The Last Starship From Earth (18 page)

Haldane stood.

Judge Malak leaned forward and studied Haldane with curiosity, as if he wanted to impress on his mind the features of one who possessed the dread syndrome.

When he spoke, the judge seemed detached. “In view of the findings of the court, Haldane IV, it is mandatory that judgment be held against you. However, I am suspending sentence pending your appeal until 2 P.M. tomorrow afternoon, remanding you to the custody of the Church, and may God show justice toward your plea.”

Haldane sat down as the rustle of departing spectators rose around him, the camera lights flicked off, and the deputies closed in. Turning to the wooden-faced Flaxon, he asked, “What court are we appealing to?”

Flaxon rose, put his folio under his arm, and said, “It isn’t us. It’s you, though heaven knows it’s my last chance too. And you aren’t appealing to a court. You’re appealing straight to God.”

He turned and walked away, not briskly, as Haldane looked sadly on the vanishing back of the—first and last of the line of Flaxon.

Franz, he noticed, was already heading through the exit. He’d make the first race at Bay Meadows.

They approached Mount Whitney from the southeast after swinging in a wide arc over Bishop and the western edge of the Inyo Mountains, buttonhooking the arc at Death Valley to soar, almost at right angles, into the massif of the Sierras.

In the front seat of the plane, between Father Kelly and a deputy, Haldane watched the wall of granite before them, vegetation stringing its sides where brooks tumbled from the snow fields. Below them, the moraines of the Panamint and the dunes of Death Valley formed a desolate approach to the City of God.

“There it is,” the priest whispered in awe.

Haldane shared his feeling. They were gliding low enough and close enough to feel the immensity of the mountain atop which perched the cathedral built to house the machine men called the pope.

Drifting toward the cathedral, like still-winged butterflies converging on a single flower, white pilgrim ships began to float beside them, but there was no alteration in the flight path of the black plane carrying Haldane. Petitioners to escape Hell had priority over pilgrims bringing praise; God’s justice was swift.

West of the cathedral was the landing field, shaved from solid granite, on which the ship alighted. It was not much larger than an oversized football field, and it was crowded with pilgrim ships.

Leaving his prisoner to the deputy, Father Kelly jumped from the plane and landed to crouch on his knees, facing the cathedral, his eyes closed, muttering Latin sentences. Haldane and the deputy crawled out as the priest finished his prayer with: “Mea culpa, mea culpa: Haldanus maxima culpas.”

The deputy made a hasty sign of the crossbow but remained standing, his eyes on Haldane. Haldane did nothing. He did not consider the cathedral a house of God but a monument to parental guilt feelings.

Father Kelly rose. “Follow me, my son.”

Together the trio mounted the long flight of steps. They marched past the waiting line of pilgrims who eyed the black uniform of Haldane with hostility because he was going ahead of them in the line.

They were met at the doorway by a gray-cowled monk of the order of Gray Brothers. Father Kelly was greeted respectfully and conversed with the monk in low whispers. All Haldane could catch of their speech was
Deus ex machina
, but he saw Father Kelly hand the monk a card punched with index holes.

The monk took the card and scampered into the shadows of the building.

Father Kelly turned to Haldane. “Brother Jones has been given your trial transcript which is keyed to your dossier, already on file with the pope. He will have it inserted by the time we reach the altar. Come.”

Inside, it was dim and cool, and the air was heavy with oxygen. Haldane, looking upward, could hardly see the ceiling so lofty was the cathedral.

Slowly, setting the tempo of their progress to the stride of Father Kelly, Haldane and the deputy walked down the long nave toward the apse and the high altar which housed the pope.

At the nave side of the transept, the priest halted. “It is mandatory that you make your plea without my intercession. Kneel. Speak directly toward the altar in a normal tone of voice. Give the pope your name and genealogical designation. Ask him to review the findings in your case. Tell him that you seek only justice. Plead any circumstance that you think may alleviate your crime. It is customary to refer to the pope as ‘your excellency.’

“And be brief,” Father Kelly warned, “for others wait for an audience.”

As he moved forward to the kneeling pad, Haldane felt the awe of intense curiosity. No matter what the background of its designer, this computer was the most perfect machine ever devised. It needed no upkeep because it repaired its own defects. It responded to the spoken word in the language of the speaker, and Haldane had heard the rumor, surely apocryphal, that if you spoke to it in pig Latin, it answered in pig Latin.

Its decision was final. It had been known to free murderers and to permit deviationists to walk away from the cathedral with their records cleared.

He went through the ritual prescribed by Father Kelly and finished with his one plea for clemency. “I ask not for justice but for mercy, and this I submit in the name of Our Savior. I loved another with a love that surpassed the understanding of my brothers in Christ.”

Suddenly a great voice issued from the altar, speaking with tones hollow and mechanically resonant, yet carrying a great burden of gentleness. “This love was for Helix?”

“Yes, your excellency.”

There was a silence underlain by the low purr of dynamos, and in that silence hope exploded in the mind of Haldane, flooding his brain with radiance.

That voice had been too gentle to condemn, too kind to wrest an innocent being from his warm, green mother planet and hurl him onto the frozen wastes of Hell. Haldane leaned forward for the words that would set him free, restore Helix to her profession, and give Flaxon back his dynasty.

Then the words came: “It is the judgment of God that the decision of the court is true and just in every respect.”

There was a whirr and a click, irrevocable, ultimate, final. Haldane was so shocked he could not get off his knees and remained on the prayer pad until the deputy, with the priest, came and wrested him forcibly to his feet.

Even the acoustics of the cathedral had changed when the pope delivered his bull, the words rolling through the vast chamber. Dazed, Haldane walked between the priest and the deputy into the bright sunlight and thin air of the mountain top. Once beyond the hypnotic influence of the pope, Haldane felt betrayed, and raw fury surged inside him. He turned on the unsuspecting priest. “If that agglomeration of transistors concocted by a moral idiot is the voice of God, then I deny God and all his works.”

Aghast, Father Kelly turned to him, his ordinarily pious eyes burning with anger. “That’s blasphemy!”

“Indeed,” Haldane agreed, “and what is the Department of the Church going to do about it, sentence me to Hell?”

Haldane’s ironic logic struck the priest with its truth, and the exultation of the righteous returned to his uptilted face. “Yes, my son, for you there is no God. You will feel His absence in the hour-long minutes, dragging into month-long hours, oozing into eon-long months of the eternity of Godless Hell, and you will suffer, and suffer, and suffer.”

Before noon they were back in San Francisco. After lunch, Haldane was returned to the court, and he was surprised to find the courtroom more crowded than the day before. The red lights glowed above the television cameras, the jury was still present, and an air of expectancy hung over the room.

Only Flaxon was absent. Off on some new assignment, Haldane figured, perhaps mopping the courthouse corridors.

Haldane thought that the passing of sentence would be an anticlimax, now that it was known his appeal had been denied, but he suddenly remembered that the sentencing was the point of the dagger. Here was the moment that unified the world into one folk at one folk festival. This was the swish of the headman’s ax, the crack of the breaking neck, the height of the trial. They had come to watch him break under the strain, as he himself had often watched when the trial of a deviationist flashed onto the television screen.

Usually, he remembered, the spectacles began with the fawning, obsequious displays of humility from the defendant, who thanked everyone for a fair trial, often shaking hands with individual jurors, and then there was a rising babble of hysteria as the condemned begged for a mercy which could not be granted. Climax was achieved when the felon fell groveling before the bench, kissing the hem of the judge’s robe, whimpering, moaning, or falling into a dead faint. Such was the standard form, and it was usually adhered to; it was not considered good form and was not satisfying to the public when felons fainted prematurely.

These things were bread and circuses for the mob and the most effective object lesson the executive departments of the state had hit upon to communicate to the people the horrors awaiting the deviationist.

Suddenly he remembered Fairweather II. Certainly the mind that in secret and alone had almost toppled the Weird Sisters had not cowered before this ordeal, and he had the same personality traits as Fairweather II. Pride of tradition ignited the powder of his anger, and a resolution exploded in Haldane’s mind.

He would treat the mob to a different exhibition.

Again the bailiff droned the audience to its feet, the judge entered, and there was the theatrical solemnity of Father Kelly intoning the decision of the pope.

Malak said, “Will the prisoner arise?”

Haldane arose.

“If the prisoner wishes, he may speak to the bar before sentence is passed.” Malak’s fatherly tone throbbed with eagerness.

Now was the moment for fawning overtures to the jury. Now was the time for him to bow in obeisance and rise babbling for mercy. Speaking in a level voice into a microphone, he began:

“I was born to the honored profession of mathematics, fourth in the line of Haldane. If all had gone as planned, I would have solved problems assigned me, would have mated a suitable female, and would have died in honor precisely as my father died, and his father, and his father.”

He paused. That was trite enough and contrite enough.

“Then I met a female whose forfended place was forbidden, but for me she possessed a beauty beyond my telling. As I walked with her in an old world grown suddenly young, I wove her charms into a sorcerer’s spell, and under that spell I saw visions and learned much wisdom, I found the Holy Grail and touched the philosopher’s stone.

“Mark me, now. In my innocence, that spell was of my own weaving, and, in my ignorance, I was the sole instrument of my doom.

“She lifted me to that high plane of self-awareness and self-oblivion once called by some ‘satori’ and by others ‘romantic love.’

“If I sipped from that chalice hemlock and thought it elixir, I put the cup to my own lips. If the song I heard from the throat of my beloved was the song of Circe, then I would turn again to hear that song, for it was piercingly sweet.

“Let it be known to the court that I do not deny this girl.

“So, I was led to a realization of selfhood, and it was my awareness of myself as an individual, not my love for the girl, which has brought me to the threshold of Hell and branded me a votary of Fairweather n. Since I can speak with unique authority, let it be known that I deny this earth and its gods, but that I do not deny Fairweather n.

“In his wisdom and in his gentleness, Fairweather n, the last saint on earth, adjured men to guard their uniqueness, to preserve some hidden portions of their selves, against the moldings of those who would come to us with persuasive smiles and irreproachable logic in the name of religion, mental hygiene, social duty, come with their flags, their Bibles, their money credits, to steal our immortal…”

“That’s enough, felon!” Malak leaned over the bench and shouted to the cameramen behind the wall slits, “Turn off those cameras!”

“Hear him out!” a voice yelled from the audience, and boos and catcalls were beginning when Haldane hurled his last cry of defiance before the red lights switched off: “Down with Soc and Psych! Wreck the pope!”

A phalanx of deputies moved from a side chamber to herd the crowd toward the doors. Haldane was surrounded by uniforms. “Get him out of here,” someone said.

All the strength and defiance which had driven Haldane left him, and he allowed himself to be pulled and shoved into a barred antechamber. A deputy said, “The chief says hold him here until we get the armored car.”

“For Christ’s sake, that’s high level thinking for you,” one complained. “If we move now, we’ll get to the big A before a mob has time to form. If we wait around twenty minutes, he’ll be lynched.”

A deputy turned to Haldane, “I’ve got to hand it to you, fellow. If you’re trying to beat a Hell rap by getting yourself killed, you’re pulling a smart trick. Trouble is, you might take some good men with you.”

Yet they waited, and when they took him from the chamber to the prisoners’ ramp, four cars were drawn up, rifles jutting from ports in their bulletproof windows. It was the first time in his life that Haldane had seen a show of force by the police.

Slowly the procession moved out of the alley. On the civic circle they were met by a heavily armored car with laser guns on the turret, and the procession turned left on Market Street. They drove slowly to allow the sirens to clear the way, and it seemed to Haldane that the spectators were being drawn from the buildings by the sound of sirens to stand woodenly on the sidewalks and watch the procession move along.

Left at the Embarcadero they turned, and always there were people, standing, looking, making no overt show of antagonism toward him. It was as if they were persons in a trance.

As they neared the long, guarded bridge to Alcatraz, Haldane noticed one gesture from the crowd. Before they turned onto the bridge, a woman lifted her hand and waved to him in a gesture of farewell.