“Why… yes,” said Wylcoxin, wondering.
“If I’d been in a building in Government Center, I wouldn’t have needed you to get in touch with Ro,” said Jim. “At that distance, I could’ve talked directly to the ship myself.”
Wylcoxin looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and puzzlement.
“I’m only pointing out,” said Jim quietly, “that there’s no point in my wasting valuable thinking time giving you answers you’re not going to be able to understand, even if you could believe them. As far as the Committee members, Max Holland, and the other witnesses are concerned—it doesn’t matter what they say, or what they ask me. All I’m asking from you, now that you’ve got word to Ro, is to sit by my side and do whatever seems necessary as things come up.”
Jim went back to his thoughts. This time Wylcoxin left him alone with them.
They reached Government Center and the building where the Inquiry was to take place. Jim was kept in a small side room until just before the Committee members were due to appear. Then he and Wylcoxin were taken to their seats in an already filled Committee room.
Jim and Wylcoxin were installed at one of the several tables directly in front of the raised platform with its long table at which the six Committee members would sit. As he came in, he saw, seated separately in the crowd a few rows back from the front row tables, Max Holland and Styrk Jacobsen—the executive heads of the program that had trained him to go to the Throne World—and Ro, as well as a handful of other, minor figures out of his past from the time when he had been selected to be trained and sent.
Ro caught his eye, looking a little pale and anxious, as he came in. She was dressed in a plain white clothlike tunic and skirt, not too remarkably different from the lightweight, summer-colored clothes of the Earth women seated in the same room. But some general effect of her total appearance made her stand out in the crowd, as if spotlighted. Jim’s eyes had adjusted to the height and cleanliness of feature of the High-born on the Throne World. Now, in spite of himself, the people of his own world, thronging this courtroom, seemed shrunken and small and drab by comparison. Ro, ignoring all the rest, was looking at him anxiously. Jim smiled to reassure her, as he took his seat, necessarily turning his back on her and the rest of those in seats behind him. The six Committee members came in, representatives of their various area sectors on Earth. The audience rose on order, to wait for the members to take their seats; and at the same time, a buzz of excitement ran through them, as there came in with the other members a small, reddish-brown man, who took his seat to the right of Alvin Heinman, representative from the powerful Central European sector. Jim looked at the small man and smiled faintly. But the other only looked back with extreme solemnity. The members seated themselves, and the audience was told they could regain their seats as the Committee went on to open proceedings.
“…And let the records show,” said Heinman a little nasally into the recording sensors built in the table before him, “that the Governor of Alpha Centauri III has consented to sit with this board unofficially, in order to give it the benefit of his experience and knowledge in the matter under Inquiry.”
Heinman rapped on the table with the gavel and called for the government’s Investigating Officer to describe the matter under Inquiry.
The Investigating Officer did so. The word “treason” was carefully avoided, but the Investigating Officer talked a clever circle around it, until there was no doubt left in the minds of those listening to him that this Inquiry had been brought to determine not whether the government should commence treason proceedings against Jim, but whether there was the slightest doubt that the government should not do so. The Investigating Officer sat down again, and Styrk Jacobsen was brought up to answer the questions of the Committee.
These questions had to do mainly with Jim’s background and the procedure which had chosen him from several hundred candidates preselected on a worldwide basis to be the man trained to go to the Throne World.
“…James Keil,” Jacobsen said, “was unusually qualified in many respects. His physical condition was superb—as it needed to be, since we planned to train the man we would send to be a bullfighter. Also, at the time Jim came to our attention, he not only had degrees in history and chemistry, as well as anthropology, but he had established himself as a respectable authority in the field of social and cultural studies.”
“Would you say,” broke in Heinman, “in character he was markedly different from the other candidates?”
“He was a strong individualist. But then, they all were,” said Jacobsen dryly. He was a spare, erect man with silver hair, in his mid-sixties, originally from Odense, Denmark. Jim remembered that Jacobsen, from the first, had taken what seemed to be an instinctive liking to him, as opposed to Max Holland’s immediate, instinctive dislike.
“…That was one of the requirements for the job,” Jacobsen was saying. He went on to list, in order, those requirements as they had originally been laid out. Roughly, they covered unusual physical and mental capacity, emotional stability, and a broad educational background.
“But about this matter of emotional stability,” Heinman pounced again. “Didn’t you find him unusually—say—unsocial? To the point of being noncommunicative and withdrawn from the people around him? What I mean is, wasn’t he from the start pretty much of a loner?”
“Yes. Again,” said Jacobsen, “we wanted someone with exactly those traits. Our man would be plunged into an unfamiliar culture—much more unfamiliar than anything he could encounter here on Earth. We wanted him to be as self-sufficient as possible.”
Jacobsen had not backed up a step. Though Heinman picked up the questioning for some little time, the silver-haired man refused to give ground. His testimony amounted to the fact that Jim was no more and no less than the man the Project had been set up to find, train, and send out.
With Max Holland, who followed Jacobsen before the Committee, the response was entirely different.
“…The other members of the team engaged in the Project,” Holland said, leaning forward over the table, a cigarette burning between his fingers, “weren’t equipped to consider the risk involved in it—the risk to the Earth as a whole, I mean. In resources and population, our world, to the Empire, is like a baby chick to an elephant. The chick’s so small that it’s likely to be safe through being ignored, unless by accident or mistake it gets under one of the elephant’s feet. Then there’s no hope for it. It seemed to me the whole Project ran a serious danger of bringing us under one of the elephant feet of the Empire, either accidentally or by error on the part of the man we were sending in to look at their Throne World. And my uneasiness was increased by the character and attitudes of James Keil himself…”
Holland, like Jacobsen, was closely questioned by Heinman and a couple of the other Committee members. Unlike Jacobsen, Holland was ready and willing to paint a dangerous picture of Jim. Jim, he testified, had struck him as being socially withdrawn to the point of near-paranoia, self-confident and arrogant to the point of near-megalomania. Then, coldly, he reported the conversation he had had with Jim underneath the stands of the arena on Alpha Centauri III, in which Jim had told him that from then on he would have to make his own decisions.
“Then, in your opinion,” said Heinman, “this man, even before he reached the Throne World, was already determined to ignore the directives given him and do whatever he chose, regardless of whatever consequences to the rest of the people of Earth that might entail?”
“I do,” said Holland as fervently as any bridegroom. That ended his appearance before the Committee.
Ro was called up next. But her appearance consisted only of sitting and listening to a recording that had been made of her own account of what had happened to Jim from the time she had first met him aboard the Princess Afuan’s spaceship until the time in which she had brought him back to the spaceport outside Government Center, Earth.