What did all this say about her probable reaction to a Tritonian trial? Would it help her, or would it drive her to suicide? Or would she see through it all and laugh?
Afra was a person, not a chart or a table.
He should have left the astrology to Groton.
Ivo shook his bursting head as though to rattle loose a productive notion and put the papers aside. He went to his own apartment and picked up the box that held his useless artifacts of Earth. He had never returned them to his clothing after the melting. The penny should still be there, amidst the junk… yes, his questing fingers found the disk. He fished it out without looking, flipped it into the air, caught it and slapped it against his wrist. “Heads we try her, tails we forget it,” he said aloud. Then he looked.
It was the bus token, possessing neither head nor tail.
Groton rapped for attention. “We do not need to be unduly formal. Ivo, you’ve been assigned to prosecute. Please make your case.”
Ivo rose, feeling for a moment as though he were actually in a formal courtroom, addressing a jury of twelve. “Harold, it is my purpose to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Afra Summerfield did willfully and with malice aforethought murder Bradley Carpenter. She—”
Afra jumped to her feet in a fury. “What a thing to say! Of all the ridiculous, unwarranted, slanderous—”
She broke off, seeing the other three silent and solemn.
Groton turned slowly to address her. “You are of course entitled to express yourself, Afra. But it would be better if you let Beatryx speak in your defense. We do need to ascertain the truth of this matter, if we are to exist in harmony here.”
She subsided, pitiful in her misery and sudden uncertainty. “Yes, of course, Harold. I understand.”
“Proceed, Ivo, if you please.”
“We have here a pampered and arrogant young woman of the upper middle class. She was raised to believe herself superior to the common folk, by reason of the purity of her breeding, the finances of her family and the quality of her education. She possesses an alert mind and tends to deem those of more leisurely intellect to be inferior for that reason, too. At the same time, she resents those of demonstrably greater intelligence than hers, since such people appear by her definition to occupy a higher niche in the hierarchy. They are, in a word, superior.”
Afra watched him, appalled. “Is that what you really believe? That I—” But she halted again, seeing his impassive demeanor. “I’m sorry. I won’t interrupt again.”
“Now picture the situation that obtained when she became employed within the orbiting Macroscope Project as a high-powered secretary. Many — perhaps most — of the trained personnel there exceeded both her education and her natural ability. Compared to them she was both ignorant and stupid. Surely this fostered in her a state of continuing resentment. No one likes to believe himself to be inferior, or to have others believe it, whatever the actual case may be.”
Ivo had intended to overstate the case, not really believing it himself, but he found himself responding to his own rhetoric. In accusing her, he was voicing some of his own attitudes. He felt inferior, and he had never liked it. And Afra was an intellectual snob.
“In addition, these personnel were multiracial. Negroes, Mongolians and halfbreeds were ranked above her, inherently and socially. Even certain members of the maintenance crew were able to earn privileges she was denied. Remember, she is Georgia-born. To her, such persons are niggers, chinks and spies, tolerable so long as they ‘keep their place’ but never to be acknowledged as equals, let alone betters. These were also of foreign nationalities and foreign ideologies: to wit, socialist, communist and fascist. To her, a belch after a meal is uncouth and a cheek-to-cheek greeting between members of the same sex disgusting.”
He was going too far, bringing in irrelevancies, but could not seem to stop. His resentments were coming out, and she personified them. He was angry at her because he loved her.
“But one thing kept her there, despite her obvious unsuitability for the position. She met an attractive young American scientist only slightly more intelligent than she who was willing to fraternize. She — became infatuated with him.” Translation: Ivo was angry because Afra loved Brad…
A crease appeared in Afra’s brow and her color heightened, but she did not move or speak.
“But it turned out, after a brief but intimate liaison, that this American had deceived her. He was far more able intellectually than she, having falsified his status in that respect. He had far, more education, and regarded what she had taken to be a commitment for marriage as no more than a temporary entertainment. Further, he proposed to reassign her favors to an acquaintance. She thus found herself reduced to the lowest status imaginable to her: so-called white slavery.”
Beatryx gestured in distress. “Ivo, that’s horrible. You have no right to accuse her of—”
He felt cold now, no longer angry. “Of de facto prostitution? I was not doing so. I was making the point that Bradley Carpenter treated her as a diversion. His real purpose—”
“You’re overdoing it,” Groton cautioned him. “Brad isn’t on trial.”
Ivo was glad to let that aspect drop. Brad had, after all, been his friend. He had known for twenty years what Brad was like: a polite, cautious, dull Schön. If Brad used people ruthlessly, what would Schön do?
“It subsequently turned out that her supposed fiancé was himself of mixed blood: by her definition, a mulatto or worse. And he had been raised in a free-love colony where morality in the conventional sense was unknown. Thus she learned that she had not been the first to share intimacies with him; rather, she was the last in a very long line, and followed after girls — and boys — of all the races of the world.”
Some condemnation! Ivo himself was as conservative as Afra, and as biased, despite what he knew of his origin. Yet he had shared much of the life of the project until its breakup. When, thereafter, he had encountered individual girls from it, he had indulged in the usual amenities. Outsiders would have considered this to be flagrant promiscuity. Yet the project bond was special; its members shared a heritage, and there were no reservations between them. What was more natural than a sharing of intellect and experience, in this way recapturing a fragment of that larger camaraderie?
Ivo had been shocked by Afra’s nudity and actions at the time of the handling — but that was because she was a nonproject girl. Had he been properly objective, he would have had no problem. She had been true to her viewpoint, then and in her relation to Brad, while he was a thorough hypocrite. He should be on trial, not she…
Time to wrap it up, before he got carried away again. He gestured at Afra. “It is not for us, as it was not for her, to judge the morality of Bradley Carpenter. He is dead by this woman’s hand. It is for us to determine whether the defendant had motivation for murder — and surely, by her bigoted definitions, she had. Her act must be interpreted in this light. There can be no verdict but guilty.”
He had spoken well, but he felt tight and sick. This trial had shown him unwelcome things in himself.
Beatryx, assigned counsel for the defense, took the floor. She was gaunt now, and troubled, but her voice was strong. “Harold, this is all wrong. Ivo has put things all out of proportion. There’s hardly anybody who couldn’t be condemned by that sort of reasoning. Afra was trying to bring back the man she loved, and she tried very hard, but it didn’t work. Nobody else did anything. The rest of us would have let him fade away, there in his tank. If she had known what would happen, she never would have—”