Illegal Alien

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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 camcorder’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 feet 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 had 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 rear 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 o’ 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 have 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.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  The Tosok landing craft skimmed above the surface of New York’s East River until it came to Turtle Bay, site of the United Nations. It zoomed over the low, concave-sided, dome-roofed General Assembly building, then did three loops around the thirty-nine-story slab of the Secretariat, before settling in the wide driveway in front of the General Assembly. No doubt about it—the Tosoks had a flare for the dramatic. Almost two billion people were watching the event live, and it seemed as though half of New York had been out on the streets, looking up.

  The UN had been cordoned off. New York’s finest on one side of the barrier and gray-uniformed United Nations guards on the other were carefully controlling who got access. Frank Nobilio hoped the precautions were sufficient. He’d spent hours poring over the photographs of the alien mothership taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (which had passed within line of sight of it repeatedly now). The guys at NASA/Ames said the ship appeared to be fusion-powered—and a fusion exhaust aimed at Earth could do enormous damage. Frank was terrified of the consequences if one of the Tosoks were assassinated.

  Still, there was always something about being here at the UN that moved him deeply. Oh, sure, over its history, the United Nations had probably had more failures than successes, but it still represented the loftiest of human ideals, and that meant something to Frank, who in his early twenties had spent a year in the Peace Corps, and who, as a grad student at Berkeley, had been involved in protests against the Vietnam War.

  “We, the People of the United States” were indeed great words, and even decades in Washington hadn’t dulled Frank’s faith in them. But “We the Peoples of the United Nations” were even greater words, he thought as he looked up at the giant plaque outside the General Assembly:

  WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED TO SAVE SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS FROM THE SCOURGE OF WAR, WHICH TWICE IN OUR LIFETIME HAS BROUGHT UNTOLD SORROW TO MANKIND, AND TO REAFFIRM FAITH IN FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS, IN THE DIGNITY AND WORTH OF THE HUMAN PERSON, IN THE RIGHTS OF MEN AND WOMEN AND OF NATIONS LARGE AND SMALL…

  Those were words the whole planet could be proud of. As everyone in the crowd waited for the air lock on the Tosok lander to open, Frank smiled to himself. Its critics notwithstanding, he was glad there was a place like this for the aliens to land.

  The air lock did open—and out came Cletus Calhoun. The crowd, which normally would have been delighted to catch a glimpse of a celebrity, reacted with disappointment. A UN guard hurried over with a microphone stand, and Clete stepped up to it.

  “Take me to your leader,” he said, in harsh, mechanical tones.

  The crowd laughed. Clete’s face split in a toothy grin. “I suppose y’all are wondering why I called y’all here today.”

  More laughter.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, sobering. “It is my profound honor to present to y’all the first extraterrestrial visitors to Earth.” He indicated the air lock, and the Tosok captain, Kelkad, strode out.

  The entire audience gasped. Most of them had seen the pictures of Hask taken aboard the Kitty Hawk, but, still, to actually see an alien with one’s own eyes…

  It started at one side of the vast crescent of spectators: a single woman clapping. Within moments it swept like a wave over the entire crowd: a thunderous storm of applause.

  Kelkad’s long strides quickly brought him over to stand next to Clete. Frank could see Clete talking to the alien, probably explaining the significance of the clapping. Kelkad made a beckoning gesture with his back hand and the remaining six Tosoks filed out of the lander. They formed two rows of three behind Kelkad, who moved to stand in front of the microphone.

  The applause died down at once, everyone anxious to hear what the alien leader had to say.

  “Hello,” said Kelkad—or rather, said his pocket translator. Frank assumed the vocabulary database from Hask’s translator must have by now been copied over to those of the other Tosoks. “Nice planet you’ve got here.”

  The applause again, with hundreds of cheers mixed in. Frank recognized Clete’s sense of humor in the comment; he’d obviously coached Kelkad on what to say.

  Frank found himself clapping so hard his palms were stinging. And so were his eyes, at the beautiful sight of aliens standing in front of the rainbow row of one hundred and eighty-five flags outside of the United Nations of Earth.

  “People of planet Earth,” said Kelkad later that afternoon, standing at one of the two podiums inside the General Assembly hall, “we come to you as neighbors: our home world is a planet in the Alpha Centauri system.”

  Frank was sitting in the public gallery above the General Assembly, looking down on the concentric semicircular rows of delegate seating. His eyebrows went up. Although Alpha Centauri A was much like the sun, it was bound gravitationally to two other stars. Offhand, Frank wouldn’t have thought that system capable of having an Earth-like world.

  “We came here,” continued Kelkad, “to bring you greetings from our people. But, unexpectedly,
it seems we also need your help. Our starship has been damaged, and is in need of repair. We cannot build the required parts ourselves—the damage is beyond the limited resources of our mothership. But although many of the principles used in building the replacement parts we need will be unfamiliar to you, Dr. Calhoun assures me that you have the technology to manufacture complex items according to our plans. We therefore ask that some of you agree to build the parts we need. In exchange, those who do build the parts will be welcome to keep whatever knowledge and technology they can glean from the process.”

  Frank could see the rows of ambassadors salivating down below. Of course it would likely only be the technologically sophisticated countries, doubtless led by the U.S. and Japan, that would get contracts with the Tosoks.

  Kelkad continued on for another half hour or so, with everyone listening intently. And then:

  “And so,” said Kelkad, “it is with great pleasure that we extend the front hand of friendship, and the back hand of trust, across the light-years to our closest neighbors, to a race of beings that we hope will also become our closest friends. Men and women of planet Earth, you are no longer alone!”

  After the speech, every nation on Earth extended invitations to the Tosoks to visit. There was considerable pressure for them to head east from New York, across the Atlantic—it was felt that the United States had monopolized the alien visitors too much already, and a westward trip across the U.S. would be inappropriate.

  And so it came to pass that the aliens toured London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Moscow, Jerusalem, Giza, Calcutta, Beijing, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Vancouver. An entourage traveled with them, including Frank and Clete, and several other prominent scientists from various nations, along with a security detachment. The Canadian representative turned out to be Packwood Smathers, the same blowhard Clete had argued with on CNN.