Part 2

"You located her at her mother's house, at 4AH54 on the Third Level, Eighty-first Sector, west of the Hudson?"

"I did."

"Continue."

"She was sitting on the lawn in front of the house, talking to a man. His back was toward me."

"You could not see his face?"

"Not then."

"Go on."

"They talked for a while. Then he moved to her on the grass. She smiled and they put their arms around one another. He kissed her."

"What happened then?"

"He lifted her to her feet, and I saw it was Charles Lathrop. They went to the door, and she opened it." He found it hard to get the words past his lips.

"Please proceed."

"When she got inside, she turned around and smiled. It looked as if she was laughing at me. Then she reached out and touched his arm. She--she--"

"Please speak louder. She what?"

"She took him inside and shut the door."

Heaped silence greeted the words. Men turned quietly and gazed at their wives, their eyes asking a question for the bewildered, the undecided.

"John Hastings, we have checked thoroughly. Your wife did spend the night of the fifteenth in the vacant house of which you speak. She spent the night, however, alone. Her graphs show no disturbances, no emotional exhilaration. You are perpetrating an untruth."

"I'm not. I saw it! I saw it as plainly as I can see the box in which I am standing now."

"You could not have seen it."

"Before my God, I did! I saw every detail. The yellow pannier she wore. The blue hydrangea bush on the lawn. That broken aneroid beside the door. Every detail." His voice crescendoed.

"It is impossible."

* * * * *

He raised his fists in the air. "Say it's impossible if you like. Repeat it a thousand times! But I saw her do it just the same!! I _saw_ it!"

Something inside me had pulled tight. Thoughts of the classroom flooded into my mind. Long forgotten formulae, theories ... somewhere! The voice droned on, charging the jurors:

"--having reviewed the evidence--"

I kept groping toward a page in a book. Somewhere there was a piece that would fit in. "The majority ballot rules." It was going too fast for me. They were calling for the vote.

"Juror Number One, please stand and tell the court; how do you find?"

With great deliberation, he turned his back on the defendant in the box.

"Juror Number One designates guilt. Juror Number Two, how do you find?"

Vortler was second. He stood and gazed at John Hastings for a long moment. Then he raised his arms toward the defendant, palms upward.

"Juror Number Two designates innocence."

I went back to the classroom again and again. There was a thing waiting there for me, but it had been so long ago.

The count was going fast....

"Juror Number Six, how do you find?" Bax. I knew his vote before he cast it. He turned his back.

Where did it stand now? Four guilty, two innocent!

My heart began to pound. It felt as if I were standing on the edge of a deep water. Where was it, that I groped after? I tried to shut myself in and think.

The semi-circle was almost completed. The voice had reached the juror on my left. Six men stood with their backs to John Hastings. Five stood with their arms outstretched, "Juror Number Twelve, how do you find?"

I asked for help then. I asked the Lord to turn the pages. And I asked Him to help Kitson too. Kitson raised his arms high. The score was even.

It waited until then to come. The piece ... the little piece, falling on my brain from that half-forgotten book.

"Juror Number Thirteen, how do--?"

"Mr. Questioner," I cried. "I would like to interpose."

"It is incorrect procedure to interrupt the vote--"

"Yes, yes, I know." My voice shook. "But there is something I just remembered. Something pertinent to what John Hastings saw."

"Can it prove anything further one way or the other?"

"I think so."

An unseen conference. "Very well. Dispensation granted. What is your information?"

I took a deep breath. "John Hastings viewed his wife on Earth from one of the planets of Alpha Centauri."

"That is correct."

My tongue was dry; my hands wet.

"Alpha Centauri is four years, four months distant, measuring in light years. Therefore, in his travel, John Hastings lost three of those months, but when he turned his instrument backward, he was looking at light images which had started from the Earth long before he ever left it. He was looking at--"

"_At ... what happened four years ago...._" John Hastings had finished the sentence for me. He was looking at something as if it were the first sunrise he had ever known.

Speculation brought the amphitheatre to its feet. For the only time during the trial, the mob found its voice. Uncertainty, relief and surprise mingled, ebbed and flowed.

The voice called for attention. "Quiet, please, quiet. The information is correct," and the storm was over.

"Since the jury is thus far hung, we will leave the decision to the last, thirteenth talisman. We would like your vote, Juror Thirteen. How do you find?"

John looked at me. It was the first time since they had brought him in.

And I stretched my arms out toward him....

Who can say whether I was right or wrong? It is too delicate a thing to come out all white or all black. But I think that in order for a man to hate a woman so very much, it is also necessary for him to have loved her very much, too.

And sometimes, I wake up, shaking, in the night. I am thinking of what might have happened if I hadn't remembered that old discarded pannier, or the way Mother transplanted the blue hydrangea bush before she died, or how Dad swore when she made him throw that aneroid away. If I hadn't remembered those things, I would never have seen the look on John's face as he walked into my outstretched arms and said: "Is it time for us to go home now, Mary? Is it?"