Overruled

by Hank Davis

  First there was silence, then the crowd gasped. People had grown used to animals that talked and worked, but they were no more prepared to think of them as persons, humans, men, than were the haughty Roman citizens prepared to concede human feelings to their barbarian slaves.

  Pomfrey let them have it while they were still groggy. “What is a man? A collection of living cells and tissue? A legal fiction, like this corporate ‘person’ that would take poor Jerry’s life? No, a man is none of these things. A man is a collection of hopes and fears, of human longings, of aspirations greater than himself—more than the clay from which he came; less the Creator which lifted him up from the clay. Jerry has been taken from his jungle and made something more than the poor creatures who were his ancestors, even as you and I. We ask that this Court recognize his manhood.”

  The opposing attorneys saw that the Court was moved; they drove fast. An anthropoid, they contended, could not be a man because he lacked human shape and human intelligence. Pomfrey called his first witness—Master B’na Kreeth.

  The Martian’s bad temper had not been improved by being forced to wait around for three days in a travel tank, to say nothing of the indignity of having to interrupt his researches to take part in the childish pow-wows of terrestrials.

  There was further delay to irritate him while Pomfrey forced the corporation to accept him as an expert witness. They wanted to refuse but could not—he was their own Director of Research. He also held voting control of all Martian-held Workers’ stock, a fact unmentioned but hampering.

  More delay while an interpreter was brought in to help administer the oath—B’na Kreeth, self-centered as all Martians, had never bothered to learn English.

  He twittered and chirped in answer to the demand that he tell the truth, the whole truth, and so forth; the interpreter looked pained. “He says he can’t do it,” he informed the judge.

  Pomfrey asked for exact translation.

  The interpreter looked uneasily at the judge. “He says that if he told us the whole truth you fools—not ‘fools’ exactly; it’s a Martian word meaning a sort of headless worm—would not understand it.”

  The court discussed the idea of contempt briefly. When the Martian understood that he was about to be forced to remain in a travel tank for thirty days he came down off his high horse and agreed to tell the truth as adequately as was possible; he was accepted as a witness.

  “Are you a man?” demanded Pomfrey.

  “Under your laws and by your standards I am a man.”

  “By what theory? Your body is unlike ours; you cannot even live in our air. You do not speak our language; your ideas are alien to us. How can you be a man?”

  The Martian answered carefully: “I quote from the Terra-Martian Treaty, which you must accept as supreme law. ‘All members of the Great Race, while sojourning on the Third Planet, shall have all the rights and prerogatives of the native dominant race of the Third Planet.’ This clause has been interpreted by the Bi-Planet Tribunal to mean that members of the Great Race are ‘men’ whatever that may be.”

  “Why do you refer to your sort as the ‘Great Race’?”

  “Because of our superior intelligence.”

  “Superior to men?”

  “We are men.”

  “Superior to the intelligence of earth men?”

  “That is self-evident.”

  “Just as we are superior in intelligence to this poor creature Jerry?”

  “That is not self-evident.”

  “Finished with the witness,” announced Pomfrey. The opposition counsels should have left bad enough alone; instead they tried to get B’na Kreeth to define the difference in intelligence between humans and worker-anthropoids. Master B’na explained meticulously that cultural differences masked the intrinsic differences, if any, and that, in any case, both anthropoids and men made so little use of their respective potential intelligences that it was really too early to tell which race would turn out to be the superior race in the Third Planet.

  He had just begun to discuss how a truly superior race could be bred by combining the best features of anthropoids and men when he was hastily asked to “stand down.”

  “May it please the Court,” said Pomfrey, “we have not advanced the theory; we have merely disposed of respondent’s contention that a particular shape and a particular degree of intelligence are necessary to manhood. I now ask that the petitioner be called to the stand that the court may determine whether he is, in truth, human.”

  “If the learned court please—” The battery of lawyers had been in a huddle ever since B’na Kreeth’s travel tank had been removed from the room; the chief counsel now spoke.

  “The object of the petition appears to be to protect the life of this chattel. There is no need to draw out these proceedings; respondent stipulates that this chattel will be allowed to die a natural death in the hands of its present custodian and moves that the action be dismissed.”

  “What do you say to that?” the Court asked Pomfrey.

  Pomfrey visibly gathered his toga about him. “We ask not for cold charity from this corporation, but for the justice of the court. We ask that Jerry’s humanity be established as a matter of law. Not for him to vote, nor to hold property, nor to be relieved of special police regulations appropriate to his group—but we do ask that he be adjudged at least as human as that aquarium monstrosity just removed from this courtroom!”

  The judge turned to Jerry. “Is that what you want, Jerry?”

  Jerry looked uneasily at Pomfrey, then said, “Okay, Boss.”

  “Come up to the chair.”

  “One moment—” The opposition chief counsel seemed flurried. “I ask the court to consider that a ruling in this matter may affect a long established commercial practice necessary to the economic life of—”

  “Objection!” Pomfrey was on his feet, bristling. “Never have I heard a more outrageous attempt to prejudice a decision. My esteemed colleague might as well ask the Court to decide a murder case from political considerations. I protest—”

  “Never mind,” said the court. “The suggestion will be ignored. Proceed with your witness.”

  Pomfrey bowed. “We are exploring the meaning of this strange thing called ‘manhood.’ We have seen that it is not a matter of shape, nor race, nor planet of birth, nor acuteness of mind. Truly, it cannot be defined, yet it may be experienced. It can reach from heart to heart, from spirit to spirit.” He turned to Jerry. “Jerry—will you sing your new song for the judge?”

  “Sure Mike.” Jerry looked uneasily up at the whirling cameras, the mikes, and the ikes, then cleared his throat:

  “Way down upon de Suwannee Ribber

  Far, far away;

  Dere’s where my heart is turning ebber—”

  The applause scared him out of his wits; the banging of the gavel frightened him still more—but it mattered not; the issue was no longer in doubt. Jerry was a man.

  •

  Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) began his career with a competently told, but not very striking story, “Lifeline,” which gave no clue that it was the first installment of the grandest saga in the history of science fiction, his “Future History” series, but soon, more substantial and vitamin-packed landmark yarns followed in those magical years when new Heinlein stories were regularly appearing in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding, making it known to all what previously untapped potential the SF field was capable of reaching. Sometimes, there would even be more than one Heinlein story in an issue, though the originator of some of those masterpieces would be concealed under pseudonym such as Anson MacDonald and John Riverside. (True, John Riverside’s byline appeared only once, in Campbell’s other classic pulp, Unknown Worlds, rather than Astounding, but as long as Heinlein and Campbell were remaking the shape of science fiction, fantasy had it coming, too.) It was much too soon to take a long pause, but, thanks to Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords, it was utterly necessary. Heinlein’s incandescent writing
career had to cool down while Heinlein and several million others around the globe pitched in to put Hitler and his pals out of business. After the war, Heinlein’s career rekindled and blazed anew, bringing the classic juvenile novels, the sales to high-paying “slick” magazines, the trailblazing movie, Destination Moon, the New York Times bestsellers, and more, This is, of course, an inadequate portrait of grand master Heinlein; but, then, aren’t they all?

  PARADOX & GREENBLATT: ATTORNEYS AT LAW

  Kevin J. Anderson

  It was an ineptly bungled attempt at murder, as even the defendant kept telling everyone, not just his counsel, so it all seemed like an open and shut case, with an unavoidable verdict of “guilty.” But depend on a lawyer to make the simple far more complicated, particularly with time travel in the case.

  •

  You might say our little firm specializes in contradictions. In a few years Aaron Greenblatt and I are sure to be millionaire visionaries overloaded with cases, but right now our field of law is still in its infancy. We’ve carved out a new niche, and people are already starting to find us.

  Since we can’t afford a receptionist (not yet) Aaron took the call. But because he was up to his nostrils in a corporate lawsuit—a client suing Time Travel Expeditions for refusing to let him go to the late Cretaceous on a dinosaur hunt—he passed the case to me.

  “Line one for you, Marty,” he said as I came out of the lav, wiping my hands. “New case on the hook. Simple attempted murder, I think. Guy sounds frantic.”

  “They all sound frantic.” I pursed my lips. “Is time travel involved?”

  He nodded, and I knew there would be nothing “simple” about the case. Fortunately, temporal complications are right up our firm’s alley. We’re forward-thinkers, my partner and I—and backward-thinkers, when it’s effective. That’s why people call us when nobody else knows what the hell to do.

  I picked up the phone and punched the solitary blinking light. “Marty Paramus here. How can I help you?”

  The man talked a mile a minute in a thin, squeaky voice; even if he hadn’t been panicked, it probably would have sounded unpleasant. “All I did was try to stop him from buying her some deep-fried artichoke hearts. How could that be construed as attempted murder? They can’t pin anything on me, can they? Why would they think I was trying to kill anybody?”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me, Mr.…uh?”

  “Hendergast. Lionel Hendergast. And I read the terms of the contract very carefully before we went back in time. It didn’t say anything about deep-fried artichoke hearts.”

  I sighed. “What was your location, Mr. Hendergast?”

  “Santa Cruz Boardwalk. The place with all the rides and the arcade games. They have concession stands and—”

  “Sure, but when was this?”

  “Umm, two days ago.”

  I hate having to pry all the obvious information out of a client. “Not in your time. I mean in real time.”

  “Oh, um, fifty-two years ago.”

  “Ah.” I made a noise that hinted at a deeper understanding than I really had, yet. “One of those nostalgic life-was-better-back-then tours.”

  Now he sounded defensive. “Nothing illegal about them, Mr. Paramus. They’re perfectly legitimate.”

  “So you said. But someone must think you broke the rules, or you wouldn’t have been arrested. Was this person allergic to artichoke hearts or something?”

  “No, not at all. And it wasn’t the artichoke hearts. I was just trying to prevent him from buying them for her. I didn’t want the two of them to meet.”

  A light bulb winked on inside my head. “Oh, one of those.”

  “Altering history” cases were my bread and butter.

  * * *

  The jail’s attorney-client meeting room wasn’t much better than a cell. The cinderblock walls were covered with a hardened slime of seafoam-green paint. The chairs around the table creaked, and veritable stalactites of petrified chewing gum adorned the table’s underside. Since prisoners weren’t allowed to chew gum, their lawyers must have been responsible for this mess. Some attorneys give the whole field a bad name.

  Lionel Hendergast was in his mid-twenties but looked at least a decade older than that. His too-round face, set atop a long and skinny neck, reminded me of a smiling jack-o’-lantern balanced on a stalk. His long-fingered hands fidgeted. He looked toward me as if I were a superhero swooping in to the rescue.

  “I need to understand exactly what you’ve done, Mr. Hendergast. Tell me the truth, and don’t hold back anything. No bullshit. We have attorney-client privilege here, and I need to know what I’m working with.”

  “I’m innocent.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Listen, Mr. Hendergast—Lionel—my job is to get you off the hook for the crime of which you’re accused. Let’s save the declarations of innocence for the judge, okay? Now, start from the beginning.”

  He swallowed, took a deep breath, then said, “I took a trip back in time to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to 1973, as I said. You can get the brochure from the time travel company I used. There’s nothing wrong with it, absolutely not.”

  “And why did you want to go to Santa Cruz?”

  He shrugged unconvincingly. “The old carousel, the carnival rides, the games where you throw a ball and knock down bottles. And then there’s the beach, cotton candy, churros, hot dogs, giant pretzels.”

  “And artichoke hearts,” I prodded.

  Lionel swiveled nervously in his chair, which made a protesting creak. “Deep-fried artichoke hearts are sort of a specialty there. A woman nearing the front of the line had dropped her wallet on the ground not ten feet away, but she didn’t know it yet. In a few minutes, she was going to order deep-fried artichoke hearts—and when she discovered she had no money to pay, the man behind her in line would step up like a knight in shining armor, pay for her artichoke hearts, and help her search for her wallet. They’d find it, and then go out to dinner. The rest is history.”

  “And you seem to know the details of this history quite well. What exactly were you going to do?”

  “Well, I found the woman’s wallet, on purpose, so I could give it back to her. Nothing illegal in that, is there?”

  I nodded, already frowning. “Thereby preventing the man behind her from doing a good deed, stopping them from going to dinner, and”—I held my hands out—“accomplishing what?”

  “If they didn’t meet, then they wouldn’t get married. And if they didn’t get married, then they wouldn’t have a son who is the true spawn of all evil.”

  “The Damien defense doesn’t hold up in court, you know. I can cite several precedents.”

  “But if I had succeeded, who would have known? There would’ve been no crime because nothing would have happened. How can they accuse me of anything?”

  “Because recorded history is admissible in a court of law,” I said. “So by attempting to keep these two people from meeting, you were effectively trying to commit a murder by preventing someone from being born.”

  “If, if, if!” Hendergast looked much more agitated now. “But I didn’t do it, so how can they hold me?”

  The legal system has never been good at adapting to rapid change. Law tends to be reactive instead of proactive. When new technology changes the face of the world, the last people to deal with it—right behind senior citizens and vested union workers—are judges and the law. Remember copyright suits in the early days of the internet, when the uses and abuses of intellectual property zoomed ahead of the lawmakers like an Indy 500 race car passing an Amish horse cart?

  Now, in an era of time-travel tourism, with the often-contradictory restrictions the companies impose upon themselves, legal problems have been springing up like wildflowers in a manure field. Aaron Greenblatt and I formed our partnership to go after these cases. We are, in effect, creating major precedents with every case we take, win or lose.

  Where was a person like Lionel Hendergast to turn? Everyone is entitled to legal r
epresentation. He didn’t entirely understand the charges against him, and I was fairly certain that the judge wouldn’t know what to do either. Judges dislike being forced to make up their minds from scratch, instead of finding a sufficiently similar case from which they can copy what their predecessors have done.

  “Do you ever sit back and play the ‘What if?’ game, Mr. Paramus?” Lionel asked, startling me. “If a certain event had changed, how would your life be different? If your parents hadn’t gotten divorced, your dad might not have killed himself, your mom might not have married some abusive truck driver and moved off to Nevada where she won’t return your calls or even give you her correct street address? That sort of thing?”

  I looked at him. Now we might finally be getting somewhere. “I’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life. Four times, in fact, including the alternate-ending version. I’m very familiar with ‘What if?’ Who were you trying to kill and what was the result you hoped to achieve?”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill anyone,” he insisted.

  From the frightened little-boy expression on Lionel’s round face, I could see he wasn’t a violent man. He could never have taken a gun to someone or cut the brake cables on his victim’s car. He wouldn’t even have had the stomach to pay a professional hit man. No, he had wanted to achieve his goal in a way that would let him sleep at night.

  “The man was Delano R. Franklin,” he said. “You won’t find a more vile and despicable man on the face of this Earth.”

  I didn’t want to argue with my client, though I could have pointed out some pretty likely candidates for the vile-and-despicable championship. “Much as it may pain me to say this, Lionel, being unpleasant isn’t against the law.”

  “My parents were happily married, a long time ago. My dad had a good job. He owned a furniture store. And my mom was a receptionist in a car dealership—a dealership owned by Mr. Franklin. We had a nice home in the suburbs. I was supposed to get a puppy that Christmas.”