The Last Starship From Earth Read online

  “Got one for you, Sergeant,” one of the arresting officers said to the booking officer who sat behind a desk.

  “Name and gene des,” the booking sergeant asked, looking at Haldane with the cold, impersonal gaze the professional usually reserves for the proletarian.

  Haldane, wearing his own mask, answered.

  “What’s the charge, Frawley?” the sergeant asked the policeman.

  “Miscegenation and impregnation, suspicion of. We took the frail to the medical O.D. uptown. Her report should be back from the office by midnight.”

  “Put him in storage,” the sergeant said, “and make out the report.”

  “Just a minute. Sergeant.” The lanky civilian unfolded from the bench and walked over to join them. “May I have a word with the prisoner?”

  “Sure, Henrick,” the sergeant said, “he’s public property.”

  Henrick, the civilian, took a note pad and the stub of a pencil out of his pocket. His movement revealed a tunic. Barely legible under beer or gravy stains, Haldane could read the designation of Communicator, class 4.

  He was thin, florid-faced, red-haired, and freckled. His Adam’s apple protruded obnoxiously. A hint of spittle clustered in the corners of his thin lips, and the odor of whisky coming from his mouth made the odor of the disinfectant mild in comparison. If he had been a dog, the shape of his droopy blue eyes would have put him in the cocker spaniel breed. But he was not a dog; he was a newspaper reporter.

  “My name’s Henrick. I work for the Observer.”

  His announcement held a fatuous note, as if he were pleased with himself for being connected with the newspaper.

  Haldane said, “So?”

  “I heard your name and gene des. There was another M-5, Haldane, who died about the second or third of January this year. If I remember, he was III. That would make you his son, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad he’s dead. He might have helped you. Would you mind giving me the name and the gene des of the female?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I don’t want to work overtime. I want to get home. I can get it off the booking desk but it’ll be midnight before it’s down from uptown. If you don’t tell me, I’ll have to wait around. We don’t get many professionals through here. Very few on impregnation charges, so this is a big story.”

  Haldane remained silent.

  “There’s a bigger reason,” Henrick continued. “I’m a feature writer, not an ordinary leg man sending in reports to the rewrite desk. Whatever way I run the story, that’s the way it’s printed. I can slant it one of two ways. I can play you up as as a thinker too stupid to use protection, and that’ll give the prols a big charge. They like to see a professional make a fool of himself.

  “On the other hand, I can play you up as a gambling man, a good old down-to-earth human being who got a yen for a frail and said, ‘To hell with shaking hands with gloves on!’ That’ll make you a hero to the prols.”

  “What do I care what the proletarians think?”

  “You don’t care now. In another fortnight or so, it will make a difference. You’ll be down there with them.”

  Haldane was struck by the man’s logic as well as his diffident manner. Here was a C-4, a category admitted to the professions less than a decade ago, whose lot could not be a happy one. Day after day he sat in police stations, watching the rejects of humanity pass and trying to weave from the warp and woof a tapestry with a little color, if not of beauty then of “human interest.”

  No doubt Henrick sympathized with the flotsam he encountered, for the odor of whisky that floated around him was a symptom of tensions.

  Thinking of the man before him not as the symbol of all reporters but as an individual with unique problems, carrying his pride as a defense against the reality of his work and shoring that pride, when it faltered, with alcohol, Haldane felt for the first time in his life a compassion for a personality with which he was not familiar.

  Dropping his mask, Haldane asked gently, “Henrick, why do you want to get home?”

  “My mate. She isn’t much, but she worries about me. She thinks I drink too much. Today is her birthday, and I wanted to give her a surprise by being home for dinner.”

  “Henrick, I don’t want you to keep your mate waiting on her birthday.”

  Haldane gave him the name and genealogical designation of Helix. “Treat the girl kindly in your story. Gentleness was her only crime, so be gentle with her.”

  Informality between professionals at their first meeting was gauche, and a request for sympathy, even for a third party, skirted the edge of sentimentality and familiarity. Haldane intended no plea, but he had sensed a secret misery in the gaunt man with the red hair.

  His own compassion sought and found compassion. Henrick reached out and grasped his hand, “Good luck, Haldane.”

  Not only did Henrick grasp his hand, but when Haldane glanced up he noticed the coldness had gone from the desk sergeant’s eyes. Frawley, the policeman, took his arm and said, almost gently, “This way, Haldane.”

  Frawley led him down a corridor to a cell, unlocked it, and led him in. It was a room with wallpaper, a bunk, a chair, and a table with a Bible on it. Except for the bars on the window, it could have been a hotel room.

  Haldane turned to Frawley. “How did you know we were in that apartment?”

  “Your friend, Malcolm, tipped us off. You were using the place with his permission, and he thought he might be picked up as an accessory. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you seem different from the other professionals. You almost act like a prol.”

  With the dubious compliment of the policeman ringing II in his ears, Haldane sat on the edge of the bunk and removed his shoes.

  Out of the tragedy of his arrest, two things had taken place which heartened him. One had happened in the booking office, when his own humanity had established a bridge, however tenuous, with other human beings.

  The other incident had occurred in the apartment when the policewoman had taken Helix away. As he had taken his last earthly look at the face of the girl he loved, he had read the expression on her face, and there had been no terror or anxiety in her eyes. Instead, he had seen pride and a form of exultation, as if she considered her lover a saint and gloried in sharing his martyrdom.

  That night he lay down to the soundest sleep he had slept in months, and he arose refreshed to take delight in breakfast.

  He knew he had come to the Second Ice Age of his mind, but he was getting acclimated to the cold. His sensibilities were frozen and all of his problems were the problems of a corpse. Despair without hope was an anodyne to pain.

  An hour after breakfast, the door of his cell blew inward from the cheerful gust of a fresh breeze, bearing a briefcase, in the form of a smiling young man with blond hair who stuck out a hand in greeting, saying, “I’m Flaxon I, your attorney.”

  As Haldane rose to shake his right hand, he tossed the briefcase on the table, slid the table aside with his free hand, and hooked his foot under the leg of the chair to bring it facing Haldane’s bunk. He was seating himself in the chair facing Haldane before Haldane had resumed his seat on the edge of the bunk.

  He had not wasted a single motion. Verily, Haldane concluded, this man was the most efficient he had ever seen.

  “Before we get down to business, I’ll introduce myself. You don’t have to. I was up at four, this morning, reading the police report and your dossier. You’re the only professional I’ve ever been assigned to. We don’t get many in this court.

  “I’m the first Flaxon. My father was a San Diego law clerk, and, when I showed an aptitude for the law, the state gave me a break. I took a competitive exam at USC and was third in a class of 542. You’re looking at the head of a dynasty.”

  Haldane greeted Flaxon’s biography with a sheepish grin. “From one going down to one coming up, greetings.”

  “Wrong remark, Haldane.” Flaxon’s smile changed to a look of gravity. “Why? It show
s flippant humor about a serious situation which, in turn, reflects an indifference to your social position. You fellows in the categories for two or three generations tend to take your responsibilities to the state far too lightly.

  “We owe it to the state to be in their hitting on every play of the game. Right here, in this district, there are judges who spend more time on tennis courts than in law courts.

  “Take you. Prime example! With all the houses the state provides students for recreation, you invade another category and, Hell’s cold, you don’t even use a contraceptive. And she didn’t! You two were trying to get caught!”

  “They know for sure she is pregnant?”

  “Of course. You’re charged with impregnation.”

  “Have you seen Helix or talked to her?”

  “I have no reason to see her. I’m defending you. Why worry about her, anyway?

  “Now, you’re guilty as charged. No doubt about it, because the impregnation proves the miscegenation, a misdemeanor proves a felony—if that isn’t moving a mountain with a crow bar!

  “In a week or ten days, depending on the docket, you’ll be tried and sentenced. Before trial, you’ll be interviewed by the jurors: a sociologist, a psychologist, and a priest. There is a fourth chosen from the category of the defendant, in this case a mathematician.

  “Our task is to influence that jury.”

  “But, Flaxon, why worry about the jury, or the judge either, if it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m guilty?”

  “Good question. Shows you’re thinking. Answer: our plea will be for clemency.

  “As we say in law, there are stratifications to declassification. Granted you’ll be sterilized and relegated to the prols, clemency may mean the difference between a soft berth on earth or the uranium mines of Pluto. So, the stakes are high.

  “My plan for your defense has two approaches. First, we present all mitigating factors we can discover to temper the judgment of the court. Second, and most important, I intend to create such a favorable impression of you with the jurors that they’ll be begging the judge to grant you clemency.

  “First there are some questions I would like to ask, and one from sheer curiosity coupled with the hope that it might be important: why in the hell didn’t you use a contraceptive?”

  In answer, and picking up the tempo from his lawyer, Haldane rapidly summarized the events surrounding his father’s funeral. “We just didn’t come prepared,” he explained lamely.

  “Good!” Flaxon’s voice was crackling with excitement. “That answer is important. You were overcome by grief. You turned to the girl for consolation. There was no plot to subvert the state’s genetic laws.

  “According to the deposition of your roommate, Malcolm, you and the girl met at the funeral. Since she was at your father’s funeral, she was devoted to your father. You two turned to each other for comfort and consolation in the throes of your great grief.”

  “Flaxon, I hate to throw a discordant note into your approach, but it didn’t happen like that. I was in a state of shock over dad’s death, and Helix acted more to comfort me than from any mutual grief.”

  “The truth of situations is not inherent in the situations, but in the point of view taken by the viewer. You say her behavior was prompted more from concern for you than from mutual grief. I infer that it was prompted by the situation outside of yourselves. My point of view is correct for the trial.

  “We want to keep the act that led to conception in the nature of an accident,” Flaxon explained. “We play down any attraction between you two, because the degree of that attraction is the degree of your primitivism. We want sanitized sex.

  “We can account for subsequent assignations on the theory that you had found something new, different, and refreshing. The girl was not a pro, so we can assume she was a delightful change from the state house fare… Hey, wait a minute!”

  Flaxon’s pell-mell rush skidded to a halt. “When did your father die?”

  “January third.”

  “But she’s only one month pregnant, and it’s April! What the hell! Who was in charge of the security detail in that arrangement? You or she?”

  “She was. It seemed less… indelicate that way.”

  “Lord, did she muff her assignment! If she weren’t killing herself in the act, I’d swear she was trying to hang you… Well, our story stands, except the element of gross stupidity has been offered in addition to the element of grief. On the surface, you two were intellectually incapable of betraying the state Maybe that’s a point in our favor.”

  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.