapient mentation. Ruth Ortheris is doing the same, only
she’s working on the line of instinct and conditioned
reflexes and nonsapient, single-stage reasoning. She has a lot of
rats, and some dogs and monkeys, and a lot of apparatus, and some
technician from Henry Stenson’s instrument shop helping her.
Juan Jimenez is studying mentation for Terran dogs, cats and
primates, and Freyan kholphs and Mimir black slinkers.”
“He hasn’t turned up any simian or canine parallels
to that funeral, has he?”
Grego said nothing, merely shook his head. Emmert muttered
something inaudible and probably indecent.
“I didn’t think he had. I only hope those Fuzzies
don’t get up in court, build a bonfire and start making
speeches in Lingua Terra.”
Nick Emmert cried out in panic. “You believe they’re
sapient yourself!”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
Grego laughed sourly. “Nick thinks you have to believe a
thing to prove it. It helps, but it isn’t necessary. Say
we’re a debating team; we’ve been handed the negative
of the question. Resolved: that Fuzzies are Sapient Beings.
Personally, I think we have the short end of it, but that only
means we’ll have to work harder on it.”
“You know, I was on a debating team at college,”
Emmert said brightly. When that was disregarded, he added:
“If I remember, the first thing was definition of
terms.”
Grego looked up quickly. “Leslie, I think Nick has
something. What is the legal definition of a sapient
being?”
“As far as I know, there isn’t any. Sapience is
something that’s just taken for granted.”
“How about talk-and-build-a-fire?”
He shook his head. “People of the Colony of Vishnu versus
Emily Morrosh, 612 A.E.” He told them about the infanticide
case. “I was looking up rulings on sapience; I passed the
word on to Ham O’Brien. You know, what your people will have
to do will be to produce a definition of sapience, acceptable to
the court, that will include all known sapient races and at the
same time exclude the Fuzzies. I don’t envy them.”
“We need some Fuzzies of our own to study,” Grego
said.
“Too bad we can’t get hold of
Holloway’s,” Emmert said. “Maybe we could, if he
leaves them alone at his camp.”
“No. We can’t risk that.” He thought for a
moment. “Wait a moment. I think we might be able to do it at
that. Legally.”
JACK HOLLOWAY HAD been out on bail before, but never for quite
so much. It was almost worth it, though, to see Leslie
Coombes’s eyes widen and Mohammed Ali O’Brien’s
jaw drop when he dumped the bag of sunstones, blazing with the heat
of the day and of his body, on George Lunt’s magisterial
bench and invited George to pick out twenty-five thousand
sols’ worth. Especially after the production Coombes had made
of posting Kellogg’s bail with one of those precertified
Company checks.
He looked at the whisky bottle in his hand, and then reached
into the cupboard for another one. One for Gus Brannhard, and one
for the rest of them. There was a widespread belief that that was
why Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard was practicing sporadic law out
here in the boon docks of a boon-dock planet, defending gun
fighters and veldbeest rustlers. It wasn’t. Nobody on
Zarathustra knew the reason, but it wasn’t whisky. Whisky was
only the weapon with which Gus Brannhard fought off the memory of
the reason.
He was in the biggest chair in the living room, which was none
too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown
hair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. He
wore a faded and grimy bush jacket with clips of rifle cartridges
on the breast, no shirt and a torn undershirt over a shag of
gray-brown chest hair. Between the bottoms of his shorts and the
tops of his ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were covered with
hair. Baby Fuzzy was sitting on his head, and Mamma Fuzzy was on
his lap. Mike and Mitzi sat one on either knee. The Fuzzies had
taken instantly to Gus. Bet they thought he was a Big Fuzzy.
“Aaaah!” he rumbled, as the bottle and glass were
placed beside him. “Been staying alive for hours hoping for
this.”
“Well, don’t let any of the kids get at it. Little
Fuzzy trying to smoke pipes is bad enough; I don’t want any
dipsos in the family, too.”
Gus filled the glass. To be on the safe side, he promptly
emptied it into himself.
“You got a nice family, Jack. Make a wonderful impression
in court—as long as Baby doesn’t try to sit on the
judge’s head. Any jury that sees them and hears that Ortheris
girl’s story will acquit you from the box, with a vote of
censure for not shooting Kellogg, too.”
“I’m not worried about that. What I want is Kellogg
convicted.”
“You better worry, Jack,” Rainsford said. “You
saw the combination against us at the hearing.”
Leslie Coombes, the Company’s top attorney, had come out
from Mallorysport in a yacht rated at Mach 6, and he must have
crowded it to the limit all the way. With him, almost on a leash,
had come Mohammed Ali O’Brien, the Colonial Attorney General,
who doubled as Chief Prosecutor. They had both tried to get the
whole thing dismissed—self-defense for Holloway, and killing an
unprotected wild animal for Kellogg. When that had failed, they had
teamed in flagrant collusion to fight the inclusion of any evidence
about the Fuzzies. After all it was only a complaint court;
Lieutenant Lunt, as a police magistrate, had only the most limited
powers.
“You saw how far they got, didn’t you?”
“I hope we don’t wish they’d succeeded,”
Rainsford said gloomily.
“What do you mean, Ben?” Brannhard asked.
“What do you think they’ll do?”
“I don’t know. That’s what worries me.
We’re threatening the Zarathustra Company, and the
Company’s too big to be threatened safely,” Rainsford
replied. “They’ll try to frame something on
Jack.”
“With veridication? That’s ridiculous,
Ben.”
“Don’t you think we can prove sapience?” Gerd
van Riebeek demanded.
“Who’s going to define sapience? And how?”
Rainsford asked. “Why, between them, Coombes and
O’Brien can even agree to accept the talk-and-build-a-fire
rule.”
“Huh-uh!” Brannhard was positive. “Court
ruling on that, about forty years ago, on Vishnu. Infanticide case,
woman charged with murder in the death of her infant child. Her
lawyer moved for dismissal on the grounds that murder is defined as
the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is defined as one
that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do
neither. Motion denied; the court ruled that while ability to speak
and produce fire is positive proof of sapience, inability to do
either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience. If
O’Brien doesn’t know that, and I doubt if he does,
Coombes will.” Brannhard poured another drink and gulped it
before the sapient beings around him could get at it. “You
know what? I will make a small wager, and I will even give odds,
that the first thing Ham O’Brien does when he gets back to
Mallorysport will be to enter nolle prosequi on both charges. What
I’d like would be for him to nol. pros. Kellogg and let the
charge against Jack go to court. He would be dumb enough to do that
himself, but Leslie Coombes wouldn’t let him.”
“But if he throws out the Kellogg case, that’s
it,” Gerd van Riebeek said. “When Jack comes to trial,
nobody’ll say a mumblin’ word about
sapience.”
“I will, and I will not mumble it. You all know colonial
law on homicide. In the case of any person killed while in
commission of a felony, no prosecution may be brought in any
degree, against anybody. I’m going to contend that Leonard
Kellogg was murdering a sapient being, that Jack Holloway acted
lawfully in attempting to stop it and that when Kurt Borch
attempted to come to Kellogg’s assistance he, himself, was
guilty of felony, and consequently any prosecution against Jack
Holloway is illegal. And to make that contention stick, I shall
have to say a great many words, and produce a great deal of
testimony, about the sapience of Fuzzies.”
“It’ll have to be expert testimony,” Rainsford
said. “The testimony of psychologists. I suppose you know
that the only psychologists on this planet are employed by the
chartered Zarathustra Company.” He drank what was left of his
highball, looked at the bits of ice in the bottom of his glass and
then rose to mix another one. “I’d have done the same
as you did, Jack, but I still wish this hadn’t
happened.”
“Huh!” Mamma Fuzzy looked up, startled by the
exclamation. “What do you think Victor Grego’s wishing,
right now?”
VICTOR GREGO REPLACED the hand-phone. “Leslie, on
the yacht,” he said. “They’re coming in now.
They’ll stop at the hospital to drop Kellogg, and then
they’re coming here.”
Nick Emmert nibbled a canape. He had reddish hair, pale eyes and
a wide; bovine face.
“Holloway must have done him up pretty badly,” he
said.
“I wish Holloway’d killed him!” He blurted it
angrily, and saw the Resident General’s shocked
expression.
“You don’t really mean that, Victor?”
“The devil I don’t!” He gestured at the
recorder-player, which had just finished the tape of the hearing,
transmitted from the yacht at sixty-speed. “That’s only
a teaser to what’ll come out at the trial. You know what the
Company’s epitaph will be? Kicked to death, along with a
Fuzzy, by Leonard Kellogg.”
Everything would have worked out perfectly if Kellogg had only
kept his head and avoided collision with Holloway. Why, even the
killing of the Fuzzy and the shooting of Borch, inexcusable as that
had been, wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been
for that asinine murder complaint. That was what had provoked
Holloway’s counter complaint, which was what had done the
damage.
And, now that he thought of it, it had been one of
Kellogg’s people, van Riebeek, who had touched off the
explosion in the first place. He didn’t know van Riebeek
himself, but Kellogg should have, and he had handled him the wrong
way. He should have known what van Riebeek would go along with and
what he wouldn’t.
“But, Victor, they won’t convict Leonard of
murder,” Emmert was saying. “Not for killing one of
those little things.”
“ ‘Murder shall consist of the deliberate and
unjustified killing of any sapient being, of any
race,’ ” he quoted. “That’s the law. If they
can prove in court that the Fuzzies are sapient beings . . . ”
Then, some morning, a couple of deputy marshals would take
Leonard Kellogg out in the jail yard and put a bullet through the
back of his head, which, in itself, would be no loss. The trouble
was, they would also be shooting an irreparable hole in the
Zarathustra Company’s charter. Maybe Kellogg could be kept
out of that court, at that. There wasn’t a ship blasted off
from Darius without a couple of drunken spacemen being hustled
aboard at the last moment; with the job Holloway must have done,
Kellogg should look just right as a drunken spaceman. The
twenty-five thousand sols’ bond could be written off; that
was pennies to the Company. No, that would still leave them stuck
with the Holloway trial.
“You want me out of here when the others come,
Victor?” Emmert asked, popping another canape into his
mouth.
“No, no; sit still. This will be the last chance
we’ll have to get everybody together; after this, we’ll
have to avoid anything that’ll look like
collusion.”
“Well, anything I can do to help; you know that,
Victor,” Emmert said.
Yes, he knew that. If worst came to utter worst and the Company
charter were invalidated, he could still hang on here, doing what
he could to salvage something out of the wreckage—if not for the
Company, then for Victor Grego. But if Zarathustra were
reclassified, Nick would be finished. His title, his social
position, his sinecure, his grafts and perquisites, his alias-shrouded Company expense account—all out the airlock. Nick would be
counted upon to do anything he could, however much that would
be.
He looked across the room at the levitated globe, revolving
imperceptibly in the orange spotlight. It was full dark on Beta
Continent now, where Leonard Kellogg had killed a Fuzzy named
Goldilocks and Jack Holloway had killed a gunman named Kurt Borch.
That angered him, too; hell of a gunman! Clear shot at the broad of
a man’s back, and still got himself killed. Borch
hadn’t been any better choice than Kellogg himself. What was
the matter with him; couldn’t he pick men for jobs anymore?
And Ham O’Brien! No, he didn’t have to blame himself
for O’Brien. O’Brien was one of Nick Emmert’s
boys. And he hadn’t picked Nick, either.
The squawk-box on the desk made a premonitory noise, and a
feminine voice advised him that Mr. Coombes and his party had
arrived.
“All right; show them in.”
Coombes entered first, tall, suavely elegant, with a calm,
untroubled face. Leslie Coombes would wear the same serene
expression in the midst of a bombardment or an earthquake. He had
chosen Coombes for chief attorney, and thinking of that made him
feel better. Mohammed Ali O’Brien was neither tall, elegant
nor calm. His skin was almost black—he’d been born on Agni,
under a hot B3 sun. His bald head glistened, and a big nose peeped
over the ambuscade of a bushy white mustache. What was it they said
about him? Only man on Zarathustra who could strut sitting down.
And behind them, the remnant of the expedition to Beta Continent,
Ernst Mallin, Juan Jimenez and Ruth Ortheris. Mallin was saying
that it was a pity Dr. Kellogg wasn’t with them.
“I question that. Well, please be seated. We have a great
deal to discuss, I’m afraid.”
MR CHIEF JUSTICE Frederic Pendarvis moved the ashtray a few
inches to the right and the slender vase with the spray of
starflowers a few inches to the left. He set the framed photograph
of the gentle-faced, white-haired woman directly in front of him.
Then he took a thin cigar from the silver box, carefully punctured
the end and lit it. Then, unable to think of further delaying
tactics, he drew the two bulky loose-leaf books toward him and
opened the red one, the criminal-case docket.
Something would have to be done about this; he always told
himself so at this hour. Shoveling all this stuff onto Central
Courts had been all right when Mallorysport had a population of
less than five thousand and nothing else on the planet had had more
than five hundred, but that time was ten years past. The Chief
Justice of a planetary colony shouldn’t have to wade through
all this to see who had been accused of blotting the brand on a
veldbeest calf or who’d taken a shot at whom in a barroom.
Well, at least he’d managed to get a few misdemeanor and
small-claims courts established; that was something.
The first case, of course, was homicide. It usually was. From
Beta, Constabulary Fifteen, Lieutenant George Lunt. Jack
Holloway—so old Jack had cut another notch on his gun—Cold Creek
Valley, Federation citizen, race Terran human; willful killing of a
sapient being, to wit Kurt Borch, Mallorysport, Federation citizen,
race Terran human. Complainant, Leonard Kellogg, the same. Attorney
of record for the defendant, Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard. The last
time Jack Holloway had killed anybody, it had been a couple of
thugs who’d tried to steal his sunstones; it hadn’t
even gotten into complaint court. This time he might be in trouble.
Kellogg was a Company executive. He decided he’d better try
the case himself. The Company might try to exert pressure.
The next charge was also homicide, from Constabulary, Beta
Fifteen. He read it and blinked. Leonard Kellogg, willful killing
of a sapient being, to wit, Jane Doe alias Goldilocks, aborigine,
race Zarathustran Fuzzy; complainant, Jack Holloway,
defendant’s attorney of record, Leslie Coombes. In spite of
the outrageous frivolity of the charge, he began to laugh. It was
obviously an attempt to ridicule Kellogg’s own complaint out
of court. Every judicial jurisdiction ought to have at least one
Gus Brannhard to liven things up a little. Race Zarathustran
Fuzzy!
Then he stopped laughing suddenly and became deadly serious,
like an engineer who finds a cataclysmite cartridge lying around
primed and connected to a discharger. He reached out to the screen
panel and began punching a combination. A spectacled young man
appeared and greeted him deferentially.
“Good morning, Mr. Wilkins,” he replied. “A
couple of homicides at the head of this morning’s
docket—Holloway and Kellogg, both from Beta Fifteen. What is known
about them?”
The young man began to laugh. “Oh, your Honor,
they’re both a lot of nonsense. Dr. Kellogg killed some pet
belonging to old Jack Holloway, the sunstone digger, and in the
ensuing unpleasantness—Holloway can be very unpleasant, if he feels
he has to—this man Borch, who seems to have been Kellogg’s
bodyguard, made the suicidal error of trying to draw a gun on
Holloway. I’m surprised at Lieuenant Lunt for letting either
of those charges get past hearing court. Mr. O’Brien has
entered nolle prosequi on both of them, so the whole thing can be
disregarded.”
Mohammed O’Brien knew a charge of cataclysmite when he saw
one, too. His impulse had been to pull the detonator. Well, maybe
this charge ought to be shot, just to see what it would bring
down.
“I haven’t approved the nolle prosequi yet, Mr.
Wilkins,” he mentioned gently. “Would you please
transmit to me the hearing tapes on these cases, at sixty-speed?
I’ll take them on the recorder of this screen. Thank
you.”
He reached out and made the necessary adjustments. Wilkins, the
Clerk of the Courts, left the screen, and returned. There was a
wavering scream for a minute and a half. Going to take more time
than he had expected. Well . . .
THERE WASN’T ENOUGH ice in the glass, and Leonard Kellogg
put more in. Then there was too much, and he added more brandy. He
shouldn’t have started drinking this early, be drunk by
dinnertime if he kept it up, but what else was there to do? He
couldn’t go out, not with his face like this. In any case, he
wasn’t sure he wanted to.
They were all down on him. Ernst Mallin, and Ruth Ortheris, and
even Juan Jimenez. At the constabulary post, Coombes and
O’Brien had treated him like an idiot child who had to be
hushed in front of company and coming back to Mallorysport they had
ignored him completely. He drank quickly, and then there was too
much ice in the glass again. Victor Grego had told him he’d
better take a vacation till the trial was over, and put Mallin in
charge of the division. Said he oughtn’t to be in charge
while the division was working on defense evidence. Well, maybe; it
looked like the first step toward shoving him completely out of the
Company.
He dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette. It tasted badly,
and after a few puffs he crushed it out. Well, what else could he
have done? After they’d found that little grave, he had to
make Gerd understand what it would mean to the Company. Juan and
Ruth had been all right, but Gerd—The things Gerd had called him;
the things he’d said about the Company. And then that call
from Holloway, and the humiliation of being ordered out like a
tramp.
And then that disgusting little beast had come pulling at his
clothes; and he had pushed it away—well, kicked it maybe—and it had
struck at him with the little spear it was carrying. Nobody but a
lunatic would give a thing like that to an animal anyhow. And he
had kicked it again, and it had screamed . . .
The communication screen in the next room was buzzing. Maybe
that was Victor. He gulped the brandy left in the glass and hurried
to it.
It was Leslie Coombes, his face remotely expressionless.
“Oh, hello, Leslie.”
“Good afternoon, Dr. Kellogg.” The formality of
address was studiously rebuking. “The Chief Prosecutor just
called me; Judge Pendarvis has denied the nolle prosequi he entered
in your case and in Mr. Holloway’s, and ordered both cases to
trial.”
“You mean they’re actually taking this
seriously?”
“It is serious. If you’re convicted, the
Company’s charter will be almost automatically voided. And,
although this is important only to you personally, you might, very
probably, be sentenced to be shot.” He shrugged that off, and
continued: “Now, I’ll want to talk to you about your
defense, for which I am responsible. Say ten-thirty tomorrow, at my
office. I should, by that time, know what sort of evidence is going
to be used against you. I will be expecting you, Dr.
Kellogg.”
He must have said more than that, but that was all that
registered. Leonard wasn’t really conscious of going back to
the other room, until he realized that he was sitting in his
relaxer chair, filling the glass with brandy. There was only a
little ice in it, but he didn’t care.
They were going to try him for murder for killing that little
animal, and Ham O’Brien had said they wouldn’t,
he’d promised he’d keep the case from trial and he
hadn’t, they were going to try him anyhow and if they
convicted him they would take him out and shoot him for just
killing a silly little animal he had killed it he kicked it and
jumped on it he could still hear it screaming and feel the horrible
soft crunching under his feet . . .
He gulped what was left in the glass and poured and gulped more.
Then he staggered to his feet and stumbled over to the couch and
threw himself onto it, face down, among the cushions.
Leslie Coombes found Nick Emmert with Victor Grego in the
latter’s office when he entered. They both rose to greet him,
and Grego said “You’ve heard?”
“Yes. O’Brien called me immediately. I called my
client—my client of record, that is—and told him. I’m afraid
it was rather a shock to him.”
“It wasn’t any shock to me,” Grego said as
they sat down. “When Ham O’Brien’s as positive
about anything as he was about that, I always expect the
worst.”
“Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert
said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but
what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s
throat?”
“He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company
either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with
native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a
Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet,
he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s
a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered.
It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic
Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You
never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”
They were both silent for a while after he had finished. Grego
was looking at the globe, and he realized, now, that while he was
proud of it, his pride was the pride in a paste jewel that stands
for a real one in a blank vault. Now he was afraid that the real
jewel was going to be stolen from him. Nick Emmert was just
afraid.
“You were right yesterday, Victor. I wish Holloway’d
killed that son of a Khooghra. Maybe it’s not too
late—”
“Yes, it is, Nick. It’s too late to do anything like
that. It’s too late to do anything but win the case in
court.” He turned to Grego. “What are your people
doing?”
Grego took his eyes from the globe. “Ernst Mallin’s
studying all the filmed evidence we have and all the descriptions
of Fuzzy behavior, and trying to prove that none of it is the
result of sapient mentation. Ruth Ortheris is doing the same, only
she’s working on the line of instinct and conditioned
reflexes and nonsapient, single-stage reasoning. She has a lot of
rats, and some dogs and monkeys, and a lot of apparatus, and some
technician from Henry Stenson’s instrument shop helping her.
Juan Jimenez is studying mentation for Terran dogs, cats and
primates, and Freyan kholphs and Mimir black slinkers.”
“He hasn’t turned up any simian or canine parallels
to that funeral, has he?”
Grego said nothing, merely shook his head. Emmert muttered
something inaudible and probably indecent.
“I didn’t think he had. I only hope those Fuzzies
don’t get up in court, build a bonfire and start making
speeches in Lingua Terra.”
Nick Emmert cried out in panic. “You believe they’re
sapient yourself!”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
Grego laughed sourly. “Nick thinks you have to believe a
thing to prove it. It helps, but it isn’t necessary. Say
we’re a debating team; we’ve been handed the negative
of the question. Resolved: that Fuzzies are Sapient Beings.
Personally, I think we have the short end of it, but that only
means we’ll have to work harder on it.”
“You know, I was on a debating team at college,”
Emmert said brightly. When that was disregarded, he added:
“If I remember, the first thing was definition of
terms.”
Grego looked up quickly. “Leslie, I think Nick has
something. What is the legal definition of a sapient
being?”
“As far as I know, there isn’t any. Sapience is
something that’s just taken for granted.”
“How about talk-and-build-a-fire?”
He shook his head. “People of the Colony of Vishnu versus
Emily Morrosh, 612 A.E.” He told them about the infanticide
case. “I was looking up rulings on sapience; I passed the
word on to Ham O’Brien. You know, what your people will have
to do will be to produce a definition of sapience, acceptable to
the court, that will include all known sapient races and at the
same time exclude the Fuzzies. I don’t envy them.”
“We need some Fuzzies of our own to study,” Grego
said.
“Too bad we can’t get hold of
Holloway’s,” Emmert said. “Maybe we could, if he
leaves them alone at his camp.”
“No. We can’t risk that.” He thought for a
moment. “Wait a moment. I think we might be able to do it at
that. Legally.”