Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

Godwin grinned evilly. “Do I? 'Senile’ is from senex, Latin for ‘old man’. I’m an ‘old-man old man.’ ” He laughed. “Well, perhaps I am. But age is a relative thing, Roly. If you leave me out, the average age on this court would be about sixty. And you’re well over that. If it weren’t for me, Roly, you'd be an old man.”

Pendleton’s mouth twitched faintly. “If we can defer the actuarial comparisons for a moment, I think I can finish. I don’t want us to grant certiorari and then find we have to decide whether there is or is not such a thing as psi. And I want to ignore Exhibit Q altogether. Its contents’—or at least the eventual contents of the camera—if any—are not of record. Drago’s insistence to the contrary, we can give it no consideration. Certainly, we cannot open it. Another point: petitioner urges an analogy to wiretapping. What has been done to him, if clairvoyance was in fact used, he calls ‘clairtapping.’ We have held that evidence obtained by wiretapping or by any other unlawful means is inadmissible, in both federal and state courts. Mapp v. Ohio, Berger v. New York. The contention is therefore made that ‘clairtapping’ is a violation of privacy as bad as, if not worse than, wiretapping, and that evidence so obtained must be similarly excluded. I think that there is merit in this contention. In summary, if the rifle was located by clairvoyance, the search may well have been unconstitutional in analogy to wiretapping. If clairvoyance does not exist, then there was no basis on which a valid warrant could have issued at all. Thus there is a possibility that we could decide the case without deciding anything about psi.” He paused and looked down the table. “Mr. Godwin, I yield to you.”

“Thank you, Shelley. It was about time. Several things bother me. Can we decide on the merits without deciding about psi? It’s rather like that Kidd will case in Arizona, back in the sixties, where the testator gave all his money to anybody who could prove the existence of the soul. The judge had to decide whether human beings have souls. Pity we didn’t grant cert on that one. Always wondered whether I’d get a soul out of a 5-4 decision. Sorry, brothers—and sister. An old man likes to ramble. So I’ll just ask a question: why don’t we just open that safe right now and see what’s on the film? Might save a lot of argument and embarrassment later on.”

“You read the testimony,” said Pendleton. “At the moment there’s supposed to be nothing on the film.”

“Then what in tarnation is the good of it?”

“Some kind of image—and don’t ask me what—is eventually supposed to appear on it.”

“When?”

“On Decision Day.”

The Senior Associate Justice snorted. “You expect us to believe that?”

“No.”

“I should think not. Let’s get back to reality. As I view this thing, we’re on the horns of a real dilemma. If we take the case and reverse Tyson’s conviction because there was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, then we have probably ruled that clairvoyance is a real and functional phenomenon. Science arises in anguish. On the other hand, if we rule that clairvoyance doesn’t exist, and that, therefore, there was no invasion of privacy, then the bleeding-heart liberals arise in howling dismay at the official blessing we have now given police use of clairvoyance. Who needs wiretaps anymore? Psi is easier, and the cops will be welcome to use all the psi techniques they can dig up: telepathy, clairvoyance, hexing, prekenners ...”

“What’s a ‘prekenner,’ Judge?” asked Edmonds, fascinated.

“Somebody who previously kens what’s going to happen, so as to set up police traps to catch criminals in the act. I just made up the word. But if Roly can use two words when he means one, surely I can use one word when I mean two. That’s all I wanted to say. You take it, Roly.”

“Thank you, Mr. Godwin,” said Burke coldly. He paused a moment, looking at the chandeliers overhead, as though simplifying and tailoring his thoughts for certain of the less disciplined minds around him.

Edmonds awaited the dissertation with interest. Somehow, of course, it would turn on logic.

In Burke’s early days as a judge on the New Jersey bench, Frankfurter had been his model. But this had changed over the years. Burke (like Cervantes) had finally recognized that every man was the product of his own work. But where Cervantes had been content to permit the process to operate subconsciously, Burke went to the final logical limit. He found in his own past works his best inspiration. As he shaved in the morning, he listened to tapes of his previous decisions. And he listened to the same tapes in his car as he drove to court, and at night put himself to sleep with them.

He had founded the Burke Chair in Logic at Harvard. His famous text, Logic in Appellate Decisions (dedicated to himself) consisted largely of annotated excerpts from his own decisions. He was both ignorant of and indifferent to what others thought of his magnificent narcissism. In fact, he considered himself modest, and sought out situations where his modesty might be displayed, noticed, and commented on. Roland Burke’s long love affair with himself had not dimmed with the passing of time: it was a serene thing, unmarred by lovers’ quarrels. He had no portraits hanging in his office; only mirrors.

Edmonds sometimes wondered at his own reaction to Burke. Far from feeling contempt or derision, he found he envied the famous jurist’s confident, self-centered, doubt-free integration into his codified environment, and his system of logic that so easily resolved all questions into black and white, with no plaguing shades of gray left over.

“Psi,” began Burke, “is hogwash—illogical by its very definition. Yet, as I shall demonstrate, logic requires that we take the case. There are only two possibilities: a) to deny the petition, and b) to grant. If we deny, this sets a precedent that the Supreme Court will refuse to review constitutional questions involving psi. Our refusal would be interpreted by the lower courts as endorsing warrants issuing on clairvoyant information. Such a consequence is clearly unthinkable. This leaves us, therefore, only with the second alternate, b), to grant. Logically, we must grant.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum” murmured Godwin.

Burke ignored him loftily.

“Thank you, Mr. Burke,” said the Chief Justice. “Mr. Moore?”

Nicholas Moore of Louisiana spoke with a soft drawl. “I disagree. This is not the kind of case this court should take. Even if there a federal question—which I doubt —we can turn it down. Since the revision of the Judiciary Act in the twenties, we have been free to turn down practically any case we wish—excepting issues between the states, or the states and the United States government. It’s a question of policy. We can handle no more than a hundred to a hundred fifty cases a year—less than ten percent of the appeals that come to us. Our every decision should throw light on some current judicial problem and state principles for the guidance of the lower courts in thousands of similar cases. We did this with the wiretapping cases, the desegregation cases, the school-prayer cases. But how many cases involving this psi thing are currently pending in the lower courts? None at all, that I’ve heard about.”

“Mr. Blandford?”

“I agree with Moore,” said the Massachusetts justice thoughtfully. “We took considerable interest in this kind of thing in Salem three hundred years ago. We burned people at the stake for less. We weren’t too sure about God, but we certainly believed in the Devil. I hope this isn’t evidence of a trend. We’re not an ecclesiastical court of the middle ages. We can’t go back. I don’t think we should get involved. No, never again.”