"Spider Robinson - The Gifts of the Magistrate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

THE GIFTS OF TILE MAGISTRATE

"Merry Christmas, Mr. Chief Justice," the Captain of the Guard said; but his
subsequent behavior scarcely reflected the holiday spirit.
Wolfgang Jannike submitted philosophically to the fingerprinting, retina scan and
close body search which were his Christmas presents from his subordinate. Jannike
could hardly protest an order he had written himself. Nor would any conceivable
protest have made the slightest difference; all the human guards at this stronghold
wereтАФagain, by his own directionтАФGurkhas, the deadliest humans alive.
Scanners had shown him unarmed, and the ID signal broadcast by the chip in his
skull had been confirmed as legitimate and valid, else he would not have lived to
reach Captain Lai. But even after Jannike had been positively identified as the person
described by that ID chip, and therefore as the Chief Justice of the Solar High
CourtтАФnominal master of this prisonтАФCaptain Lal remained vigilant.
That was understandable. Of the four assas-sins who had come here to date, two
had gotten this far; one of them so recently that Jannike could still see the stains on
the wall. That one, he knew, had been a friend of the Captain's.
"How may I help Your Honor?" Lal asked when the ritual was done.
"I will speak with the prisoner alone for a time," Jannike replied firmly. He was
commit-ted now; at least three microphones had recorded those words.
There was a long pause, during which Cap-tain Lal's eyes made all the responses
his lips dared notтАФeven a Gurkha must sometimes tread cautiouslyтАФand at last his
lips made the only reply they could. "Yes, sir."
"Have you ever read the works of Clement Samuels, Captain?" the Chief Justice
was moved to ask then.
"No, sir," Lal replied, doubtless baffled but showing nothing. He spun smartly in
place and headed for the door, motioning to two of his men. They fell in behind
Jannike in antiterror-ist mode, one facing forward and one facing back, weapons out
and ready. Somehow, he noted over his shoulder, they contrived to make it seem
merely ceremonial. Then he faced forward and followed the Captain, to the cell
which held the Vandal, the worst vandal of all time.
"Cell" it was in a legal and actual sense, but most of the humans alive in the Solar
System in 2061 occupied meaner quarters. The Chief Justice himself owned slightly
more cubic, and more flexible hedonics thereinтАФbut not by much. It was odd. The
whole System was angry at the Vandal, murderously angry, but it seemed to be a
kind of anger that precluded cruelty. The execution would be retribution, but not
ven-geance. Revenge was not possible, and the crime was so numbingly enormous
and senseless that deterrence could have no meaning. Nonetheless society would do
what it could to redress the balance.
The Vandal was in an odd and striking posi-tion, both legally and morally,
andтАФJannike saw as Captain Lal waved him into the cellтАФphysi-cally as well.
Virtually all humans in free fall are uncomfortable if they can not align themselves
with an arbitrary "up" and "down"; since the earliest days of spaceflight men have
built rooms with an assumed local vertical, and the occupants have oriented
themselves accordingly. This occu-pant was crouched upside down and tilted
slightly leftward with respect to the Chief Jus-tice, drifting slightly in the eddy of the
airflow.
The prisoner was studying the display wall: the cell had a better computer and
much greater data storage capacity than Jannike's own home. (On the other hand,
Jannike's computer was plugged into the Net, could send and receive data; the