The Sam Gunn Omnibus (95 page)

THE TRIAL STARTED
promptly enough. I begged for more
time to prepare a defense, interview witnesses, check the prosecution’s
published statement of the facts of the case (“And scatter a few bribes around,”
Sam suggested). No go. The IAA refused any and all requests for a delay in the
proceedings. Even their cheerful chief administrator gave me a doleful look and
said, “No can do. The trial starts tomorrow, as scheduled.”

That worried me. Nobody wanted to
appear on Sam’s behalf; there were no witnesses to the alleged crimes that
weren’t already lined up to testify for the prosecution. I couldn’t even dig up
any character witnesses.

“Testify to Sam’s character?” asked
one of his oldest friends. “You want them to throw the key away on the little
SOB? Or maybe you expect me to commit perjury?”

That was the
kindest
response I got.

What worried me even more was the
fact that several hundred “neutral observers” had booked passage to the Moon to
attend the trial; half of them were environmentalists who thirsted for Sam’s
blood; the other half were various enemies the little guy had made over his many
years of blithely going his own way and telling anybody who didn’t like it to
stuff his head someplace where the sun doesn’t shine.

The media sensed blood—and
Sam’s
blood, at that. He had been great material for them for a long time: the little
guy who always thumbed his nose at authority and got away with it. But now Sam
had gone too far, and the kindest thing being said about him in the media was
that he was “the accused mass-murderer of an entire alien species, the man who
wiped out the harmless green lichenoids of Europa.”

If all this bothered Sam he gave no
indication of it. “The media,” he groused. “They love you when you win and they’ll
use you for toilet paper when you don’t.”

I
studied his
round, impish, Jack-o’-lantern face for a sign of concern. Or remorse. Or even
anger at being haled into court on such serious charges. Nothing. He just
grinned his usual toothy grin and whistled while he worked, maddeningly
off-key.

Sam was more worried about the
impending collapse of Asteroidal Resources, Inc. than his impending trial. The
IAA had frozen all his assets and embargoed all his vehicles. The two factory
ships on their way in from the belt were ordered to enter lunar orbit when they
arrived at the Earth-Moon system and to stay there; their cargoes were
impounded by the IAA, pending the outcome of the trial.

“They want to break me,” Sam
grumbled. “Whether I win the trial or lose, they want to make sure I’m flat
busted by the time it’s over.”

And then the Toad showed up,
closely followed by Beryllium Blonde.

WE WERE SITTING
at the defendant’s table in the
courtroom, a very modernistic chamber with severe, angular banc and witness
stand of lunar stone, utterly bare smoothed stone walls and long benches of
lunar aluminum for the spectators. The tables and chairs for the defendant and
prosecution were also burnished aluminum, cold and hard. No decorations of any
kind; the courtroom was functional, efficient, and gave me the feeling of
inhuman relentlessness.

“Kangaroo court,” Sam muttered as
we took our chairs.

The crowd filed in, murmuring and
whispering, and filled the rows behind us. Various clerks appeared. No media
reporters or photographers were allowed in the courtroom but there had been
plenty of them out in the corridor, asking simple questions like, “Why did you
wipe out those harmless little green lichenoids, Sam?”

Sam grinned at the them and replied,
“Who says I did?”

“The IAA, DULL, just about
everybody in the solar system,” came their shouted response.

Sam shrugged good-naturedly. “Nobody’s
heard my side of it yet.”

“You mean you didn’t kill them?”

“You claim you’re innocent?”

“You’re denying the charges against
you?”

For once in his life, Sam refused
to be baited. All he said was, “That’s what this trial is for; to find out who
did what to whom. And why.”

They were so stunned at Sam’s
refusal to say anything more that they stopped pestering him and allowed us to
go into the courtroom. I was sort of stunned, too. I was used to Sam’s nonstop
blather on any and every subject under the Sun. Sphinx-like silence was something
new, from him.

The courtroom was settling down to
a buzzing hum of whispered conversations when the three black-robed judges
trooped in to take their seats at the banc. No jury. Sam’s fate would be
decided by the three of them.

As everybody rose to their feet,
Sam looked at the three judges and groaned. “Buddha on ice-skates, it’s the
Toad.”

His name was J. Everest Weatherwax,
and he was so famous that even I recognized him. Multi-trillionaire, captain of
industry, statesman, public servant, philanthropist, Weatherwax was a legend in
his own time. He had helped to found DULL and funded unstintingly the
universities that joined the consortium. He was on the board of directors of so
many corporations nobody knew the exact number. He was also one the board of
governors of the IAA. His power was truly interplanetary in reach, but he had
never been known to use that power except for other people’s good.

Yet Sam clearly loathed him.

“The Toad?” I whispered to Sam as
we sat down and the chief judge— a comely gray-haired woman with steely
eyes—began to read the charges against Sam.

“He’s a snake,” Sam hissed under
his breath. “An octopus. He controls people. He
owns
them.”

“Mr. Weatherwax?” I was stunned. I had
never heard a harsh word said against him before. His good deeds and public
unselfishness were known throughout the solar system.

“Just look at him,” Sam whispered
back, his voice dripping disgust.

I
had to admit that
Weatherwax did look rather toad-like, sitting up there, looming over us. He was
very old, of course, well past the century mark. His face was fleshy, flabby,
his skin was gray and splotchy, his shoulders slumped bonelessly beneath his
black robe. His eyes bulged and kept blinking slowly; his mouth was a wide
almost lipless slash that hung slightly open.

“God help any fly that comes near
him,” Sam muttered. “Zap! with his tongue.”

Weatherwax’s money had founded
DULL. He had saved the ongoing Martian exploration company when that nonprofit
gaggle of scientists had run out of funding. He had made his money originally
in biotechnology, almost a century ago, then diversified into agro-business and
medicine before getting into space exploration and scientific research in a major
way. He had received the Nobel Peace Prize for settling the war between India
and China. Rumor had it that if he would only convert to Catholicism, the Pope
would make him a saint.

As soon as the chief judge finished
reading the charges, Sam shot to his feet.

“I protest,” he said. “One of the
judges is prejudiced against me.”

“Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge,
glaring at Sam, “you are represented by legal counsel. If you have any protests
to make, they must be made by him.”

Sam turned to me and made a nudging
move with both hands.

I
got to my feet
slowly, thinking as fast as I could. “Your honor, my client feels that the
panel might be less than unbiased, since one of the judges is a founder of the
organization that has brought these charges against the defendant.”

Weatherwax just smiled down at us,
drooling ever so slightly from the corner of his toadish mouth.

The chief judge closed her eyes
briefly, then replied to me, “Justice Weatherwax has been duly appointed by the
International Astronautical Authority to serve on this panel. His credentials
as a jurist are impeccable.”

“Since when is he a judge?” Sam
stage-whispered at me.

“The defense was not aware that Mr.
Weatherwax had received an appointment to the bench, your honor,” I said as
diplomatically as I could.

“Justice.
Weatherwax received his
appointment last week,” she answered frostily, “on the basis of his long and
distinguished record of service in international disputes.”

“I see,” I said meekly. “Thank you,
your honor.” There was nothing else I could do.

“Settling international disputes,”
Sam grumbled. “Like the China-India War. Once he stopped selling bio-weapons to
both sides they
had
to stop fighting.”

“However,” the chief judge said,
turning to Weatherwax, “if the justice would prefer to withdraw in the face of
the defendant’s concern ...”

Weatherwax stirred and seemed to
come to life like a large mound of protoplasm touched by a spark of
electricity.

“I assure you, Justice Ostero, that
I can judge this case with perfect equanimity.” His voice was a deep groan,
like the rumble of a distant bullfrog.

The chief justice nodded once,
curtly. “So be it,” she said. “Let’s get on with these proceedings.”

It was exactly at the point that
the Beryllium Blonde entered the courtroom.

IT WAS AS
if the entire courtroom stopped
breathing; like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, everything and everybody seemed
to stop in their tracks, just to look at her.

Lunar cities were pretty austere in
those days; the big, racy casinos over at Hell Crater hadn’t even been started
yet. Selene City was the largest of the Moon’s communities, but even so it wasn’t
much more than a few kilometers of rock-walled tunnels. Even the so-called
Grand Plaza was just a big open space with a dome sealing it in. Okay, so most
of the ground inside the plaza was green with grass and shrubs. After two days,
who cared? You could rent wings and go flying on your own muscle power, but
there wasn’t much in the way of scenery.

The Beryllium Blonde was
scenery.
She stepped into the courtroom and lit up the place, like her golden hair was
casting reflections off the bare stone walls. The panel of three judges—two
women and the Toad— just stared at her as she walked demurely down the
courtroom’s central aisle and stopped at the railing that separated the lawyers
and their clients from the spectators.

We were all spectators, of course.
She was absolutely gorgeous: tall and shapely beyond the dreams of a teenaged
cartoonist. A face that could launch a thousand rockets—among other things.

She looked so sweet, with those
wide blue eyes and that perfect face. Her glittery silver suit was actually
quite modest, with a high buttoned Chinese collar and trousers that looped
beneath her delicate little feet. Of course, the suit was form-fitting: it
clung to her as if it’d been sprayed onto her body, and there wasn’t a man in
the courtroom who didn’t envy the fabric.

Even Sam could do nothing more than
stare at her, dumbfounded. It wasn’t until much later that I learned why he
called her the Beryllium Blonde: beryllium, a steel-gray metal, quite brittle
at room temperature, with a very high melting point; used mostly as a hardening
agent.

How true.

“Am I interrupting?” she asked, in
a breathy innocent voice.

The chief judge had to swallow
visibly before she found her voice. “No, we were just getting started. What can
I do for you?” This from the woman who was known, back in Australia, as the
Scourge of Queensland.

“I am here to help represent the
prosecution, on a pro bono basis.”

All four of the prosecution’s
expensive lawyers shot to their feet and welcomed her to their midst.

Sam just moaned.

“It goes back a long way,” Sam told
me after the preliminaries had ended and the court had adjourned for lunch. We
had scooted back to the hotel suite we were renting, the two of us desperately
trying to hold the company together despite the trial and embargo and
everything else.

“She tried to screw me out of my
zero-gee hotel, way back when,” he said.

I
wondered how
literally Sam meant his words. He had the solar system’s worst reputation as an
insensitive womanizing chauvinist boor. Yet somehow Sam never lacked for female
companionship. I’ve seen ardent feminists succumb to Sam’s charm. Once in a
while.