Illegal Alien

*32*

“On the record now, in California v. Hask. The jury is not present. All right, Mr. Rice, you may proceed.”

“Your Honor, I’d like to speak in support of the two defense motions Ms. Katayama filed yesterday.”

“Go ahead.”

“First, on the matter of our new witness—”

“I don’t like new witnesses this late in the game, counselor,” said Pringle.

“Nor do I. But this is a special instance. The witness is Dr. Carla Hernandez, who assisted in the surgery on Hask. Obviously, she had no involvement with Hask until he was shot, so there was no way she could have been deposed earlier.”

“Your Honor,” said Linda Ziegler, “this case is about the murder of Cletus Calhoun. Anything that might have happened after that murder is irrelevant to the proceedings at hand.”

“Dr. Hernandez’s testimony does relate to matters that occurred before the murder,” said Dale.

“Very well,” said Pringle. “I’ll allow it.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Now, about my motion that the other Tosoks be barred from the courtroom during Dr. Hernandez’s testimony—”

“I can see barring the Tosoks on the witness list, if what Hernandez is going to say might influence their testimony, but that only applies to Kelkad, Stant, Ged, and Dodnaskak.”

“As you can see in my brief,” said Dale, “I may wish to expand the witness list, as a direct result of Dr. Hernandez’s testimony.”

“All right,” said Pringle. “I’ll order all of them out of the room, and I’ll ask them to avoid the media coverage of Hernandez’s testimony.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Now, to my other request—that the lawyers and the jury be allowed to tour the Tosok mothership.”

Linda Ziegler spread her arms in an appeal for basic common sense. “The People strenuously object to this bit of theater, Your Honor. The murder took place on Earth. Now, if Mr. Rice felt there was a need for the jury to tour the crime scene at the University of Southern California, the People might indeed support him in such a motion. But the only reason for wanting the jury to see the alien ship is so that they can be awed by it.”

“The Court is inclined to agree,” said Pringle. “Mr. Rice, I see nothing in your brief that makes me want to grant your request. Besides, you had your chance during the discovery phase to request any evidence you thought was necessary.”

“Your Honor,” said Dale, “the defense believes that Dr. Hernandez’s testimony will suggest a further line of inquiry that can only be accommodated aboard the mothership.” He turned to Ziegler. “The police should have searched the accused’s home, as a matter of course. That no search was done is surely the People’s fault, and we should be entitled to a wide-ranging remedy for that oversight.”

Ziegler spread her arms again. “Your Honor, for Pete’s sake, the Tosok mothership is hardly located within the jurisdiction of the LAPD. It’s not in anyone’s jurisdiction. No one can issue a valid search warrant for it.”

“But if Captain Kelkad agrees to let the jury—”

“No,” said Judge Pringle, shaking her head. “No, even if he agrees, it doesn’t matter. There are all kinds of liability issues here. If one of the jurors were to be injured, the lawsuits would be incredible.”

“We could ask the jurors to sign waivers,” said Dale.

“And if even one of them chooses not to?” said Pringle. “Then we’re looking at a mistrial.”

“There are alternates—”

“I’m not going to manufacture a situation in which we have to dip into the alternate pool again. No, Mr. Rice, if you think there’s evidence aboard the mothership, find a way to present it in my courtroom. Now let’s get the jury in here, and get back to work.”

Dale glanced at the double row of empty Tosok chairs, then turned back to face the judge’s bench. “The defense calls Dr. Carla Hernandez,” he said.

The woman was sworn in and took her place in the witness box.

“Dr. Hernandez,” said Dale, “what’s your job title?”

“I’m chief of surgery at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center.”

“And in that capacity, did you have an opportunity to assist in surgery on a Tosok patient?”

“I did.”

“Please describe the circumstances of that.”

“The defendant Hask was shot on May eighteenth. He required immediate surgery to remove a bullet still lodged in his chest. Another Tosok named Stant performed the surgery, and it was my privilege to provide assistance to Stant while this was being done.”

“When surgery is performed on a human, is the human normally fully clothed?”

Hernandez smiled. “No.”

“In fact, the area in which the surgery is being performed is usually naked, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Were Hask’s clothes removed before the surgery was performed on him?”

“I removed his tunic, yes, then covered most of the torso with sterile sheets so that only the entrance wound was exposed.”

“Did you do this before or after Stant entered the operating theater?”

“Before. Stant was receiving hurried instruction on using our operating instruments in the adjacent, identical theater.”

“So only you saw Hask’s naked torso in its entirety that day.”

“No, three nurses also saw it.”

“But Stant never actually saw it?”

“That’s correct. Stant had me close the wound once the bullet was removed. Stant had left the operating theater by the time the sheets were taken off Hask’s body.”

“When you saw Hask’s naked torso, did you notice anything unusual?”

“Well, everything about Tosok anatomy is unusual. As a doctor, I was fascinated by every aspect of it.”

“Of course, of course,” said Dale. “What I meant was this: was the bullet entrance wound the only sign of recent injury to Hask’s torso?”

“No.”

“What other signs were there?”

“I saw three raised, dark-purple lines on his torso.”

“Did these lines remind you of anything you’d seen before?”

“Yes.”

“And what would that be?”

“Well, except for the color, they looked like recent scars.”

“What kind of scars?”

“Well, normally I’d say they were untreated injury scars, but—”

“What do you mean by ‘normally’?”

“Well, a surgical scar will usually be flanked left and right by small dots of scar tissue, caused by the sutures used to seal the wound.”

“So these weren’t surgical scars?”

“On the contrary, I think they were indeed. Stant told me that his people don’t use suture—at least not anymore—to close wounds. But a wound has to be closed somehow; otherwise, it simply gapes open. These were very neat, very precise lines—the kind one gets with a scalpel. And they clearly had been closed somehow.”

Dale reached into a bag on his desk and pulled out a Tosok doll; Mattel had rushed them to market shortly after the aliens had arrived on Earth. “Dr. Hernandez, using this doll, would you indicate where you recollect the scars being?”

“Certainly.” She started to leave the box, but Dale motioned for her to stay there. He walked through the well and handed her the doll and a purple Magic Marker.

“The first one was here,” she said, drawing a line vertically between the front arm and the left leg near the bottom of the torso.

“The second was here,” she said, drawing a horizontal line well below the left-front breathing orifice.

“And the third was here,” she said, making a diagonal line behind and just to the left of the front arm. “There could have been other scars, as well; I never saw Hask’s back.”

“Now, Dr. Hernandez,” said Dale, “you are the only human ever to assist in a surgical procedure on a Tosok, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And have you followed the revelations that have been made during this trial and elsewhere about Tosok anatomy?”

“Yes. As you know, the Tosoks are not at all forthcoming about such matters, but there’s an Internet newsgroup devoted to what we’ve been able to glean about Tosok physiology; I’ve been on that from the day it started.”

“If these scars were left behind from surgical incisions, what areas of Tosok anatomy would the surgery likely have concentrated on?”

“One of the four Tosok hearts, one of the four Tosok lungs, and one of the four organs that we’ve gathered serves a combined function similar to what our separate kidneys and spleen perform.”

“Thank you, Dr. Hernandez. Your witness, counselor.”

Ziegler rose warily. She clearly had no idea what Dale was getting at. Still, her natural instinct was to discredit anything the defense tried to enter into evidence. “Dr. Hernandez, have you examined Hask since you closed the bullet entrance wound on him?”

“No.”

“Does he still have the stitches you put in him?”

“No.”

“What happened to them?”

“Stant removed them, I’m told.”

Ziegler paused for breath, presumably expecting a “Hearsay!” objection from Dale, but it didn’t come. She pressed on. “But you put in the stitches yourself.”

“Well, putting stitches in requires a certain skill. Taking them out is easy—you just snip the suture with scissors, then pull the threads out. Stant had asked me how it was done, and I told him; he said he was sure he could manage it himself.”

“So you’ve never actually seen Tosok scar tissue, correct?”

“I believe I have, yes, in the three places I indicated on the doll.”

“But you’ve never seen what you were sure was Tosok scar tissue.”

“Not a hundred percent sure, no, but in my best expert medical judgment, that’s what it was.”

“But, Dr. Hernandez, we all know that Tosoks shed their skin—we even saw it happen in this courtroom. Surely any old scars are discarded with the old skin.”

“Human beings replace all their skin cells over a seven-year period, Ms. Ziegler. And yet I’ve got scars I’ve had since childhood. My judgment from having seen the bullet wound on Hask is that the Tosok body covering is multilayered, and that the so-called new skin revealed when old skin is shed is already many years old, but simply never has been exposed at the surface before. Indeed, it would have to be thus if we’re to believe that shedding of the old skin can be induced at any time. If you carved right through all the layers of skin, into the organ cavity, I’m sure you would leave scars that would survive the shedding of the outer skin.”

“But what about the Tosok recuperative powers? We heard earlier in testimony from Captain Kelkad that Tosoks can regenerate damaged organs. Surely beings that can do that would not have scars that persisted for long?”

“One has nothing to do with the other,” said Hernandez. “Scar tissue isn’t a replacement for the skin that’s normally there—it’s a supplement, a natural attempt to help close the injury site and protect it from being damaged again. No one knows for sure, of course, but it’s my expert opinion that the scars on Hask’s body are of relatively recent origin, but predate his most recent skin shedding.”

During the lunch break, Frank and Dale went for a walk. First, of course, they had to push through the crowd of reporters and onlookers, but once that was done, they made their way onto Broadway. It was a bright day, and as they left the courtroom Dale put on his sunglasses. Frank, meanwhile, took a pair of clip-ons out of his jacket pocket and affixed them to his normal glasses.

And then he stopped dead in his tracks. “That’s what’s been bothering me!”

“Pardon?” said Dale.

“Alpha Centauri—the Tosoks. Something just hasn’t quite added up about them.” Frank started walking again, and Dale fell in next to him. “I even went over to the PBS studios to look at Clete’s old show on Alpha Centauri. What do you know about Alpha Centauri?”

“That’s where the Robinsons were headed in Lost in Space,” said Dale.

“Anything else?”

Dale shook his head.

“Well, as you heard in the courtroom, Alpha Centauri isn’t really one star—it’s actually three stars very close together. We call the three parts Alpha Centauri A, B, and C, in descending order of brightness. The Tosoks claim they come from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, and I’m inclined to believe that. If they came from B, the principal lighting aboard their mothership would be orange instead of yellow.”

“Okay.”

“Well, Centauri A is a almost a twin for our sun. It’s what we call a G2V star, precisely the same spectral class as Sol, and—”

“Sol?”

Frank smiled. “Sorry. The word ‘sun’ is actually a generic term. Any star that has planets is a sun. Our sun’s proper name is Sol, after the Roman god of the sun.”

Dale nodded.

“So, as I was saying,” continued Frank, “Alpha Centauri A is actually damn near a twin for our own sun, Sol. It’s the same color, the same temperature, and so on. And it’s about the same age—actually, a little older. But there’s one significant way in which Centauri A differs from Sol.”

“And what’s that?”

“Its brightness. Centauri A is an inherently brighter star—fifty-four percent brighter than our sun.”

“So?”

“So even on cloudy days here, all the Tosoks wear those pop-in sunglasses. If they’re from a world of a brighter star, our dimmer sun shouldn’t bother them.”

“Maybe they have a different atmosphere from us; maybe it’s not transparent like ours is.”

Frank nodded, impressed. “That would be an excellent explanation, except for one thing: the Tosoks breathe our air without any difficulty, and when Clete went aboard their mothership, he breathed their air without trouble, too—and you saw in those videotapes that it was crystal clear.”

“Well, then, maybe they orbit their sun farther out than we orbit ours.”

They had come to a park bench. Dale motioned for them to sit down.

“Exactly,” said Frank, lowering himself to the bench. “In fact, when I was talking to Kelkad about how long it would take to build replacement parts for the mothership, he got upset when I said two years—but he calmed down when Hask explained I meant two Earth years. The Tosok year is obviously much longer, and since Alpha Centauri A is about the same mass and size as Sol, to have a substantially longer year, the Tosok home world must orbit much farther out from it than we do from our sun.”

“I don’t know anything about astronomy,” said Dale, “but that sounds reasonable.”

“Well, it is—sort of. Remember, Centauri A is the same size, but 1.54 times as bright as our sun. A planet orbiting the same distance from Centauri A as Earth is from Sol would therefore get 1.54 times as much light from it.”

“Okay.”

“But if you double the distance, you only get one quarter of the sunlight. So, a planet orbiting Centauri A at a distance of two AUs—two times the distance between Earth and Sol—would get one quarter of 1.54 times Sol’s light as seen from Earth. That works out to—let me think—something like forty percent of what we get.”

“Well, that would explain why they always need sunglasses, even on cloudy days. But wouldn’t that also make their world much cooler than ours?”

Frank smiled. “For someone who doesn’t know anything about astronomy, you ask all the right questions. Certainly, Clete said the mothership’s air temperature, even outside the hibernation room, was only about fifty degrees Fahrenheit. But how far away from a G2V star can a planet be and still have a fifty-degree surface temperature? Well, the answer depends on how much carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane there is in the atmosphere of the Tosok home world. See, those gases trap heat. You’ve heard of the greenhouse effect? It’s caused by excess amounts of them, all of which are clear, colorless gases. They’re the wild card in planetary positions. If you’ve got enough of a greenhouse effect, you could be much farther from our sun and still have surface temperatures comparable to those on Earth—in theory, there could be an Earth-like planet out in the orbit of Jupiter as long as it had enough greenhouse gases to trap sufficient heat.”

“So there’s your answer,” said Dale. “The Tosoks come from a planet that orbits much farther from its star than we do from ours.”

“Ah, but you’re forgetting something when you say ‘its star,’ singular. Alpha Centauri is a multiple-star system. When Centauri A and B are at their closest to each other, they’re only eleven AUs apart—just about one billion miles.”

Dale frowned. “So you’re saying the light from Centauri B would make things bright, even if the Tosok world orbited a long way from Centauri A?”

“No, no. Even at its closest approach, Centauri B would only appear about one percent as bright as our sun. That’s still thousands of times brighter than our full moon—meaning nights on the Tosok home world when A has set but B is still up are probably reasonably bright, but surely no brighter than our streetlights make our streets.”

“Oh.”

“No, the problem isn’t Alpha Centauri B’s light—it’s its gravity. Clete explained all this in his show. According to celestial mechanics, planetary orbits in a double-star system are stable out to a distance of one fifth the closest approach between the two stars. Since the closest A ever gets to B is eleven AUs, then planetary orbits around A are stable out to just over two AUs—just over twice as far out as Earth is from our sun.”

“But farther out than that, they’re unstable?”

Frank nodded. “And an unstable orbit could be threatening them with extinction. In which case, it’s possible that they’re not just here for a visit. The Tosok race may be looking for a new home.”

“You mean, as in invading ours?”

Frank shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“God.”

“Exactly,” said Frank. “And think about the missing body parts: the eyes are clearly one of our most fragile components. And the throat—you heard what Professor Wills said: the design makes it easy to choke to death. And the appendix, a part that can be made to burst, causing death if not treated immediately.” He paused, and looked at the old lawyer. “You know what Linda Ziegler’s got Packwood Smathers doing: looking for a way to kill a Tosok, should the jury hand down a death sentence. Perhaps the Tosoks were doing something similar: looking for a way to wipe us out, to make room for them to come here.”