The Judge

by Randy Singer

  Victoria and the Swami stole a look toward shore. “Sounds good,” Victoria said, pulling her snorkel over her face and taking off.

  “I’m with her,” the Swami said.

  After five minutes of snorkeling, the contestants regrouped around Kareem.

  “Did you see that turtle?” the Swami asked. “He was huge.”

  “I saw him,” Dr. Kline said.

  “And those . . . like angelfish that are purple and gold—what are they called?”

  “Will options two or three involve any risk of the producers going public with the blackmail material they have against us?” Kareem directed his question toward Finney with the same take-no-prisoners look he wore in court during Finney’s cross-examination.

  Finney met his gaze. “If we tell McCormack and Murphy that we’ve leaked information to the press, it will probably keep them from hurting anyone. But I would expect them to retaliate by making the blackmail information, as you call it, public. The same would be true if we go to the authorities, unless we could get the authorities to conduct some kind of surprise raid and shut the rest of the show down.”

  “On what basis?” Kline asked.

  “That’s the problem,” Finney said, swishing his hands back and forth in the water. “Right now, our evidence is pretty thin.”

  “I’d rather die than have that blackmail information released.” Kareem looked from one contestant to the next, making sure everyone realized how serious he was.

  Which didn’t stop the Swami. “Dude, what could be that bad?”

  “I said I’d rather die than have it revealed,” Kareem said. He cut an imposing figure, his sculpted pecs glistening in the sun, his furrowed brow hooding his eyes.

  “I get that,” the Swami said. “But it just feels like we’re playing right into their hands. I don’t see how anything could be that bad.”

  “It is.”

  Nobody spoke for a beat. “I know the feeling,” Dr. Kline said. “I’d survive if my information became public, but my career wouldn’t. I’d rather figure out a way to ensure our safety that doesn’t compromise that information.”

  Finney glanced at the camera crew again. A few of them watched the contestants intently. “I’ve been thinking about a plan,” Finney explained softly, “that probably wouldn’t risk that information becoming public for anyone but me.”

  He could tell immediately that he had Kareem’s and Victoria’s attention. He provided the details as quickly as possible, pointing into the water and out to the horizon as he spoke.

  When they all agreed, Victoria swam off toward the shed that housed the snorkel gear. A split second later, the Swami took off in hot pursuit. Finney removed his flippers and walked toward the beach with Kareem.

  “There really is some amazing stuff out there,” Finney said.

  Kareem didn’t respond. Instead, he stared toward the shore as if Finney had never spoken.

  “’Course, if you can’t swim, it’s a little hard to see the best stuff.”

  Kareem took a few more steps, still ignoring Finney. “It was adultery,” he said, his voice so low that Finney wasn’t sure he had heard the man right. “Almost ten years ago—a one-weekend deal.” They walked a few more steps in silence. “My wife never found out. My kids don’t know. What’s amazing is that the show’s producers somehow found out.”

  Finney looked straight ahead as well, sensing that for some reason Kareem didn’t want to share this face-to-face.

  “They had me hooked up to that lie detector and asked me a few preliminary questions. As a Muslim, how could I defend clients I knew were guilty? That type of thing.”

  Finney thought about his own preliminary questions—the ones about Nikki he had refused to answer.

  “Then, out of the blue, they showed me a picture of the woman. I denied it, but the lie detector probably bounced off the chart.” Kareem paused, still stunned by the ambush. “Ten years,” he said. “I thought it was ancient history.”

  It was uncanny, Finney thought, the amount of preshow investigation these guys had done on each contestant. “I don’t know how they found out about my sins either,” Finney said. “Because of my negligence, a drug dealer was released. Recently, he killed a woman.”

  “I dishonored Allah,” Kareem said. “I betrayed my wife.” They were now getting dangerously close to shore. Kareem stopped. Finney did the same. They stood there for a moment, facing the shore, water dripping from their bodies.

  Finney bent over and washed out his mask. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

  “Because you’re going to stick your neck out for me,” Kareem said, “and I want you to know how critical this is to me.” But before Finney could get warm and fuzzy, his Muslim friend continued. “And if anybody finds out about my adultery, I’ll hold you personally responsible. Whatever you do, don’t put them in a position where they need to release that lie detector information. It would destroy my family.” He paused, but Finney sensed he wasn’t done. “I’d rather die first. In fact, Allah may require it.”

  The camera crews on the beach had moved in too close for Finney to risk saying what he really felt. He wanted to talk about forgiveness and about Kareem confessing the matter to his wife, but all that would have to come later, if at all. For now, he could only say something that would be innocuous if overheard.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Finney said.

  “Good.” Kareem started toward the shore, a half step ahead of Finney, his mask and attached snorkel shoved on top of his head. He took it off and plastered his wet hair back, the water dripping from his broad shoulders. To Finney, he looked like a Navy SEAL emerging from a special mission.

  Except that Kareem couldn’t swim. The Muslim was full of surprises, Finney thought.

  41

  Dr. Henri Fetaya was a diminutive man with short, curly brown hair, and he stayed in perpetual motion. Finney got tired just watching him. Fetaya was beamed into the Paradise Courtroom by the wonders of satellite technology, his larger-than-life face captured on the large screen situated in the jury box. This would be a high-tech cross-examination befitting a scientist of Fetaya’s caliber, an Ivy League microbiology professor whose list of peer-reviewed articles ran more than three pages long.

  Dr. Kline took her turn with the witness first, comfortably discussing the basics of scientific theories and Darwinian evolution as if she and Fetaya were old friends. Finney found himself scrambling just to keep up with the terminology, struggling to comprehend the scientific code that peppered their language. Next to him, Kareem stared at the large flat-screen monitor as if he could intimidate a witness thousands of miles away.

  For most of her ten minutes, Victoria’s questions drew out a crisp and forceful critique of creationism and its recently developed first cousin, intelligent design. “It is,” the witness scoffed, “just the latest in a series of wild swings by a losing prizefighter hoping for a big knockout punch.”

  “Has the punch landed?” Kline asked.

  Fetaya smiled. “Absolutely not. It’s been an impressive roundhouse right, with some credentialed scientists actually signing on, but in the end—” he shook his head—“nothing but air.”

  After several minutes of kicking around intelligent-design straw men, Kline went for her own knockout punch. “So what does that tell you about whether some kind of divine being initiated life as we know it?”

  Fetaya sat up straighter in his seat, fully engaged. “Many scientists jump on the agnostic bandwagon at this point. But that is not where science leads me.”

  Fetaya looked directly into the camera. “There is reason and there is faith, and I believe both are necessary for ultimate truth. Science allows us to investigate the natural world through observation, experiment, and theory. Science allows us to understand the world around us, but it does not give our world meaning. As humans, we long to find a purpose in what we observe. And we ultimately learn that this purpose comes from outside science, from a transcendent being who d
esigned a world that actually works and then turned it loose, free from any dictatorial whims.”

  As Fetaya lectured, Finney watched Kline’s face tighten. The response had taken her completely by surprise. Theistic evolution. She had only a few minutes to undo the damage. Finney marveled at the cunning of the show’s producers. They had found a scientist who would alienate all the contestants, and Kline had walked right into their trap.

  “The self-sufficiency of nature does not mean that God doesn’t exist,” Fetaya continued, talking rapidly and shifting in his seat as his excitement increased. “It only means that God fashioned a world in which free and independent beings can evolve into ever-higher life forms. It’s a world where God loves us enough to give us the ultimate freedom to embrace Him or not, to evolve toward Him or away from Him.”

  “Are you done?” Kline interjected gruffly as soon as Fetaya paused for breath.

  “Not quite,” Fetaya responded evenly. His bright-blue eyes twinkled as he realized the mischief he was creating in the courtroom. “I didn’t get a chance to give you my punch line, a phrase I first heard articulated by a distinguished professor of biology at Brown University.” Fetaya paused ever so briefly, just long enough to punctuate his next sentence. “I believe in Darwin’s God.”

  Kline stiffened and launched some rapid-fire questions challenging the logic of Fetaya’s conclusions. Was this a God who left everything to chance, including the evolution of humans, or a God who preordained each step of the evolutionary process? If the former, how could Fetaya say that God loved humans if it wasn’t even a sure thing that humans would one day exist? And if the latter, how could Fetaya claim to believe in the random mutation and natural selection process if Darwin’s God was secretly guiding the entire process?

  As they sparred, Kline didn’t hide her contempt for the witness. Finney took some perverse pleasure in her discomfort, though he didn’t much care for the happy little biologist either. Finney believed in a God who designed the human race and called humans His masterpiece. Finney’s God didn’t spin a primitive world into existence and then sit back and watch it evolve. But Fetaya had a quick smile and a winning way. Finney had seen too many cases where a lawyer tried to annihilate an expert as sharp as Dr. Fetaya, only to end up choking on his or her own questions.

  Maybe Finney could fake a coughing fit in the middle of his cross-examination.

  “Your time is up,” Javitts said to Victoria Kline.

  “One more question, Judge Javitts.”

  Javitts banged his gavel and looked stern, just like a real TV judge. “I said your time is up.”

  “So to sum up, Dr. Fetaya, you acknowledge that the scientific evidence does not support the theory of intelligent design, yet you still claim to believe in an intelligent designer?”

  “I said your time is up,” Javitts said, raising his voice.

  Kline scoffed and returned to her seat. “Pass the witness,” she said with contempt.

  Kareem took the floor next and used an old trick that Finney had seen many times before—he kept the witness answering questions outside his main area of expertise. Finney sat back and enjoyed the show. Sitting at the counsel table was better than being on the witness stand when the Muslim was on the prowl.

  “You have studied enough physics, sir, to know that our universe is incredibly fine-tuned so that just the right conditions exist to create and sustain life. Is this true?”

  “I am not an expert in physics,” Fetaya replied, “but I know the concepts you’re referring to.”

  “Well, you are familiar with the concept of gravity, aren’t you?”

  Fetaya rose up in indignation. “Yes. Of course.”

  “And you know that if you alter the ratio of gravity to electromagnetism ever so slightly, our sun could not exist?”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Or if the nuclear strong force in the universe is weakened just a little, we would have only hydrogen and no other chemicals?”

  “Yes. I understand that to be true.”

  “Or if we strengthen the nuclear strong force ever so slightly, it would yield a universe without atoms. Correct?”

  Fetaya did his best to look bored. “Yes.”

  Kareem, decked out in another tailored Italian suit (his fourth one so far, by Finney’s count), took a step closer to the television monitor. He had no notes for his examination and never took his eyes from the screen in front of him. “In the formation of the universe, the balance of matter to antimatter had to be accurate to one part per ten billion for the universe to arise. And if the expansion rate of the Big Bang had been one billionth of a percent larger or smaller, the universe would be incapable of sustaining life. Am I correct, Dr. Fetaya?”

  “I’m not sure about your exact numbers,” the witness said, taking a sip of water. Very casual. He gave the camera an I’m-not-flustered look. “But the gist of what you’re saying is correct. I’m just not sure it proves what you think it does.”

  Kareem stared at the monitor for a moment as if trying to decide whether he should chase that thought or not. Eventually, he walked over to an easel and rolled it to the middle of the room. “Can you see this?” he asked Dr. Fetaya.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m going to start by writing the number one on the board.” Kareem did this and then turned back to the witness. “Now I’m going to start adding zeros until you tell me to stop. And here’s what the zeros represent: there are more than thirty separate physical or cosmological constants that require precise calibration in order to produce a universe that sustains life. You are going to tell me—approximately—what the odds are that all these constants were fine-tuned this way by random chance. So one zero would represent a one-out-of-ten chance. Two zeros would be one out of a hundred. Et cetera. Are you ready?”

  Fetaya started shaking his head as if it were the most ridiculous idea he had ever heard. “I can’t do that, Mr. Hasaan. It makes no sense to do it.”

  “You can’t do it because the number of zeros won’t even fit on this board. Am I right?”

  “No, Mr. Hasaan. The problem is not the size of the board but the assumption in your question.” Fetaya then launched into a long lecture about the multiverse theory—the thought that ours is not the only universe in existence, that there are billions or even an infinite number of other universes, and therefore one universe is bound to have these types of parameters. It just happens to be ours.

  An exasperated Kareem finally cut in. “Dr. Fetaya, I have a very limited amount of time. I’ve asked you about the way our universe appears to be fine-tuned for life. Is your response to simply imagine an infinite number of other universes that are not?”

  “It’s not just my response,” Fetaya replied, his frustration starting to show. “It’s also the thinking of the best minds in physics today. We cannot assume that we are the only universe in existence.”

  “Have you or any of these brilliant minds observed any of these other universes?”

  “No. Of course not. We are confined in time and space to our own.”

  “Would you agree that belief in a billion unseen universes requires a certain amount of blind faith?”

  “Objection,” Dr. Kline said, her face dark. “These questions distort this entire school of thought. And while he’s at it, why doesn’t Mr. Hasaan ask a few questions about biology—the actual area of expertise for the witness?”

  “I’ll sustain the objection,” Javitts replied. “And, Mr. Hasaan, your time has now expired.” Javitts then turned to Finney. “Your witness, Judge.”

  Finney’s mind was still reeling with the terms and numbers that Kareem had tossed around for the last ten minutes. He couldn’t wait to see the Muslim zero in on the biochemistry aspects. But now it was Finney’s turn—Mr. B Minus in general sciences. He felt like Charlie Brown in the cartoon strip where Linus is describing what he sees in the clouds—a map of the British Honduras, the stoning of Stephen with the apostle Paul standing to one side. A
nd Charlie Brown? “I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsey, but I changed my mind.”

  Finney stood to his full height and looked at Javitts. He coughed quickly to the side—it seemed to always hit him when he was nervous. “I yield my time to the gentleman from Lebanon,” Finney said.

  Kline jumped up. “He can’t do that.”

  So much for my sailing buddy. “Judge, I can either have Mr. Hasaan whisper questions in my ear that I will then ask the witness or we can let him ask the witness directly. I suggest that things might go smoother if we just let Mr. Hasaan continue.”

  “No!” came a voice from the back. “Cut!” Bryce McCormack walked to the front of the courtroom, taking over as self-appointed judge. “This isn’t the United States Senate. We don’t yield our time to others.”

  Finney turned to confront him, and McCormack apparently decided to take a more accommodating approach. “Good television isn’t necessarily two people discussing terms that the rest of us don’t understand. Judge, you may think you’re not as qualified as Mr. Hasaan or Dr. Kline, but your approach might be exactly the thing that connects with the viewers.”

  McCormack turned back to Javitts before Finney could respond. “Let’s start with you calling time on Kareem, and we’ll take it from there.”

  “I’ll just yield my time again,” Finney said.

  But McCormack was already walking toward the back of the courtroom. “And Judge Javitts will just overrule that request.”

  42

  “You ever read Darwin’s journal from his time on board the HMS Beagle?” Finney asked.

  “Many times,” Dr. Fetaya said, shifting to get more comfortable. He leaned back in his chair as if Finney were a lightweight. Which I am, Finney thought.

  “Do you remember a statement in that journal where Darwin said he was amazed at the amount of ‘creative force’ displayed on the small, barren, and rocky islands of the Galápagos?” Finney stole a glance at Dr. Kline, who seemed to be enjoying this spectacle way too much. She jotted some notes with her right hand and propped her left elbow on the table, her fist resting against her cheek. The Swami, sitting next to her, gave Finney a thumbs-up.