The Last Starship From Earth (17 page)

“Adjacent to, and two inches lower, I mark the students of mathematics.” Haldane felt a negative pride in his own department when he saw the bar. His department excelled, but it was only second. If the boys in math had known they were second, they would have tried harder.

“From the two extremes, students of mechanical engineering students of theology, we have established a norm for all students, discounting the summer recess and eliminating statistically such fringe deviations as self-stimulation, mutual participation, and isolated cases of self-enforced celibacy which exists, even in the mechanical engineering and mathematics students with a bias toward theology, as a form of reverse status-seeking. But, your honor, this overview of the field means little in itself except as a prelude to the rather outstanding, or, more precisely, astounding, analysis of the subject in relation to the defendant’s peer group, and particularly in relation to the defendant himself. Your honor, in respect to the court, I must confess a certain awe in regards to the sexo-sociological profile, analyzed within the peer group, for the years 1967 and 1968, of the defendant himself. If it pleases the court, may I present for your edification the sexo-sociological profile of Haldane IV!”

With a dramatic flourish, he reached over and ripped the top sheet from the overview; beneath, in the form of a graph, the red line of Haldane IV was impressive when contrasted to the blue of his fellow mathematicians and the bright purple of the mechanical engineers.

“Your honor, I wish to point out to the court that though the index is based solely on the Berkeley House of Recreation statistics, the possibility of social mobility was taken into account by the department and a dossier was prepared of the defendant which included a mobile photograph and a detailed analysis of his techniques which included a
modus operandi
, wearing a wristwatch with a sweep second hand to time the stimulus-reaction period of his co-participants and the use of a peculiar circular movement known on the University of California campus as the ‘Haldane swizzlestick,’ characteristics which received positive identification without photographs from areas extending as far north as Seaside, Oregon, and as far south as Pismo Beach.”

Pointing to the chart, Brandt continued, “If your honor will note, the chart is divided into three time periods, 1967, 1968, 1969. In the periods of 1967, his freshman year, and 1968, his sophomore year, the defendant
single-handedly
lifted the entire percentile rating for his category by .08. Further note, your honor, that both the purple line of the M.E.’s and the blue line of his peer group—without him—continue through March of this year, but the red line of Haldane IV stops on September 5, 1969, the very date of his accidental meeting with the then-virgin and extracategorical student. Helix, now held in custody, whose condition, pregnant, is attested to by Exhibit B, on file with the clerk…”

“He’s hung you by them,” Flaxon groaned.

He knew he was hung. Brandt rambled on, wasting subordinate clauses for the better part of half an hour to prove such drives could not possibly be sublimated to the invention of a computer, however complex, but must have been spent in dalliance with Helix.

Then Franz called Gurlick to the stand.

It was slow going for the old man to get to the witness box, and he brought no props, but he made it unassisted. When he spoke, his childish treble seemed to whistle into the microphone, but it carried clearly.

“After I put the boy’s mind at ease by asking him about his father, whom I knew slightly in a professional relationship, I started to probe the lad’s mind for attitudes.

“Judge, if you’ll look on line 83 of page seven in that juror’s report, you’ll find a remark that boy made, namely, ‘I may be a lousy prophet but the next thing they’ll break is the light barrier.’ ”

The man who had sent greetings to a dead man because of a poor memory was quoting page and line number of a juror’s report.

“Not one man out of a hundred thousand would have said ‘light barrier.’ It’s just not that generally known what Fairweather was talking about, but this young horse knows. The term used is ‘time barrier’ because it’s called the Simultaneity Theory, but Fairweathian Mechanics holds that time and light are, for theoretical purposes, the same phenomena expressed in different media.

“Now, Judge, I can speak to you without fear of contradiction because my language is not spoken in your world and if you go back to your world and tell them what I have said, they will not understand you, and so they can’t come back to me; but I tell you, your honor, this stripling has thought of negative light, and you can’t think in nonhuman concepts without nonhuman conceptual ability. This means he’s as smart as I am, and I don’t like that!

“I’m talking to him now, and he knows what I’m talking about, because he’s onto the fact that negative light is another name for negative time, if Fairweather was right and he is.

“That boy out there is a sinner. What’s worse, he’s a pragmatic theoretician! He hinted around to me that he wanted to get a berth on a Hell ship. That jack wasn’t looking for any job. He wanted a laboratory.

“It’s my observation, your honor, that sinners don’t repent sins, begging the father’s pardon. What they repent’s getting caught. Chinese remorse!

“This lad wasn’t doing any repenting, either. He was going to do himself a little correcting of the error. He was going to try again. He knows what I mean!”

Full well Haldane knew. That vast and secret concept which had come to him in the quietude of a frozen mind, promising his deliverance, was pinned on the old man’s exhibition board.

“Now, when he was talking to Brandt, page 76, line 22, he said, I’m no Fairweather, I won’t build your pope.’

“I thought those conversations were privileged,” Haldane whispered.

“They were. They weren’t monitored. Even now, he can’t read them aloud. He’s quoting from memory.”

The old man was rambling on. “You don’t talk about a state hero like that, unless you feel you’re his equal…”

“I warned you about Jesus,” Flaxon groaned. “I couldn’t warn you about every damned thing.”

“… That electronic Shakespeare he was talking about putting together in his spare time would have reproduced a brain more complex than any pope’s, and he’d have had to do it in eight years if he was going to jump his fence to get to that filly by foaling time, and it took Fairweather thirty years to build the pope.

“I think he could have done it! Judge, now I’ve got to be excused, but I say this young jasper’s got a mind where practiced amorality coupled with potential immortality could get my and your jobs, and I recommend putting that mind in the deep freeze.”

As Gurlick hurdle-hobbled from the stand, heading for the wings, Father Kelly swept forward, set his profile for the cameras, and delivered testimony far less damaging than his predecessors’. He quibbled only over Haldane’s assertion that God was love.

“In this bit of sophistry,” the priest said, “the defendant struck at the cornerstone of the Church. Without a concept of God as justice, and the concomitant sternness which the Holy Spirit reveals in administering his order, Freud would be revived, Darwin preached, and Darrow would be nipping at our robes.”

He even closed on a note of leniency. He would pray that justice be granted the soul of Haldane IV.

Glandis, the boy department member, strode into the arena as purposefully as a gladiator.

“Your honor, before interviewing the defendant I made extensive preparations to establish empathy. Under the assumption that the subject was possibly atavistic, I read the standard text on the personality aberrations which the ancients called ‘being in love,’ Booth Tarkington’s
Seventeen
.

“Assuming that the object of the subject’s libidinal fixation might throw light on the subject’s personality, I interviewed the object. She gave me a veiled message for the subject which was, in essence, that he should read for comfort the sonnets of one E. Browning, a poetess who was noted for her excess of sentimentality in an era renown for an excess of sentimentality. When the message was conveyed, the subject’s eyes lighted and his whole demeanor expressed happiness.

“With acute insight, I knew that I had established empathy and uncovered atavism.

“Following techniques of ingratiation laid down by the psychology of police interrogation, I expressed the view that the penalty for miscegenation might be unduly harsh since the possibility existed that the products of antisocial births might be socially useful.

“Sensing an ally, the subject demonstrated that the theory of selective eugenics was mathematically unsound and that environmental factors might cause its success.

“I would like to point out to the court that the theory of environmental psychology has been pronounced heretical.”

Flaxon responded automatically. “Objection!”

“Sustained,” Malak ruled. “Heresy immaterial.”

“After initial ingratiation,” Glandis continued, “I selected anger-stimuli and aroused subject’s ideo-aggressions by deriding his category. His response was to deride my category for failing to develop individual personality, thus subconsciously championing egoism over conditioned reaction or individualism over the greatest good for the greatest number. It is valid to point out to the court that this concept is non-Aristotelian, anti-Pavlovian. It is sheer Freud!

“During this period of the interview, I glimpsed the malfunctions of a social psychopath. In reviewing reports of other jurors, I noted his preoccupation with the personality of our noble hero, Fairweather I.

“His interest in the ideas of Fairweather I were consistent with a youth in his category; but his antipathy toward the state hero indicated a sadomasochistic love-hate relationship.

“This man sought a personal god! He rejected the socially approved worship of Jesus merely because it was socially acceptable. He rejected Fairweather I merely because he was a state hero. This man wanted a nonintegrated, nonvictorious, nonconformist, non-state-approved god.”

Listening, Haldane felt a chilled fury howl across the icescape of his mind. No police conspiracy this, but vile entrapment by state officers. He had been baited. Even the most casual side remarks of his jurors had been lures for a trap, and this moist-fleshed, fish-lipped lad, seemingly so innocuous, was a master baiter.

“In the routine National-American League question, his reaction, naturally, was negative. He was indifferent to group sports and equivocal about group recreation, a finding amply supported by the data collected without in-depth analysis by the Department of Sociology. But he was
very
interested in the individualistic, competitive, self-aggrandizing sport of judo.

“Your honor, the full extent of the subject’s antisocial orientation came in his answer to the job placement question: he
wanted
a job in the Hell ships!

“Sir, millions have been spent to create in the subject’s mind a neuropsychotic Hellophobia, and that horse… the subject has balked.” Glandis throbbed with incredulous indignation, and his fishface was lifted to the god of mackerels to witness this abomination.

“Then I asked myself, your honor, if the state has failed in this major area of his indoctrination, in how many minor areas must it have failed?

“Here was no mere atavism. I assembled the profile and fed the data into the department’s personality analyzer.

“Your honor, out of 153 items indicating a Fairweather Syndrome, the subject scored on 151. A simple majority is enough to carry.

“The time bomb has not exploded, but it is ticking away. There is no psychosis because there has been no overt action, but there,” he pointed his finger at Haldane, “sits a fully ripened Fairweather Syndrome. The department of psychology is to be complimented for this discovery.”

He turned and faced the judge. “Superficially, the defendant was charming, candid, and persuasive; had it not been for the training given to me by my department, this sociopsychopathic genius would be roaming the solar system unchecked. My initial suspicion was alerted by an idle gesture all others overlooked, the indication of sublimated aggressiveness in his practice of swinging a clenched fist into an open palm.

“May my claim for the department be so entered on the records of the court.”

As the judge pronounced, “Clerk, so enter.” And as the victorious Glandis walked back to resume his seat beside the remaining jurors, Haldane turned to Flaxon. “A question, Counselor. If Fairweather’s such a pariah, why was he permitted to build the pope?”

“The syndrome was not named for the mathematician,” Flaxon said. “It was named after his son, Fairweather II.”

“Who was Fairweather II?”

“A wild-eyed revolutionary who organized an army of dissident professionals and prols to overthrow the state. You can see what a feat that was! You got no further than one girl and one stupid lawyer before you were caught.”

“I never read about it in history books.”

“Do you think the state would publish a manual for revolutionaries? The only people who know about it are those who have to be on guard to detect it, people like lawyers, sociologists, psychologists… some lawyers, that is!

“This case ends the Flaxons. You don’t defend a Fairweather Syndrome, you report it!” He lowered his head to his hands. “Ninety-nine per cent of the lawyers go their lifetime without even hearing about one, and I get one on my fifth pleading.”

One segment of his mind sympathized with the abject man beside him, but curiosity brushed aside his concern not only for Flaxon but for himself as Haldane asked, “What happened to the army?”

“Crushed! Fairweather’s father found out and told the police. They were waiting for him when he struck. The uprisers took over Moscow for a week, blew up a few power stations in America, sacked Buenos Aires, but it was all over in three days.

“One good came of it. They analyzed Fairweather’s personality before they carted him off to Hell, so the state’s been on guard ever since… everybody but me, that is.”

The voice of the bailiff cut across Haldane’s thoughts. “Will the defendant stand?”