Gordon R. Dickson (20 page)

“I think so,” said Wylcoxin. More energetically he added, “Yes, I know I can! If nothing else, I can get word to her when she comes in tomorrow morning. They’ll be calling her to repeat her story to the Committee. She’ll be there tomorrow too, undoubtedly.”

“If you can get word to her this evening on the ship, I’d appreciate that more,” said Jim.

“I should be able to.” Wylcoxin looked at him oddly. “But what do you expect from her? She can’t very well change her story from what it was earlier.”

“I don’t expect her to,” said Jim.

“But you said no one from Earth could help you. That leaves only Ro and that other passenger you brought back from the Throne World,” said Wylcoxin. “Let me warn you that these are almost in the position of being prosecution star witnesses. In short, you don’t have anyone to testify for you.”

“I might have.” Jim smiled slightly. “There’s the Governor of Alpha Centauri III.”

“Him!” Wylcoxin’s eyes lit up. “I’d never thought of him! That’s right—he did put in a good word for your Ro when she wanted to stay aboard the spaceship. Maybe he would speak up in your defense tomorrow… . Want me to get in touch with him?”

Jim shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Leave that to me.”

Wylcoxin shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I just don’t know. But I guess I’m along for the ride. Anything else?”

He looked up at Jim.

“No,” said Jim. “Just get that message to Ro if you can.”

“All right.” Wylcoxin got to his feet. “I’ll be around about half an hour before it’s time for you to be taken into Government Center, and I’ll ride in with you.”

He went over to the door, rattled the doorknob, and pounded on the door panel.

“It’s Wylcoxin!” he shouted through the door. “Let me out!”

After a second the door opened gingerly. Wylcoxin looked over at Jim.

“Well, good night,” he said. “And good luck.”

“Thank you,” said Jim.

Wylcoxin went out, and the door was shut and locked behind him.

Jim lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. For a moment the rush of thoughts that came immediately upon him threatened to overwhelm him. But he stemmed and silenced them with a grim self-control. After a little while, like a soldier in the field and under arms, he slept.

Daniel Wylcoxin came for him at eight-fifteen the following morning and rode along as Jim was transferred by closed car to the Committee room in one of the government buildings at Government Center. The Inquiry, Wylcoxin told him, was to start at nine.

Jim asked the other man only whether he had been able to get in touch with Ro. Wylcoxin nodded.

“They wouldn’t let me out to the ship to see her,” Wylcoxin said, “but I was able to talk into the ship from the guard line outside it, on a field phone they’ve rigged in order to keep in touch with her and that other fellow aboard. I asked her a lot of general questions, ostensibly for answers I needed in acting as your counsel, and slipped the information you wanted given her in between the lines, so to speak.”

“Good,” said Jim.

However, after that, and during the half-hour ride into Government Center in the closed car, Jim withdrew into himself and ignored the questions Wylcoxin put him, to the point where the other man finally got exasperated and forced himself on Jim’s attention by joggling Jim’s elbow.

“Look. Give me some answers, will you?” demanded Wylcoxin. “In half an hour I’m going to have to be up there, theoretically aiding and representing you as your counsel. You owe me some answers! Don’t forget, I got through to Ro for you, and that wasn’t easy. There was absolutely no line of communication open to her except that field telephone from the spaceport outside into your ship.”

Jim looked at him.

“Government Center is less than ten miles from Government Center spaceport,” he said, “isn’t that right?”

“Why … yes,” said Wylcoxin, wondering.

“If I’d been in a building in Government Center, I wouldn’t have needed you to get in touch with Ro,” said Jim. “At that distance, I could’ve talked directly to the ship myself.”

Wylcoxin looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and puzzlement.

“I’m only pointing out,” said Jim quietly, “that there’s no point in my wasting valuable thinking time giving you answers you’re not going to be able to understand, even if you could believe them. As far as the Committee members, Max Holland, and the other witnesses are concerned—it doesn’t matter what they say, or what they ask me. All I’m asking from you, now that you’ve got word to Ro, is to sit by my side and do whatever seems necessary as things come up.”

Jim went back to his thoughts. This time Wylcoxin left him alone with them.

They reached Government Center and the building where the Inquiry was to take place. Jim was kept in a small side room until just before the Committee members were due to appear. Then he and Wylcoxin were taken to their seats in an already filled Committee room.

Jim and Wylcoxin were installed at one of the several tables directly in front of the raised platform with its long table at which the six Committee members would sit. As he came in, he saw, seated separately in the crowd a few rows back from the front row tables, Max Holland and Styrk Jacobsen—the executive heads of the program that had trained him to go to the Throne World—and Ro, as well as a handful of other, minor figures out of his past from the time when he had been selected to be trained and sent.

Ro caught his eye, looking a little pale and anxious, as he came in. She was dressed in a plain white clothlike tunic and skirt, not too remarkably different from the lightweight, summer-colored clothes of the Earth women seated in the same room. But some general effect of her total appearance made her stand out in the crowd, as if spotlighted. Jim’s eyes had adjusted to the height and cleanliness of feature of the Highborn on the Throne World. Now, in spite of himself, the people of his own world, thronging this courtroom, seemed shrunken and small and drab by comparison. Ro, ignoring all the rest, was looking at him anxiously. Jim smiled to reassure her, as he took his seat, necessarily turning his back on her and the rest of those in seats behind him. The six Committee members came in, representatives of their various area sectors on Earth. The audience rose on order, to wait for the members to take their seats; and at the same time, a buzz of excitement ran through them, as there came in with the other members a small, reddish-brown man, who took his seat to the right of Alvin Heinman, representative from the powerful Central European sector. Jim looked at the small man and smiled faintly. But the other only looked back with extreme solemnity. The members seated themselves, and the audience was told they could regain their seats as the Committee went on to open proceedings.

” … And let the records show,” said Heinman a little nasally into the recording sensors built in the table before him, “that the Governor of Alpha Centauri III has consented to sit with this board unofficially, in order to give it the benefit of his experience and knowledge in the matter under Inquiry.”

Heinman rapped on the table with the gavel and called for the government’s Investigating Officer to describe the matter under Inquiry.

The Investigating Officer did so. The word “treason” was carefully avoided, but the Investigating Officer talked a clever circle around it, until there was no doubt left in the minds of those listening to him that this Inquiry had been brought to determine not whether the government should commence treason proceedings against Jim, but whether there was the slightest doubt that the government should not do so. The Investigating Officer sat down again, and Styrk Jacobsen was brought up to answer the questions of the Committee.

These questions had to do mainly with Jim’s background and the procedure which had chosen him from several hundred candidates preselected on a worldwide basis to be the man trained to go to the Throne World.

” … James Keil,” Jacobsen said, “was unusually qualified in many respects. His physical condition was superb—as it needed to be, since we planned to train the man we would send to be a bullfighter. Also, at the time Jim came to our attention, he not only had degrees in history and chemistry, as well as anthropology, but he had established himself as a respectable authority in the field of social and cultural studies.”

“Would you say,” broke in Heinman, “in character he was markedly different from the other candidates?”

“He was a strong individualist. But then, they all were,” said Jacobsen dryly. He was a spare, erect man with silver hair, in his mid-sixties, originally from Odense, Denmark. Jim remembered that Jacobsen, from the first, had taken what seemed to be an instinctive liking to him, as opposed to Max Holland’s immediate, instinctive dislike.

” … That was one of the requirements for the job,” Jacobsen was saying. He went on to list, in order, those requirements as they had originally been laid out. Roughly, they covered unusual physical and mental capacity, emotional stability, and a broad educational background.

“But about this matter of emotional stability,” Heinman pounced again. “Didn’t you find him unusually—say—unsocial? To the point of being noncommunicative and withdrawn from the people around him? What I mean is, wasn’t he from the start pretty much of a loner?”

“Yes. Again,” said Jacobsen, “we wanted someone with exactly those traits. Our man would be plunged into an unfamiliar culture—much more unfamiliar than anything he could encounter here on Earth. We wanted him to be as self-sufficient as possible.”

Jacobsen had not backed up a step. Though Heinman picked up the questioning for some little time, the silver-haired man refused to give ground. His testimony amounted to the fact that Jim was no more and no less than the man the Project had been set up to find, train, and send out.

With Max Holland, who followed Jacobsen before the Committee, the response was entirely different.

” … The other members of the team engaged in the Project,” Holland said, leaning forward over the table, a cigarette burning between his fingers, “weren’t equipped to consider the risk involved in it—the risk to the Earth as a whole, I mean. In resources and population, our world, to the Empire, is like a baby chick to an elephant. The chick’s so small that it’s likely to be safe through being ignored, unless by accident or mistake it gets under one of the elephant’s feet. Then there’s no hope for it. It seemed to me the whole Project ran a serious danger of bringing us under one of the elephant feet of the Empire, either accidentally or by error on the part of the man we were sending in to look at their Throne World. And my uneasiness was increased by the character and attitudes of James Keil himself… .”

Holland, like Jacobsen, was closely questioned by Heinman and a couple of the other Committee members. Unlike Jacobsen, Holland was ready and willing to paint a dangerous picture of Jim. Jim, he testified, had struck him as being socially withdrawn to the point of near-paranoia, self-confident and arrogant to the point of near-megalomania. Then, coldly, he reported the conversation he had had with Jim underneath the stands of the arena on Alpha Centauri III, in which Jim had told him that from then on he would have to make his own decisions.

“Then, in your opinion,” said Heinman, “this man, even before he reached the Throne World, was already determined to ignore the directives given him and do whatever he chose, regardless of whatever consequences to the rest of the people of Earth that might entail?”

“I do,” said Holland as fervently as any bridegroom. That ended his appearance before the Committee.

Ro was called up next. But her appearance consisted only of sitting and listening to a recording that had been made of her own account of what had happened to Jim from the time she had first met him aboard the Princess Afuan’s spaceship until the time in which she had brought him back to the spaceport outside Government Center, Earth.

As the recording ended, Heinman cleared his throat and leaned forward as if to speak to her. But the Governor of Alpha Centauri III, beside him, hastily leaned over in his turn and whispered in the Committee chairman’s ear. Heinman listened and then sank back in his seat. Ro was released from her interview with the Committee without any further questions.

Beside Jim, through all this, Wylcoxin had been fidgeting in his chair. Now he leaned over and spoke urgently, low-voiced to Jim.

“Look!” he said. “At least let me take advantage of your right to cross-question her. That Alpha Centauran Governor made a mistake when he stopped Heinman from asking her questions. It may have been a kindness to her, but it wasn’t any help to you. She wants to testify in your favor. If we get her up there, I’m sure we can make a good impression with her!”

Jim shook his head. In any case, there was no more time to argue, because now he was being called upon to answer the questions of the Committee himself. Heinman began, mildly enough, by reviewing Jim’s qualifications for being sent as an observer to the Throne World. But he drifted from these almost imperceptibly into sensitive territory.

” … Did you at any time have doubts about the wisdom of this Project?” he asked Jim.

“No,” said Jim.

“But at some time between your selection as the man to go and when you arrived at the Throne World, you seemed to have developed such doubts.” Heinman plowed among the notes before him on the table and finally located what it was he sought. “Mr. Holland reports you as saying on Alpha Centauri Ill—and I quote—’… Max, it’s too late for you to interfere now. I’ve been invited. From now on I make my own decisions.’ Is that correct?”

“No,” said Jim.

“No?” Heinman frowned at him over the notes he still held in his hand.

“The wording isn’t correct,” said Jim. “What I actually said was, ‘I’m sorry, Max. But it was bound to come to this sooner or later. From here on out the Project can’t guide me any longer. From now on I have to follow my own judgment.’ “

Heinman’s frown deepened.

“I don’t see any essential difference,” he said.

“Neither did Max Holland, evidently,” said Jim. “But I did—or else I wouldn’t have phrased it that way.”