“—but Alpha Centauri ain’t just one star,” said Clete. “It’s actually three of ’em, all very close together. We call ’em—Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and—wait for it—Alpha Centauri C. Us astronomers—we got the souls of poets.” His broad face split in a grin. “Actually, Alpha Centauri C is the closest of the bunch to us, so sometimes we do call it by a fancier name: Proxima Centauri—Proxima like in ‘proximity.’ Nuther thing y’all should know about astronomers: we like fifty-dollar words, ’cuz that’s as close as most of us ever gets to a fifty-dollar bill.” He grinned again.
The image changed to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, with Clete walking down a street at night. He paused to watch a man in gaudy dress juggling three flaming torches. “’Course,” said Clete, “when you got three stars close together, things get very interesting indeed.” The camera zoomed in on the dancing torches, then pulled out of the fireplace inside Clete’s mountain cabin—a common sight in the series. He was sitting behind an old wooden desk. A potbelly stove was in the background, and a hunting rifle hung on the wooden wall behind him. A bowl of fruit sat on the desktop.
“A and B are big stars,” Clete said. He picked a grapefruit out of the fruit bowl. “This here could be A—a big yellow star, very much like our own sun. ’Fact, A’s a tetch bigger than our sun, and about fifty percent brighter.”
He reached into the fruit bowl and pulled out an orange. “Now this here, this could be B—a smaller, dimmer, orange star. B’s about ten percent smaller than our sun, and not even half as bright—kinda like my cousin Beau.” Clete winked at the camera. He rummaged around in the fruit bowl and found a cherry. “And C—well, shoot, C’s just a l’il peckerwood of a star, a cold, dim red dwarf. Dang thing’s so small and dim, nobody even noticed it was there till 1911.”
“Now, A and B—they orbit ’round each other like this.” He moved the grapefruit and the orange to demonstrate. “But the distance between ’em ain’t constant.” The sound of a buzz saw had started in the background. “Y’all know how I hate jargon, but here’s one little bit that’ll help us out.” He turned and shouted into the distance, “Hey, you! Y’all stop that, hear?” The buzz saw died down. Clete then looked back at the lens and grinned again. “For things that are purty close together—close enough for shoutin’—we astronomers use the ‘Hey, you!’ as our yardstick. Okay, truth be told, it’s really an ‘AU’ not a ‘Hey, you!’ AU stands for ‘astronomical unit,’ and it’s equal to the distance ’tween the Earth and the sun.” A diagram appeared, illustrating this.
“Well, when they’s as far apart as they ever get, Centauri A” (he held up the grapefruit with one fully extended arm) “and Centauri B” (he held up the orange in his other fully extended arm) “are thirty-five AUs apart. That’s ’round ’bout the distance ’tween here and Uranus.”
He paused and grinned, as if contemplating making a joke about the planet’s name, but then shook his head in a “let’s not go there” expression.
“But when A and B are as close as they ever get” (he drew his arms together) “they is just eleven AUs apart—practically spittin’ distance. It takes ’em about eighty years to orbit round each other.”
He placed the grapefruit and the orange on the desktop and then picked up the cherry. “Now, Centauri C is a bunch farther away from A and B.” He used his thumb to flick the cherry clear across the room and right out an open window. “It’s a wallopin’ thirteen thousand AUs from the other two. The little guy might not even be really bound by gravity to the others, but if it is, it more’n likely takes a million years or so to revolve around them in what’s probably a highly elliptical orbit—”
Frank hit the pause button, and sat in the dark, thinking.
CHAPTER
26
“Our next order of business,” said Dale Rice, leaning back in his leather chair, “is the missing body parts.”
Something was different about Dale’s office. It took Frank a minute to realize what it was. His normal chair was now on the left, and the Tosok chair was on the right; the cleaning staff must have moved them in order to vacuum the rich brown carpet. Indeed, in the late-afternoon sunlight, the paths made by the vacuum were clearly visible.
On the table across the room, Dale’s latest jigsaw puzzle had gaping holes in it.
“I wish we had some idea why those parts were taken,” said Frank.
Dale nodded. He’d put some witnesses related to them on his witness list, but hadn’t made up his mind whether he’d actually call them all. “The question we’ve put to our shadow jury is this,” he said. “‘Given the unusual choice of missing body parts—an eye, the throat, the appendix—are you more or less likely to think an alien was involved in the crime?’ The answer, of course, is more likely.”
“Then do we do any good by examining the question of the missing parts at all?” asked Frank.
“Well, you can be sure Linda is going to harp on them during her closing argument, so…”
Frank was quiet for a moment, thinking. Suddenly he sat up straight. “What about the Simpson case?” he said. “The DNA in the Simpson case.”
“What about it?” said Dale.
“Well, you said the Simpson criminal jury simply ignored that entire portion of the evidence. On the one hand, you had Robin Cotton from CellMark presenting the prosecution’s view of the DNA evidence, and on the other, you had all the defense experts presenting their view of it. You said the jury essentially just threw up its hands and said, hell, if these experts can’t find the truth in it, how can we? And so they ended up simply ignoring that entire line of evidence.”
Dale spread his arms, humoring the layman. “But Linda didn’t present anything for us to counter about those body parts during the prosecution’s case-in-chief.”
“That’s true,” said Frank, “but what if we present conflicting testimony about those parts? If we put people on the stand giving two mutually contradictory interpretations, the jury might still throw the whole line of evidence out. A human could have used the Tosok cutting tool, after all; the missing body parts are the thing that points most directly to an alien perpetrator—and getting the jury to ignore them is the best thing we can do.”
Dale opened his mouth to say something, closed it, then just sat there, frowning thoughtfully.
The next day, Dale Rice stepped up to the lectern in Judge Pringle’s ninth-floor courtroom. “The defense calls Dr. James Wills.”
Wills, a brown-haired white man in his late forties, was sitting in the third row, doing The New York Times crossword puzzle in ink with an antique silver fountain pen. He put the cap back on the pen, rose, and was sworn in: “James MacDonald Wills,” he said. “That’s James the usual way, although I’m commonly called Jamie, M-A-C-capital-D-Donald, and Wills, W-I-L-L-S.”
Dale went through the business of establishing Wills’ credentials—he was an anatomy professor at UC Irvine. Wills stood five-eight and weighed maybe a hundred and fifty-five pounds. Frank noticed he wore no watch, but was remarkably well dressed for a professor.
“Dr. Wills,” said Dale, “the prosecution has spent a lot of time on the missing parts—the items apparently removed form Dr. Calhoun’s body by whatever person killed him. Would you start by telling the jury what the significant characteristics are of the human throat and lower jaw?”
“Certainly,” said Wills, who had a pleasant, deep voice. “The shape of the cavity made by the throat and the lower jaw is what allows us to produce the complex range of sounds we’re capable of. In other words, it makes human speech possible.”
“Is the throat shape significant in any other way?”
“Well, the Adam’s apple serves as a secondary sexual characteristic in humans; it’s much more prominent in adult males.”
“Anything else?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
Dale was pleased with Wills’s performance; the defense could play the “see, we don’t rehearse expert testimony” game ev
ery bit as well as the People could. “Well,” said Dale, “consider a chimpanzee’s throat and a human throat. What differences are there?”
Wills adjusted his wire-frame glasses. “The angle made by the path between the lips and the voice box is quite different. In a human, it’s a right angle; in a chimp, it’s a gentle curve.”
“Does that cause any problems?”
“Not for the chimp,” said Wills, grinning widely, inviting everyone in the court to share in his joke.
“How do you mean?”
“In humans, there’s a space above the larynx in which food can get caught. We can choke to death while eating; a chimp can’t.”
“Thank you, Dr. Wills. Now, what about the appendix? We’ve all heard of it, of course, but can you tell us a bit about it?”
“Certainly. The appendix is a hollow tube of lymphoid tissue between two and twenty centimeters long, and about as thick as a pencil. In other words, it looks like a worm—which is why we call it the vermiform process; vermiform is Latin for ‘wormlike.’ One end of this worm is attached to the cecum, which is the pouch that forms the beginning of the large intestine. The other end is closed.”
“And what does the appendix do?”
Wills blinked his blue eyes. “The common wisdom is that it does nothing at all; it’s just a vestigial organ. Our primate ancestors were herbivores, and in its original form, the appendix was probably of some use in aiding digestion—modern herbivores have an extended cecum that resembles a longer version of our appendix. But for us, the appendix does little, if anything.”
“And are there any dangers associated with the appendix?”
“Oh, yes. It’s prone to infection and inflammation. About one out of every fifteen people will come down with appendicitis during their lifetimes.”
“This is a minor condition, no?”
“No. It’s a major, excruciating, and potentially fatal problem. Usually, the appendix has to be surgically removed.”
“Thank you, Professor. Your witness, Ms. Ziegler.”
Ziegler consulted briefly with her second chair, Trina Diamond, then shrugged. “No questions.”
“All right,” said Judge Pringle. “In view of the lateness of the hour, we’ll recess until ten A.M. tomorrow morning.” She looked at the jury box. “Please remember my admonitions to you. Don’t discuss the case among yourselves, don’t form any opinions about the case, don’t conduct any deliberations, and don’t allow anyone to communicate with you regarding the case.” She rapped her gavel. “Court is in recess.”
Hask still spent his nights in his room at Valcour Hall. As usual, Frank escorted him back home, along with a total of four LAPD officers—two in the same car as Frank and Hask, and two others in a second cruiser. The one problem with Valcour Hall was that although the building had been finished, the parking lot adjacent to it hadn’t been surfaced yet, and so the police cruiser had to let Hask out about two hundred yards from the residence. Wooden stakes had been driven into the grass all around the dorm, with yellow “Police Line—Do Not Cross” tape stretched between them. Still, every day after the trial, hundreds of students, faculty members, and other Angelenos could be seen waiting behind the line for a glimpse of Hask. Frank and Hask left the police cruiser together. As usual, Frank was having trouble keeping up with the Tosok, whose stride was much longer than his. It was only four-forty in the afternoon. The sun was still well up the bowl of the cloudless sky.
To Frank’s ears, the two sounds seemed to begin simultaneously, but, of course, one of them had to have come first. The first sound was a cracking so loud it hurt the ears, like thunder or bone breaking or a frozen lake shattering beneath the weight of a stranded man. It echoed off walls of glass and stone, reverberating for several seconds.
The second sound was high-pitched and warbling, unlike anything Frank had ever heard before. It was partly the sound of shattering glass, and partly the sound of train wheels screeching to a halt on metal tracks, and partly the wail of a hundred phones left too long off the hook.
Frank had thought—hoped—the first sound had been a car backfiring, but it wasn’t. In a blur of motion, two of the four police officers surged forward, running toward the crowd of people behind the police line. They had a man to the ground almost at once. Frank looked down at his own chest, and saw a spiderweb splash of pink across his jacket, shirt, and tie.
And then he realized what the second sound had been.
Hask was still standing, but as Frank watched he crumpled as if in slow motion to the ground, each of his legs folding first at its lower joint then its upper one. His torso tumbled backward, and the alien’s scream died as the square of his mouth diminished in size until nothing was left but the horizontal slit that marked the outer opening. He continued to fall, his rear arm splaying out behind him. Frank moved forward, trying to catch him, but the Tosok’s collapse was completed before the human reached him.
The assailant—a white man in his late twenties—was pinned to the ground. He was yelling, “Is the devil dead? Is the devil dead?”
The bullet hole in Hask’s tunic was obvious, surrounded by a pink carnation of Tosok blood. What to do was less obvious, though. Frank was certified in CPR—anyone who got to spend time alone with the president was required to be. Spectators were ignoring the police tape now, and had rushed to reach the downed alien, clustering around him in a circle. Frank leaned in and placed his ear next to one of Hask’s breathing orifices. Air was being expelled; he could feel it on his cheek. But he had no idea where to check for a pulse. Not much blood had spilled out of the wound—possibly a sign that the being’s four hearts had stopped pumping.
Frank looked up, about to tell someone to call for an ambulance, but one of the cops was already on his cruiser’s radio, doing that. Frank reached into his own jacket pocket and pulled out his cellular flip phone. He hit the speed-dial key for the cellular that had been given to Captain Kelkad, and then handed the phone to the other officer, not waiting for Kelkad to answer. Frank bent down over Hask again. “Hask,” he said. “Hask, can you hear me?”
There was no response from Hask. Frank loosened his tie and pulled it up over his head, then wadded it up into a ball and used it as a pressure bandage on the entrance wound. He had no idea if that was the right thing to do, given how little he knew about Tosok physiology, but—
“Frank,” said the cop. “I’ve got Kelkad on the phone.” She handed the cellular to him. He took it in his left hand while continuing to lean on the wadded-up tie with his right.
“Kelkad, what should I do?” said Frank. “Hask has been shot.”
Kelkad and the other Tosoks were in separate cars, on their way back from the Criminal Courts Building. The connection was staticky. There was a long pause, then a spate of faint Tosok language—but not in Kelkad’s voice—then some more of the alien tongue; this time it was Kelkad. And then the voice of the translator. “Describe the injury, and the way in which it was made.” Frank realized Kelkad had to be moving the cellular back and forth between his translator and his ear slit.
Frank lifted his hand up off his pressure bandage. Although the tie was covered with Tosok blood—which was crystallizing, like a thin layer of ice, rather than clotting the way human blood did—the total volume of bleeding seemed to be tiny. “He’s been shot by a metal projectile—presumably lead. He’s lying on his back, is still breathing, but appears to be unconscious. The bullet entered between the front arm and the left leg, about eight inches below the breathing orifice. I can’t tell what angle it moved through the body. I was applying pressure to the wound, but it seems to have stopped bleeding, and the blood is crystallizing.”
There was a sound from Kelkad, and noises from the translator—plus traffic sounds, and a siren. The car Kelkad was in was now rushing to the scene.
“You will probably not harm him by rolling him over onto his front,” said Kelkad. “Did the bullet go all the way through the body?”
Frank handed the phone
to the cop and grabbed the upper part of Hask’s left leg with both hands, feeling the odd alien skeleton beneath the skin, then rolling him ninety degrees. He examined the back of Hask’s dun-colored tunic, but could find no exit hole. He looked at the cop. “Tell him there’s no sign that the bullet came out.”
She did so, then she listened for a moment. “Kelkad asks you to confirm that lead is atomic number eighty-two.”
“What?” said Frank. “Christ, I have no idea.”
“He says lead is highly toxic to Tosoks. He says the bullet will have to be removed within the hour.”
“Where’s that damn ambulance?” said Frank.
“It’s coming,” said the other cop, who had rejoined them. He pointed in the distance. A white van with flashing lights on its roof was approaching.
Frank rose to his feet. One of the other police officers came over to him. “The assailant’s name is Donald Jensen, according to his ID. I called it in; he’s got a small record—disturbing the peace, mostly.”
Frank looked over at the man, who was now on his feet with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was clean-cut, with short blond hair, and he was wearing a sports jacket with patches on the elbows. The left side of his face was badly scraped from where the officers had forced him down onto a paved walkway. His blue eyes were wide. “Death to all the devils!” he shouted.
The ambulance pulled up at the curb, and two burly men got out. They immediately opened the vehicle’s rear doors and brought a stretcher over to Hask.
Just behind the ambulance, the cars carrying the other Tosoks pulled up on the access road. Their doors flew open, and the six Tosoks came running across the field with giant strides. Lagging far behind them were the police officers who were supposed to be their escorts.
Frank looked like he expected a lynching. “Get him out of here,” he ordered the cops, pointing at the blond man. “Get him out of here right now.”
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