Produced by Bruce Albrecht, Paula J. Franzini and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: Italic text has been marked with _underscores_. Detailed transcriber's notes are to be found at the end of the text. THE TRIAL OF _Callista Blake_ EDGAR PANGBORN There is no ethical absolute that does not arise from error and illusion. --GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, _The meaning of Evolution_. St Martin's Press New York _Copyright_ © _Edgar Pangborn 1961_ _Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-13391_ _Manufactured in the United States of America_ _by H. Wolff, New York_ _The author wishes to express his thanks to William Morrow & Company, Inc., for permission to use an excerpt from_ THE COURT OF LAST RESORT _by Erle Stanley Gardner, Copyright 1952 by Erle Stanley Gardner; to Yale University Press for permission to use a quotation from G. G. Simpson's_ THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION; _and to Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to use a passage from_ THE STORY OF MY LIFE _by Clarence Darrow._ To the Memory of My Father NOTE: All characters in this novel are fictitious, not intended to resemble any actual persons living or dead. The locale is semifictitious: for "New Essex" read "almost any of the northeastern States within a 300-mile radius of New York City." E.P. THE TRIAL OF CALLISTA BLAKE 1 Now laws maintain their credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority: they have no other. MONTAIGNE, _Of Experience_ I Doves wheeled above the city's winter morning, vanishing by a turn of wings, reappearing in a silent explosion of light. Judge Terence Mann saw smoke rising through windless cold from a thousand chimneys, and saw, beyond a bleak acreage of city roofs, the apartment house that contained his bachelor burrow; further on, the Veterans Hospital shone not as a temple of sickness but a shaft of splendor in the sun. His eyes smarted as he turned away from the brightness. That was partly from a lack of sleep. The Judge remembered that, like this robing-room, the detention cells also looked up across the long rise of land where, for something like three hundred years, the city had been haphazardly expanding, fattening on river commerce, and becoming--in the American sense--old.