Chandler's lawyer tapped him on the shoulder. "Last chance to change your mind," he said.
"No. I'm not guilty, and that's the way I want to plead."
The lawyer shrugged and stood up, waiting for the judge to notice him.
Chandler, for the first time, allowed himself to meet the eyes of the crowd.
He studied the jury first. He knew some of them casually, it was not a big enough town to command a jury of total strangers for any defendant, and Chandler had lived there most of his life. He recognized Pop Matheson, old and very stiff, who ran the railroad station cigar stand. Two of the other men were familiar as faces passed in the street. The forewoman, though, was a stranger. She sat there very composed and frowning, and all he knew about her was that she wore funny hats. Yesterday's had been red roses when she was selected from the panel; today's was, of all things, a stuffed bird.
He did not think that any of them was possessed. He was not so sure of the audience.
He saw girls he had dated in high school, long before he met Margot; men he worked with at the plant. They all glanced at him, but he was not sure who was looking out through some of those familiar eyes. The visitors reliably watched all large gatherings, at least momentarily; it would be surprising if none of them were here.
"All right, how do you plead?" said Judge Ellithorp at last.
Chandler's lawyer straightened up. "Not guilty, Your Honor, by reason of temporary pandemic insanity."
The judge looked pleased. The crowd murmured, but they were pleased too. They had him dead to rights and it would have been a disappointment if Chandler had pleaded guilty. They wanted to see one of the vilest criminals in contemporary human society caught, exposed, convicted and punished; they did not want to miss a step of the process. Already in the playground behind the school three deputies from the sheriff's office were loading their rifles, while the school janitor chalked lines around the handball court to mark where the crowd witnessing the execution would be permitted to stand.
All this, as Chandler very reasonably told himself, was quite insane. There were satellites in orbit in the skies overhead! Every home in the town owned a television set, although to be sure they now did nothing but serve as receptacles for the holding of seashells and flowers ... and hopes for a better world. This was the 20th century!
But they gave every sign of being about to kill him as dead as though it were the seventeenth. The prosecution made its case very quickly. Mrs. Porter testified that she worked at McKelvey Bros., the antibiotics plant, where the defendant also worked. Yes, that was him. She had been attracted by the noise from the culture room last -
Let's see -- "Was it the seventeenth day of June last?" prompted the prosecutor, and Chandler's attorney instinctively gathered his muscles to rise, hesitated, glanced at his client and shrugged. That was right, it was the seventeenth.
Incautiously she went right into the room. She should have known better, she admitted. She should have called the plant police right away, but, well, they hadn't had any trouble at the plant, you know, and well, she didn't. She was a stupid woman, for all that she was rather good-looking, and insatiably curious. She had seen Peggy Flershem on the floor. "She was all blood. And her clothes were ... And she was, I mean her - her body was" With relentless tact the prosecutor allowed her to stammer out her observation that the girl had clearly been raped. And she had seen Chandler laughing and breaking up the place, throwing racks of cultures through the windows, upsetting trays. Of course she had crossed herself and tried a quick exorcism but there was no visible effect; then Chandler had leaped at her. "He was hateful! He was just foul!" But as he began to attack her the plant police came, drawn by her screams.
Chandler's attorney did not question.
Peggy Flershem's deposition was introduced without objection from the defense. But she had little to say anyway, having been dazed at first and unconscious later. The plant police testified to having arrested Chandler; a doctor described in chaste medical words the derangements Chandler had worked on Peggy Flershem's virgin anatomy.
There was no question from Chandler's lawyer and, for that matter, nothing to question. Chandler did not hope to pretend that he had not ravished and nearly killed one girl, then done his best to repeat the process on another. Sitting there as the doctor testified, Chandler was able to tally every break and bruise against the memory of what his own body had done. He had been a spectator then, too, as remote from the event as he was now; but that was why they had him on trial. That was what they did not believe.
At twelve-thirty the prosecution rested its case. Judge Ellithorp looking very pleased. He recessed the court for one hour for lunch, and Larry Grant took Chandler back to the detention cell in the basement of the school.
Two Swiss cheese sandwiches and a wax paper carton of chocolate milk were on the desk. They were Chandler's lunch. As they had been standing, the sandwiches were crusty and the milk lukewarm. He ate them anyway. He knew what the judge looked pleased about. At one-thirty Chandler's lawyer would put him on the stand, and no one would pay very much attention to what he had to say, and the jury would be out at most twenty minutes, and the verdict would be guilty. The judge was pleased because he would be able to pronounce sentence no later than four o'clock, no matter what.
They had formed the habit of holding the executions at sundown. As, at that time of year, sundown was after seven, it would all go very well for everyone but Chandler.
LASRY GRANTZ looked in, eating a wedge of pie from the diner across the street. "You want anything else?" he demanded.
"Coffee."
"Ah, you won't have time to drink it." Grantz licked his fingers. "Of course, if you wasn't such a bastard about tipping me off" He waited a moment and, when Chandler did not reply, closed the door.
Chandler looked out the window. It was a nice day. Far outside, above and away, a thin pale line of cloud stretched itself across the horizon. Contrail. Chandler watched it, listening, and caught the distant thundering mumble of a transonic jet.
He wondered what sort of hand was at its controls. Where they came from no one knew, where they were going no one could tell. None had ever landed in this little part of the world in a long time. Not even at the Air Force base. Not anywhere, in the years since that day of disaster when the old world came to an end. Every once in a while one rasped across the sky, on what errands Chandler could not guess.
In any event he had more pressing problems. The odd thing about his dilemma was not merely that he was innocent in a way, that is, but that many who were guilty (in a way; as guilty as he himself, at any rate) were free and honored citizens. Chandler himself was a widower because his own wife had been murdered. He had seen the murderer leaving the scene of the crime, and the man he had seen was in the courtroom today, watching Chandler's own trial. Of the six hundred or so in the court, at least fifty were known to have taken part in one or more provable acts of murder, rape, arson, theft, sodomy, vandalism, assault and battery or a dozen other offenses indictable under the laws of the state. Of course, that could be said of almost any community in the world in those years; Chandler's was not unique. What had put Chandler in the dock was not what his body had been seen to do, but the place in which it had been seen to do it.
For everybody knew that medicine and agriculture were never molested by the demons.