How? Julie wondered. How could anyone not have an ID? Even if you lost your card you could get a new one simply by paying a fine. Even if you had been in prison you got a new card when you were released. You had to have a card! Everyone had to....

A court attendant called out: "Garcia, Miguel!" and a small, dark-complexioned man walked out of the detention pen and stood meekly before the judge.

The clerk of the court read the charge, rattling it off in the sing-song jargon of court clerks, his words slurred together into one almost unintelligible burst of sound. There was a pause, and silence in the courtroom.

"Well?" said the magistrate, "how do you plead?" His voice sounded kindly. He sat high on his bench, hunched into his black robe, and looked down with apparent benignancy on the little man who stood silently before him.

The audience was hushed. It watched hopefully and waited.

Julie could sense the intense excitement in Stan as he leaned forward, straining to catch every detail of the scene, anxious not to miss a thing.

She heard a giggle, then Stan's hearty laugh, then a loud burst of laughter. She opened her eyes.

The defendant was shrugging his shoulders in bewilderment. He turned half-way around to look at the laughing audience, a sheepish grin on his face.

The magistrate smiled his appreciation of the humorous response to his question. "So, you can't make up your mind?" he said in a seemingly friendly and sympathetic way. "Well, I'll tell you what I'll do, Miguel. I'll give you thirty days in the city's hotel to think it over."

Laughter and applause filled the room. The judge nodded his head in a little bow of acknowledgement. Miguel Garcia was led away, still smiling, obviously ignorant of what was happening. Miguel Garcia apparently did not understand English.

Stan was happily filling in the first line of his scorecard. His face was flushed. His eyes were bright. A satisfied smile lingered on his lips.

"Stan, let's leave," Julie said.

Stan laughed in disbelief. "Are you kidding? The fun's just starting."

"Please, Stan. I ... I don't feel well."

"Oh? I'm sorry, honey." It was a formality, like saying 'I beg your pardon' to a stranger you bump into in a crowd. There was no concern in Stan's voice. The second case was being presented, and his attention was rapt upon the clerk and the object of the proceedings, an old white haired derelict.

"Stan, please!" Julie insisted.

"Look, honey," Stan said impatiently, "we can't leave now, even if we wanted to. They don't give back the IDs until after it's all over."

A sharp burst of laughter brought his attention abruptly back to the action up front. The old man had dropped his hat and an attendant had kicked it away from him. The white haired castoff shuffled across the room to retrieve it.

"I missed something!" Stan said, testily. He turned to his neighbor and was hurriedly filled in on what had happened.

"Well, I'm leaving!" Julie said. She got up and edged her way out to the aisle. Stan made no protest. He was concentrating on the performance up front.

Julie hurried up the aisle and pushed through the pack of people standing in the back of the room. She found the usher at the door. "I'd like to leave," she told the girl. "May I please have my ID?"

The usher's face was expressionless, her voice efficiently official. "ID cards will be returned at the conclusion of the session."

"But I want to leave now!" Julie protested. "I don't want to see any more of this!"

"No cards can be returned until the session is concluded," the usher recited. It was a final decree of official policy. There could be no arguing, no appeal from the decision. There was no alternative but to abide by it.

Julie returned to her seat. She squeezed past a barricade of knees, rousing disgruntled comments from several of the spectators.

Stan glanced up at her as she settled back into the seat at his side. It was only a glance, and then his eyes were fixed once again on the magistrate, the attendants, and the "undesirable" being judged.

Minutes passed. Hours. Julie suffered the time in silence. She saw and heard, but could hardly believe, the unrestrained sadism of the giggling, laughing, applauding, cheering, jeering audience. What kind of people were these, who laughed at the pain and humiliation of others? What did they find amusing in the ruin of human life?

They laughed when a partially paralyzed hunchback limped before the judge and pleaded guilty to a charge of ogling girls in a public park. They roared with hilarity when the magistrate suspended sentence and commented that a more appropriate charge would have been that of defacing public property. They applauded lustily when he said to the arresting officer, "Bring him in on that one tomorrow and I'll throw the book at him!"

They laughed when an alcoholic appeared, twitching and brushing imaginary creatures from his torn jacket. They howled gleefully when he whimpered and sobbed like a small boy having a nightmare.

They laughed when the magistrate said his fountain pen had run out of ink and, looking into the detention pen, inquired, "Would any of you blue bloods care to make a donation?"

They laughed when a court attendant read a complaint which charged that the defendant, a small skinny man, had attacked the arresting officer, and that the officer (six-three, two hundred and ten pounds) had used reasonable force in defending himself. The man's broken arm was in a sling and bandages covered twelve stitches in his scalp.

The audience laughed. They gloated. They sat in judgment of their fellow men and called for punishment—the more severe, the better.

At last, the detention pen was empty. The last "undesirable" was brought before the bench. He was a small, pathetic looking man dressed in sailor's dungarees. He spoke Norwegian and clumsily tried to explain his predicament with the few words of English that he knew.

"Stop gibbering!" the judge shouted at him. The magistrate's facade of kindliness had long since disappeared. He turned to the arresting officer. "Do you speak that language?" He made it sound like a disgrace to be able to speak Norwegian.

The officer shook his head.

"Neither do I," the magistrate said, with obvious pride that he was not contaminated by such knowledge. He arbitrarily ordered the man held until he learned to make himself understood; the hearing to take place when that had been accomplished. The sailor was led away.

The Show was over.

"That's the end of it, folks," the judge said, genially. He tapped his gavel and rose from his seat. The courtroom rang with lusty applause.

The judge hurried through the door to his chambers and the applause died out. The people started to leave. Their animated discussions of the evening's events dinned through the room in a babble of noise.

Julie's head throbbed painfully and there was a queasy feeling in her stomach. She thirsted for fresh air.

Slowly, the mob of spectators formed a procession in the aisle. Slowly, the column of people moved toward the exit. Slowly, slowly, Julie was pushed along with the crowd.

The line paused as each person stopped at the door and waited until his ID card was located and returned to him. Then the procession would take another step forward. And pause again. And again. Occasionally, an ID could not be found and its owner was requested to step aside and allow the line to move on while the search for his card continued. And there was another step forward.

Stan held Julie's hand to prevent the pressing crowd from separating them. "How'd you like it?" he asked. He was aglow with satisfaction, tired by the long evening's excitement but with a pleasant weariness of accomplishment. "It's a terrific show, isn't it?"

Julie did not answer him. She wanted to break away and run and run and run and run! She inched along with the rest of the procession.

At last they reached the door. They told the usher their names and she methodically checked through the cards in her file. The procession behind them waited.

Julie's ID card was quickly found and returned to her, but the usher reported some difficulty in finding Stan's card. He was asked to step aside, please, and let the line go through. He protested at the inconvenience, then sullenly joined a few other people waiting for their cards in the rear of the court.

Julie stood impatiently in the doorway. She watched Stan strike up a grumbling conversation with another detained person. It was the moon-faced man who had been sitting in front of them. For a fleeting moment she thought of the old adage about "birds of a feather".

She waited. People filed past her in a steady stream, from the courtroom, across the lobby, out through the street door. Watching them—smiles and pleasant conversation, civilized small talk and serious debate of the merit of the evening's fare, as if it were a dramatic work of art. She clenched her teeth and prayed that Stan would hurry up.

Soon the flow of people stopped. Still no Stan. Julie waited.

Some twenty minutes later, an attendant came out of the courtroom. He went past Julie, then paused at the door, turned and came over to her. "Waiting for someone, miss?"

"Yes. My friend. They seem to have misplaced his ID card."

The attendant smiled and shook his head. "You might as well go on home, miss. If he's still in there, he won't be coming out for some time."

"I'll wait," Julie said.

"You don't understand, miss. He won't be out tonight."

"What are you talking about? He's just waiting till they find his ID, and it couldn't have gotten up and...."

"Seventeen IDs were lost," the attendant explained. "Those people in there can't get them back. They're going to have to go to Caracas or Milan to apply for new cards."

"Don't be silly!" Julie scoffed. "You don't have to go to another city to apply for a new card! All you have to do is file a claim and pay the fine."

"These are special cases," the attendant said uneasily. He seemed reluctant to talk about it.

Julie frowned. "What's special about them? Their ID cards were lost, weren't they?"

"Look, miss, all I know is every time an ID is lost in there," he nodded toward the courtroom, "they've gotta go out of the country to apply for a new one. That's all I can tell you."

"But why out of the...?"

"The reassignment orders are being drawn up right now," the attendant said. He led Julie to the street exit. "So you'd better go home and forget that fellow."

Confusion and a vicarious fear made Julie shiver. "Will he ... will they get new cards?"

The attendant shrugged. "They might—some day." He touched her arm. His voice was low, barely audible. "Was this your first time at the Show?"

Julie nodded.

"How did you like it?"

"I ... I ..." She shook her head.

The attendant smiled at her gently. "Don't ever be a third-timer." He released her arm and hurried away down the street.

Julie puzzled over his parting remark as she went out into the foul smelling night and walked away from the courthouse. Suddenly, the street before her dimmed as the lights on the huge marquee blinked out. She turned and looked back at the entrance of the court, now dark and deserted. And then she understood.

She remembered the moon-faced man's observation about the scarcity of third-timers. She understood how the "undesirables" lost their ID cards and why so many could not speak English. She understood the apparent cruelty of the sentences meted out to them, too.

The answer was on the marquee. As she looked back at it, only the raised letters on the canopy were visible, shining luminously in the darkness: "judge not, that ye be not judged". And she recalled the quotation on the program: "For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged."