The trial itself was a legal farce. The prisoner promptly pleaded guilty to the charge of betraying mankind to an alien race, but he didn’t allow them to question him. When one lawyer persisted in face of his pleasant refusals, he died suddenly in a cramped ball of screaming agony.
The gray-faced Chief Justice inquired whether he wished to be sentenced and he answered yes, but not to death. They couldn’t kill him, he explained. That was part of the reward the aliens had given him. The other part was that he could kill or immobilize anybody in the world—or everybody—from any distance. He sat back and smiled at the stricken courtroom. Then he lost his composure and his mouth twitched. He laughed uproariously and slapped his knees in ecstasy.
It was plain that he was fond of a joke.
An anonymous lawyer stood up and waited patiently for his merriment to subside.
If this was true, he asked, why had not the aliens used this power? Why had they not simply killed off the inhabitants and taken over the vacant planet? The traitor gazed kindly at him; and a court stenographer who had cautiously picked up a pencil returned agonizingly to her foetal position and, that way, died.
The traitor looked at his fingers and shrugged. The thumb that had been snapped off in the mob’s frenzy was more than half grown again.
“They needed slaves,” he said simply.
“And at the end, while some of them were still sane?”
The traitor raised his eyebrows, giving him his full courteous attention. The lawyer sat down abruptly, his question unfinished. The creature who had betrayed his own race smiled at him and permitted him to live.
He even completed his question for him, and answered it. “Why did they not kill then? They had something else on their minds—fungoids!” He laughed uproariously at his macabre joke. “And in their minds too!”