“You better worry, Jack,” Rainsford said.  “You saw the combination against us at the hearing.”

Leslie Coombes, the Company’s top attorney, had come out from Mallorysport in a yacht rated at Mach 6, and he must have crowded it to the limit all the way.  With him, almost on a leash, had come Mohammed Ali O’Brien, the Colonial Attorney General, who doubled as Chief Prosecutor.  They had both tried to get the whole thing dismissed—­self-defense for Holloway, and killing an unprotected wild animal for Kellogg.  When that had failed, they had teamed in flagrant collusion to fight the inclusion of any evidence about the Fuzzies.  After all it was only a complaint court; Lieutenant Lunt, as a police magistrate, had only the most limited powers.

“You saw how far they got, didn’t you?”

“I hope we don’t wish they’d succeeded,” Rainsford said gloomily.

“What do you mean, Ben?” Brannhard asked.  “What do you think they’ll do?”

“I don’t know.  That’s what worries me.  We’re threatening the Zarathustra Company, and the Company’s too big to be threatened safely,” Rainsford replied.  “They’ll try to frame something on Jack.”

“With veridication?  That’s ridiculous, Ben.”

“Don’t you think we can prove sapience?” Gerd van Riebeek demanded.

“Who’s going to define sapience?  And how?” Rainsford asked.  “Why, between them, Coombes and O’Brien can even agree to accept the talk-and-build-a-fire rule.”

“Huh-uh!” Brannhard was positive.  “Court ruling on that, about forty years ago, on Vishnu.  Infanticide case, woman charged with murder in the death of her infant child.  Her lawyer moved for dismissal on the grounds that murder is defined as the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is defined as one that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do neither.  Motion denied; the court ruled that while ability to speak and produce fire is positive proof of sapience, inability to do either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience.  If O’Brien doesn’t know that, and I doubt if he does, Coombes will.”  Brannhard poured another drink and gulped it before the sapient beings around him could get at it.  “You know what?  I will make a small wager, and I will even give odds, that the first thing Ham O’Brien does when he gets back to Mallorysport will be to enter nolle prosequi on both charges.  What I’d like would be for him to nol. pros. Kellogg and let the charge against Jack go to court.  He would be dumb enough to do that himself, but Leslie Coombes wouldn’t let him.”

“But if he throws out the Kellogg case, that’s it,” Gerd van Riebeek said.  “When Jack comes to trial, nobody’ll say a mumblin’ word about sapience.”