The Last Starship From Earth

by John Boyd

  Flaxon was on his feet. “Your honor, may I ask the indulgence of the court for five minutes while counsel clarifies point of law to defendant?”

  “What says the prosecution?” Malak asked.

  Flaxon turned to shield his signal from the bench and held up one finger on one hand and four on the other.

  Haldane quickly deciphered the code to the prosecuting attorney: if he granted the indulgence, Franz saw the first race; if he didn’t, Flaxon would stall the hearing into the fourth race.

  Franz promptly intoned, “Indulgence agreed to.”

  Flaxon sat down and began to draw hasty diagrams on his note pad: “Here’s the situation, law-wise. If Franz knows the girl is a nymphomaniac, and I don’t object, you’re home free. The state will drop the charges against you to get at the girl…”

  “She’s no nymphomaniac!”

  “… but if I don’t object, and the girl is a police pigeon, you’re hung out to dry, because he can slap a deviationism charge against you…”

  “She’s no stool pigeon!”

  “… and since I haven’t objected to inadmissible evidence—that jurors’ report—it will still not be admissible in the second phase, and we wouldn’t have the chance of a lone ember on Hell to prove entrapment. The police would never volunteer to admit conspiracy.”

  “Helix is not a nymphomaniacal stool pigeon!”

  “Agreed! There’s the beauty of Franz’s maneuver. He knows we know she isn’t both—the police would never let her out of the station house.

  “But if I object, and she’s a nympho, you’re swacked! It would be maximum punishment for you, exile to Pluto, because her punishment is geared to yours and she’d be shipped to Pluto on the next rocket transport. You would be innocent, but you’d have to go along because we’ve already pleaded you guilty.”

  “I would be innocent?” Haldane was dazed by legal subtleties.

  “McNaughton’s Rule—any man able to understand right from wrong, any normal man, that is, has no recourse but intercourse with an aroused white-livered female, lawyer’s slang for a nympho.”

  “But why Pluto? Why doesn’t the state send pros?”

  “Pros crack up in penal colonies. Their clients are low, bestial, stinking, debased degenerates—which is just fresh meat to the nympho felons.”

  “That would be no place for a gentle-minded girl of eighteen!”

  “Agreed,” Flaxon said, “unless she’s developed a fondness for low, bestial, stinking, dirty, depraved degenerates, but the girl’s not my client.”

  “Would I get visiting privileges with her if I were a convict on Pluto?”

  “For about five minutes a week, but you’d have to wait in a long line… Now, if I don’t object and he slaps a deviationism charge against you, our defense would be based on the point of law that perversion is not necessarily deviation. Admittedly you two conspired to pervert the genetic codes to personal ends, but you committed no overt act to interfere with state policies. You two never got out of that apartment, for obvious reasons, so there could be no overt obstructionism.”

  Haldane was thinking. Helix read a lot. Any girl who read Freud would read law books for light recreation. She could be familiar enough with law to feign nymphomania and get him off the hook because she loved him. He couldn’t accept her sacrifice.

  “Let’s object.”

  “It’s not that easy They’ve got you, if there’s entrapment. They won’t even S.O.S. you, and it’ll be Hell for sure As they say in law school, S.O.L. antecedes S.O.S I hate to lose a chance on a nympho even if it means letting a stooly off the hook.

  “But the bulk of the evidence points to her being a stooly, and if I don’t object, I’ll never get a chance to look at the book to determine entrapment.” Flaxon was genuinely perplexed. “She could be a nympho; that pregnancy of hers came too easily. Characteristic of amorous haste, avidity, hunger for appeasement. Yet, when reading your manuscript, I got the feeling you were being deconditioned by an expert, which would suggest entrapment. Besides, she lied to you, but that doesn’t indicate either nymphomania or police connections.”

  “Are you insinuating that she is a liar?”

  “No. I’m defining her legal position. One thousand truths spoken do not make an honest man, but one lie dropped among those truths marks him, henceforth and forever, as a damned liar. You are my client, and I feel that whatever else you may lack, you have at least the honesty of the maladroit. So I can’t define you as a liar.”

  “I don’t follow your legal reasoning.”

  “When I checked your report, I went to the library and looked up Fairweather’s Complete Poetic Works. The girl was telling the truth about that four-line poem with the long name, but the ‘Lament of an Earth-Bound Star Rover’ was on the fourth page in the book.”

  “Maybe it was torn out of her book?”

  “She would have known it if she reads as much poetry as you say she does. It’s in every anthology in the public library.

  “But our indulgence time is running out. It’s your choice, Haldane. If you object and she’s a nympho, you’re dead. If you don’t object, and she’s a police pigeon, you’re dead Well, what’ll she be, nympho or stooly?”

  Dazed by the legal complexities and astounded by the computer mind of Flaxon, he said, “A man can’t be trusted to make a decision like that about the woman he loves… You’re my lawyer, counselor. Flip your own coin!”

  “Personally, I’d like a chance to read a jurors’ report.”

  Flaxon was rising to his feet. “Object, your honor, on the grounds that the evidence is inadmissible.”

  “Objection sustained.”

  “Your honor,” Franz said, “will defense withdraw objection if jurors’ report is made admissible?”

  “How say you, defense?”

  “Defense will withdraw.”

  Haldane, watching, saw a smile light the face of Father Kelly XXXX, who was seated directly behind Franz. Almost as a reflex, the priest tilted his face, and Haldane knew; Father Kelly XXXX was getting ready for the television cameras. That benign glow in his eyes told Haldane that Helix was not a nymphomaniac.

  “Move granted… Court will recess for thirty minutes to permit defense counsel to read the jurors’ report.”

  “Something tells me,” Flaxon said, “that I have not made an error. You can never go wrong if you lean toward the weight of the evidence… I should have known, anyway, that you would have been able to recognize a nympho.”

  He got up and went to the judge’s chambers as the deputies stepped forward to stand beside Haldane.

  It was difficult to believe that she, with all her resources of intelligence and charm, would be an undercover agent for the police. He was sickened by the thought.

  But he had to shrive himself of emotions. Experience 1 and logic should have taught him by now that anyone could be anything. Flaxon was a lawyer.

  He focused his attention on the sweeping hand of the clock to the right of the bench and watched as it eked out the time with grudgingly granted seconds. Finally, behind him, he heard the rustle of returning spectators, and Franz, Flaxon, and Judge Malak emerged from the chambers. Flaxon moved woodenly to the table as the deputies stepped back. His eyes were glazed. He took his seat beside Haldane as the deputies moved back and Malak motioned the bailiff to the bench.

  “She was a pigeon,” Haldane said, “and I’m sunk.”

  Flaxon did not look at Haldane. He was talking to himself. “I’m the pigeon,” he said, “and we’re sunk. My fifth pleading Most lawyers never see one. Old Flaxon gets his on the fifth pleading. On my fifth… on my fifth… on MY FIFTH!”

  Haldane shook his shoulder. He was in a state of shock.

  His attention was drawn from the lawyer by the bailiff, who was ending his “oyez” with, “… to hear pleadings in the case of Haldane IV, M-5, 138270, 3/10/46, versus the World State, the charge being deviationism.”

  Haldane was no longer charged with a mere crime
against humanity; he was charged with a crime against the state.

  Red lights flashed on above the television cameras, and Haldane knew from experience what was happening beyond the courtroom. Raucous arguments in friendly family taverns would cease. Conversations and the clatter of silverware against china in public restaurants would stop. Housewives would watch gladly as their television serials were interrupted.

  As the crowds had gathered five centuries before at the foot of Tyburn Hill, they would gather now, but they would not be gathering to watch in simple fascination as the hooded hangman opened his trap to innocent death. They would thrill to an enlarging terror prolonged into the sentient agony of a living death.

  The bailiff was calling the roll of jurors, and now Haldane knew with certainty that the men who answered to the call were no longer his evaluators but his executioners.

  Back when he was mentally competent, Flaxon had assumed that Helix was “right” in saying that that poem had only four lines. As Haldane watched the Third Ice Age of his mind crunch down on him, he knew with intuitive certainty that four lines were all that “Reflections from a Higher Place, Revised” had ever possessed. Helix had composed the others seated across the table from him at Point Sur.

  She had planted those lines knowing that she would meet him again and use his doubts to destroy his loyalty to the state. When the police led him away, the triumph and exultation in her eyes had sprung not from an ecstasy of shared martyrdom with her lover, but from delight over the success of her nefarious plot.

  As a murderess of loyalties, she had succeeded better than she knew, for his loyalty to her was dead. Perhaps, as Flaxon inferred, she was not a police pigeon, but she had betrayed him, and now she was dead, gone to her death bed, and the cold winds were beginning to howl over the grave where he had buried her.

  Helix was gone. His father was dead. And Flaxon was in a state of shock.

  He would ride the starships, not as a laser room mech but as cargo on a one-way trip to Hell.

  Chapter Ten

  As a member of the senior department and as jury foreman, Brandt, the sociologist, was first on the stand.

  He had foreseen the direction of the trial, for he had made preparations. Behind him, the bailiff rolled out a tripod on which a large chart was hung. Brandt angled the chart to give the judge and jury a partial view, but it was head-on for one of the television cameras.

  “Your honor, I beg the indulgence of the court beforehand for the brevity of my report, which is based purely on a sexo-sociological profile of the defendant elicited from a review of transitory phenomena to project an overview of the defendant in relation to the peer group in which the subject belongs, on a vertical plane in a most cursory manner because this dimension will be, I’m sure, handled adequately by my esteemed colleagues, contrasted to the socioeconomic groupings surrounding his peer group and related to it on a horizontal level, no pun intended, consisting of verifiable, empirical, objective data which lend themselves to hard-core analysis in the sexo-sociological areas, because my departmental duties are pressing; so I must not only apologize for the brevity of my report and for my reliance on your honor’s tolerance of subjective analysis of horizontal in-depth factors, but further request to be excused from the continuance of the proceedings after the finalization of my report.”

  “Permission granted,” Judge Malak said. “Continue.”

  Haldane wasn’t positive what permission was being granted, and, thinking himself inattentive, decided to concentrate more closely on what the sociologist was saying.

  “In the field of sexo-social behavior, apart from recreational values, the unmated student is practicing a form of status-seeking within peer groups and between peer groups, as was pointed out in the monumental study of the subject by Merk, Baltan, and Fring, to whom I wish to extend my thanks. I have compiled a chart showing the Grossinger Curve for six representative groups, not random samplings, ranging from the theologians, here…”—Brandt walked over and pointed to a nubbin on the chart which covered hardly an inch of the approximately 36-inch width of the chart—“… to the students of mechanical engineering, here.” The M.E.’s drew a whistle from the audience. Their bar covered roughly 34½ inches of the depth.

  “Adjacent to, and two inches lower, I mark the students of mathematics.” Haldane felt a negative pride in his own department when he saw the bar. His department excelled, but it was only second. If the boys in math had known they were second, they would have tried harder.

  “From the two extremes, students of mechanical engineering students of theology, we have established a norm for all students, discounting the summer recess and eliminating statistically such fringe deviations as self-stimulation, mutual participation, and isolated cases of self-enforced celibacy which exists, even in the mechanical engineering and mathematics students with a bias toward theology, as a form of reverse status-seeking. But, your honor, this overview of the field means little in itself except as a prelude to the rather outstanding, or, more precisely, astounding, analysis of the subject in relation to the defendant’s peer group, and particularly in relation to the defendant himself. Your honor, in respect to the court, I must confess a certain awe in regards to the sexo-sociological profile, analyzed within the peer group, for the years 1967 and 1968, of the defendant himself. If it pleases the court, may I present for your edification the sexo-sociological profile of Haldane IV!”

  With a dramatic flourish, he reached over and ripped the top sheet from the overview; beneath, in the form of a graph, the red line of Haldane IV was impressive when contrasted to the blue of his fellow mathematicians and the bright purple of the mechanical engineers.

  “Your honor, I wish to point out to the court that though the index is based solely on the Berkeley House of Recreation statistics, the possibility of social mobility was taken into account by the department and a dossier was prepared of the defendant which included a mobile photograph and a detailed analysis of his techniques which included a modus operandi, wearing a wristwatch with a sweep second hand to time the stimulus-reaction period of his co-participants and the use of a peculiar circular movement known on the University of California campus as the ‘Haldane swizzlestick,’ characteristics which received positive identification without photographs from areas extending as far north as Seaside, Oregon, and as far south as Pismo Beach.”

  Pointing to the chart, Brandt continued, “If your honor will note, the chart is divided into three time periods, 1967, 1968, 1969. In the periods of 1967, his freshman year, and 1968, his sophomore year, the defendant single-handedly lifted the entire percentile rating for his category by .08. Further note, your honor, that both the purple line of the M.E.’s and the blue line of his peer group—without him—continue through March of this year, but the red line of Haldane IV stops on September 5, 1969, the very date of his accidental meeting with the then-virgin and extracategorical student. Helix, now held in custody, whose condition, pregnant, is attested to by Exhibit B, on file with the clerk…”

  “He’s hung you by them,” Flaxon groaned.

  He knew he was hung. Brandt rambled on, wasting subordinate clauses for the better part of half an hour to prove such drives could not possibly be sublimated to the invention of a computer, however complex, but must have been spent in dalliance with Helix.

  Then Franz called Gurlick to the stand.

  It was slow going for the old man to get to the witness box, and he brought no props, but he made it unassisted. When he spoke, his childish treble seemed to whistle into the microphone, but it carried clearly.

  “After I put the boy’s mind at ease by asking him about his father, whom I knew slightly in a professional relationship, I started to probe the lad’s mind for attitudes.

  “Judge, if you’ll look on line 83 of page seven in that juror’s report, you’ll find a remark that boy made, namely, ‘I may be a lousy prophet but the next thing they’ll break is the light barrier.’ ”

  The man who had sent gr
eetings to a dead man because of a poor memory was quoting page and line number of a juror’s report.

  “Not one man out of a hundred thousand would have said ‘light barrier.’ It’s just not that generally known what Fairweather was talking about, but this young horse knows. The term used is ‘time barrier’ because it’s called the Simultaneity Theory, but Fairweathian Mechanics holds that time and light are, for theoretical purposes, the same phenomena expressed in different media.

  “Now, Judge, I can speak to you without fear of contradiction because my language is not spoken in your world and if you go back to your world and tell them what I have said, they will not understand you, and so they can’t come back to me; but I tell you, your honor, this stripling has thought of negative light, and you can’t think in nonhuman concepts without nonhuman conceptual ability. This means he’s as smart as I am, and I don’t like that!

  “I’m talking to him now, and he knows what I’m talking about, because he’s onto the fact that negative light is another name for negative time, if Fairweather was right and he is.

  “That boy out there is a sinner. What’s worse, he’s a pragmatic theoretician! He hinted around to me that he wanted to get a berth on a Hell ship. That jack wasn’t looking for any job. He wanted a laboratory.

  “It’s my observation, your honor, that sinners don’t repent sins, begging the father’s pardon. What they repent’s getting caught. Chinese remorse!

  “This lad wasn’t doing any repenting, either. He was going to do himself a little correcting of the error. He was going to try again. He knows what I mean!”

  Full well Haldane knew. That vast and secret concept which had come to him in the quietude of a frozen mind, promising his deliverance, was pinned on the old man’s exhibition board.

  “Now, when he was talking to Brandt, page 76, line 22, he said, I’m no Fairweather, I won’t build your pope.’

  “I thought those conversations were privileged,” Haldane whispered.