“Six fingers. Jerry.”
“Five, Boss.”
“Six fingers. Jerry. I give you cigarette. Six.”
“Five, Boss. Jerry not cheat.”
Pomfrey spread his hands. “Will the court accept him?”
The court did. Martha van Vogel sighed. Jerry could not count very well and she had been afraid that be would forget his lines and accept the bribe. But he had been promised all the cigarettes he wanted and chocolate as well if he would remember to insist that five was five.
“I suggest,” Pomfrey went on, “that the matter has been established. Jerry is an entity; if he can be accepted as a witness, then surely he may have his day in court. Even a dog may have his day in court. Will my esteemed colleagues stipulate?”
Workers, Incorporated, through its battery of lawyers, agreed-just in time, for me judge was beginning to cloud up. He had been much impressed by the little performance.
The tide was with him; Pomfrey used it. “If it please the court and if the counsels for the respondent will permit, we can shorten these proceedings. I will state the theory under which relief is sought and then, by a few questions, it may be settled one way or another. I ask that it be stipulated that it was the intention of Workers, Incorporated, through its servants, to take the life of my client.”
Stipulation was refused.
“So? Then I ask that the court take judicial notice of the well known fact that these anthropoid workers are destroyed when they no longer show a profit; thereafter I will call witnesses, starting with Horace Blakesly, to show that Jerry was and presumably is under such sentence of death.”
Another hurried huddle resulted in the stipulation that Jerry had, indeed, been scheduled for euthanasia.
“Then,” said Pomfrey, “I will state my theory. Jerry is not an animal, but a man. It is not legal to kill him-it is murder.”
First there was silence, then the crowd gasped. People had grown used to animals that talked and worked, but they were no more prepared to think of them as persons, humans, men, than were the haughty Roman citizens prepared to concede human feelings to their barbarian slaves.
Pomfrey let them have it while they were still groggy. “What is a man? A collection of living cells and tissues? A legal fiction, like this corporate ‘person’ that would take poor Jerry’s life? No, a man is none of these things. A man is a collection of hopes and fears, of human longings, of aspirations greater than himself-more than the clay from which he came; less than the Creator which lifted him up from the clay. Jerry has been taken from his jungle and made something more than the poor creatures who were his ancestors, even as you and I. We ask that this Court recognize his manhood.”
The opposing attorneys saw that the Court was moved, they drove in fast. An anthropoid, they contended, could not be a man because he lacked human shape and human intelligence. Pomfrey called his first witness-Master B’na Kreeth.
The Martian’s normal bad temper had not been improved by being forced to wait around for three days in a travel tank, to say nothing of the indignity of having to interrupt his researches to take part in the childish pow-wows of terrestrials.
There was further delay to irritate him while Pomfrey forced the corporation attorneys to accept B’na as an expert witness. They wanted to refuse but could not-he was their own Director of Research. He also held voting control of all Martian-held Workers’ stock, a fact unmentioned but hampering.
More delay while an interpreter was brought in to help administer the oath-B na Kreeth, self-centered as all Martians, had never bothered to learn English.
He twittered and chirped in answer to the demand that he tell the truth, the whole truth, and so forth; the interpreter looked pained. “He says he can’t do it,” he informed the judge.
Pomfrey asked for exact translation.
The interpreter looked uneasily at the Judge. “He says that if he told the whole truth you fools-not ‘fools’ exactly; it’s a Martian word meaning a sort of headless worm-would not understand it.”