No one noticed when Ed Smith watched the World Trade Center bomb trial. He slipped into a front bench in the courtroom, looking like just another FBI agent or lawyer in pinstripes.

Tomorrow morning, there will be no mistaking him.

At 10 a.m. in a third-floor courtroom at Foley Square, four of the men who bombed the Twin Towers will be sentenced by Judge Thomas Francis Duffy. The bombers likely will hear the sound of a door closing firmly on their lives.

But they also will hear from Ed Smith, a 31-year-old machinery salesman who has been granted extraordinary permission to address the court on behalf of those murdered in the Trade Center explosion.

Smith is breaking his public silence in the name of his pregnant wife, Monica, and their unborn child - a boy the Smiths planned to call Eddie - who were killed in the bombing of the World Trade Center, along with Robert Kirkpatrick, Steve Knapp, Bill Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, and John DiGiovanni.

The Smiths were the youngest victims.

"You know what, if these guys have to spend the rest of their lives in jail, great," Smith said. "But if for one minute I can make them think about what they took from someone else, I will. Our baby. I do feel bad about everybody that passed away, and I will talk about them. But here's a person, the baby, who never got to see anything."

In his work, Smith smiles fast, laughs easily, a salesman born with an agreeable manner. He also spends hours in airplanes, flying across the country. Alone, seven miles up, he broods. Last Thursday night, Smith sat in the business-class section of a Continental flight from New York to Los Angeles and wrote the five-page speech he will deliver tomorrow.

"I will tell them what they took. About the baby. And what my wife and me never got to experience with the baby, the first steps, the baby getting sick and holding the baby. I'll never get to see the kid play baseball. Watching him write for the first time. Making those noises. Calling me Daddy. Going home, just holding another living thing, and knowing I created that."

The four bombers also may speak. They are expected to talk about the glories of their God, which somehow got blended with 1,500 pounds of nitroglycerin, urea-nitrate and hydrogen.

"These guys say, 'oh we're trying to get our point across for Allah,' " Smith said. "Let me tell you something, that's bull - - - . These people do these things for personal gain and they stand behind this robe. But there's nothing religious about it at all. You can't sell that to me. How can any God want people to be dead, for any reason?

"Some of these guys have kids. They got to hold their kids. I never got that opportunity. I just want them to hear it. Maybe I'll get through to one of them. Just so they know what was lost," Smith said.

And Wednesday, the morning after the sentencing, Ed Smith will go to a law office in Long Island, sign some papers, and hand over the keys to the house in Seaford, L.I. that he and Monica rebuilt from scratch. With their home sold, he will board a plane and leave New York behind, escaping the skyline dominated by Twin Towers that are, to him, giant tombstones.

The plume that trails Ed Smith, airborne or on the ground, is a love story, a tale dangling from the new, demented world order.

"You're like every other salesman," said Monica Rodriguez, black hair, smooth coffee-colored skin. "You keep talking, you keep moving." That day in 1982, young Eddie Smith was flirting with Monica again. He was tall and apple-cheeked, just two years out of high school, making money and spilling the high exuberance of the young and strong. She was a secretary for the building management of the Trade Center, famous for her cheerful energy. He made sales calls to the B-2 level of the Trade Center.

"Anyway, I can't go on a date with you," she said. "I'm going to Hawaii on a vacation."

"Bring me back some pineapple," he pleaded. She rolled her big, beautiful eyes. A few weeks later, he was back in the Trade Center. Monica reached for something and produced a fresh pineapple. "Hey," Eddie Smith said. "Now I owe you. You have to let me take you out." She consented to a movie, then they stopped at JT's Alehouse on Jamaica Avenue.

He was wild and five years younger. She was full of fun, but ready for marriage. They broke up. "Someday," Ed promised. "I'll give you a call if I can ever settle down."

One day in 1989, he walked through the concourse of the Trade Center and saw a florist near the PATH station. In the window was a dog made of push-in pompons. He had brought one to Monica years ago. He changed directions and walked to a pay phone.

"You want to meet me for lunch?" Smith asked.

"I don't think so," she said.

"C'mon," Smith said. "You want to go to Atlantic City?"

She paused to think of her response. "I have a boyfriend," she fibbed. "Call me tomorrow."

He did. "I'll go back to you, but you know, this is serious," she said. "Absolutely, I wouldn't have called you unless I was," Ed promised. Later, he would remember the trip to Atlantic City: "All the way on the ride, she wouldn't let me give her a kiss or hold her hand. It was pretty funny." They were engaged three months later. On Aug. 31, 1990, they married in the Church of the Nativity on Woodhaven Boulevard.

For the party afterward, Rodriguez relatives arrived from Ecuador, while Smith's came from Queens and Long Island. It was a hot, muggy night, but Monica stayed on the floor all night. She danced and laughed with her bosses and friends from the Trade Center, Steve Knapp and Bill Macko. The world was too fresh and young to imagine that all three would die in the same instant.

Ed and Monica bought the house in Seaford where Ed grew up. On weekends, they stopped at the Cherrywood for a drink. During the day, they tore apart the house and made it new. They put seven coats of polyurethane on the wood floors, painting their way out the door in the morning. Each wanted bragging rights. "We still fight to this day," said Ed recently, then pausing to get his bearings. "She said she painted. I say, I did."

Ed was going to night school at Queensborough Community College. When he got home after 10, Monica, who had come from Ecuador at age 12, would get out of bed to make sure his dinner was warm. Sometimes, they argued about moving out of New York. "I love my job, I don't want to leave," she told Ed. "The people are the best." One night, she called him at school to rush him home. She had bought a pregnancy test. He held the tube while she dipped the stick. Monica bought Winnie The Pooh books for Ed to read to her belly, to the boy growing inside. In mid-February last year, with two months to go, they shopped for baby furniture.

The next weekend, Ed shopped by himself for a coffin. He buried his wife, age 35, in Manta, Ecuador, near her parents' home. In their bedroom at Seaford, he built a shrine with the Virgin of Montserrat, to whom Monica prayed nightly. When his feet found the ground again, he sneaked into the trial, listening to the dreadful tale of the murder of his wife and their friends.

"Why put yourself through this?" asked his father.

"To show that hey, listen, you can't get away with doing that," Ed said. "To say, who are you to do that? You know what? It's like, if nobody ever went, or nobody ever yelled, do you hear a noise? If nobody ever goes, do you really care? Yeah, I care. I care enough to see that something was done."