Lone Star Planet
I assented and he got a bottle of superbourbon out of his desk, with
four glasses. Palme got some water tumblers and brought the pitcher of
ice-water from the cooler.
I noticed that the New Texas Secretary of State filled his three-ounce
liquor glass to the top and gulped it down at once. He might act as
though he were descended from a long line of maiden aunts, but he took
his liquor in blasts that would have floored a spaceport labor-boss.
We had another drink, a little slower, and chatted for a while, and then
Hutchinson said, regretfully that we'd have to go outside and meet the
folks. Outside, our guards--Hoddy, the two Marines, the Rangers who had
escorted us from Palme's office, and Hutchinson's retinue--surrounded
us, and we made our way down the plaza, through the crowd. The
din--ear-piercing yells, whistles, cowbells, pistol shots, the cacophony
of the two dance-bands, and the chorus-singing, of which I caught only
the words: _The skies of freedom are above you!_--was as bad as New
Year's Eve in Manhattan or Nairobi or New Moscow, on Terra.
"Don't take all this as a personal tribute, Mr. Silk!" Hutchinson
screamed into my ear. "On this planet, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a good
barbecue halloweth any cause!"
That surprised me, at the moment. Later I found out that John Hutchinson
was one of the leading scholars on New Texas and had once been president
of one of their universities. New Texas Christian, I believe.
As we got up onto the platform, close enough to the barbecue pits to
feel the heat from them, somebody let off what sounded like a fifty-mm
anti-tank gun five or six times. Hutchinson grabbed a microphone and
bellowed into it: "Ladies and gentlemen! Your attention, please!"
The noise began to diminish, slowly, until I could hear one voice, in
the crowd below:
"Shut up, you damn fools! We can't eat till this is over!"
Hutchinson introduced me, in very few words. I gathered that lengthy
speeches at barbecues were not popular on New Texas.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" I yelled into the microphone. "Appreciative as I
am of this honor, there is one here who is more deserving of your notice
than I; one to whom I, also, pay homage. He's over there on the fire,
and I want a slice of him as soon as possible!"
That got a big ovation. There was, beside the water pitcher, a bottle of
superbourbon. I ostentatiously threw the water out of the glass, poured
a big shot of the corrosive stuff, and downed it.
"For God's sake, let's eat!" I finished. Then I turned to Thrombley, who
was looking like a priest who has just seen the bishop spit in the
holy-water font. "Stick close to me," I whispered. "Cue me in on the
local notables, and the other members of the Diplomatic Corps." Then we
all got down off the platform, and a band climbed up and began playing
one of those raucous "cowboy ballads" which had originated in Manhattan
about the middle of the Twentieth Century.
"The sandwiches'll be here in a moment, Mr. Ambassador," Hutchinson
screamed--in effect, whispered--in my ear. "Don't feel any reluctance
about shaking hands with a sandwich in your other hand; that's standard
practice, here. You struck just the right note, up there. That business
with the liquor was positively inspired!"
The sandwiches--huge masses of meat and hot relish, wrapped in tortillas
of some sort--arrived and I bit into one.
I'd been eating supercow all my life, frozen or electron-beamed for
transportation, and now I was discovering that I had never really eaten
supercow before. I finished the first sandwich in surprisingly short
order and was starting on my second when the crowd began coming.
First, the Diplomatic Corps, the usual collection of weirdies, human and
otherwise....
There was the Ambassador from Tara, in a suit of what his planet
produced as a substitute for Irish homespuns. His Embassy, if it was
like the others I had seen elsewhere, would be an outsize cottage with
whitewashed walls and a thatched roof, with a bowl of milk outside the
door for the Little People ...
The Ambassador from Alpheratz II, the South African Nationalist planet,
with a full beard, and old fashioned plug hat and tail-coat. They were a
frustrated lot. They had gone into space to practice _apartheid_ and had
settled on a planet where there was no other intelligent race to be
superior to....
The Mormon Ambassador from Deseret--Delta Camelopardalis V....
The Ambassador from Spica VII, a short jolly-looking little fellow, with
a head like a seal's, long arms, short legs and a tail like a
kangaroo's....
The Ambassador from Beta Cephus VI, who could have passed for human if
he hadn't had blood with a copper base instead of iron. His skin was a
dark green and his hair was a bright blue....
I was beginning to correct my first impression that Thrombley was a
complete dithering fool. He stood at my left elbow, whispering the names
and governments and home planets of the Ambassadors as they came up,
handing me little slips of paper on which he had written phonetically
correct renditions of the greetings I would give them in their own
language. I was still twittering a reply to the greeting of
Nanadabadian, from Beta Cephus VI, when he whispered to me:
"Here it comes, sir. The z'Srauff!"
The z'Srauff were reasonably close to human stature and appearance,
allowing for the fact that their ancestry had been canine instead of
simian. They had, of course, longer and narrower jaws than we have, and
definitely carnivorous teeth.
There were stories floating around that they enjoyed barbecued Terran
even better than they did supercow and hot relish.
This one advanced, extending his three-fingered hand.
"I am most happy to make connection with Solar League representative,"
he said. "I am named Gglafrr Ddespttann Vuvuvu."
No wonder Thrombley let him introduce himself. I answered in the Basic
English that was all he'd admit to understanding:
"The name of your great nation has gone before you to me. The stories we
tell to our young of you are at the top of our books. I have hope to
make great pleasure in you and me to be friends."
Gglafrr Vuvuvu's smile wavered a little at the oblique reference to the
couple of trouncings our Space Navy had administered to z'Srauff ships
in the past. "We will be in the same place again times with no number,"
the alien replied. "I have hope for you that time you are in this place
will be long and will put pleasure in your heart."
Then the pressure of the line behind him pushed him on. Cabinet Members;
Senators and Representatives; prominent citizens, mostly Judge
so-and-so, or Colonel this-or-that. It was all a blur, so much so that
it was an instant before I recognized the gleaming golden hair and the
statuesque figure.
"Thank you! I have met the Ambassador." The lovely voice was shaking
with restrained anger.
"Gail!" I exclaimed.
"Your father coming to the barbecue, Gail?" President Hutchinson was
asking.
"He ought to be here any minute. He sent me on ahead from the hotel. He
wants to meet the Ambassador. That's why I joined the line."
"Well, suppose I leave Mr. Silk in your hands for a while," Hutchinson
said. "I ought to circulate around a little."
"Yes. Just leave him in my hands!" she said vindictively.
"What's wrong, Gail?" I wanted to know. "I know, I was supposed to meet
you at the spaceport, but--"
"You made a beautiful fool of me at the spaceport!"
"Look, I can explain everything. My Embassy staff insisted on hurrying
me off--"
Somebody gave a high-pitched whoop directly behind me and emptied the
clip of a pistol. I couldn't even hear what else I said. I couldn't hear
what she said, either, but it was something angry.
"You have to listen to me!" I roared in her ear. "I can explain
everything!"
"Any diplomat can explain anything!" she shouted back.
"Look, Gail, you're hanging an innocent man!" I yelled back at her. "I'm
entitled to a fair trial!"
Somebody on the platform began firing his pistol within inches of the
loud-speakers and it sounded like an H-bomb going off. She grabbed my
wrist and dragged me toward a door under the platform.
"Down here!" she yelled. "And this better be good, Mr. Silk!"
We went down a spiral ramp, lighted by widely-scattered overhead lights.
"Space-attack shelter," she explained. "And look: what goes on in
space-ships is one thing, but it's as much as a girl's reputation is
worth to come down here during a barbecue."
There seemed to be quite few girls at that barbecue who didn't care what
happened to their reputations. We discovered that after looking into a
couple of passageways that branched off the entrance.
"Over this way," Gail said, "Confederate Courts Building. There won't be
anything going on over here, now."
I told her, with as much humorous detail as possible, about how
Thrombley had shanghaied me to the Embassy, and about the chase by the
Rangers. Before I was half through, she was laughing heartily, all
traces of her anger gone. Finally, we came to a stairway, and at the
head of it to a small door.
"It's been four years that I've been away from here," she said. "I think
there's a reading room of the Law Library up here. Let's go in and enjoy
the quiet for a while."
But when we opened the door, there was a Ranger standing inside.
"Come to see a trial, Mr. Silk? Oh, hello, Gail. Just in time; they're
going to prepare for the next trial."
As he spoke, something clicked at the door. Gail looked at me in
consternation.
"Now we're locked in," she said. "We can't get out till the
trial's over."
CHAPTER V
I looked around.
We were on a high balcony, at the end of a long, narrow room. In front
of us, windows rose to the ceiling, and it was evident that the floor of
the room was about twenty feet below ground level. Outside, I could see
the barbecue still going on, but not a murmur of noise penetrated to us.
What seemed to be the judge's bench was against the outside wall, under
the tall windows. To the right of it was a railed stand with a chair in
it, and in front, arranged in U-shape, were three tables at which a
number of men were hastily conferring. There were nine judges in a row
on the bench, all in black gowns. The spectators' seats below were
filled with people, and there were quite a few up here on the balcony.
"What is this? Supreme Court?" I asked as Gail piloted me to a couple of
seats where we could be alone.
"No, Court of Political Justice," she told me. "This is the court that's
going to try those three Bonney brothers, who killed Mr. Cumshaw."
It suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time I had heard
anything specific about the death of my predecessor.
"That isn't the trial that's going on now, I hope?"
"Oh, no; that won't be for a couple of days. Not till after you can
arrange to attend. I don't know what this trial is. I only got home
today, myself."
"What's the procedure here?" I wanted to know.
"Well, those nine men are judges," she began. "The one in the middle is
President Judge Nelson. You've met his son--the Ranger officer who
chased you from the spaceport. He's a regular jurist. The other eight
are prominent citizens who are drawn from a panel, like a jury. The men
at the table on the left are the prosecution: friends of the politician
who was killed. And the ones on the right are the defense: they'll try
to prove that the dead man got what was coming to him. The ones in the
middle are friends of the court: they're just anybody who has any
interest in the case--people who want to get some point of law cleared
up, or see some precedent established, or something like that."
"You seem to assume that this is a homicide case," I mentioned.
"They generally are. Sometimes mayhem, or wounding, or simple assault,