Illegal Alien Read online

“Sustained,” said Pringle. “You know the rules, Ms. Ziegler.”

  “Very well. Stant, you’ll recall that Mr. Rice did talk to you about the shedding of skin during his cross-examination. Now, you said that this event naturally occurs on a fixed, predictable schedule, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And would that schedule be synchronized with—”

  “Objection!”

  “Freeze right there, Ms. Ziegler.”

  “But, Your Honor—”

  “Freeze.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “If you have proper redirect, you may continue. Otherwise, take your seat now.”

  Ziegler considered for several seconds. Finally, she shrugged and sat back down. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Dale looked over at the jury. Some of the faces were perplexed, but several others were nodding slowly. They’d come to the same realization as Ziegler and Dale had, and would doubtless share it with the others after today’s session, the admonition not to discuss the case notwithstanding.

  The damage had been done.

  CHAPTER

  21

  “The People call Kelkad,” said Linda Ziegler.

  The alien captain was sworn in.

  Ziegler stepped up to the lectern. This time, she chose her words carefully. “Kelkad, what is your working relationship to the defendant?”

  “I am captain of a starship on which he serves.”

  “So you are his boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you also his friend?”

  “We are not close emotionally.”

  “Kelkad, how long have you known Hask?”

  “Two hundred and nineteen of your years.”

  “But you spent most of that time in hibernation, no?”

  “That is correct.”

  “How long were you in hibernation?”

  “Two hundred and eleven Earth years.”

  “So, setting aside that time, you’ve still known Hask for eight years.”

  “Correct.”

  “Have you ever had to discipline him?”

  “Of course. I am his commanding officer.”

  “In other words, Hask in the past has failed to observe regulations?”

  “From time to time.”

  “Would you please give an example of Hask’s disobedience?”

  “Certainly. Regulations require venting the reclamation facilities aboard our ship after each use; Hask has occasionally failed to observe this protocol.”

  A couple of jurors laughed.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Ziegler.

  “It is comparable to forgetting to flush the toilet,” said Kelkad.

  The rest of the jurors laughed, and so did Judge Pringle. Ziegler turned slightly red. “Can you give a more significant example of his disobedience?”

  “I have no way of knowing what you would consider significant,” said Kelkad.

  “Isn’t it true that your crew originally consisted of eight members?”

  “Objection,” said Dale. “Irrelevant.”

  “Overruled.”

  “Yes,” said Kelkad.

  “And isn’t it true that one of those crew members died en route to Earth?”

  “Objection,” said Dale. “Irrelevant.”

  “Overruled.”

  “Yes,” said Kelkad.

  “What was the name of this dead crew member?”

  “Seltar.”

  “Did you have to discipline Hask over Seltar’s death?”

  “I was not pleased about it, but it seemed unavoidable. However, I did discipline him for making contact with you humans before I was revived; I felt that Hask had been presumptuous in exceeding his authority.”

  “Do you personally know for a fact what killed Seltar?”

  “Hask told me that—”

  “Hearsay is inadmissible,” said Ziegler. “Do you personally know for a fact what killed Seltar?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I was informed by Hask that—”

  “Again, that is hearsay.”

  “I trust Hask,” said Kelkad.

  “Nonresponsive,” said Ziegler. “Move to strike.”

  “The jury will disregard the witness’s last comment,” said Pringle.

  “Did you yourself examine Seltar’s body?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was still in hibernation when the accident occurred.”

  “But Seltar was not?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Who else was not in hibernation?”

  “Hask had also been revived.”

  “Hask and Seltar were the only ones conscious aboard your ship at that time?”

  “Correct.”

  “And Hask was the only possible witness to Seltar’s death?”

  “Correct. However, I do not know if he actually did witness the death. She died while performing repairs to our ship.”

  “I didn’t ask you that. What became of Seltar’s body?”

  “It was expelled into space.”

  “The whole thing?”

  Kelkad’s tuft waved in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Was the whole, intact body expelled into space?”

  “No.”

  “In what way was it not intact?”

  “Its significant component parts were harvested prior to ejection.”

  “‘Harvested.’ What do you mean by that?”

  Kelkad paused. He glanced uncomfortably at the other Tosoks. “Her organs were removed and stored in case they might be required for transplant at some future time. Of course, if a single organ is damaged, it can usually be regenerated internally, but if two or more are damaged simultaneously, a transplant may be required.”

  “Who performed the organ harvesting?”

  “Why, Hask, of course.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Ziegler, now facing the jury. “Prior to your arrival at Earth, Hask had been awoken early, and one of the principal tasks he performed at this time was carving the organs out of a Tosok body.”

  “It was not a principal task.”

  “But he did do it.”

  “Yes. I have seen Seltar’s organs in cold storage aboard the mothership.”

  “So Hask opened up her body, removed the hearts, the lungs, and so on.”

  “Yes.”

  “Blood spilling everywhere.”

  A sucking in of breath from juror four.

  “Your Honor!” said Dale. “Objection.”

  Judge Pringle frowned at the prosecutor. “Sustained. Ask a question, Ms. Ziegler.”

  “Hask is not a doctor, correct?”

  “That is correct. But he was consecrated by a priest-physician to perform certain medical procedures; we all had such training.”

  “Despite the Tosok taboo about such matters?”

  “We view the internal workings of the body the way you view sexual intercourse. They are private matters, but at appropriate times they can be appropriately explored. Given that five individuals are involved in Tosok mating, we have no privacy taboos associated with that act, and I assure you, Ms. Ziegler, that human embarrassment over sexual matters seems as strange to us as our reticence about interior biology is to you.”

  “Understood,” said Ziegler. “When Hask was confronted with the task of harvesting Seltar’s organs, this would have been his first time performing such a procedure on an actual corpse, no? His training would have been done on simulations or dummies, correct?”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” said Dale. “Compound question.”

  “Sustained.”

  “To your knowledge,” said Ziegler, “Hask would never have dissected an actual corpse before?”

  “Object to the term ‘dissected.’ Inflammatory.”

  “Sustained.”

  “To your knowledge, Hask would never have removed organs from a real body before, correct?”

  The cl
ock whirred again. Someone coughed in the back of the courtroom. “Correct.”

  Ziegler locked her gaze on the alien captain. “Is it conceivable that Hask took pleasure in this act?”

  “Objection! Calls for speculation.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Very well. As leader of your expedition, you no doubt received training in psychology, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Tosok psychology, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you are qualified as an expert in this area—more so than any human psychologist?”

  “Yes.”

  “And of all your crew, you’ve had the most psychological training?”

  “Your Honor,” said Dale, spreading his arms. “Objection. Ms. Ziegler has tried this same stunt before. We’ve got no way to verify any of this. Surely the Court can’t rely on such opinions.”

  “The People are not asking you to accept Kelkad’s opinions, Your Honor,” said Ziegler, “but the Tosoks are the only witnesses who can offer any sort of testimony in these areas. To that extent, these are factual matters, not matters of opinion, and they are clearly probative.”

  “Normally I wouldn’t allow it,” said Pringle, “but, Mr. Rice, I’ll give you similar latitude should you wish to pursue similar lines of questioning during your case-in-chief.”

  “Thank you,” said Ziegler. “Kelkad, as an expert in Tosok psychology, let me ask you a hypothetical question. Given the taboos surrounding internal bodily processes in your culture, is it conceivable that a Tosok could find pleasure in performing organ extraction?”

  “Not a normal Tosok.”

  “No, not a normal Tosok,” said Ziegler. “But in the annals of Tosok psychology, have there been cases of aberrant individuals taking pleasure in carving into other people’s bodies?”

  Kelkad said nothing.

  “Come now, Kelkad. I realize you’re trying to put the best foot forward for your people, just as our race has been trying to portray itself positively in your eyes. There are human beings who take pleasure in such matters. We consider it sick and deviant, and it is mercifully rare, but such human beings do exist. Are you telling me that no such Tosoks exist?”

  “They exist,” said Kelkad slowly.

  “In Tosok psychology, are there predictive tests for such a predilection?”

  “I do not understand the question.”

  “I mean, how is it that you discover that a Tosok has this particular aberration? Can you determine it just by looking at the Tosok?”

  “No.”

  “Would a normal Tosok psychological test—say, the kind your crew might have undergone before being assigned to this mission—reveal this predilection?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “In fact, in most such cases, a Tosok would not know that he found this pleasurable until circumstance forced him to actually expose the internal organs, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes, I suspect that is probably true.”

  “And if a Tosok did find itself stimulated by this action, he or she might be as surprised as anyone, no?”

  “It would certainly shock me to discover it about myself,” said Kelkad.

  “I’m sure it would,” said Ziegler. “Psychologically speaking, do individual Tosoks desire to repeat experiences they have found stimulating?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You’re hedging, Kelkad. The answer is surely more direct.”

  “Objection,” said Dale. “Badgering.”

  “Overruled.”

  “Yes, they may well desire to repeat pleasurable experiences.”

  “So,” said Ziegler, “if Hask had found himself enjoying the act of removing the organs from—”

  “Objection! Your Honor, counsel is arguing her case.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Very well,” said Ziegler. She looked at the jury. “Very well. Your witness, Mr. Rice.”

  Dale rose. “Mr. Kelkad, in your experience, has Hask ever exhibited signs of sadism?”

  Kelkad’s translator beeped. “Sadism?”

  “Deriving satisfaction from inflicting pain on others.”

  “No, Hask never exhibited any such thing.”

  “Did he demonstrate an unnatural fondness for the gory?”

  “No.”

  “Any bloodthirstiness?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen him cause deliberate injury to other Tosoks?”

  “No.”

  “What about animals on your world?”

  “Hask in fact had a pet kogloo he was quite fond of; he treated it extremely well.”

  “Thank you,” said Dale, returning to his seat. “No further questions.”

  CHAPTER

  22

  A number of lesser witnesses occupied the next two weeks—other Tosoks, experts on deviant human psychology, and a variety of individuals who tried to shore up the State’s shaky case for premeditation, which seemed to hinge on two facts: first, that Hask had arranged to stay back at the dorm while the others went to the Stephen Jay Gould lecture, knowing Calhoun was also staying back, and, second, that to induce his skin shedding, he must have thought in advance to bring the chemical agent down from the mothership.

  Finally, though, it was time for the People’s most compelling bit of evidence. Linda Ziegler rose from her place at the prosecution table. “If it pleases the Court,” she said, “the People would now like to introduce a segment of the videotape made by the decedent while he was aboard the Tosok mothership.”

  “Mr. Rice?”

  Dale had fought long and hard before the trial began to get this suppressed, but Judge Pringle had ruled it admissible, and the appeals court had agreed with her. “No objection.”

  “Please proceed.”

  Two large color-television monitors were mounted on the walls of the courtroom, one facing the jury box, the other facing the spectators. In addition, Judge Pringle had a smaller TV on her bench, as did the prosecution and the defense. The bailiff dimmed the lights in the room…

  All the still pictures of the Apollo 11 crew walking on the moon have one thing in common: they all show Buzz Aldrin, for the simple reason that it was Neil Armstrong who was holding the camera. Although Armstrong was the first man on the moon, there are, in fact almost no pictures of him there.

  The videos shot in microgravity aboard the Tosok mothership were taken by Cletus Calhoun, and except for the occasional glimpse of one of his gangly limbs, he himself was therefore completely absent from the footage. Dale Rice was pleased by this. The more the jury forgot about Calhoun—the amiable hillbilly who could trade jokes with Jay Leno—the better.

  Still, Clete’s drawling voice was heard loud and clear throughout the videotape. The tape began with him chatting with a floating Hask, who was plainly visible; Dale had forgotten just how blue Hask’s old hide had been.

  “But you guys,” Clete was saying in that rich Tennessee accent, “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 have been destined to sail between the stars.”

  “Many of our philosophers would agree with that statement,” remarked Hask. Then, after a second: “But not all, of course.” They were both quiet for a time. “I am hungry,” said Hask. “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,” said Hask. The alien folded his three-part legs against a bulkhead and kicked off. Clete started off with a hand push—his long arm darted into the shot for a moment—but then apparently kicked off the wall as well. They floated down another corrido
r, large yellow lights overhead alternating with small orange ones.

  Soon they came to a door, which slid aside for Hask. They floated into the room. As they did so more lights came on overhead.

  There was a sound of Clete sucking in his breath. No way to know what he’d been thinking, but Dale Rice always felt like vomiting when he saw this part of the tape. In the dimmed light of the courtroom, he could see several jurors wincing.

  There was a great bloody mass in the middle of the picture. It took several seconds for the shape of the thing to register as Clete panned the camera. It seemed to be an enormously long tube of raw meat, its surface glistening with pinkish-red blood. The tube wound around itself like a pile of spilled intestines. Its diameter was about five inches, and its length—well, if it were all stretched out, instead of coiled up, it might have run to fifty feet, a great, gory anaconda stripped of its hide. One end was plugged into one of the room’s walls; the other end, which terminated in a flat circular cross section, was propped up by a Y-shaped ceramic support.

  “God a’mighty!” said Clete voice. “What is it?”

  “It is food,” said Hask.

  “It’s meat?”

  “Yes. Would you like some?”

  “Ah—no. No, thanks.”

  Hask floated over to the tube’s free end. He reached into one of the pouches on his dun-colored vest and removed a small blue cylinder about ten inches long and two inches in diameter. He took one end of it in the fingers of his front arm and the other in his back arm, then bent it. It split down the middle into two five-inch cylinders. He then moved his hands as if he were drawing an invisible loop of string stretched between the two cylinders around the great tube of meat, about four inches from its end. He pulled the two blue handles away from each other, and to the jury’s amazement, the last four inches of the great meat sausage separated from the rest. It just floated there, but the picture clearly showed a receptacle attached to the Y-shaped support that obviously would have caught it had the ship been undergoing acceleration.

  “How did you do that?” said Clete, off camera.

  Hask looked at him, puzzled. Then he seemed to realize. “You mean my carving tool? There is a single, long, flexible molecular chain connecting the two handles. The chain cannot be broken, but because of its thinness, it cuts easily through almost anything.”