The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 15

THREE WEEKS LATER

They held a trial of sorts. Under Fuchs’s own prodding, the people of Ceres picked a judge by sorting through the computerized personnel files and coming up with a woman who worked for Humphries Space Systems as a contracts lawyer. A jury was selected by lot; no one picked was allowed to refuse the duty. For the defense, Fuchs represented himself. No less than the owner and barkeep of the Pub volunteered to prosecute the case.

The trial, held in the Pub itself, took all of forty-five minutes. Practically everyone in Ceres jammed into the rock-walled chamber. Chairs and two tables had been moved up to the bar to accommodate the accused and the counselors. The judge sat on a high laboratory stool behind the bar. Everyone else stood.

Six different witnesses told substantially the same story: Fuchs had asked Buchanan to go to Selene with him for a formal investigation of Ripley’s murder. Buchanan reached for the laser. Fuchs stabbed him with the power tool. Even Buchanan’s two companions admitted that that was the way it had happened.

Fuchs’s punctured beer goblet was presented as evidence that Buchanan had indeed fired his laser with intent to kill.

The only question arose when the prosecutor asked Fuchs why he had come into the Pub armed with the tool that eventually killed Buchanan.

Fuchs admitted openly, “I knew that he was a dangerous man. I knew that he had murdered Niles Ripley —”

The judge, sitting on a high stool behind the bar, snapped, “That’s inadmissible. This trial is about you, Mr. Fuchs, not about Ripley’s death.”

With only the slightest of frowns, Fuchs said, “I was afraid he would be dangerous. I had been told that he had come to the Pub before and started a fight. And that he had several friends with him.”

“So you armed yourself with a lethal weapon?” asked the prosecutor.

“I thought it might be useful as a club, if it came to a fight. I had no intention of using it to stab him.”

“Yet that’s exactly what you did.”

“Yes. When he tried to shoot me I suppose I reacted without thinking of the consequences. I defended myself.”

“Very thoroughly,” the judge grumbled.

The verdict was never in doubt. Fuchs was acquitted, the killing called justifiable self-defense. Then the prosecutor displaced the judge behind the bar and proclaimed that there would be a round of drinks on the house for everybody.

Amanda was delighted with the outcome, but Fuchs was morose for the next several days.

“This isn’t the end of it,” he told her one night as they lay in bed together.

“Lars darling,” said Amanda, “you mustn’t let this get you down so. You acted in self-defense.”

“I really would have gone with him to Selene,” Fuchs said. “But I knew he would never do that. Never.”

“It’s not your fault that you had to kill him. It was self-defense. Everyone knows that. You mustn’t feel bad about it.”

“But I don’t!” He turned to face her. In the darkened room, lit only by the glow of the digital clock numerals in one corner of the wallscreen, he could barely make out the puzzled expression on her lovely face.

“I don’t feel bad about killing that vermin,” Fuchs said, in a low, firm voice. “I knew I would have to. I knew he would never listen to reason.”

Amanda looked surprised, almost fearful. “But Lars—”

“No one would do a thing about it. I knew I was the only one who would bring him to justice.”

“You knew? All along you knew?”

“I wanted to kill him,” Fuchs said, his voice almost trembling with fervor. “He deserved to die. I wanted to kill the arrogant fool.”

“Lars… I’ve never seen you this way.”

“What’s worrying me,” he said, “is Humphries’s reaction to all this. The negotiations for buying out Helvetia are obviously finished. Buchanan was part of his attempt to force us out of the Belt. What is he going to try next?”

Amanda was silent for a long while. Fuchs watched her adorable face, so troubled, so filled with care for him. He almost smiled. The face that launched a thousand spaceships, he thought. Well, at least several hundred.

Yet she was thinking that her husband had turned into an avenging fury. Perhaps only for an hour or so, but Lars had gone out to the Pub deliberately to kill a man. And it didn’t worry him, didn’t frighten him at all.

It terrified her.

What can I do? Amanda asked herself. How can I stop him from becoming a brute? He doesn’t deserve this; it isn’t fair to force him to become a monster. She racked her brain, but she could see only one way back to sanity.

At last she said, “Lars, why don’t you speak directly to Martin?”

He grunted with surprise. “Directly? To him?”

“Face-to-face.”

“Over this distance that’s not possible, really.”

“Then we’ll go to Selene.”

His expression hardened. “I don’t want you that near to him.”

“Martin won’t hurt me,” she said. Tracing a hand across his broad chest, she went on, “And you’re the man I love. You have nothing to fear from Martin or any other man in the universe, on that score.”

“I don’t want you at Selene,” he whispered firmly.

“We can’t go to Earth unless we go through weeks and weeks of reconditioning.”

“The centrifuge,” he muttered.

Amanda said, “I’ll stay here, Lars, if that’s what you want. You go to Selene and talk this out with Martin.”

“No,” he said immediately. “I won’t leave you here.”

“But…?”

“You come to Selene with me. I’ll talk to Humphries, assuming he’ll agree to talk to me.”

Amanda smiled and kissed his cheek. “We can put an end to this before it becomes an out-and-out war.”

Pulling her to him, Fuchs said gently, “I hope so. I truly hope so.”

She sighed. That’s more like it, she thought. That’s more like the man I love.

But he was thinking, It’s Amanda that Humphries wants, nothing less. And the only way he’ll get Amanda is over my dead body.

“She’s coming here?” Martin Humphries asked, hardly daring to believe what his aide had just told him. “Here, to Selene?”

Diane Verwoerd allowed a tiny frown of displeasure to crease her forehead. “With her husband,” she said.

Humphries got up from his high-backed chair and practically pranced around his desk. Despite his aide’s sour look he felt like a little kid anticipating Christmas.

“But she’s coming to Selene,” he insisted. “Amanda is coming to Selene.”

“Fuchs wants to talk to you face-to-face,” Verwoerd said, folding her arms across her chest. “I doubt that he’ll let his wife get within a kilometer of you.”

“That’s what he thinks,” Humphries countered. He turned to the electronic window on the wall behind his desk and tapped at his wristwatch several times. The stereo image on the wide screen flicked through several changes. Humphries stopped it at an Alpine scene of a quaint village with steeply-pitched roofs and a slim church steeple against a background of snow-covered peaks.

That’s ancient history, Verwoerd thought. There hasn’t been that much snow in the Alps since the great avalanches.