“Justice is the Lord’s,” Danvers bellowed. “God will avenge.”
The crowd surged forward dangerously. Danvers backed up several steps. Bracknell saw that it was going to be no use. The trucks were inching through the rear of the mob now. Bringing reinforcements, he thought. He stepped forward. “I’m the one you want,” he said in Spanish. “I’m the man responsible.”
An older man scurried up to Bracknell and peered at him. Turning back to the others, he shouted, “This is he! This is the chief of the skytower!”
The mob flowed forward, surrounding Bracknell. Lara screamed as Danvers dragged her back into the shadows, toward safety. The leader of the mob spat in Bracknell’s face and raised his shovel high in the air.
A shot cracked through the night. Everyone froze into immobility. Bracknell could feel his heart pounding against his ribs. Then he saw soldiers pouring out of the trucks, each of them armed with assault rifles. An officer waved a pistol angrily and told the men of the mob to back away.
“This man is under arrest,” the officer announced loudly. “He is going to jail.”
Bracknell’s knees nearly gave way. Jail seemed much better than having his brains splattered with a shovel.
THE TRIAL
As the crisply uniformed soldiers with their polished helmets and loaded guns bundled Bracknell into one of the trucks, he thought, Of course. They need to blame someone for this catastrophe. Who else? I’m the one in charge. I’m the one at fault.
He was treated with careful respect, as if he were a vial of nitroglycerine that might explode if mishandled. They placed him in the prison hospital, where a team of physicians and psychologists diagnosed Bracknell as suffering from physical exhaustion and severe emotional depression. He was dosed with psychotropic drugs for five of the six months between his arrest and his trial. During those five months, he was allowed no visitors, no television, nor any contact with the outside world, although police investigators questioned him for hours each day.
Skytower Corporation declared bankruptcy. Its board of directors issued a statement blaming the tower’s collapse on the technical director who headed the construction project in Ecuador, the American engineer Mance Bracknell. Several of the board members fled to the lunar city of Selene, where Earthly legal jurisdiction could not reach them.
After five months of imprisonment Bracknell’s interrogators flushed his body of the drugs they had used on him and showed him the written record of his confession. He signed it without argument. Only then was he allowed to speak to an attorney whom the government of Ecuador had appointed to represent him. When Lara was at last allowed to visit him, he had only the haziest of notions about what had happened to him since his arrest. Physically he was in good condition, except that he had lost more than five kilos in weight, his deep tan had faded, and his voice had withered to a whisper. Emotionally he was a wreck.
“I’ll get you the best lawyers on Earth,” Lara told him urgently.
Bracknell shrugged listlessly. “What difference does it make?”
The whole world watched his trial, in the high court in what was left of Quito. The court building had escaped major damage, although there were still engineers who had been brought in from Brazil poking around the building’s foundations; most of the court’s high stately windows, blown out by the shock of the tower’s collapse, had been replaced by sheets of clear plastic.
Skytower Corporation dissolved itself in the face of trillions of dollars of damage claims. Bracknell was too guilt-ridden even to attempt to find himself a lawyer other than the government-appointed lackey. Lara coaxed a family friend to help represent him. The old man came out of retirement reluctantly and told Bracknell at their first meeting that his highest hope was to avoid the death penalty.
Lara was shocked. “I thought international law forbids the death penalty.”
“More than four million deaths are being blamed on you,” the old man said, frowning disapprovingly at Bracknell. “Mass murder, they’re calling it. They want to make an example of you.”
“Why not?” Bracknell whispered.
Although the trial took place in Quito, it was held under the international legal regime. Years earlier, Lara’s lawyer had helped to write the international legal regime’s guiding rules. That did not help much. Nor did Bracknell do much to help himself.
“It’s my fault,” he kept repeating. “My fault.”
“No, it isn’t,” Lara insisted.
“The structure failed,” he told Lara and her lawyer, time and again. “I was in charge of the project, so it’s my responsibility.”
“But you’re not to blame,” Lara insisted each time. “You didn’t deliberately destroy the tower.”
“I’m the only one left to blame,” Bracknell pointed out morosely. “All the others were killed in the collapse.”
“No, that’s not true,” said Lara. “Victor is in Melbourne. He’ll help you.”
At Lara’s importuning Molina flew in from Melbourne. Sitting between his two lawyers on the opening day of the trial, dressed in a state-provided suit and a stiffly starched shirt that smelled of detergent, Bracknell felt a flicker of hope when he saw his old friend enter the courtroom and sit directly behind him, beside Lara. But once the trial began, it became clear that nothing on Earth could save him…
The first witness called by the three-judge panel was the Reverend Elliott Danvers.
The prosecuting attorney was a slim, dark-haired Ecuadorian of smoldering intensity, dressed in a white three-piece suit that fit him without a wrinkle. The video cameras loved his handsome face with its dark moustache, and he knew how to play to the vast global audience watching this trial. To Bracknell he looked like a mustachioed avenging angel. He started by establishing Danvers’s position as spiritual advisor to the people of Ciudad de Cielo.
“Most of them are dead now, are they not?” asked the prosecutor. Since the trial was being held under the international legal regime, and being broadcast even to Selene and the mining center at Ceres, it was conducted in English.
Danvers answered with a low “Yes.”
The prosecutor smoothed his moustache as he gazed up at the cracks in the courtroom’s coffered ceiling, preparing dramatically for his next question. “You were troubled by what you learned about this construction projection, were you not?”
Bit by bit, the prosecutor got Danvers to tell the judges that Bracknell had been using genetically engineered microbes as nanomachines to produce the tower’s structural elements.
The state-appointed defense attorney said nothing, but the lawyer that Lara had hired rose slowly to his feet and called in a tired, aged voice, “Objection. There is nothing illegal about employing genetically engineered microbes. And referring to them as ‘nanomachines’ is prejudicial.”
The judges conferred in hurried whispers, then upheld the objection.
The prosecutor smiled thinly and bowed his head, accepting their decision, knowing that the dreaded term would be remembered by everyone.
“Have such genetically engineered microbes been used in any other construction projects?”
Danvers shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I’m not an engineer…”
“To the best of your knowledge.”
“To the best of my knowledge: no, they have not. The project’s biologist, Dr. Molina, seemed quite proud of the originality of his work. He had applied for a patent.”
The prosecutor turned toward Bracknell with a thin smile. “Thank you, Rev. Danvers.”
Bracknell’s defense attorney got to his feet, glanced at the state-appointed attorney, then said, “I have no questions for this witness at this time.”
Lara, sitting behind Bracknell, touched his shoulder. He turned to her, saw the worried look on her face. And said nothing. Molina, sitting beside her, looked impatient, uncomfortable.
“I call Dr. Victor Molina to the stand,” said the prosecutor, with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of
