Mr. Beanfield shrugged mentally and struck Mrs. Donahue off his list of paying properties. "Oh, around a couple of hundred, your honor, in property damage. But the court should allow for inconvenience and mental anguish."
Mrs. Donahue yelped. "That's preposterous! My prize roses."
The needle jumped and fell back too quickly to work the buzzer. Greenberg said wearily, "What prizes, Mrs. Donahue?"
Her lawyer cut in, "They were right next to Mrs. Donahue's well-known champion plants. Her courageous action saved the more valuable bushes, I am happy to say."
"Is there more to add?"
"I think not. I have photographs, marked and identified, to offer."
"Very well."
Mrs. Donahue glared at her lawyer. "Well! I have something to add. There is one thing I insist on, absolutely insist on, and that is that that dangerous, blood-thirsty beast be destroyed!"
Greenberg turned to Beanfield. "Is that a formal prayer, counsellor? Or may we regard it as rhetoric?" Beanfield looked uncomfortable. "We have such a petition, your honor."
"The court will receive it."
Betty butted in with, "Hey, wait a minute! All Lummie did was eat a few of her measly old..."
"Later, Miss Sorenson."
"But..."
"Later, please. You will have your chance. The court is now of the opinion that it has all the pertinent facts. Does anyone have any new facts to bring out, or does anyone wish to question further any witness? Or bring forward another witness?"
"We do," Betty said at once.
"You do what?"
"We want to call a new witness."
"Very well. Do you have him here?"
"Yes, your honor. Just outside. Lummox."
Greenberg looked thoughtful. "Do I understand that you are proposing to put, uh, Lummox on the stand in his own defense?"
"Why not? He can talk."
A reporter turned suddenly to a colleague and whispered. to him, then hurried out of the room. Greenberg chewed his lip. "I know that," he admitted. "I exchanged a few words with him myself. But the ability to talk does not alone make a competent witness. A child may learn to talk, after a fashion, before it is a year old, but only rarely is a child of tender years... less than five, let us say... found competent to give testimony. The court takes judicial notice that members of nonhuman races... non-human in the biological sense... may give evidence. But nothing has been presented to show that this particular extra-terrestrial is competent."
John Thomas whispered worriedly to Betty, "Have you slipped your cams? There's no telling what Lummie would say."
"Hush!" She went on to Greenberg. "Look, Mr. Commissioner, you've said a fancy lot of words, but what do they mean? You are about to pass judgment on Lummox... and you won't even bother to ask him a question. You say he can't give competent evidence. Well, I've seen others around here who didn't do so well. I'll bet if you hook a truth meter to Lummie, it won't buzz. Sure, he did things he shouldn't have done. He ate some scrawny old rose bushes and he ate Mr. Ito's cabbages. What's horrible about that? When you were a kid, did you ever swipe a cookie when you thought nobody was looking?"
She took a deep breath. "Suppose when you swiped that cookie, somebody hit you in the face with a broom? Or fired a gun at you? Wouldn't you be scared? Wouldn't you run? Lummie is friendly. Everybody around here knows that... or at least if they don't they are stupider and more irresponsible than he is. But did anybody try to reason with him? Oh, no! They bullied him and fired off guns at him and scared him to death and chased him off bridges. You say Lummie is incompetent. Who is incompetent? All these people who were mean to him? Or Lummie? Now they want to kill him. If a little boy swiped a cookie, I suppose they'd chop his head off, just to be sure he wouldn't do it again. Is somebody crazy? What kind of a farce is this?"
She stopped, tears running down her cheeks. It was a talent which had been useful in school dramatics; to her own surprise she found that these tears were real.
"Are you through?" asked Greenberg.
"I guess so. For now, anyway?'
"I must say that you put it very movingly. But a court should not be swayed by emotion. Is it your theory that the major portion of the damage... let us say everything but the rose bushes and the cabbages... arose from improper acts of human beings and therefore cannot be charged to Lummox or his owner?"
"Figure it yourself, your honor. The tail generally follows the dog. Why not ask Lummie how it looked to him?"
"We'll get to that. On another issue: I cannot grant that your analogy is valid. We are dealing here, not with a little boy, but with an animal. If this court should order the destruction of this animal, it would not be in spirit of vengeance nor of punishment, for an animal is presumed not to understand such values. The purpose would be preventive, in order that a potential danger might not be allowed to develop into damage to life or limb or property. Your little boy can be restrained by the arms of his nurse... but we are dealing with a creature weighing several tons, capable of crushing a man with a careless step. There is no parallel in your cookie-stealing small boy."
"There isn't, huh? That little boy can grow up and wipe out a whole city by pushing one teeny little button. So off with his head before he grows up. Don't ask him why he took the cookie, don't ask him anything! He's a bad boy-chop his head off and save trouble."
Greenberg found himself again biting his lip. He said, "It is your wish that we examine Lummox?"
"I said so, didn't I?"
"I'm not sure what you said. The court will consider it."
Mr. Lombard said quickly, "Objection, your honor. If this extraordinary..."
"Hold your objection, please. Court will recess for ten minutes. All will remain." Greenberg got up and walked away. He took out a cigarette, found again that he had no light, stuck the pack back in his pocket.
Blast the girl! He had had it figured how to dispose of this case smoothly, with credit to the department and everybody satisfied... except the Stuart boy, but that could not be helped... the boy and this precocious preposterous young mammal who had him under her wing. And under her thumb, too, he added.
He could not allow this unique specimen to be destroyed. But he had meant to do it suavely... deny the petition of that old battle-axe, since it was obviously from malice, and tell the police chief privately to forget the other one. The Save-the-World-for-the-Neanderthals petition didn't matter. But this cocky girl; by talking when she should have listened, was going to make it appear that a departmental court could be pushed into risking public welfare over a lot of sentimental, anthropomorphic bosh!
Confound her pretty blue eyes!
They would accuse him of being influenced by those pretty blue eyes, too. Too bad the child wasn't homely.
The animal's owner was responsible for the damage; there were a thousand "strayed animal" cases to justify a ruling-since this was not the planet Tencora. That stuff about it being the fault of the persons who frightened him off was a lot of prattle. But the e.-t., as a specimen for science, was worth far more than the damage; the decision would not hurt the boy financially.
He realized that he had allowed himself to fall into a most unjudicial frame of mind. The defendant's ability to pay was not his business.
"Excuse me, your honor. Please don't monkey with those things."
He looked up, ready to snap somebody's head off, to find himself looking at the clerk of the court. He then saw that he had been fiddling with the switches and controls of the clerk's console. He snatched his hands away. "Sorry."
"A person who doesn't understand these things," the clerk said apologetically, "can cause an awful lot of trouble."
"True. Unfortunately true." He turned away sharply. "The court will come to order."
He sat down and turned at once to Miss Sorenson. "The court rules that Lummox is not a competent witness."
Betty gasped. "Your honor, you are being most unfair!" -