Holloway had been out on 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 drop when he dumped the bag of sunstones, blazing with the heat of the day and of his body, on George Lunt’s 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 law out here in the boondocks of a boondock 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 of gray-brown beard. He wore a faded and grimy bush jacket with clips of rifle 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 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 , 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 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 you from the box, with a vote of 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 , had come Mohammed Ali O’Brien, the Colonial Attorney General, who doubled as Chief . They had both tried to get the whole thing dismissed—self- for Holloway, and 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; Lunt, as a police , 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 ?” 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 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 it before the sapient beings around him could get at it. “You know what? I will make a small , and I will even give , 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. . 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 it. You all know colonial law on homicide. In the case of any person killed while in commission of a felony, no 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 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 stick, I shall have to say a great many words, and produce a great deal of , 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 . “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 a canape. He had reddish hair, pale eyes and a wide, face.
“Holloway must have done him up pretty badly,” he said.
“I wish Holloway’d killed him!” He 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 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 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 court, at that. There wasn’t a ship blasted off from Darius without a couple of drunken spacemen being 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 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 , his and , his -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 globe, imperceptibly in the orange . 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 any more? 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 elegant, with a calm, untroubled face. Leslie Coombes would wear the same 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 , 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 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 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 hi............