Overruled

by Hank Davis

  “There’s a certain rebellious feeling, yes. But it’s hardly born yet. It won’t spread unless we let it, and we won’t. By tomorrow afternoon, we’ll be back to normal.

  “Thank you, Justices. This hearing’s concluded, and Mr. Joyce, Mr. Kallimer, and I will stay behind for further discussion.”

  Joyce watched the lesser Justices file out of the hearing room, their manner much less nervous than it had been. Normandy had put some starch back into their spines.

  Joyce, too, felt better. He’d been right in expecting Kallimer and Normandy to have a solution. He was leaving the Law in capable hands.

  * * *

  Normandy waited until the room was empty. Then he turned to Kallimer with an expression of disgust.

  “Well, they believe it. I’d be happier if a few of them hadn’t.”

  Kallimer shrugged. “There’s no telling. If any of them saw through it, they’d be intelligent enough not to show it.”

  Normandy cocked an eyebrow, pursed his lips, and, after a moment, grinned. “That’s a good point.”

  Joyce looked blankly at both of them. “I gather,” he said finally, “that the situation is more serious than was divulged.” He felt a slight return of his old disquiet, but nothing near panic.

  Normandy and Kallimer turned in their chairs. Both of them looked at him speculatively.

  Normandy nodded. “By quite a good bit. It took the engineers a while to realize what was happening, but they took over the rebellion within the first hour. They’re directing it now. We had to bomb the radio station and establish a false transmitter on the same wavelength. It looks very much as though the engineers had a plan ready to use, but not quite this soon. They were caught a little short.”

  Normandy grimaced. “Not short enough, though. We anticipated a little trouble down there, but we were unprepared for the discovery of anything like that. The Guard can’t handle it. I sent in the Army this morning.”

  Kallimer grunted. “You know,” he told Normandy, “I asked Joyce to reconsider his verdict.”

  Normandy’s eyes snapped open. “You did? Why?”

  “We didn’t need any tests, after all. I could smell the trouble in that crowd. It was that thick. They didn’t know it themselves, but they were spoiling for a riot.” He shrugged. “Joyce overruled me, of course. It’s a good thing, too, or we’d never have found out in time just how deep the trouble had dug.”

  Normandy stared thoughtfully off into the distance, his head barely moving as he nodded to himself. “Yes,” he whispered under his breath.

  He looked sharply at Joyce. “How much of this shocks you, Justice?”

  Joyce was looking at the expression on Kallimer’s face. It had become coldly sardonic.

  “I—” He broke off and shrugged in reply to Normandy’s question. “I don’t really know. But I’m sure you’re aware of what you’re doing.” Nevertheless, he was bewildered. He couldn’t quite make out what Kallimer had meant.

  Normandy looked at him steadily, his black eyes watchful. “I’ve always been of two minds about you,” he said in a thoughtful voice. “I believe I chose wisely, but there’s no certainty, with individuals like you.” He grinned in his abrupt way. “But sometimes a calculated risk is justified. Sometimes, only an honest man will do.”

  Joyce’s bewilderment was growing. He understood that Normandy was being much more candid with him than he had ever been before. Vaguely, he was aware that the situation had forced Normandy into it.

  But if Normandy was being forced into drastic steps, then what did that say about Sam Joyce’s ability to do the proper thing in this crisis?

  “There’s something I believe I should tell you,” he said quickly, conscious of a return to his earlier panic. He had to state his position as early in this discussion as possible, before Normandy and Kallimer assumed he could be counted on. “I’m…not sure of exactly what you mean about me,” he went on as Normandy and Kallimer looked at him curiously. “But there’s something you should know.”

  He stopped to choose his words carefully. He had to convince these men that he wasn’t acting on impulse; that he’d thought this out. They deserved an explanation, after having assumed he’d help them. And, too, it was important to him personally. Possibly this was the most important decision of his life.

  “I’ve been Chief Justice for a comparatively long time,” he began. He had; he’d always felt The Messire had a good servant in him, and, up until yesterday, The Messire had seemed to agree.

  He looked down at his hands. “I have a good record. I’ve done my best.

  “You know my history. I began years ago, on a minor bench, and I rose step by step. No one has the skill with his gun or is better in the ritual of Trial than I was in my prime.” He looked up at Normandy and Kallimer, trying to see whether they understood him. “I feel that I’ve been a good Justice; that I’ve served The Messire’s Law as He desired it. But I’ve always known I wasn’t the most brilliant man on the bench. I haven’t delivered many famous opinions, and I’m no lawyer’s lawyer. I’ve simply”—he gestured indecisively—“been a Justice for a long time.” He paused momentarily.

  “But this,” he went on in a low voice, “is beyond my capabilities.” He looked down again. “I know I haven’t the capacity to do my duty properly in this situation. I’d like to resign in Justice Kallimer’s favor.”

  There was a long silence. Joyce did not look up, but sat thinking of the foolish things he’d done and thought during the past two days.

  He looked up, finally, and saw Normandy’s quizzical expression. Kallimer’s face was a nonplussed blank.

  Normandy tented his fingers and blew out a breath over them. “I see.” He looked cryptically at Kallimer, and Kallimer seemed to exchange some silent message with him.

  Kallimer spoke slowly. “Mr. Joyce, I know you well enough to realize this hasn’t been a hasty decision. Would you mind telling me what led you to it?”

  Joyce shook his head. “Not at all. I’ve decided that this is the only possible interpretation of yesterday’s events in the plaza. It seems clear to me that The Messire’s intent was to have me do what I’ve just done.”

  Normandy jerked his head violently, and stared at Joyce. “I’ll be damned!” he exploded.

  Kallimer’s mouth twisted. “This is hardly what I expected to result from our talk yesterday,” he muttered. He looked at Joyce with perverse admiration. Then he spoke to Normandy. “Well, Justice, there’s your honest man.”

  Normandy shot Kallimer one sour look before he turned back to Joyce. His voice grated harshly.

  “That’s all well and good, but you’re not resigning. Not now, at least, and never in Kallimer’s favor. You’ve still got one Trial to run, and Kallimer’s after my job, not yours.”

  “Not until after you’ve retired, Justice,” Kallimer interjected, turning his sardonic smile on Normandy. “I’ve made it clear I have no intention of competing with you. Furthermore, I’m your only natural heir in any case.” He chuckled for the first time in Joyce’s experience. “There aren’t many like us born to each generation, are there, Justice?”

  Joyce sat numbly, unable to decide what he thought of Normandy’s outburst.

  “Justice Normandy—” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “You say I’ve still got one Trial—”

  “Yes!”

  “But, if The Messire has indicated that He no longer considers me competent, the Trial will be prejudiced—”

  Normandy thrust himself out of his chair and away from the table. His eyes were blazing, and his hands trembled. “Damn your Messire! He didn’t meddle with your last trial, did he?”

  “Sir?”

  Normandy cursed again and turned away. “Kallimer, talk to this moron! I’ve had enough.” He stalked out of the hearing room, and the door crashed behind him.

  * * *

  Kallimer was looking after him with a faint look of exasperation tingeing the amusement of his mouth
.

  “He’s getting old, Joyce.” Kallimer sighed. “Well, I suppose the day will come when I’ll have no more patience, either. It’s a shaky pedestal he sits on.”

  Joyce was in a turmoil. He knew his face was pale.

  Kallimer turned back to him. “There’s been an insertion made in your court calendar,” he told him. “Tomorrow, you’ll hold a special mass trial for the engineers the Army will be dragging out of Nyack. They’ll be indicted as ‘members of the people.’ Their origin won’t be specified—no use alarming the nation. Is there? And I suppose there’ll be a variety of charges. I’ll set them up tonight. But the verdict’ll be ‘Completely Guilty’ in every case. You and I and a couple of other Justices will handle the executions.”

  Joyce found himself unable to argue with more than the last few statements. Too much was happening.

  “A mass trial? Here, in New York, you mean. For the Nyack rebels. But that’s illegal!”

  Kallimer nodded. “So are improper indictment and prejudged verdict. But so is rebellion.

  “The folderol of Normandy’s has a rather shrewd point. The rebels will be punished, but the general populace won’t know what for. Only the other rebellious organizations scattered throughout the country will realize what’s happened. It’ll slow down their enthusiasm, giving us time to root them out.”

  Joyce looked down at the floor to hide the expression on his face. Kallimer seemed not at all concerned with breaking the spirit of the Law. Normandy was even more blunt than that.

  It was a frightening step in his logic, but there was only one possible answer. Both of them were acting as though man made the Law, and men administered the final Verdict; as though there were no Messire.

  He looked up at Kallimer, wondering what his face was showing of the sudden emptiness in his stomach. He felt as though he was looking down at the Associate from a great height, or up from the bottom of a pit.

  “What did Normandy mean about my last trial?” he asked in a low voice.

  “First of all, Joyce, bear in mind that The Messire is omniscient. He knows of more crimes than we possibly can. Even if we judge a case incorrectly, it is possible our verdict is nevertheless justified by some other crime of the Accused’s.”

  He looked at Joyce with a flicker of anxiety flashing subtly across his face, leaning even closer, and Joyce’s first emptiness became a twinge of disgust and sickness.

  “I accept that,” Joyce said, the words tasting cottony in his mouth, but wanting to urge Kallimer on.

  Kallimer twitched his shoulders. “Perhaps you do,” he muttered. Joyce appreciated, with a deep, bitter amusement that never came to the surface, just how much Kallimer must hate Normandy for leaving him with this task to perform.

  “In any case,” Kallimer went on, “about the girl, yesterday; Normandy’s son had heard some things from her. A lot of unrest in Nyack; talk; dissatisfaction; that sort of thing. He told his father.

  “It wasn’t the only place we’d heard that from, but it was our only real lead. It was decided that a trial, with a particularly controversial member of the people as the Accused, might bring enough of it to the surface for us to gauge its importance.”

  He stopped and shook his head. “It certainly did. We hadn’t the faintest idea it was that strong, or that close to exploding. Sheer luck we found it out.”

  Joyce looked steadily at Kallimer, hoping his face was calm. “The girl wasn’t guilty.”

  Kallimer’s mouth twitched. “Not of the charge we tried her on, no. Normandy’s son accused her on his father’s order. You were sent down to try the case because we could predict you’d give us the verdict we wanted. I went along to observe.”

  Joyce nodded slowly. “I think I understand, now,” he said.

  * * *

  In the middle of the day, just at noon, Samson Joyce stood at the foot of the high steps behind New York City’s onyx judges’ bench.

  “Ready, Justice?” Kallimer asked him.

  “Yes,” Joyce answered. He replaced the ceremonial gun it its tooled holster.

  Kallimer looked at him again and shook his head. “Justice, if we weren’t in public, I’d offer you my hand. You hit bottom and you’ve come up swinging.”

  Joyce’s lower lip tugged upward at the corners. “Thank you, Justice,” he said, and prepared to walk up the steps on his aching legs.

  * * *

  Emily had been puzzled, too, as he prepared to leave her this morning.

  “Sam, I can’t understand you,” she’d said worriedly, watching him scowl with pain as he stood up from putting on his boots.

  He smiled at her, ignoring the ache in his legs. “Why?”

  “You haven’t slept in two nights, now. I know something new happened yesterday.”

  He bent and kissed her, still smiling.

  “Sam, what is it?” she asked, the tears beginning to show at the corners of her eyes. “You’re too calm. And you won’t talk to me.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps I’ll tell you about it later.”

  * * *

  The steps seemed almost inhumanly high today, though he’d walked up them often. He reached the center of the bench gratefully, and leaned against the parapet. Looking down, he saw the Accused standing in their box. They’d been given new clothing, and an attempt had been made to hide their bandages. They were a sullen, dun-colored knot of men and women.

  He looked across the plaza at the First Family boxes, crowded with the family men and their ladies, and the lesser family boxes flanking them. There was the usual overflow crowd of people, too, and a doubled force of Civil Guards.

  The Accused, the First Families, the lesser families, the people, and even some of the Civil Guards, were all watching him. For all that a number of Justices would go through the full ritual of Trial today, he was the only one who wore the Suit.

  When he’d come home to Emily last night, she’d asked him what had happened, looking up at his calm face.

  “I went to Chapel after the hearing,” he’d told her, and now he seemed to stand there again.

  Lowery, one of Manhattan’s Associate Justices, began to read the indictments. It was only then that Joyce realized there’d been applause for him and his Associates, and that he’d automatically instructed Lowery to begin.

  He listened to the solemn beat of the words in the plaza.

  This was Trial. Once again, men stood before The Messire, and, once again, the Justices endeavored to act as proper instruments of His justice.

  Thirty years of trials had brought him here, in his Suit. In that time, The Messire had thought well of him.

  But Kallimer and Normandy had planted the dirty seed of doubt in his mind, and though he knew them for what they were, still, the doubt was there. If the girl had been innocent, how had he been permitted to execute his unjust sentence upon her?

  Kallimer had given him an answer for that, but Kallimer had given him too many answers already. It wasn’t until he stood in Chapel, watching the candles flicker, that he understood where the test would lie.

  If there was no Messire—the thought bewildered him, but he clung to it for argument’s sake—then every particle of his life was false, and the ideal he served was dust.

  If there was an Ultimate Judge—and how many noons, in thirty years, had brought him the feeling of communion with his Judge—then Joyce knew where to make his appeal.

  He looked across the plaza at Joshua Normandy’s box, and reflected that Normandy could not begin to guess the magnitude of what was undergoing Trial today.

  He put his hand inside his vest and closed his fingers around the butt of his Grennell. It was his gun. It had served him as he had served The Messire; efficiently, without question.

  Here was where the test came; here where men prayed to The Messire for the ultimate, infallible judgment.

  The Messire knew the guilty, and the innocent; punished the one and protected the other. Joyce was only His instrument, and Trial the opportunity for His judgment
to become apparent.

  He whispered to himself: “I pray my verdict is correct, but if it is not, I pray that justice prevail at this trial.” He took out the gun.

  He turned quickly, and fired in Kallimer’s direction. He fired across the plaza at Joshua Normandy. Then he began to fire at random into the First Family boxes, seeing Normandy collapse in his box, hearing Kallimer’s body tumble backward off the bench, and knowing, whether he was right or wrong, that whatever happened now, The Messire had not, at least, reversed his verdict.

  This was the Truth he’d lived for.

  AFTERWORD

  As we have often heard, truth is stranger than fiction (and it pays better, too). Algis Budrys was in the editorial offices of If, an sf magazine which published consistently good work in the Fifties and Sixties, winning three Hugo Awards for Best Prozine (even if they did buy my first story in 1968) to meet with the editor, who was unavoidably detained that day. While waiting, he saw a painting by Frank Kelly Freas leaning against the wall, and decided to impress the editor, when he showed up, by writing a story based on the cover right then and there, so he sat down at an unoccupied desk with a typewriter and waxed creative. When the editor finally returned, Budrys offered him the story, but was told that the painting illustrated a story by Frank Riley with the title of “The Executioner,” and it was going to be in an upcoming issue, so If could not use the Budrys story. Fortunately, the happy ending arrived when John W. Campbell bought the story for Astounding Science-Fiction (and likely paid better, too), and not only did the January 1956 ASF print Budrys’ story, come out before the April 1956 If, but Freas illustrated that story, too. I would like to have run Riley’s story alongside Budrys’ in this book, but was overruled (where have I heard that word before?). Fortunately you can not only read the Riley “Executioner,” but see the fateful cover as well by going to Gutenberg.org and browsing through the “R’s.” And to see another story by Mr. Riley, check out “The Cyber and Justice Holmes” within these pages.

  —HD

  •

  Algis Budrys (1931–2008) was the name under which Algirdas Jonas Budrys wrote most of his eight novels and over one hundred and thirty short stories, and novelets sometimes as Algis J. Budrys and A. J. Budrys, though he also used a number of pseudonyms, one of which, “John A. Sentry,” is a free translation of his Lithuanian name into English. To friends and 1950s science fiction fandom, he was usually known as “Ajay.”