by Ben Bova
He worked blindly, numbly, side by side with the few surviving technicians, clerks, maintenance people, cooks, and others who had once been a proud team of builders. Lara worked alongside him, never complaining, like Bracknell and all the others too tired and shocked and disheartened to do much of anything except scrabble in the debris, eat whatever meager rations they could find, and sleep when they were too tired to stand any longer. Grimy, her face smeared with soot, her fingers bloody from digging, her clothes sodden with perspiration, Lara still worked doggedly at rescuing the few who were still alive and dragging out the mangled bodies of the dead.
The third night they saw torches lining the road from Quito, heading toward them.
“Volunteers?” Lara asked, her voice ragged with exhaustion.
“More likely a lynch mob,” said Bracknell, getting up from the rubble he’d been digging in.
“Can you blame them?” said Danvers who was working beside them. “They’re coming to kill everyone here.”
“No,” Bracknell replied, standing up straighter. “It’s me they want. I’m the one responsible for this.”
Lara, her weariness suddenly forgotten, turned her smudged face to Danvers. “You’re a man of god! Do something! Talk to them! Stop them!”
Danvers looked terrified. “Me?”
“There’s no one else,” Lara insisted.
“I’ll go,” Bracknell said grimly. “I’m the one they want.”
“I’ll… I’ll go with you,” Danvers stammered.
“You stay here,” Bracknell said to Lara.
“The hell I will!”
“This is going to be ugly.”
“I’m going where you go, Mance.”
The three of them walked—tottered, really—down the rubble-strewn street to the main road, where the torch-waving mob was marching toward them. Farther down the road, Bracknell could see the headlights of approaching trucks.
The crowd was mainly young men, all of them looking tired and grimy, clothes torn, faces blackened with soot and dirt. They carried shovels, picks, planks of wood. Christ, they look like us, Bracknell said to himself. They’ve been digging for survivors, too.
Danvers fished a small silver crucifix out of his pocket and held it up. In the flickering torchlight it gleamed fitfully. The mob stopped uncertainly.
“My sons,” he began.
One of the men, taller than the others, his eyes glittering with anger and hatred, spat out a string of rapid Spanish. Bracknell caught his drift: We want the men who killed our families. We want justice.
Danvers raised his voice, “Do any of you speak English?”
“We want justice!” a voice yelled from the crowd.
“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 Ea
rth 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 his hat.
Molina got to his feet and walked slowly to the witness chair; he tried to make a smile for Bracknell but grimaced instead.
Once again, the prosecutor spent several minutes establishing Molina’s credentials and his position on the project. Then he asked:
“You left the skytower project before it was completed, did you not?”
“Yes, I did,” said Molina.
“Why is that?”
Molina hesitated a moment, his eyes flicking toward Bracknell and Lara, sitting behind him.
“Personal reasons,” he answered.
“Could you be more specific?”
Again Molina hesitated. Then, drawing in a breath, he replied, “I wasn’t certain that the structures produced by my gengineered microbes were sufficiently strong to stand the stresses imposed by the tower.”
Bracknell blinked and stirred like a man coming out of a coma. “That’s not true,” he whispered, more to himself than to his lawyers.
But Molina was going on, “I wanted more testing, more checking to make sure that the structure would be safe. But the project director wouldn’t do it.”
“The project director was Mr. Mance Bracknell,” asked the prosecuting attorney needlessly. “The accused?”
“Yes,” said Molina. “He insisted that we push ahead before the necessary tests could be done.”
Bracknell said to his attorney, “That’s not true!” Turning to Lara, he said, “That isn’t what happened!”
The chief judge, sitting flanked by his two robed associates at the high banc of polished mahogany, tapped his stylus on the desktop. “The accused will remain silent,” he said sternly. “I will tolerate no disruptions in this court.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor. Then he turned back to Molina, in the witness chair.
“So the accused disregarded your warnings about the safety problems of the tower?”
Molina glanced toward Bracknell, then looked away. “Yes, he did.”
“He’s lying!” Bracknell said to his lawyer. Jumping to his feet, he shouted to Molina, “Victor, why are you lying?”
His lawyer pulled him back down onto his chair while the chief judge leveled an accusatory stare at Bracknell. “I warn you, sir: another such outburst and you will be removed from this courtroom.”
“What difference would that make?” Bracknell snapped. “You’ve convicted me already.”
The judge nodded to the pair of burly soldiers standing to one side of the banc. They pushed past the attorney on Bracknell’s left and grabbed him by his arms, hauling him to his feet.
He turned to glance back at Lara as they dragged him out of the courtroom. She was smiling. Smiling! Bracknell felt his guts churn with sudden hatred.
Lara watched them hustle Mance out of the courtroom, smiling as she thought, At least he’s waking up. He’s not just sitting there and accepting all the blame. He’s starting to defend himself. Or trying to.
THE VERDICT
The trial proceeded swiftly. With Bracknell watching the proceedings on video from a locked and guarded room on the other side of the courthouse, the prosecuting attorney called in a long line of engineers and other technical experts who testified that the skytower was inherently dangerous.
“No matter what safety precautions may or may not have been taken,” declared the somber, gray-haired dean of the technology ethics department of Heidelberg University, “such a structure poses an unacceptable danger to the global environment, as we can all see from this terrible tragedy. Its very existence is a menace to the world.” Bracknell’s attorney called in technical witnesses, also, who testified that all the specifications and engineering details of the skytower showed that the structure had been built well within tolerable limits.
“I personally reviewed the plans before construction ever started,” said the grizzled, square-faced professor of engineering from Caltech. “The plan for that tower was sound.”
“Yet it fell!” snapped the prosecutor, on cross-examination. “It collapsed and killed millions.”
“That shouldn’t have happened,” said the Caltech professor. “It shouldn’t have happened,” the prosecutor repeated, “if the actual construction followed the plans.”
“I’m sure it did,” the professor replied.
“Did the plans call for nanotechnology to be employed in manufacturing the structural elements?”
“No, but—”
“Thank you. I have no further questions.”
As Bracknell sat and seethed in his locked room, the prosecution built its case swiftly and surely. There were hardly any of the skytower crew left alive to testify to the soundness of the tower’s construction. And when they did the prosecutor harped back to the use of nanotechnology.
“Call Victor back to the stand,” Bracknell urged his attorney with white-hot fury. “Cross-examine him. Make him tell the truth!”
“That wouldn’t be wise,” the old man said. “There’s no sense reminding the judges that you used nanomachines.”
“I didn’t! They were natural organisms!”
“Genetically modified.”
“But that doesn’t make any difference!”
The attorney shook his head sadly. “If I put Molina back in the witness stand and he sticks to his story, it will destroy you.”
“If you don’t, I’m destroyed anyway.”
The hardest part of the trial, for Bracknell, was the fact that the judges would not let him see anyone except his attorneys. Every day he sat in that stuffy little isolation room and watched Lara in the courtroom, with Molina now at her side. She would leave with Victor. On the morning that the verdict was to be announced she arrived with Victor.
On that morning, before the proceedings began, the chief judge stepped into Bracknell’s isolation room, flanked by two soldiers armed with heavy black pistols at their hips. After weeks of viewing him only in his black robe up on his high banc, Bracknell was mildly surprised to see that the man was very short and stocky. His skin was light, but he was built like a typical mestizo. His face bore the heavy, sad features of a man about to do something unpleasant.
Bracknell got to his feet as the judge entered the little room.
Without preamble, the judge said in barely accented English, “I am to pass sentence on you this morning. Can you restrain yourself if I allow you back into the courtroom?”
“Yes,” said Bracknell.
“I have your word of honor on that?”
Almost smiling, Bracknell replied, “If you believe that I have any honor, yes, you have my word.”
The judge did not smile back. He nodded wearily. “Very well, then.” Turning, he told the soldiers in rapid Spanish to escort the prisoner into the courtroom.
The courtroom was jammed, Bracknell saw as he came in, escorted by the soldiers. From the video screen in his isolation room he’d been unable to see how many people attended the trial. Now he realized there were reporters and camerapersons from all over the world wedged along both side walls. The benches were packed with people, most of them dour, dark Ecuadorians who stared at him with loathing. Looking for my blood, Bracknell realized.