Illegal Alien

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “So, for instance, two plus two equals four is right?” said Penney.

  “In all counting systems except base three and base four, yes.”

  “And, in base ten now, two plus two equals five is wrong, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do the words right and wrong have any other meaning?”

  “Right also refers to the direction that is to the south when one is facing east.”

  “Yes, yes. Right on its own has other meanings, but the concept of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ do they apply to anything other than factual matters?”

  “Not in my experience.”

  Penney looked briefly at Dale, then turned back to Hask. “What about the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’?”

  “A food item that has an agreeable taste is said to be good; one that has putrefied is said to be bad.”

  “And what about the concepts of moral and immoral?”

  “These apparently have to do with human religion.”

  “They have no bearing on Tosok religion?”

  “Tosoks believe in predetermination—we do the will of God.”

  “You believe in a single God?”

  “We believe in a single being that was foremother to our race.”

  “And this God—she is good?”

  “Well, she has not begun to putrefy.”

  “You perform no actions that are not the will of your God?”

  “The God.”

  “Pardon?” said Penney.

  “It is not acceptable to speak of God possessively.”

  “Sorry. You perform no actions that are not the will of the God?”

  “By definition, such a thing would be impossible.”

  “Is there a devil in your religion?”

  Hask’s translator beeped. “A—devil? The word is unfamiliar.”

  “In many Earth religions,” said Frank, once again leaning against the wall, “there is a supremely good being, called God, and an adversary, who attempts to thwart God’s will. This adversary is called the devil.”

  “God is omnipotent,” said Hask, looking briefly at Frank, then turning back to Penney. “Nothing can thwart her.”

  “Then there is no continuum of behavior?” asked the psychiatrist.

  “I have encountered this concept repeatedly in human thought,” said Hask. “The idea that everything moves from one extreme on the left to another on the right, or that there are two equal ‘sides’ to every issue—using the word ‘sides’ in a way a Tosok never would.” His topknot moved. “This is an alien way of thinking to me; I rather suspect it has something to do with the left-right symmetry of your bodies. You have a left hand and a right, and although each individual among you seems to favor one—Frank, I have noticed you favor your right, but Dale, you favor your left—in general, you seem to view the hands as equal. But we Tosoks have a front hand that is much stronger than our back hand; we have no concept—to use one of your words that does not translate fully—of what you call ‘evenhandedness.’ One perspective is always superior to the other; the front always takes precedence over the back. The aspect with the preponderance of power or weight is the side of God, and it always wins.”

  Frank smiled. Clete would have loved that kind of biology-based answer.

  “Let me ask you some hypothetical questions,” said Penney. “Is it all right to steal?”

  “If I do it, God certainly must have observed it, and since she did not stop me, it must be acceptable.”

  “Is it all right to kill?”

  “Obviously, God could prevent one from doing so if she wished; that she does not clearly means the killer must have been acting as her instrument.”

  Penney’s eyebrows went up. “Are there any unacceptable actions?”

  “Define unacceptable.”

  “Unacceptable: acts that cannot be countenanced. Acts that are not reasonable.”

  “No.”

  “If you killed someone because he was trying to kill you, would that be acceptable?”

  “If it happened, it is acceptable.”

  “If you killed someone because he was trying to steal from you, would that be acceptable?”

  “If it happened, it is acceptable.”

  “If you killed someone because the joke they told was one you had already heard, would that be acceptable?”

  “If it happened, it is acceptable.”

  “In our culture,” said Penney, “we define insanity as the inability to distinguish moral acts from immoral acts.”

  “There is no such thing as an immoral act.”

  “So, by the definition of the human race, are you insane?”

  Hask considered this for a moment. “Unquestionably,” he said at last.

  Frank, Dale, and Dr. Penney walked out of the residence hall and ambled across the USC campus, passing by the statue of Tommy Trojan and then cutting diagonally across Alumni Park. It was an overcast January day. “We’re not going to sell that insanity defense, are we?” said Frank.

  A couple of students passed them going the other way. Penney waited until they were out of earshot. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Hask’s thinking is radically different, but he doesn’t seem out-and-out deranged. Most juries like to see illogic as part of insanity, but what Hask believes appears to be internally consistent.” Penney lifted his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Dale.”

  “What about the self-defense approach?” asked Frank.

  “Hask would have to admit to the crime before we could even begin to structure a defense based on that, and so far he’s refused to do so,” said Dale.

  “So what are we going to do?” asked Frank.

  Dale paused again, as more students, plus one old fellow who must have been a prof, passed them. “If he continues to plead innocent, then we’ve got to at the very least establish a reasonable doubt about his guilt. And that means attacking every aspect of the prosecution case.”

  “The Simpson criminal strategy?” asked Frank.

  Dale shrugged. “Basically.”

  “But what if we get a Hiroshi Fujisaki instead of a Lance Ito?” asked Frank. “What if we don’t get the latitude to do that?”

  Dale looked first at Penney, then at Frank. “Then we’re in deep trouble,” he said. “The prosecution has an excellent case.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  Linda Ziegler arrived at Valcour Hall late in the afternoon. She didn’t want to see the murder site again, nor did she want to speak to any of the Tosoks. Rather, she went straight to Packwood Smathers’s room. She knocked on his door, and he called out for whoever it was to come in.

  “Hello, Dr. Smathers,” she said, opening the door. “My name is Linda Ziegler, and I’m a deputy district attorney here in Los Angeles County.”

  Smathers was working at a desk mounted against one wall. He knit his bushy white eyebrows together. “I want legal counsel present.”

  Ziegler smiled her best, brightest smile. “Dr. Smathers, you’re not a suspect for anything. I understand you were treated unpleasantly by the police earlier, and on behalf of—well, on behalf of Americans in general—I apologize for that. I know you’re a visitor to our country, and I’m coming to you now for some help.”

  Smathers sounded dubious. “Help?”

  “Yes, sir. We have a problem facing us in alien—well, I guess ‘alien physiology’ would be the right term, and I’m told you’re the top person in that field.”

  Like many an arrogant man, Smathers was apparently willing to be self-effacing so long as someone else was simultaneously singing his praises. “Well, as much as one can be—until recently, everything I’ve dealt with has been purely hypothetical, but, still, despite the way Calhoun twisted it on TV, so far I’ve seen nothing in the Tosoks that invalidates my basic work.”

  Ziegler moved fully into the room, taking the other chair. Smathers’s bed was a mess, but otherwise the room was well kept. “And—do forgive me, Professor; I freely admit I’m in over my head here—but wh
at exactly was your basic work in this area?”

  Smathers seemed to be warming slightly. “Well, simply, that all lifeforms, no matter where they’re from, must adhere to certain basic engineering principles in their fundamental body plan.”

  “Fundamental body plan?” said Ziegler.

  Smathers nodded. “Our Tosok friends are vertebrates. Reduced to simplest terms, the Tosok body is a hollow tube, with an internal support structure, very much like our own.” The Canadian paused. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the Tosoks don’t like talking about the insides of bodies—it’s a taboo with them. It’s like us and nudity: it’s perfectly acceptable for a human to be seen nude by his doctor, but outside of that context, it takes on a completely different meaning. The Tosoks won’t show us their medical texts, nor will they look at ours. Stant—he’s the Tosok biologist—seems downright embarrassed by my curiosity about their inner workings.”

  Ziegler nodded.

  “Anyway,” said Smathers, “the Tosoks differ in several noticeable ways from the vertebrates of Earth. Our vertebrates have body parts that come either singly or in pairs: we have one heart, one liver, one spleen, one stomach, but two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes, two arms, two legs, and so on. Because of the pairing of our body parts, we have bilateral symmetry.”

  Ziegler nodded. “Right,” she said.

  Smathers smiled. “Right—exactly. And left. Just two sides. The Tosoks, on the other hand, have quadrilateral symmetry. Their body parts either come singly or in groups of four. Stant has at least admitted to that much.”

  “That’s not true,” said Ziegler. “They’ve got two arms and two legs, and their eyes come in pairs.”

  Smathers nodded. “Yes, yes. That’s the way it appears superficially. It’s hard when looking at the product of billions of years of evolution to see the underlying architecture. But let’s consider a hypothetical primitive creature from Alpha Centauri. I suspect it had a body plan like so.” He took a lined pad off his desk and drew a large central circle on it with four smaller circles clustered around it, like a café table and chairs as seen on a blueprint. “This is a view from above,” he said. “The central circle is the animal’s torso. Each of the four circles is the cross section of a limb, looking down from the shoulder. I suspect in early Centauri lifeforms, the four limbs were undifferentiated, and were all used for locomotion—as flagella in aquatic forms, and as legs in land-dwelling ones. You can call these four limbs north, east, south, and west.” He wrote the letters N, E, S, and W next to them.

  “Well,” said Smathers, “you’ve seen that the Tosoks have two arms—one in front, almost like a trunk; and another, more slender one, in back, where you’d expect a tail to be. And they have two legs, one on either side. Obviously, what happened through evolution is that the east and west limbs became the sole locomotor appendages, and the north and south ones shortened, so that they no longer touched the ground, freeing them up for manipulatory uses.

  “A Tosok also has four orifices on the head. Two of the orifices seem to have specialized for breathing, and two more—the ones directly above the arms—have specialized for the intake of food.”

  “And the eyes?” said Ziegler.

  “Right—the four eyes. I suspect they were originally evenly spaced around the head, but over time have migrated together forming two pairs, each of which is capable of stereoscopic vision.”

  Ziegler nodded, impressed. “All right,” she said, “there’s no doubt you’ve got a good handle on the basic physiology.”

  “As good as anyone can have without ever having seen the insides of a Tosok, yes.”

  “Then how do you kill one?”

  Smathers visibly pulled back. “I—I beg your pardon?”

  “If the jury finds Hask guilty, we’re going to ask for the death penalty. We’ll need a way to execute him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, how do you kill one?”

  “I, ah—well, gee, that’s a good question.”

  “They figured out how to kill our kind easily enough,” said Ziegler bitterly.

  “We, ah, don’t have the death penalty in Canada,” said Smathers. “I don’t know if I’m really the right person for this job.”

  “My sources tell me you’re damn near the only person for this job. The state of California will compensate you for your time, Professor, but we really do have to know how to kill a Tosok.” She smiled at him. “Think of it as a puzzle in science.”

  Smathers scratched his chin through his white beard. “Well, you can kill just about anything by depriving it of oxygen.”

  Ziegler shook her head. “It has to be quick and painless; otherwise, it will be deemed unconstitutional cruel-and-unusual punishment. It also can’t be gruesome; the public won’t stand for that.”

  Smathers considered for a moment. “That makes it difficult. Hanging is out—Tosoks have no necks; having eyes in the back of their heads obviates the need for one. And using either lethal injection or a gas chamber depends on fine details of physiology; I can suggest all kinds of possible poisons, but can’t guarantee any of them will work quickly or without causing pain.”

  “Electrocution?”

  “Yeah, probably—but, again, I can’t guarantee that it’ll be painless or quick for a Tosok.”

  “Well, I need you to find a way.”

  Smathers shook his head. “Really, Ms. Ziegler, I—”

  “And, of course,” said Ziegler, “we would make the corpse available to you after execution.” She paused. “It might be your only opportunity to ever study alien anatomy.”

  Smathers frowned for a very long time, obviously at war with himself. Then, at last, he spoke. “As you know, we don’t have tissue samples or X rays of a Tosok; they’ve been quite shy about such matters. This really isn’t an easy problem.” He paused again, then: “Leave it with me, Ms. Ziegler. I’m sure I can work out a method.” But then he shook his head and was quiet for a long moment. “I just hope,” he said softly, “that I can live with myself after I do.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  Dale and Frank were meeting in a restaurant over lunch. Dale was eating a clubhouse sandwich, French fries, and a Caesar salad; Frank was having a grilled chicken breast and tossed salad with fat-free Italian dressing. “Doesn’t the fact that there are samples of Tosok blood at the crime scene create problems for us?” asked Frank, after swallowing a piece of radicchio.

  “Why?” asked Dale.

  “Well, if Tosok biochemistry is anything like human biochemistry, the prosecution should be able to get some sort of genetic fingerprint off it to prove it’s Hask’s blood.”

  “They could only do that if they had samples of the blood of the other Tosoks, to match it against.”

  “Well, surely they’ll subpoena them.”

  Dale made a grim little smile. “If they try that, I’ll be all over them like ugly on an ape.” He took a bite of his sandwich.

  “What? Why?”

  The lawyer swallowed, and took a swig of Pepsi. “You know how DNA testing got started?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “It started in Leicester, England. In 1983, someone there raped and strangled a fifteen-year-old girl. The police couldn’t come up with a single suspect. Three years later, in ’86, the same damned thing happened again: another fifteen-year-old, raped and choked to death. This time, the police arrested a guy named—what was it now?—Buckley, Buckland, something like that. He confessed to the recent murder, but not the one three years before.

  “Coincidentally, a British geneticist working right there at the University of Leicester had recently been in the news, because he’d invented a technique for finding genetic markers for disease. He called his technique restriction fragment-length polymorphism; that’s the RFLP they kept talking about in the Simpson criminal trial. One of its incidental uses was that it could distinguish one person’s DNA from another, so the cops called him up and said, look, we’ve got the guy wh
o killed one of the girls, but we want to prove he killed both of them. If we send you semen samples collected from both bodies, can you prove that the DNA in them came from the same guy? The scientist—Jeffreys, his name was—said, sure thing, send them over.”

  Frank nodded, and took a sip of coffee.

  “Well, guess what?” said Dale. “Jeffreys proved the semen samples both came from the same man—but that man was not the guy who had confessed. The police were furious, but they had to let Buckland go. Now, what to do? How to catch the real murderer? Well, the cops decided they’d ask all male residents of the area between seventeen and thirty-four to submit a blood specimen so that they could be ‘eliminated from the inquiries.’” Dale shook his head. “Genteel Brits! Anyway, four thousand men came forward, but none of them matched the killer. Eventually, though, they found that a coworker of a man named Colin Pitchfork—the name should have tipped them off, don’t you think?—had donated a sample in Pitchfork’s place. The police took a sample from Pitchfork, who, of course, was the murderer. That was the first case in which DNA fingerprinting was ever used.”

  “Terrific,” said Frank.

  “No,” said Dale. “No, it stank to high heaven. Don’t you see? A whole population of people were treated like suspects solely because they were males in a likely age group. They weren’t forced to donate blood, but the idea caught on like wildfire in the community—and anyone who didn’t make a donation was suspect. See? It was a gross violation of civil rights. Suddenly people were being compelled to prove themselves innocent, instead of being assumed to be so. If a cop came up to me and said, look, you’re black and we think our criminal is black, so you prove to me you’re not the criminal, I’d have that person busted off the force. Well, asking the Tosoks to give up blood specimens is the same thing: you belong to this group, therefore prove to us that you’re innocent. No, we can prevent that from happening, I’m sure.”

  “But they’re only seven of them!”

  “It’s still a civil-rights issue,” said Dale. “Trust me.”

  “So the prosecution won’t try to introduce the blood evidence?”