Chapter 18

The detective pushed his way out of the crowded courtroom before the rest of the crowd started to move. The members of the jury were still filing in, and he knew that no one else would leave the room until the verdict was in.

He didn’t care. He knew what the verdict ought to be. He knew also that juries had occasionally been swayed by histrionics on the part of the defense counsel, and had been persuaded to free guilty men. He knew, too, that prosecutors had railroaded innocent men. But such things as that didn’t happen often in the Belt. A man doesn’t live too long in the Belt unless he’s capable of recognizing Truth when he sees it.

But even if the wrong verdict had been brought in, there would have been nothing he could do about it now. He had done his part. He had done everything he could. He had brought them in. He had testified. All the rest of it was up to the Jury and the Court--those two enigmatic halves of Justice and Judgment.

The point was that this was the perfect time to leave the courtroom. When he reached his office, he could, if he wanted--and, he thought ruefully, he probably would want to, in spite of his pretended indifference--call up to find out what the verdict had been. But, during these few moments, all eyes were on the jury box. No one was watching who left quietly by the side door of the big courtroom.

He moved silently and with assurance in the fractional-gee field of the planetoid. One of the uniformed guards looked at him and smiled, throwing him an informal salute.

The detective returned both. “If any of those news reporters ask which way I went,” he said amiably, “tell ‘em I went thataway.” He gestured over his shoulder with a thumb.

“I ain’t even seen you, Mr. Martin,” said the guard.

The detective waved his thanks and kept going. It wasn’t that he disliked newsmen. Most of them were fairly intelligent, pleasant people. But he didn’t want to be asked any questions right now. He had given them interviews aplenty during the trial, and they could use those, now that the end of the trial had lifted the news ban. They had plenty of quotations from Stan Martin without asking him what he thought of the verdict itself.

Ten minutes later, he was in his own office in the Lloyd’s Area. Helen, his secretary, was just cutting off the phone as he walked into the outer office. She flashed him a big smile.

“They just gave the verdict, Mr. Martin! Guilty all the way down the line--conspiracy, extortion, kidnapping, and all the others. The only ‘not guilty’ verdict was a minor one. They decided that Hedgepeth wasn’t involved in the actual kidnapping itself, and therefore wasn’t guilty of the physical assault of the guard.”

“They’re probably right,” the detective said, “but, as you said, it’s a minor point. It doesn’t much matter whether he was physically present at the time the boy was taken or not; he was certainly in on the plot.” He paused, frowning. “That’s over and done with, except for a possible appeal. And it’s unlikely that that would involve us, anyway. Get Mr. Pelham on the phone, will you? I’ll take it in my office.”

“The Morton case?” she asked.

“Yeah. There’s something fishy about the wreck of the spaceship Morton, and I want Pelham to let me work on it.”

He went on into his office and had barely sat down when the phone hummed. “Yes?” he said, depressing the switch.

“Mr. BenChaim would like to speak to you, sir,” Helen said formally.

“Oh?” In order to have gotten here so quickly, BenChaim, too, must have left before the verdict was delivered. He was hardly more than a minute behind the detective. And that was unusual in a man who was waiting at the trial of the kidnappers of his own son. Still, Moishe BenChaim was an unusual man.

“Tell him to come right on in,” the detective said. “Oh, and Helen ... hold off on that Pelham call for a little while.” He didn’t want to be talking business while BenChaim was in the office.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

A few seconds later, the door opened, and Moishe BenChaim came in. He was not a big man, but he was broad of shoulder and broad of girth, built like a wrestler. He had a heavy, graying beard, and wore it with a patriarchal air. He was breathing rather heavily as he came through the door, and he stopped suddenly to pull a handkerchief from his pocket. He began coughing--harsh, racking, painful coughs that shook his heavy frame.

“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “Damn lungs. Shouldn’t try to move so fast.” He wiped his lips and put the handkerchief away.

The detective didn’t say anything. He knew that Moishe BenChaim had injured his lungs eighteen years before. An accident in space had ruptured his spacesuit, and the explosive decompression that had resulted had almost killed him. He had saved his own life by holding the torn spot with one hand and turning up the air-tank valve full blast with the other. The rough patch job had held long enough for him to get back inside his ship, but his lungs had never been the same, and his eyes were eternally bloodshot from the ruptured and distended capillaries.

“I noticed you’d slipped out of the courtroom,” he went on. “I hope you don’t mind my following you.”

“Of course not, Mr. BenChaim,” the detective said. “Sit down.”

BenChaim sat in the chair across the desk from the detective. “I didn’t wait for the verdict,” he said. “I knew the conviction was certain after you testified.”

“Thanks. My secretary got the news just before you came in. Guilty straight across the board. But your son’s testimony was a lot more telling than mine.”

“Guilty,” BenChaim repeated with satisfaction. “Naturally. What else? I admit my son’s testimony was good,” he continued; “Little Shmuela told his story like a little man up there in the witness-box. Never looked scared, never got mixed up. But Shmuela’s testimony was your testimony too, Mr. Martin. If it hadn’t been for you, he wouldn’t be here to testify, for which I’m grateful to God.” Then he leaned back and spread his hands apart in a gesture of dismissal.

“But that’s all over and done with,” he said. “I came about a different matter.” Again he paused, as if picking his words carefully. “Do you know a man named Barnabas Nguma?”

“Nguma? Yes; I met him once. Why?”

“He was in the courtroom today. He came to see me just before court convened.”

“Oh?” the detective said noncommittally.

“Yes. He claims to represent an organization on Earth which has been trying to hire you for a job there. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” the detective said warily. “What did he want with you?”

“Now, that’s a funny thing,” BenChaim said. “It seems that he’s under the impression that you turned down his job to take on this kidnapping. Is that right?”

“Not exactly,” the detective said tightly. “I was working on your son’s case before he and a couple of other men came out here to talk to me. But they’d written to me long before that.” He wondered what BenChaim was getting at. He didn’t owe any explanations to the industrialist, but, on the other hand, he couldn’t be impolite to him.

“I see,” BenChaim said, nodding his head slowly. “Like most Earthies, Mr. Nguma is suffering under a misapprehension. He seems to think that I have some sort of hold over you, that I was the one who made you turn down his job, so that you’d take my case.”

“Oh? Was he angry because you’d put your own selfish interests ahead of his unselfish ones?” the detective asked with a trace of hard sarcasm in his voice.

“Oh, no,” said BenChaim. “Oh, no. Not at all. He said he understood perfectly. But he wondered if, now that my boy had been returned safely, I might not put a little pressure on you to get you to take his case.”

“And what did you say?”

Moishe BenChaim scowled. “I told him exactly where he could head in. I told him that I had no power over you whatever, that I hadn’t hired you at all, that I didn’t even know that you were working on the case until after you rescued Shmuel. I told him that even if I held the power of life and death over you I would never lift so much as a finger against you. I told him that it was just the other way around, in fact. I told him that you have such a power over me because of what you did for Shmuel that it is I who will jump through your hoop if ordered, not the other way around. I was quite angry.” BenChaim relaxed a little before going on. “Actually, I’m sorry I blew up. He’s a well-meaning man, I think.”