“Having heard these things, Marylyn and Kent, step forward and join hands.”
They did. The ceremony was short and simple; the couple then walked from the courtroom under the beaming smile of the judge.
A burly guard next to Ross pointed at the groom. “Look,” she said sentimentally. “He’s crying. Cute!”
“I don’t blame the poor sucker,” Ross flared, and then, being a man of conscience, wondered suddenly if that was why, on Halsey’s Planet, women cried at weddings.
A clerk called: “Dear, let’s have those egalitarians front and center, please. Her honor’s terribly rushed.”
Helena was escorted forward from one side, while Ross and Bernie were jostled to the fore from the other. The judge turned from the happy couple. As she looked down at the three of them the smile that curved her lips turned into something quite different. Ross, quailing, suddenly realized that he had seen just that expression once before. It was when he was very, very young, when a friend of his mother’s had come bustling into the kitchen where he was playing, just after she had smelled, and just before she had seen, the long-dead rat he had fetched up from the abandoned cellar across the street.
While the clerk was reading the orders and indictment, the judge’s stare never wavered. And when the clerk had finished, the judge’s silent stare remained, for a long, terrible time.
In the quietest of voices, the judge said, “So.”
Ross caught a flicker of motion out of the comet of his eye. He turned just in time to see Bernie, knees buckling, slip white-faced and unconscious to the floor. The guards rushed forward, but the judge raised a peremptory hand. “Leave him alone,” she ordered soberly. “It is kinder. Defendants, you are charged with the gravest of crimes. Have you anything to say before sentence is passed on you?”
Ross tried to force words—any words, to protest, to plead, to vilify—through his clogged throat. All he managed was a croaking sound; and Helena, by his side, nudged him sharply to silence. He turned to her sharply, and realized that this was the best chance he’d be likely to get. He clutched at her, rolled up his eyes, slumped to the floor in as close an mutation of Bernie’s swoon as he could manage.
The judge was visibly annoyed, and this time she didn’t stop the attendants when they rushed in to kick him erect. But he had the consolation of seeing a flash of understanding cross Helena’s face, and her hand dart to a pocket with the paper he had handed her. In the confusion no one saw.
The rest of the courtroom scene was kaleidoscopic hi Ross’s recollection. The only part he remembered clearly was the judge’s voice as she said to him and Bernie,
“——for the rest of your lives, as long as Almighty God shall, in Her infinite wisdom, permit you the breath of life, be banished from Azor and all of its allied worlds to the prison hulk in ‘Orbit Minerva.’ ”
And they were hustled out as the judge, even more wrathful than before, turned to pronounce sentence on Helena.
9
THE guard spat disgustedly. “Fine lot of wrecks we’re getting,” she complained. “Not like the old days. They used to send real men here.” She glowered at Ross and Bernie, holding their commitment papers loosely in her hand. “And for treason, too!” she added. “Used to be it took guts to commit a crime against the state.” She shook her head, then made a noise of distaste and scribbled initials on the commitment papers. She handed them back to the pilot who had brought them up from Azor, who grinned, waved, and got out of there. “All right,” said the guard, “we have to take what we get. I’ll have to put you two on construction; you’ll never stand up under hard work. Keep your noses clean, that’s all. Up at 0500; breakfast till 0510; work detail till 1950; dinner and recreation till 2005; then lights out. Miss a formation and you miss a meal. Miss two, and you get punishment detail. Nobody misses three.”
Ross and Bernie found themselves sharing a communal cell. They had all of five minutes to look around and get oriented; then they were out on their first work detail.