IT is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a wholly just man.
His image had been chilling enough in court. Now we were summoned to himself. Dusk took us as we stepped from the flyer, blue-gray around, deepening to black where the mountainside toppled into the valley, overhead still a violet touched by the earliest stars. A guardian satellite hastened among them, entered Earth’s shadow, and vanished as if the thin cold wind that whittered about us had blown it out.
There streamed a smell of glaciers and distances.
The house was built of native stone, enormous, a part of these heights. Few men on man’s mother planet can afford solitude. The president of the Tribunal commands it. A light in a bronze frame glowed above an ironbound oaken door. Our pilot gestured us that way. His whole body said we had better not keep Daniel Espina waiting.
Though my heart stammered, we all walked steadily. The door opened to show an attendant, live and nonhuman. “Buenos tardes,” the thing said. “Siganme ustedes, por favor.” We followed down a hallway darkly wainscoted, to a room perhaps intended for meetings such as this.
It was broad and tall, full of antiquities and silence.
The carpet muffled footfalls. Chairs and a couch stood rigid-framed, leather-covered, with a teak and ivory table. A grandfather clock from centuries agone ticked opposite an owl carved in marble. Shelves lined the walls, carrying books in the hundreds, more codices than reels. A modem desk and console—communications, data retrieval, computation, recording, projection, printout, disposal—somehow likewise belonged.
