Illegal Alien

*4*

The inside of Hask’s lander was simple and elegant. Frank and Clete had been hoping for a glimpse of some fantastically advanced technology, but clearly almost all aspects of the lander’s operations were automated. There was a single control console with a few cross-shaped keypads similar to the one on Hask’s handheld computer. There were also some recognizable mechanical devices, including cylinders with nozzles that were most likely fire extinguishers.

The most intriguing thing were the Tosok chairs, which were shaped something like tall, sideways saddles. Hask sat on one. As he did so the raised sides rose up to—well, to his “leg-pits” might be the appropriate term: the hollows beneath where his long legs joined his shoulders. The sides seemed to be spring-loaded. As Hask lowered his weight into the chair, the sides compressed, then snapped into place at just the right height to support him.

There were indeed eight chairs: two in the front row, then two additional rows of three chairs apiece. Clete tried to sit in one of the chairs, but found it excruciating. Hask went over to the wall, which was pale green and waxy in appearance. He touched it, and a hatch popped open. Hask reached in and pulled out a device that looked a bit like a screwdriver, although no part of it seemed to be metallic. He then dropped down to the floor—it was a strange, fluid movement, his long legs folding in three places, and his front arm helping to support his weight. He ended up lying on his front, and his rear arm reached up with the tool held in his four-fingered hand. He did something with it and the front part of the saddle seemed to come loose.

Clete surged forward and grabbed that part of the chair before it toppled onto the Tosok.

Hask then rose to his feet. “Suitable?” he said.

Clete sat down sideways on it, leaning back against the remaining projection from the curving seat. He smiled at Frank. “Ain’t no La-Z-Boy, but it’ll do the trick.”

“When are you going to leave?” Frank said to Hask.

“Whenever Clete is ready.”

“Can I bring my video camera?” asked Clete, indicating an equipment bag sitting on the lander’s floor.

“Yes.”

“All right,” said Clete. “Then let’s go.”

Frank left the spacecraft, and the airlock door slid shut behind him.

It was three in the afternoon. The sky had been whipped by contrail lashes: dozens of media and government airplanes had flown over the area to get glimpses of the alien ship. The sea was reasonably calm; waves slapped softly against the Kitty Hawk’s hull.

All the arrangements had been made. Hask and Clete would fly up to the mothership, get the rest of the Tosoks, and then land in United Nations Plaza. There was going to be some delay aboard the mothership—Hask lacked the vocabulary to explain exactly why that was—so they would not be returning for about twenty hours.

Frank, meanwhile, would be flown by fighter jet direct from the Kitty Hawk to Washington, where he’d brief the president, who was already miffed that the meeting was taking place at the UN rather than on the White House lawn, as fifties SF films had predicted. They would both then fly to New York; other world leaders were making their way there is well. All in all, Frank was pleased: humanity was handling first contact much better than he’d expected.

The alien lander lifted off the flight deck, its deep green form stark against the pale blue sky. Frank waved as it rose higher and higher. Two F-14s provided an escort—as well as an opportunity to observe the alien ship in flight.

Inside the lander, Clete was getting it all on videotape. No live transmission was possible, unfortunately—the lander was shielded against radio waves, preventing Clete from broadcasting out, and there was no way of using the equipment on hand to interface his camera with the communications system employed by the Tosoks.

Although the four mirrored squares along the pointed bow of the shield-shaped craft did indeed turn out to be windows, Clete found he got a much better view through the wall display inside the ship. The lander rose up, higher and higher; the Atlantic Ocean receded beneath them, and the sky quickly changed from blue to purple to black. Soon Clete could see the east coast of Central America, and then the west coast of Africa as well. He was literally shaking with excitement—his whole life he’d wanted to go into space, and now it was happening! Adrenaline coursed through his system, and when he caught sight of his own reflection in the wall monitor, he saw that there was a huge grin spread across his face.

The lander continued to rise, and soon it passed over the terminator, into Earth’s nightside. Above, the real stars were rock steady; below, the constellations of city lights twinkled with interference patterns.

Soon the ship was in orbit, and the invisible hand stopped pressing against Clete’s side—he was, after all, sitting sidesaddle. He felt himself grow weightless, and his heart pounded even harder with excitement.

And then, there it was—floating majestically in front of them.

The mothership.

It was indeed gigantic. Almost all parts of it were flat black, making it hard to see against the backdrop of space. It seemed to be baton-shaped, with a bulbous habitat module at one end and what appeared to be an engine at the other. That the engine and the living quarters were so far apart suggested to Clete that the power source was nuclear. He’d have to get his colleagues to look over starplates they’d made in the last year or so; in all likelihood, the alien ship had come toward Earth tail first. Most ideas Clete had seen for starflight proposed a continuous acceleration to the halfway point, turning the ship around, then continuously decelerating until the destination was reached. Astronomers might well have inadvertently recorded the fusion exhaust of the braking starship—and from its spectra, something could be gleaned about Tosok technology.

Hask said the Tosok home world had a higher gravity than Earth, but the mothership, of course, was in microgravity now, although during its starflight its constant acceleration would have provided a sensation of normal weight.

Clete was still having trouble maintaining his composure. Flying through space was enough in and of itself to qualify as the greatest thrill of his life, but to have that coupled with actually being in the presence of an extraterrestrial lifeform was almost too much to bear. He’d been grinning so much that his cheeks hurt, and he felt positively giddy.

And weightlessness! My God, it was everything Armstrong and the other astronauts had told him it was! Once, for his PBS show, Clete had flown aboard the Vomit Comet—the KC-135 jet that NASA used to train astronauts. That had been fun, but this—this was spectacular!

Space travel.

Alien life.

Starships.

He’d come a long way from his poor upbringing in the hills of Tennessee.

He was famous, a celebrity, rich, a frequent guest on The Tonight Show.

But he’d always said he would trade all of that to go into space, to know for sure that life existed elsewhere.

Clete had guessed correctly: the lander was indeed fully automated; Hask never once touched the controls. But as the lander maneuvered along the baton’s boom, something caught Clete’s eye. Although it was hard to know what Tosok technology was supposed to look like, a portion of the ship seemed damaged. Clete pointed at it.

“Yes,” said Hask. “An impact, as we entered your solar system. To our surprise, much junk at the edge.”

“How far out?” said Clete.

“Perhaps fifty times Earth’s orbital radius.”

Clete nodded to himself. The Kuiper belt—the source of comets with orbital periods of twenty years or less. “Is the damage severe?”

“Must be repaired,” said Hask. “Your help needed.”

Clete felt his eyebrows rising. “Of course. I’m sure we’ll be glad to.”

The lander continued to approach the mothership, which Clete estimated was three hundred meters long. If its hull had been more reflective, it would have easily been visible from the ground.

Finally, the lander connected with the mothership’s hull, clamping onto it just behind the bulbous habitat module; Clete could hear the clanging of docking clamps connecting with the ship. No clamshell-doored hangar deck like on the original starship Enterprise. Clete had always found that unbelievable anyway—it required pumping so much air in and out. Three other landers—two just like the one he was in now, plus one more that was much longer and narrower—were already clamped onto the hull. There was also one additional, unused docking port.

“Is the other empty port a spare, or is a ship missing?” asked Clete.

“Ship missing,” said Hask. “One was knocked loose during the impact; we were unable to recover it.”

Hask floated forward, and both the inner and outer doors of the air lock slid aside, revealing the interior of the mothership. The lighting was yellow-white, and rather dim. If the color matched that of sunlight on the Tosok world, then they must come from a G-class star. In the local stellar neighborhood, besides Earth’s sun, only Alpha Centauri A and Tau Ceti were Gs.

It was cool inside the starship—perhaps fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The weightlessness was utterly intoxicating; Clete indulged himself with a few barrel rolls while Hask watched, his head tuft moving in a way that might indicate amusement. Soon, though, Hask floated down a corridor, and Clete followed, trying to maneuver while keeping an eye on his cam-corder’s small LCD screen. Since the Tosoks had apparently been traveling for two hundred and eleven years, Clete had expected the ship to be roomy on the inside, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of open spaces, and so far they had yet to see another Tosok.

“Where are the others?” asked Clete.

“This way,” said Hask. Every few meters he gave a gentle push off the wall with his back hand to continue him on his way. It was clear which part of the corridor served as the floor and which as the ceiling when the engines were on: the ceiling had circular yellow-white light fixtures set into it at regular intervals. In between those were tiny, much dimmer, orange lamps, which Clete thought might be emergency lighting.

The floors were covered with—well, at first Clete thought it was deep-pile carpet, but as he pushed his own hand against it to propel him along, he realized it was some sort of plant material, with purple leaves. It wasn’t grass; rather, it was more like a quilt of soft Brillo pads. Various possibilities ran through Clete’s mind: that the plant carpeting was responsible for sucking up carbon dioxide, or some other waste gas, and replenishing it with oxygen; that it represented a food source for the Tosoks; or that they just liked the sensation of walking with their bare reet through it. Although he wouldn’t presume to guess much yet about Tosok psychology, anything that helped them get through a multicentury voyage was doubtless to the good.

They finally arrived at the room Hask had been heading for. The door opened, and a puff of condensation billowed toward them, along with a blast of air so cold it gave Clete gooseflesh. He hoped it hadn’t fogged his camera lens.

Inside the tiny room were six other Tosoks, strapped to special slabs, and mostly covered over with red plastic blankets. There were two empty slabs, with their blankets removed; one was presumably Hask’s, and the other must have belonged to the eighth crew member, who Hask had said had passed away. On these, Clete could see that there was a trough running down the slab’s length to accommodate an arm. Clete couldn’t tell if the other Tosoks were lying on their fronts or their backs; so far, the only difference between the two sides he’d noticed in Hask was in the interior of his mouth, the color of his eyes, and the robustness of the front arm—and these Tosoks had their mouths and eyes closed, and the arm that was up was covered by the blanket.

“What are they doing?” asked Clete.

“Sleeping,” said Hask.

All of them at once? Surely the crew would work in shifts, and—

And then it hit him—they hadn’t just been sleeping for a few hours. Rather, they’d been sleeping for years—for centuries. This is how the Tosoks endured the long spaceflight: in hibernation.

Clete tipped his camera to look around the room. Illuminated panels were positioned on pedestals next to each slab. Each one had several animated bar charts and X-Y plots on it. Clete guessed they were medical readouts, monitoring the condition of the hibernating crew members. A careful study of the readouts might reveal a lot about Tosok physiology. Some of the panels had what looked like add-on pieces of equipment plugged into them; on others, three-holed connectors were exposed where no such equipment was in position. “I will turn up the heat,” said Hask, “and they will wake. That one”—he pointed at a Tosok with a hide much bluer than Hask’s own—“is Kelkad, the captain of this ship.”

It wasn’t cryonics—the kind of freezing for suspended animation humans had long dreamed off. Yes, this was cold—well below zero Celsius—but it was nowhere near absolute zero. The Tosoks seemed to have a natural ability to hibernate, just as many Earth animals did.

Clete was wearing blue jeans and a denim jacket; neither provided quite enough insulation against the cold. He looked around the room, still relishing the weightlessness. He found every detail of Tosok engineering fascinating. The only places he saw actual fasteners were where they were clearly meant to be undone for maintenance, like the bolts that secured the chair supports in the lander. Everything else seemed to have been molded in a single piece, mostly from ceramic, although there were a few places where metal was visible.

“They can hibernate for centuries without aid of equipment or drugs?” asked Clete.

“Yes.”

Clete shook his head. “Y’know, before humans went into space we weren’t even sure we could survive there. After all, we’d always lived under Earth’s gravity—seemed reasonable that nature might’ve made some use of gravity feed, whether in our circulatory systems, our digestive systems, or somewheres else. But it didn’t. We can live just fine in zero gravity. The one part of us that does rely on gravity—the sense of balance, which is controlled by fluids in our inner ears—simply shuts down under zero-g. Dreamers like me, we thought this meant that as a race we were intended to go into space.”

Hask’s translator had beeped a few times at unfamiliar words during Clete’s comments, but the alien clearly got the gist of what the human had been saying. “Interesting thought,” he replied.

“But you guys,” said Clete, “being able to shut down for centuries, having that ability built right into y’all. You can fake gravity in space, course, through centrifugal force or constant acceleration. But there ain’t nothing you can do about the time it takes for interstellar travel. With a natural suspended-animation ability, y’all sure got us beat. We might have been destined to go into planetary orbit, but your race seems to nave been destined to sail between the stars.”

“Many of our philosophers would agree with that statement,” said Hask. He paused. “But not all, of course.” There was silence between them for several moments. “I am hungry,” said the Tosok. That didn’t surprise Clete in the least; as far as he could tell, Hask hadn’t eaten since his lander had splashed down. “It will take several hours for the others to revive. Do you require food?”

“I brought some with me,” said Clete. “Navy rations. Hardly gourmet vittles, but they’ll do.”

“Come with me.”

Clete and Hask killed time eating and talking. Clete found the Tosok approach to food utterly fascinating—not to mention disgusting—and he recorded it all on videotape. Eventually, the other Tosoks were revived enough to leave the hibernation chamber, and Clete heard the Tosok language for the first time as they spoke to each other. Although it contained many English-like sounds, it also included a snapping, a pinging, and something like two wooden sticks being clacked together. Clete doubted that a human could speak it without mechanical aids.

There was a lot of variation in skin color among the Tosoks. Hask’s skin was blue-gray. One of the others had a taupe hide, another a neutral gray.

Two had cyan skin. One was navy blue. Kelkad’s was a bit lighter than that.

Eye color seemed to vary widely; only one of the Tosoks had all four eyes the same color. They chattered endlessly, and one of the aliens took great interest in Clete, poking him in the ribs, feeling his skin and the hair on his head, and staring with two round eyes directly into Clete’s face from only inches away.

Hask seemed to be briefing the others. As far as Clete could tell, hand gestures didn’t play any significant role in Tosok communication but the tufts on the tops of each one’s head waved in complex patterns that seemed to add nuance to the spoken words. Hask’s monologue contained several instances of a word that sounded like kash-boom! Clete wondered if it was onomatopoeic, referring to the explosion that must have accompanied the collision in the Kuiper belt; apparently only Hask and the now-deceased Tosok had been revived during that.

It was difficult to tell, but Captain Kelkad seemed displeased with Hask—his voice rose higher than was normal as his sentences progressed and his tuft moved with great agitation. Perhaps, thought Clete, the alien captain felt Hask had exceeded his authority by making first contact before reviving the others, or maybe he was angry over the death of one of his crew.

At last, Kelkad turned to look at Clete. He spoke a few words, and Hask translated. “Kelkad says he will meet with your leaders now. We are ready to fly back down.”