Flatlander - Larry Niven [108]
It got rather heated.
Chris Penzler was out of his travel chair, but foam bandaging still bulked out his shirt, and he moved like an old man. He wasn’t inclined to join the discussions. Neither was I. Once I tried to suggest that the length of a trial should depend on the complexity of the case. Nobody much liked that, and in fact Marion Shaeffer insisted that I was biased in the accused’s favor. I dropped it.
Presently Bertha Carmody called us to order, said a few words intended to soothe ruffled feelings, and adjourned us to the courtroom.
* * *
I wasn’t called again. Chris Penzler was. He testified at length as to his relationship to Itch and Naomi on Earth.
He said he had seen Naomi when she had arrived at Hovestraydt City. She had given him a cold glare, and he had returned it, and they had avoided each other since. He repeated that he couldn’t describe what he saw before he was shot. Lunie, Belter, flatlander: he couldn’t say.
He didn’t seem to be trying to hurt Naomi. It was as if he were trying to work out a puzzle with the court’s help.
Defense called Dr. Harry McCavity, who testified that from the nature of the wound, the beam must have spread abnormally. Asked to agree that something other than a message laser had been used—something cobbled together by an amateur, for instance, so that it didn’t collimate very well—McCavity dithered. The hole in Penzler was not that much too big. And, damn him, he raised my suggestion of a drop of oil on the aperture.
They wrapped it up faster than I would have believed.
At eleven hundred the elf woman started her summing up. She pointed out that Naomi had motive, method, and opportunity.
Jurisprudence did not require that motive be proved (I had wondered if that was true in lunar law), but Naomi had motive enough. Circumstances had struck Naomi a terrible blow; she had made a half-mad attempt to escape an intolerable environment; Chris Penzler had blocked it for his own motives. Prosecution made no excuse for Penzler, but his vindictive act had been the straw that broke her mind.
Method? Naomi had been a top computer programmer. Breaking the code of the Hovestraydt City computer wouldn’t be easy, but her needs were not great. She needed only to enter a computer-guarded gun room without leaving a record in the computer memory.
Opportunity? Someone had fired at Penzler from the badlands west of Hovestraydt City. Penzler had seen her; a known psychic had testified that nobody else was in the vicinity. Had Naomi Mitchison fired that beam? Who else?
During his own summing up Boone made a big thing of the missing weapon. The jury must disregard Gil “the Arm’s” testimony as to the absence of other suspects or accept that there was no weapon, either, and thus no murder. The nature of the wound indicated that the weapon was homemade, using skills Naomi Mitchison didn’t have. Gil Hamilton’s talent had missed it and the killer, too.
Prosecution’s counterargument was concise. There had been a laser. Ignore the nature of both weapon and would-be killer; if Hamilton couldn’t find it, the weapon must have been broken up. There were dust pools to hide the parts. Jury must disregard the absence of the laser and consider the presence of a suspect caught out on the moon with an air system going sour.
By shortly after noon the judge was instructing the jury. By thirteen hundred the jury had retired.
We straggled off to lunch. I wasn’t hungry, of course, but I managed to get Bertha Carmody talking around her sandwich.
“I wonder if they’ve really got enough information to make a decision,” I ventured. “The summing up seemed so quick.”
“They’ve got everything they need,” Bertha said. “They’ve got a computer with access to all the records of the trial, dossiers for everyone who was so much as mentioned, and anything in the city library. If a point of law comes up, they can call the judge day or night until they bring in a verdict. What more do they need?”
They needed to have been