No point now in sifting causes why my old advisor was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting of Herman Hermann and sentenced to the maximum penalty. True it is that while Max himself would plead neither guilty nor otherwise to the charge (which would have gone uncontested but for our protests to his court-appointed lawyer), he affirmed in court his full confession, not only of the deed but of what he called "virtual" premeditation — by which adjective, lost I fear upon the jury, he seemed to mean a prior yen to persecute unknown to him until the crime (and whereof the deed was the single proof, I vainly testified). Moreover, he asked for the Shaft as the only palliative of his conscience — of the Moishian conscience! — which, he told the court, had centuries of flunkèd pride to atone for…
"We Moishians," he testified, "we've had it coming, on account we've known all the time we are the Chosen Class!" Protests rose among the spectators, Moishians and non-Moishians alike. The Judge rapped his gavel. "Why passèder than the rest?" Max demanded, unimpressed. He touched his fingertips together and rocked his head. "On account we're the only class knows how flunked we are!" The irony was too nice for most to follow and exasperating to the others; absent-minded with impatience, I chewed the straw fans issued us against the summer heat. The effect of such testimony as this was that reactionary, even Bonifacist elements in West Campus, who approved of capital punishment and had little use for Moishians, rallied to Max's defense, arguing in effect that having condemned himself and his class, he might be let go. Their sympathy, of course, Max repudiated, and since only the most self-flagellant liberals could accept his notions of "guilty victimship" and "flunkèd passèdness," he was left without effectual supporters — almost without sympathizers — and may be said to this extent to have chosen his fate.
But it is also true, alas, that both the issue of capital punishment itself and the question of Moishiocausticide had been being hotly argued in New Tammany just prior to the Hermann killing: the former on account of the then-rising crime-rate, which some attributed to "coddling the flunks"; the latter because two other former Bonifacists had been mysteriously kidnaped and killed since the expiration of Siegfrieder College's statute of limitations for the trial of "crimes against studentdom." Chancellor Rexford himself had formerly been inclined against the ancient practice of Shafting condemned men, but since initiating his Open Book reforms he'd ceased to press for repeal of that penalty. Conservative opinion, slow to condemn the Moishiocausts themselves and skeptical of the post-facto law forbidding "crimes against studentdom," was quick to condemn the Moishiocausticides. The liberals — pro-Moishian and anti-Bonifacist — were deeply divided, for though they abhorred capital punishment generally and lynching in particular, they could not bear that the legal safeguards they themselves had struggled for over the terms should make it possible for Moishiocausts to escape retribution for their awful crimes. Much as they revered Max from terms gone by, they deplored his deed, and the manner of his "defense" even more; the whole matter anguished and embarrassed them; they fell out among themselves, husband and wife, teacher and pupil; in the end they stood by painfully, rather hoping Max would be acquitted, or at least not Shafted, but unable to come to his defense when he would not defend himself.
At the trial's end everyone expected a verdict of guilty and the minimum sentence, in view of the defendant's age and fame: a few terms' detention followed by parole. Before the summation Max's lawyer once again begged him to plead insanity and was of course refused. The jury retired, deliberated only a minute or two, and returned the expected verdict. Max stroked his beard, nodding assent; his lawyer, long out of patience with so uncooperative a client, clicked and clicked his ball-point pen. We looked Judgewards and were horrified to see him raise the black cowl, emblematic of capital sentence. Mildly, as if making a procedural point or recessing for lunch, he said to Max: "It is the sentence of this Court that you be taken from here to Main Detention and thence to Founder's Hill, and the life Shafted out of you. Founder have mercy on your mind."
Most were surprised; a few shocked. But who (Leonid excluded) could protest, when the defendant himself had asked for that sentence?
"Beside-the-pointcy!" Leonid shouted at me, back in our cells. "He wants Shaft like Mrs. Anastasia wants rapeness! Inside-outhood! Passitude!"
Before my own failure I would have agreed, and wept Leonidlike with frustrate love. But I could no longer judge anyone — except myself — or hold opinions on any head, or feel strongly any emotion but a dumb acknowledgment that I'd Failed All. "I don't know what to say," I said.
"Selfish, pfui!" Leonid cried at Max, in the idiom learned from him. "I take you to Classmate X! Old friend of you; him you listen! I take Shaft! Exchangeness!"
Max shook his head, adding that he'd never met Leonid's stepfather.
"Don't say!" the Nikolayan bellowed, grinning hugely, and commenced to flap his arms and pound us all upon the back. Was saving, he declared, for big surprisehood or last resortity, as the case should warrant: his stepfather was no native Nikolayan (Had we thought? Ha ha on us!), but a New Tammany Moishian whose parents had transferred out of Nikolay in the bad old days before Student-Unionism. What his original name was, no one knew except the Department of Intelligence, but as best Leonid could infer, he had worked with automatic computers in their infancy, during Campus Riot II; and subsequently, when New Tammany refused to share its electroencephalic secrets with its colleagues, he had defected to Nikolay College, liquidated his former self, and designed a counter-computer to preserve studentdom's peace of mind from aggressive Informationalism.
Max's face clouded as he listened, and my skin tingled; recalling now Classmate X's curious emotion in the U.C. building at mention of my keeper's name, I realized who he must be.
"Your old friend What's-his-name!" I exclaimed to Max. "The one that helped you EAT the Amaterasus and then defected…"
"Chementinski?" Max frowned and plucked angrily at his beard. "Ach, impossible! Chementinski had no head for politics: a smart scientist, but a silly man."
"Not silly!" Leonid shouted, and plunged to his knees before the bunk where Max lay resting.
"Silly and flunkèd, Leonid," Max insisted quietly. "If he is your stepfather, and he sent you here to take my place, so I could defect like him — pfui, that proves it!"
"Untruthery!" Leonid's protest was more distressèd than indignant. That Classmate X was indeed Max's former colleague seemed beyond dispute: no one else in East Campus had had the practical knowledge required for EASCAC's development, which Leonid knew his stepfather had directed. His later forsaking of mathematical for political science, and his formidable success in that department, was to be explained by the utter eradication of his earlier self (which might indeed have been silly and flunkèd); the successful replacement of his personal, fallible will with the Will of the Student Body, impersonal and infallible. So Leonid explained it, roaring earnestly; that one of his idols should dislike the other clearly anguished him as much as the capital sentence had, and I was surprised at the sternness with which Max refused to soften his opinion.