They stopped whispering at the door, turned right, and ascended to the
bench, bearing themselves like images in a procession, Ruiz first, then
himself and then Janiver. They turned to the screen so that the public
whom they served might see the faces of the judges, and then sat down. The
court crier began his chant. They could almost feel the tension in the
courtroom. Yves Janiver whispered to them:
"They all know about it."
As soon as the crier had stopped, Max Fane approached the bench, his face
blankly expressionless.
"Your Honors, I am ashamed to have to report that the defendant, Leonard
Kellogg, cannot be produced in court. He is dead; he committed suicide in
his cell last night. While in my custody," he added bitterly.
The stir that went through the courtroom was not shocked surprise, it was
a sigh of fulfilled expectation. They all knew about it.
"How did this happen, Marshal?" he asked, almost conversationally.
"The prisoner was put in a cell by himself; there was a pickup eye, and
one of my deputies was keeping him under observation by screen." Fane
spoke in a toneless, almost robotlike voice. "At twenty-two thirty, the
prisoner went to bed, still wearing his shirt. He pulled the blankets up
over his head. The deputy observing him thought nothing of that; many
prisoners do that, on account of the light. He tossed about for a while,
and then appeared to fall asleep.
"When a guard went in to rouse him this morning, the cot, under the
blanket, was found saturated with blood. Kellogg had cut his throat, by
sawing the zipper track of his shirt back and forth till he severed his
jugular vein. He was dead."
"Good heavens, Marshal!" He was shocked. The way he'd heard it, Kellogg
had hidden a penknife, and he was prepared to be severe with Fane about
it. But a thing like this! He found himself fingering the toothed track of
his own jacket zipper. "I don't believe you can be at all censured for not
anticipating a thing like that. It isn't a thing anybody would expect."
Janiver and Ruiz spoke briefly in agreement. Marshal Fane bowed slightly
and went off to one side.
Leslie Coombes, who seemed to be making a very considerable effort to look
grieved and shocked, rose.
"Your Honors, I find myself here without a client," he said. "In fact, I
find myself here without any business at all; the case against Mr.
Holloway is absolutely insupportable. He shot a man who was trying to kill
him, and that's all there is to it. I therefore pray your Honors to
dismiss the case against him and discharge him from custody."
Captain Greibenfeld bounded to his feet.
"Your Honors, I fully realize that the defendant is now beyond the
jurisdiction of this court, but let me point out that I and my associates
are here participating in this case in the hope that the classification of
this planet may be determined, and some adequate definition of sapience
established. These are most serious questions, your Honors."
"But, your Honors," Coombes protested, "we can't go through the farce of
trying a dead man."
"_People of the Colony of Baphomet_ versus _Jamshar Singh, Deceased_,
charge of arson and sabotage, A.E. 604," the Honorable Gustavus Adolphus
Brannhard interrupted.
Yes, you could find a precedent in colonial law for almost anything.
Jack Holloway was on his feet, a Fuzzy cradled in the crook of his left
arm, his white mustache bristling truculently.
"I am not a dead man, your Honors, and I am on trial here. The reason I'm
not dead is why I am on trial. My defense is that I shot Kurt Borch while
he was aiding and abetting in the killing of a Fuzzy. I want it
established in this court that it is murder to kill a Fuzzy."
The judge nodded slowly. "I will not dismiss the charges against Mr.
Holloway," he said. "Mr. Holloway had been arraigned on a charge of
murder; if he is not guilty, he is entitled to the vindication of an
acquittal. I am afraid, Mr. Coombes, that you will have to go on
prosecuting him."
Another brief stir, like a breath of wind over a grain field, ran through
the courtroom. The show was going on after all.
* * * * *
All the Fuzzies were in court this morning; Jack's six, and the five from
the constabulary post, and Ben's Flora and Fauna, and the four Ruth
Ortheris claimed. There was too much discussion going on for anybody to
keep an eye on them. Finally one of the constabulary Fuzzies, either
Dillinger or Dr. Crippen, and Ben Rainsford's Flora and Fauna, came
sauntering out into the open space between the tables and the bench
dragging the hose of a vacuum-duster. Ahmed Khadra ducked under a table
and tried to get it away from them. This was wonderful; screaming in
delight, they all laid hold of the other end, and Mike and Mitzi and
Superego and Complex ran to help them. The seven of them dragged Khadra
about ten feet before he gave up and let go. At the same time, an
incipient fight broke out on the other side of the arc of tables between
the head of the language department at Mallorysport Academy and a
spinsterish amateur phoneticist. At this point, Judge Pendarvis, deciding
that if you can't prevent it, relax and enjoy it, rapped a few times with
his gavel, and announced that court was recessed.
"You will all please remain here; this is not an adjournment, and if any
of the various groups who seem to be discussing different aspects of the
problem reach any conclusion they feel should be presented in evidence,
will they please notify the bench so that court can be reconvened. In any
case, we will reconvene at eleven thirty."
Somebody wanted to know if smoking would be permitted during the recess.
The Chief Justice said that it would. He got out a cigar and lit it. Mamma
Fuzzy wanted a puff: she didn't like it. Out of the corner of his eye, he
saw Mike and Mitzi, Flora and Fauna scampering around and up the steps
behind the bench. When he looked again, they were all up on it, and Mitzi
was showing the court what she had in her shoulder bag.
He got up, with Mamma and Baby, and crossed to where Leslie Coombes was
sitting. By this time, somebody was bringing in a coffee urn from the
cafeteria. Fuzzies ought to happen oftener in court.
* * * * *
The gavel tapped slowly. Little Fuzzy scrambled up onto Jack Holloway's
lap. After five days in court, they had all learned that the gavel meant
for Fuzzies and other people to be quiet. It might be a good idea, Jack
thought, to make a little gavel, when he got home, and keep it on the
table in the living room for when the family got too boisterous. Baby, who
wasn't gavel-trained yet, started out onto the floor; Mamma dashed after
him and brought him back under the table.
The place looked like a courtroom again. The tables were ranged in a neat
row facing the bench, and the witness chair and the jury box were back
where they belonged. The ashtrays and the coffee urn and the ice tubs for
beer and soft drinks had vanished. It looked like the party was over. He
was almost regretful; it had been fun. Especially for seventeen Fuzzies
and a Baby Fuzzy and a little black-and-white kitten.
There was one unusual feature; there was now a fourth man on the bench, in
gold-braided Navy black; sitting a little apart from the judges, trying to
look as though he weren't there at all--Space Commodore Alex Napier.
Judge Pendarvis laid down his gavel. "Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready
to present the opinions you have reached?" he asked.
Lieutenant Ybarra, the Navy psychologist, rose. There was a reading screen
in front of him; he snapped it on.
"Your Honors," he began, "there still exists considerable difference of
opinion on matters of detail but we are in agreement on all major points.
This is quite a lengthy report, and it has already been incorporated into
the permanent record. Have I the court's permission to summarize it?"
The court told him he had. Ybarra glanced down at the screen in front of
him and continued:
"It is our opinion," he said, "that sapience may be defined as differing
from nonsapience in that it is characterized by conscious thought, by
ability to think in logical sequence and by ability to think in terms
other than mere sense data. We--meaning every member of every sapient
race--think consciously, and we know what we are thinking. This is not to
say that all our mental activity is conscious. The science of psychology
is based, to a large extent, upon our realization that only a small
portion of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness,
and for centuries we have been diagraming the mind as an iceberg,
one-tenth exposed and nine-tenths submerged. The art of psychiatry
consists largely in bringing into consciousness some of the content of
this submerged nine-tenths, and as a practitioner I can testify to its
difficulty and uncertainty.
"We are so habituated to conscious thought that when we reach some
conclusion by any nonconscious process, we speak of it as a 'hunch,' or an
'intuition,' and question its validity. We are so habituated to acting
upon consciously formed decisions that we must laboriously acquire, by
systematic drill, those automatic responses upon which we depend for
survival in combat or other emergencies. And we are by nature so unaware
of this vast submerged mental area that it was not until the first century
Pre-Atomic that its existence was more than vaguely suspected, and its
nature is still the subject of acrimonious professional disputes."
There had been a few of those, off and on, during the past four days, too.
"If we depict sapient mentation as an iceberg, we might depict nonsapient
mentation as the sunlight reflected from its surface. This is a
considerably less exact analogy; while the nonsapient mind deals,
consciously, with nothing but present sense data, there is a considerable
absorption and re-emission of subconscious memories. Also, there are
occasional flashes of what must be conscious mental activity, in dealing
with some novel situation. Dr. van Riebeek, who is especially interested
in the evolutionary aspect of the question, suggests that the introduction
of novelty because of drastic environmental changes may have forced
nonsapient beings into more or less sustained conscious thinking and so
initiated mental habits which, in time, gave rise to true sapience.
"The sapient mind not only thinks consciously by habit, but it thinks in
connected sequence. It associates one thing with another. It reasons
logically, and forms conclusions, and uses those conclusions as premises
from which to arrive at further conclusions. It groups associations
together, and generalizes. Here we pass completely beyond any comparison
with nonsapience. This is not merely more consciousness, or more thinking;
it is thinking of a radically different kind. The nonsapient mind deals
exclusively with crude sensory material. The sapient mind translates sense
impressions into ideas, and then forms ideas of ideas, in ascending orders
of abstraction, almost without limit.
"This, finally, brings us to one of the recognized overt manifestations of
sapience. The sapient being is a symbol user. The nonsapient being cannot
symbolize, because the nonsapient mind is incapable of concepts beyond
mere sense images."
Ybarra drank some water, and twisted the dial of his reading screen with
the other hand.
"The sapient being," he continued, "can do one other thing. It is a
combination of the three abilities already enumerated, but combining them
creates something much greater than the mere sum of the parts. The sapient
being can imagine. He can conceive of something which has no existence
whatever in the sense-available world of reality, and then he can work and
plan toward making it a part of reality. He can not only imagine, but he
can also create."
He paused for a moment. "This is our definition of sapience. When we
encounter any being whose mentation includes these characteristics, we may
know him for a sapient brother. It is the considered opinion of all of us
that the beings called Fuzzies are such beings."
Jack hugged the small sapient one on his lap, and Little Fuzzy looked up
and murmured, "_He-inta?_"
"You're in, kid," he whispered. "You just joined the people."
Ybarra was saying, "They think consciously and continuously. We know that
by instrumental analysis of their electroencephalographic patterns, which
compare closely to those of an intelligent human child of ten. They think
in connected sequence; I invite consideration of all the different logical
steps involved in the invention, designing and making of their
prawn-killing weapons, and in the development of tools with which to make
them. We have abundant evidence of their ability to think beyond present
sense data, to associate, to generalize, to abstract and to symbolize.
"And above all, they can imagine, not only a new implement, but a new way
of life. We see this in the first human contact with the race which, I
submit, should be designated as _Fuzzy sapiens_. Little Fuzzy found a
strange and wonderful place in the forest, a place unlike anything he had
ever seen, in which lived a powerful being. He imagined himself living in
this place, enjoying the friendship and protection of this mysterious
being. So he slipped inside, made friends with Jack Holloway and lived
with him. And then he imagined his family sharing this precious comfort
and companionship with him, and he went and found them and brought them
back with him. Like so many other sapient beings, Little Fuzzy had a
beautiful dream; like a fortunate few, he made it real."
The Chief Justice allowed the applause to run on for a few minutes before
using his gavel to silence it. There was a brief colloquy among the three
judges, and then the Chief Justice rapped again. Little Fuzzy looked
perplexed. Everybody had been quiet after he did it the first time, hadn't
they?
"It is the unanimous decision of the court to accept the report already
entered into the record and just summarized by Lieutenant Ybarra, TFN, and
to thank him and all who have been associated with him.
"It is now the ruling of this court that the species known as _Fuzzy fuzzy
holloway zarathustra_ is in fact a race of sapient beings, entitled to the
respect of all other sapient beings and to the full protection of the law
of the Terran Federation." He rapped again, slowly, pounding the decision
into the legal framework.
Space Commodore Napier leaned over and whispered; all three of the judges
nodded emphatically. The naval officer rose.
"Lieutenant Ybarra, on behalf of the Service and of the Federation, I
thank you and those associated with you for a lucid and excellent report,
the culmination of work which reflects credit upon all who participated in
it. I also wish to state that a suggestion made to me by Lieutenant Ybarra
regarding possible instrumental detection of sapient mentation is being
credited to him in my own report, with the recommendation that it be given
important priority by the Bureau of Research and Development. Perhaps the
next time we find people who speak beyond the range of human audition, who
have fur and live in a mild climate, and who like their food raw, we'll
know what they are from the beginning."
Bet Ybarra gets another stripe, and a good job out of this. Jack hoped so.
Then Pendarvis was pounding again.
"I had almost forgotten; this is a criminal trial," he confessed. "It is
the verdict of this court that the defendant, Jack Holloway, is not guilty
as here charged. He is herewith discharged from custody. If he or his
attorney will step up here, the bail bond will be refunded." He puzzled
Little Fuzzy by hammering again with his gavel to adjourn court.
This time, instead of keeping quiet, everybody made all the noise they
could, and Uncle Gus was holding him high over his head and shouting:
"The _winnah_! By unanimous decision!"