“I see,” I said meekly. “Thank you, your honor.” There was nothing else I could do.
“Settling international disputes,” Sam grumbled. “Like the China-India War. Once he stopped selling bio-weapons to both sides they had to stop fighting.”
“However,” the chief judge said, turning to Weatherwax, “if the justice would prefer to withdraw in the face of the defendant’s concern …”
Weatherwax stirred and seemed to come to life like a large mound of protoplasm touched by a spark of electricity.
“I assure you, Justice Ostero, that I can judge this case with perfect equanimity.” His voice was a deep groan, like the rumble of a distant bullfrog.
The chief justice nodded once, curtly. “So be it,” she said. “Let’s get on with these proceedings.”
It was exactly at the point that the Beryllium Blonde entered the courtroom.
It was as if the entire courtroom stopped breathing; like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, everything and everybody seemed to stop in their tracks, just to look at her.
Lunar cities were pretty austere in those days; the big, racy casinos over at Hell Crater hadn’t even been started yet. Selene City was the largest of the Moon’s communities, but even so it wasn’t much more than a few kilometers of rock-walled tunnels. Even the so-called Grand Plaza was just a big open space with a dome sealing it in. Okay, so most of the ground inside the plaza was green with grass and shrubs. After two days, who cared? You could rent wings and go flying on your own muscle power, but there wasn’t much in the way of scenery.
The Beryllium Blonde was scenery. She stepped into the courtroom and lit up the place, like her golden hair was casting reflections off the bare stone walls. The panel of three judges—two women and the Toad—just stared at her as she walked demurely down the courtroom’s central aisle and stopped at the railing that separated the lawyers and their clients from the spectators.
We were all spectators, of course. She was absolutely gorgeous: tall and shapely beyond the dreams of a teenaged cartoonist. A face that could launch a thousand rockets—among other things.
She looked so sweet, with those wide blue eyes and that perfect face. Her glittery silver suit was actually quite modest, with a high buttoned Chinese collar and trousers that looped beneath her delicate little feet. Of course, the suit was form-fitting: it clung to her as if it’d been sprayed onto her body, and there wasn’t a man in the courtroom who didn’t envy the fabric.
Even Sam could do nothing more than stare at her, dumbfounded. It wasn’t until much later that I learned why he called her the Beryllium Blonde: beryllium, a steel-gray metal, quite brittle at room temperature, with a very high melting point; used mostly as a hardening agent.
How true.
“Am I interrupting?” she asked, in a breathy innocent voice.
The chief judge had to swallow visibly before she found her voice. “No, we were just getting started. What can I do for you?” This from the woman who was known, back in Australia, as the Scourge of Queensland.
“I am here to help represent the prosecution, on a pro bono basis.”
All four of the prosecution’s expensive lawyers shot to their feet and welcomed her to their midst.
Sam just moaned.
“It goes back a long way,” Sam told me after the preliminaries had ended and the court had adjourned for lunch. We had scooted back to the hotel suite we were renting, the two of us desperately trying to hold the company together despite the trial and embargo and everything else.
“She tried to screw me out of my zero-gee hotel, way back when,” he said.
I wondered how literally Sam meant his words. He had the solar system’s worst reputation as an insensitive womanizing chauvinist boor. Yet somehow Sam never lacked for female companionship. I’ve seen ardent feminists succumb to Sam’s charm. Once in a while.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Sam said, sighing mightily at his memories. “Of course, we spent a pretty intense time together before the doo-doo hit the fan.” He sighed again. “All she was after was the rights to my hotel.”
“While you were truly and deeply in love,” I wisecracked.
Sam looked shocked. “I think I was,” he said, sounding hurt. “At least, while it lasted.”
“So she has a personal bias against you. Maybe I can get her thrown off the case—”
“Don’t you dare!” Sam shrieked, nearly jumping over the coffee table.
“But—”
He gave me his Huck Finn grin. “If I’ve got to be raped, pillaged and burnt at the stake,” he said happily, “I couldn’t think of anybody I’d prefer to have holding the matches.”
Had Sam given up?
I don’t know about Sam, but after the first two days of testimony I was ready to give up.
Fourteen witnesses—a baker’s dozen plus one—all solemnly testified that Sam had deliberately, with malice aforethought and all that stuff, wiped out the harmless lichenoid colony that dwelled under Europa’s ice mantle. And had even bashed one of the DULL scientists on the head with an oxygen tank when the man had tried to stop him.
The spectators on the other side of the courtroom rail sobbed and sighed through the testimony, hissed at Sam and groaned piteously when the last of the witnesses showed a series of computer graphics picturing the little green lichenoids before Sam and the empty cavity under the ice where the lichenoids had been but were no longer—because of Sam.
“What need have we of further witnesses?” bellowed a heavyset woman from the back of the courtroom.
I turned and saw that she was on her feet, brandishing an old-fashioned rope already knotted into a hangman’s noose.
The chief judge frowned at her, rather mildly, and asked her to sit down.
For the first time since his profession of impartiality Weatherwax spoke up. “We want to give the accused a fair trial,” he rumbled, again sounding rather like a bullfrog. “Then we’ll hang him.”
He made a crooked smile to show that he was only joking. Maybe.
The chief judge smiled, too. “Although we haven’t yet decided how a sentence of capital punishment would be carried out,” she said, looking straight-faced at Sam, “I’m sure it won’t be by hanging. In this low-gravity environment that might constitute cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Thanks a lot,” Sam muttered.
Then the chief judge turned to me. “Cross-examination?”
The scientist who had shown the computer graphics was still sitting in the witness chair, to one side of the judges’ banc. I didn’t have any questions for him. In fact, I wanted him and his cute little pictures off the witness stand as quickly as possible.
But just as I started to shake my head I heard Sam, beside me, speak up.
“I have a few questions for this witness, your honors.”
The three judges looked as startled as I felt.
“Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge, with a grim little smile, “I told you before that you are represented by counsel and should avail yourself of his expertise.”
Sam glanced at me. We both knew my expertise consisted of a gaggle of computer programs and not much else.
“There are aspects of this case that my, uh… counsel hasn’t had time to study. I was on the scene and I know the details better than he possibly could.”
The three judges conferred briefly, whispering and nodding. At last the chief judge said, “Very well, Mr. Gunn, you may proceed.” Then she smiled coldly and added, “There is an old tradition in the legal profession that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.”