The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

“Because he’s here.”

“You’re assuming that he came here because of his own will, sir and doctor.”

Vomact smiled the wise crafty smile of his family; it was almost a trademark of the Vomact house.

“I am assuming all the things which I cannot otherwise prove.

“First, I assume that he came here naked out of space itself, driven by some kind of force of which we cannot even guess.

“Second, I assume he came here because he wanted something. A woman named Elizabeth, who must already be here. In a moment we can go inventory all our Elizabeths.

“Third, I assume that the Lord Crudelta knew something about it. He has led troops into the building. He began raving when he saw me. I know hysterical fatigue, as do you, my brothers, so I condamined him for a night’s sleep.

“Fourth, let’s leave our man alone. There’ll be hearings and trials enough, Space knows, when all these events get scrambled out.”

Vomact was right.

He usually was.

Trials did follow.

It was lucky that Old Earth no longer permitted newspapers or television news. The population would have been frothed up to riot and terror if they had ever found out what happened at the Old Main Hospital just to the west of Meeya Meefla.

Twenty-one days later, Vomact, Timofeyev and Grosbeck were summoned to the trial of the Lord Crudelta. A full panel of seven Lords of the Instrumentality were there to give Crudelta an ample hearing and, if required, a sudden death. The doctors were present both as doctors for Elizabeth and Rambo and as witnesses for the Investigating Lord.

Elizabeth, fresh up from being dead, was as beautiful as a newborn baby in exquisite, adult feminine form. Rambo could not take his eves off her, but a look of bewilderment went over his face every time she gave him a friendly, calm remote little smile. (She had been told that she was his girl, and she was prepared to believe it, but she had no memory of him or of anything else more than sixty hours back, when speech had been reinstalled in her mind; and he, for his part, was still thick of speech and subject to strains which the doctors could not quite figure out.)

The Investigating Lord was a man named Starmount.

He asked the panel to rise.

They did so.

He faced the Lord Crudelta with great solemnity. “You are obliged, my Lord Crudelta, to speak quickly and clearly to this court.”

“Yes, my Lord,” he answered.

“We have the summary power.”

“You have the summary power. I recognize it.”

“You will tell the truth or else you will lie.”

“I shall tell the truth or I will lie.”

“You may lie, if you wish, about matters of fact and opinion, but you will in no case lie about human relationships. If you do lie, nevertheless, you will ask that your name be entered in the Roster of Dishonor.”

“I understand the panel and the rights of this panel. I will lie if I wish - though I don’t think I will need to do so” - and here Crudelta flashed a weary intelligent smile at all of them - ”but I will not lie about matters of relationship. If I do, I will ask for dishonor.”

“You have yourself been well trained as a Lord of the Instrumentality?”

“I have been so trained and I love the Instrumentality well. In fact, I am myself the Instrumentality, as are you, and as are the honorable Lords beside you. I shall behave well, for as long as I live this afternoon.”

“Do you credit him, my Lords?” asked Starmount.

The members of the panel nodded their mitered heads. They had dressed ceremonially for the occasion.

“Do you have a relationship to the woman Elizabeth?”

The members of the trial panel caught their breath as they saw Crudelta turn white: “My Lords!” he cried, and answered no further.

“It is the custom,” said Starmount firmly, “that you answer promptly or that you die.”

The Lord Crudelta got control of himself. “I am answering. I did not know who she was, except for the fact that Rambo loved her. I sent her to Earth from Earth Four, where I then was. Then I told Rambo that she had been murdered and hung desperately at the edge of death, wanting only his help to return to the green fields of life.”

Said Starmount: “Was that the truth?”

“My Lord and Lords, it was a lie.”

“Why did you tell it?”

“To induce rage in Rambo and to give him an overriding reason for wanting to come to Earth faster than any man has ever come before.”

“A-a-ah! A-a-ah!” Two wild cries came from Rambo, more like the call of an animal than like the sound of a man.

Vomact looked at his patient, felt himself beginning to growl with a deep internal rage. Rambo’s powers, generated in the depths of space 3, had begun to operate again. Vomact made a sign. The robot behind Rambo had been coded to keep Rambo calm. Though the robot had been enameled to look like a white gleaming hospital orderly, he was actually a police robot of high powers, built up with an electronic cortex based on the frozen midbrain of an old wolf. (A wolf was a rare animal, something like a dog.) The robot touched Rambo, who dropped off to sleep. Doctor Vomact felt the anger in his own mind fade away. He lifted his hand gently; the robot caught the signal and stopped applying the narcoleptic radiation. Rambo slept normally; Elizabeth looked worriedly at the man whom she had been told was her own.

The Lords turned back from the glances at Rambo.

Said Starmount, icily: “And why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted him to travel through space.”

“Why?”

“To show it could be done.”

“And do you, my Lord Crudelta, affirm that this man has in fact traveled through space 3?”

“I do.”

“Are you lying?”

“I have the right to lie, but I have no wish to do so. In the name of the Instrumentality itself, I tell you that this is the truth.”

The panel members gasped. Now there was no way out. Either the Lord Crudelta was telling the truth, which meant that all former times had come to an end and that a new age had begun for all the kinds of mankind , or else he was lying in the face of the most powerful form of affirmation which any of them knew.

Even Starmount himself took a different tone. His teasing, restless, intelligent voice took on a new timbre of kindness.

“You do therefore assert that this man has come back from outside our galaxy with nothing more than his own natural skin to cover him? No instruments? No power?”

“I did not say that,” said Crudelta. “Other people have begun to pretend I used such words. I tell you, my Lords, that I planoformed for twelve consecutive Earth days and nights. Some of you may remember where Outpost Baiter Gator is. Well, I had a good Go-captain, and he took me four long jumps beyond there, out into intergalactic space. I left this man there. When I reached Earth, he had been here twelve days, more or less. I have assumed, therefore, that his trip was more or less instantaneous. I was on my way back to Baiter Gator, counting by Earth time, when the doctor here found this man on the grass outside the hospital.”

Vomact raised his hand. The Lord Starmount gave him the right to speak, “My sirs and Lords, we did not find this man on the grass. The robots did, and made a record. But even the robots did not see or photograph his arrival.”

“We know that,” said Starmount angrily, “and we know that we have been told that nothing came to Earth by any means whatever, in that particular quarter hour. Go on, my Lord Crudelta. What relation are you to Rambo?”

“He is my victim.”

“Explain yourself!”

“I computered him out. I asked the machines where I would be most apt to find a man with a tremendous lot of rage in him, and was informed that on Earth Four the rage level had been left high because that particular planet had a considerable need for explorers and adventurers, in whom rage was a strong survival trait. When I got to Earth Four, I commanded the authorities to find out which border cases had exceeded the limits of allowable rage. They gave me four men. One was much too large. Two were old. This man was the only candidate for my excitement. I chose him.”