Free The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd Page A

mated to a man whose ideas she could not have shared, because there are not fifteen men in the world today who can grasp the full implications of his theories.”
    “Good! Now there remains the figure of Fairweather II, their son. He is mentioned only as having been born and having entered the profession of mathematics. Nowhere is there again mention of him. We know he lived past the age of twenty-four because he was admitted to a profession. At that time, his parents had been married twenty-eight years. Statistics show that most females jump between the ages of thirty and thirty-six when it is marital dissolution that is the motive for suicide. So the chances are that she didn’t jump because she couldn’t understand her husband’s ideas. It little mattered, since they had brought him, and thus her, international prestige. We must assume that she committed suicide for another reason.
    “What could Fairweather have done that caused his wife to commit suicide and the Church to bring excommunication proceedings against him? What could he have done that so created remorse that he would lick the boot that kicked him? What remorse could be so vast and so genuine as to be regarded as penitence by the Church, and thus permit Pope Leo to again open the doors of the Church to the repentant sinner?”
    She got up from the sofa and walked away from him, turning to face him. “Logic guides me to only one choice—filicide. Fairweather murdered his own son. Remember, ‘Summoning all my social grace, I mix the hemlock to your taste.’ ”
    “Oh, Helix,” he almost roared his protest, “you’re reading personal motives into the most impersonal, universal mind that ever existed.”
    She shook her head. “You’ve erected a god in your mind. You believe Fairweather capable of nothing but divine behavior. I faced the possibility that the state could practice censorship. Match your courage with mine, and face the facts of logic.”
    “I can back you up with the information that Pope Leo was humanitarian,” he said, “but logic will trip you. If Fairweather had murdered his own son, he would have been excommunicated.”
    “Not if there was legal doubt”—she stressed the word ‘legal’—“which would have got him the support of Soc and Psych. They are concerned with legality, while the Church is concerned with morality. If he put piranhas in the swimming pool without telling his son… you follow?”
    “Yes,” he agreed, “but Soc and Psych would not buck the church on mere legalities.”
    “Oh, wouldn’t they?” she flashed. “What was the life of a half-breed prol to them? Nothing! What would the manner of his dying mean to the Church? Everything!
    “Now, suppose Soc and Psych wheeled into line, not to protect Fairweather I so much as to oppose and crush the Church. Suppose they hit on the Fairweather trial as a cause célèbre . What would they gain?”
    So his father, with vaster knowledge than hers, had hinted. His interest keyed higher as she walked over and picked up the history book.
    “I’ve marked the passage. Listen: ‘In the conclave of February 1952, redistribution of authority gave the Church complete spiritual authority over those not professing the faith’—remember, there were still a few Buddhists and Pharisaic Jews back in the first half of the nineteenth-century—‘and full police power was invested in the Department of Psychology while the judicial functions were delivered to the Department of Sociology.’ That shift was probably the direct outgrowth of the Fairweather trial.”
    Haldane leaned back on the sofa. She had done a splendid job of analysis, but she was reasoning like a female, intuitively. She had set up a theory and then gone looking for the facts to support it, rather than let the facts set up the theory.
    “Judged purely on the basis of his work,” Haldane said, “Fairweather was a great humanitarian. Humanitarians don’t murder.”
    “Humanitarian!” Helix moved