The Last Starship From Earth (12 page)

Flaxon seemed hardly aware of his client as he leaned back, considering a defense in all honesty which rankled Haldane almost as much as the charges, but it was true.

He had not even thought about the time lapse until this moment.

Suddenly Flaxon’s body became rigid, and he leaned forward. His eyes bored into Haldane’s. “Now for the hundred credit question. Why did you throw that microphone out of the window?”

“I felt the police had heard enough. There was little point in broadcasting my last will and testament, since I wasn’t leaving any heirs.”

“You’re rationalizing after a fact,” Flaxon said bluntly. “Now, tell me the truth! Why did you throw that microphone out of the window?”

“All right, I was angry. It was a spontaneous thing. I did it without thinking.”

“We’re getting closer to the truth. It may be a bad truth, but we’ve got to find it if we wish to shape it in our direction. So, give me another answer: why did you throw that microphone out of the window?”

“I hated it!”

“But it was an inanimate object. How can you hate an inanimate object?”

“I hated what it represented.”

“Now, we’re getting down to bedrock. You hated it because it represented the power of the state. By extension, you hate the state. This is a bad truth.

“Throwing that microphone out of the window could be the worst thing you did in a series of acts, not one of which would have won you a good conduct medal from the Department of Sociology.”

“You’re reading too much into an impulse,” Haldane said.

“I’m reading nothing; I’m only concerned with what your psychologist juror will think. Psychologists don’t think as you and I. They think in a series of mental quirks hung loosely together by indefinite conjunctions.

“You could be guilty of the mass insemination of forty different categories by forcible assault, and if you kept rubbing your hands together, the psychologist would cease to wonder about your procreative crimes and hone in on the hands. He would build your scaffold out of that, for Christ’s sake!

“I tell you, the microphone is bad, but we’ll think about it.”

Flaxon slapped his hands together as if to put a period to that troubling line of thought, rose, and walked over to the window. He looked out for a moment.

He turned suddenly, came back to the bunk, and sat down.

“I think there’s a pattern here, something we can make attractive, but I’ll need much, much more.” He leaned back for a moment, reflecting, then turned again to Haldane.

“I want to give you a project. Write out for me every detail that happened between you and the girl from the first meeting. Don’t justify. Don’t explain. Leave that up to me, but tell the truth, even when it hurts.

“You can tell me anything. I’ll make myself your alter ego and I’ll explain the acts.

“What you tell me is absolutely privileged. As I read the notes, I’ll burn them. By the time I’m through here, you’ll know I’ll never betray your confidence, like that rat, Malcolm, for if I did and they sent you to Pluto, you as a prisoner would have me dangling by the same item of anatomy that brought you here.

“I’ve got the paper in my brief case. You can start after I leave. My object is to learn enough about you to project your personality and character with sympathy. On the degree of sympathy we can arouse in the jurors depends the degree of clemency granted by the judge.”

He leaned back on the bunk, resting on one elbow.

“Among the jurors, you won’t have to worry too much about the mathematician. He’ll be the custodian of your skills, sort of a job placement expert. Hell be your concern since he’ll be evaluating abilities that I can’t judge. But the priest…”

He threw himself onto his feet, slapped his hands together, and walked again to the window.

“The priest won’t like it that you turned to another human being for consolation. In matters touching on human mortality, one is expected to turn to the Church for consolation. In essence, you substituted a human female for Our Holy Mother. Incidentally, are you religious?”

“No.”

“Did you have any religious thoughts when they told you your father was dead.”

“I went to the chapel on the campus.”

“Very good. That’s better than a thought! Did you pray?”

“I knelt before the altar, but I couldn’t pray.”

“Good!”

Flaxon turned and began to pace back and forth the length of the cell. Haldane noticed that even his random movements were not without efficiency. He took the five maximum steps the space permitted, wheeled, and took five back. As he walked, he talked.

“Here’s where we begin to sculpture the truth. Make it a point to tell the priest that you went to the chapel and knelt before the altar. He’ll assume that you prayed, and we’re not responsible for his assumptions.

“Perhaps you did pray. Didn’t you even mumble a Pater Noster or count a bead or two?”

“No, I tried to sympathize with Christ. I finally decided that I couldn’t because he had asked for it, and I hadn’t.”

“Don’t tell him that! You’re giving yourself a bosom-buddy relationship with Our Blessed Savior, and the Church loves humility, not only before God but before his representatives on earth.

“Keep that Bible open whether you read it or not, and don’t open it to the Song of Solomon.”

Flaxon walked over and drew a sheaf of notepaper from his folio. “Here’s writing material. We’ll have about five days before your interviews with the jurors, but I can get a continuance if we need it.

“I think we’re lucky that there was a conception. Otherwise, you’d have been psychoanalyzed for sure, and something tells me that psychoanalysis would have meant Pluto for you. Now that primitivism is an established fact, we can present our picture rather than let the psychologists present theirs. Incidentally, have you ever undergone civilian analysis?”

“Once, when I was a child.”

“What for?”

“Aggressions. I shoved some flower pots off a window sill and almost hit a pedestrian. My mother had fallen out of the window while watering the pots, and I blamed them.”

Flaxon clapped his hands and flashed a broad grin. “That’ll take care of the microphone!”

“How?”

“When you threw that microphone out of the window you were regressing to compulsive infantile behavior. Helix was your mother substitute. The microphone which destroyed her was the flower pots which destroyed your mother. You were reliving an old trauma.”

“That theory sounds farfetched to me.”

“That’s the beauty of it. Listen,” Flaxon leaned forward, his intensity compelling attention, “when the psychologist comes in, you say conversationally, ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve met your profession.’

“Naturally, he’s going to ask for details, and you give them. Let him draw his own conclusions. You and I will have nothing to do with those conclusions.”

He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Whew, I was worried about that microphone.”

Haldane knew that Flaxon had been truly worried, and it moved him that a man whom he had known for less than an hour could become so involved in his problems. He was aware that lawyers were expected to defend their clients, but he was grateful that the state had assigned him a man so completely committed to his cause that he had called Malcolm a rat for fulfilling his duties as a citizen.

“Now, the sociologist is the jury foreman,” Flaxon continued. “His duties are administrative, which means the other jurors make the decisions and he gets credit. Frequently he’ll come up with a minor idea phrased in major language. His sentences will be so long that you’ll forget the subject before he reaches the predicate, but pay him close attention, and I mean close.

“If you think he’s trying to be witty, smile. If you know he’s trying to be witty, laugh. He’s a member of the ranking department, so curry his favor.

“In general, remember you’re a professional and you’ll be treated as one until you’re sentenced. Be friendly, be casual, be frank, but don’t volunteer any information. They’ve got facts enough to work on without our contributions.”

Flaxon walked over to the window and looking out, said, “We’ve got some things going for us. You’re intelligent, personable, and the affair started during an extreme emotional crisis. We’ve got to convince them that your delinquency did not spring from atavism.”

He turned back and looked at Haldane, almost accusingly. “Frankly, from your interest in the girl, I think maybe you are a throwback, but that’s all right with me.” He grinned. “I’ve got a few atavistic tendencies myself.

“Get cracking on those notes. I’ll be back in the morning to pick up what you’ve written. Remember, the more facts you can give me, the easier it will be for us to pick out the truths we can use in projecting an image of you as a noble, law-abiding lad.”

There was a quick extension of the hand, a rapid shake, and Flaxon was slamming the door behind him.

Haldane shuffled the sheets of paper together as he turned to his task. He was constantly being surprised to find acute intelligences in mediocre professions. Within the limits of social orthodoxy, Flaxon had a mind that flashed and sparkled, was capable of profound insights, and was backed by human sympathies.

He liked the man. All during the interview, Flaxon had smiled, frowned, or grown pensive. Not once had he worn the mask.

Haldane began to write in straight, chronological order all the incidents that had occurred between the meeting at Point Sur and his arrest. He was writing at lunch time and writing when they brought supper. When he ran out of paper, he went to bed.

In the morning, he greeted Flaxon with, “Counselor, I need more paper.”

Flaxon had come prepared. He pulled a sheaf from his briefcase, commented on the legibility of Haldane’s handwriting, and left with the completed portion of the manuscript.

Fully committed to his task, Haldane relived every moment of his life with Helix. His principle aim ill the composition was clarity, but he found that when he was describing his remembered passions, somehow a shadow of his emotion fretted through his words. As the work progressed, he knew he was writing for an audience of one the last love story on earth.

Flaxon must have spent more time analyzing the notes than Haldane did writing them. In the morning he would arrive haggard and tired, although his appearance was belied by his driving energy.

“About the epic poem of Fairweather,” he would remark, “don’t tell the priest you dropped it because you figured you couldn’t get it published. Tell him you stopped the project after you found out the biography was proscribed. That is exactly what happened, and he will assume the religious motivation.”

Then he might say, in one of those purely personal asides that endeared him to Haldane, “Don’t go into details about your mathematics of aesthetics with the mathematician. For all I know, the idea is valid and you might want to work on it as a prol. Tip him on the idea, and twenty years from now you might find someone else’s name appended to your theory.”

He would badger the same idea from different angles. “Tell the sociologist about your theory. He’d like the social thinking behind your attempt to absorb an art category.

“Hit the psychologist with it, too. He’ll be convinced that if you were working
that
kind of a deal with the girl, your relationship had to be on the plane of the superego. Your id slipped in when you weren’t looking.”

Flaxon’s mind was constantly probing the material he got from the manuscript. “Don’t let the sociologist know that you never feared the Hell ships. Those boys have spent time, energy, and credits conditioning you to feel terror. They don’t take kindly to defeat.”

Once he dropped a personal remark that spread ripples through Haldane’s mind. “With your knowledge of Fairweather mechanics, you’d make a good engine room mechanic on a starship. There wouldn’t be any competition for the job.”

Despite the growing friendship between them, Flaxon would make no inquiries about Helix. “If I asked, they’d know where the inquiry came from, and you’d be prejudiced. Besides, her punishment will be gauged to yours, only lighter. Females are never regarded as aggressors in miscegenation cases, the point of law being that she has no point.”

Each day, for two hours, Flaxon would go over the notes he had prepared from Haldane’s manuscript, coaching his client.

“Now, about the girl. In reading about her, I was touched. No doubt your portrait of her is true. It is certainly beautiful, it may be prejudiced, and it’s atavistic. You’ve succeeded in doing with her in my eyes what I hope to do with you in the jury’s eyes.

“So, I’ll warn you. Never hint to the jury that you felt for her anything more than transient desire. This they will understand. More than this they will understand, too, but not to our benefit.”

Flaxon was giving to empty nothing the habitation and name of Haldane IV.

Without altering the basic facts, Flaxon was sculpting an image that would make Haldane appear to the priest as a young man of strong religious convictions, to the mathematician a brilliant but orthodox mathematician, to the sociologist a socially alive young fellow who had wished to eliminate a troublesome category, and to the psychologist a normal superego that had toppled before a superb libido.

At the end of five days, he and Flaxon agreed, after rehearsals, that the leading man was ready for his entrance.

“Tomorrow, you’ll be interviewed,” Flaxon said. “I’ll burn your manuscript tonight and check with you tomorrow afternoon to see how the interviews came out. You take care of the jury, and I’ll take care of the judge. Mine’s the easy part.”

They shook hands, and later, stretched on his bunk, Haldane felt the first feeling of confidence he had known for months. Whatever degree of clemency was granted him, he knew that Flaxon would get the highest for him that any lawyer could get, and he was not seeking the highest level of clemency; he intended to choose the lowest job on the priority scale.

In that First Ice Age of his discontent, he had discerned the incompleteness of Fairweather’s Simultaneity Formula, 2(LV) = S. But he had shoved that discovery behind him for his mortal affairs were pressing, and he knew that no laboratory on earth could offer him facilities to test the Haldane Theory, LV
²
= (−T). But there was a laboratory, not of tills earth, now available.