boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

One-Way Trip 245
before. A W.B.I. man makes arrests and often finds it necessary later to visit his
prisoners. But he does not expect to find himself in prison.
The doctor said, “Conscious now? Good. Feeling better? No, don’t touch your
face. That’s a nasty burn, but it’ll heal up. In time for your one-way trip.”
Gan Garrett gasped. For a minute he thought the red-and-green-speckled blackness
was coming back. “One-way trip—” he fumbled out. “What—” But the doctor
had already left.
Garrett knew the layout of these cells. He found his way to the tablet dispenser
and swallowed a mouthful of condensed food. Damn these dispensers! No need
now for a guard to bring meals. A guard could be questioned. But instead he must
sit here wondering—
Had he indeed stabbed that Ainu? In some sort of muscular spasm after unconsciousness?
If so— He straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. The
laws were good. Man must not kill man. If he had done so, no matter under what
circumstances, then a one-way trip was his only possible reward. But if he had been
somehow framed by Stag Hartle— Could that have been what the jackal had meant
by “what we’d planned for you”—
There was the buzz which meant that the cell door was being dilated for an
official visitor. The man who came in was very young, very alert, and very precise.
He said, “Garrett?”
“I guess so. I’m not too sure of anything.”
“Breckenridge. I’ve been appointed to defend you before the judicial council. I
might as well warn you to start with that I have no hope whatsoever.” He made the
statement with efficient impartiality.
“That’s cheery. But first of all—what are you defending me for?”
“Killing. It’s a one-way trip for sure. But if you’ll tell me your story—”
“First tell me the prosecution.”
“Very simple. And I may add, convincing. One Stag Hartle—not too good a
witness, I know, but plentifully corroborated—was worried about the continued
silence of the painter Emigdio Valentinez and took a searching party down to his
beach studio. They did not find Valentinez, but they did find an unidentified Ainu
lying dead on the sand, stabbed through the back. You lay beside him; apparently
you had fainted from the shock of killing him and lain on the beach long enough
to acquire a startlingly severe sunburn. The prosecution’s theory is that you disposed
of Valentinez, perhaps into the ocean, and that this unknown was his bodyguard, or
perhaps a mere tramp who saw you and so had to be finished off.”
“Nuts,” said Gan Garrett. “If that’s all they’ve got—”
“The Ainu’s blood was all over you—spurted out of his back when he was stabbed.
Positions of stains indicate your left arm did the stabbing. Besides, there are your
prints all over the knife handle. Why on earth couldn’t you have had the sense to
use paraderm?” the defense lawyer moaned sadly.
The trial took fifteen minutes. In the two days before it, Gan Garrett had worked
harder than ever before in his life. He had managed to get an interview with the
police chief himself, and spent an hour desperately trying to rip holes in the prosecution’s
case, with no success whatsoever. In all his cases, the chief had never had