Robert Sawyer - Illegal Alien

’What makes you think I’m not going to win this time?”

“Are you kidding? Your buddy Mr. Spock offed one of TV’s most popular personalities. This is Simpson in reverse: a celebrity stiff and a no-name defendant.”

“Hask is famous as hell.”

“Hask is going to hell.”

Rice sighed. “Are you even looking for other suspects?”

“Certainly. But there are not many possibilities. There were only twenty-five people, including the seven Tosoks, who had access to the USC residence that night. But of the humans, the biggest question remains motive. Who would kill Calhoun? And who would kill him in that manner?”

“As you doubtless know, it could be someone wanting to frame the Tosoks—to incite ill will toward them. And if that’s the case, it could be a conspiracy involving two or more people—meaning the fact that someone has someone else as an alibi isn’t worth anything.”

“A conspiracy!”

“Why not? I should think you’d be glad that somebody is proposing a conspiracy outside of the LAPD.”

Perez fixed Dale with a withering stare. “An eminent group of scientists hardly seems likely to frame an alien for murder.”

Dale had gotten tired of waiting to be offered a seat. He took one—a metal-framed job, uncomfortably small for him; it groaned in protest under his weight. “Don’t be so sure. Academic jealousy is the greenest of all. These gentlemen fight for ever-declining grant dollars and toil in obscurity, while some fellow from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, makes millions and gets to hobnob with Jay Leno. They figure nobody’s going to be crazy enough to arrest an alien—they didn’t count on Monty Ajax’s lust for power. It would be a perfect crime; they’d assume Washington would get it swept under the rug…”

“Which is precisely what they’ve been trying to do, apparently,” said Perez. “No, counselor, we’ve got our— we’ve got our creature. It had to be a Tosok.”

Dale’s turn to fix a withering stare. “I would have thought, Lieutenant Perez, that you would have felt the sting of that kind of thinking enough in your own life not to apply it here. It has to be a Tosok. It must be a Latino. It was some black guy—and, hey, that guy over there is black, so it must be him.”

“Don’t accuse me of that, counselor. Don’t you dare accuse me of that.”

“Why not? ‘It has to be a Tosok.’ There are seven Tosoks on Earth. And unless you can prove that it’s Hask in particular—Hask, and nobody else—my client is going to walk.”

“Well, of course it’s Hask.”

“You can’t prove that.”

Perez smiled. “Just watch me.”

Frank and Dale were meeting over breakfast in the restaurant at the University Hilton Hotel, just on the other side of Figueroa Street from the main USC campus. Frank was eating shredded wheat with skim milk, a half grapefruit, and black coffee. Dale was eating bacon, two fried eggs, and what seemed to be half a loaf’s worth of toast with orange marmalade, all washed down with a pot of coffee with cream and sugar.

“Everybody on the planet is clamoring to interview your client,” said Frank.

Dale nodded, and gulped more coffee. “I know.”

“Do we let them?”

Dale stopped eating long enough to consider this. “I’m not sure. We don’t care one whit about the public as a whole. The only people we’re interested in are the twelve who will end up on the jury. The question is, do we do better if the potential jurors know Hask or not? We’re probably not going to put Hask on the stand, after all, and—”

“We’re not?”

“Frank, you never put your defendant on the stand, unless you can’t avoid it. So, yes, an interview could be our one chance to let the people who might end up on the jury get to know and like Hask. On the other hand, this is a bizarre crime, and if they decide he’s just some weird alien, they may figure he probably did it.”

“So, what do we do?”

Dale wiped his face with the napkin and signaled for the waitress to bring more coffee. “Let him do one interview—one of the biggies. Barbara Walters, maybe. Or Diane Sawyer. Somebody like that.”

“What if it goes badly?” Frank asked. “Can you ask for a change of venue for the trial?”

“To where? The far side of the moon? There’s no getting away from the media coverage this trial is going to get.”

Barbara Walters was wearing her usual solicitous frown. “My guest today is Hask,” she said, “one of the seven alien visitors to Earth. Hask, how are you?”

Dale, who was seated with the alien captain, Kelkad, just outside of camera view, had asked Hask not to wear his sunglasses, even though the camera lights were bothering him. Now, though, watching him squint at Walters, he thought perhaps he’d made a mistake.

“I have seen better days,” said Hask.

Walters nodded sympathetically. “I’m sure you have. You’re free on two-million-dollars bail. What is your assessment of the American legal system?”

“You have a huge number of people in jail.”

Walters seemed taken aback. “Ah, yes. I guess we do.”

“I am told your country has set a record. You have a greater percentage of your population in jail than any other country—even those countries that are referred to as police states.”

“My question was intended more specifically,” said Walters. “I was wondering how the Los Angeles Police Department treated you?”

“It was explained to me that I was to be presumed innocent until proven guilty—and yet I was put in a cage, something my race does not to anything, and I had thought your race only did to animals.”

“You’re saying you were treated poorly?”

“I have been treated poorly, yes.”

“You mean, as a guest on our world, you should be accorded more respect?”

“Not at all. There is nothing special about my status. I imagine if you were interviewing a human being who had been wrongly accused of a crime, he or she would also decry the treatment. Have you ever been imprisoned, Ms. Walters?”

“Me? No.”

“Then you cannot understand.”

“No,” said Walters. “No, I guess not. What is the justice system like on your world?”

“On my world, there is no such thing as crime; allowing a crime to occur would imply that God had ceased to be vigilant over the affairs of her children. Besides, we do not prize material things the way they are prized here, so there is no theft of objects. And everybody has enough to eat, so there is no theft of food, or the means to acquire food.” He paused, then:

“It is not my place to say, but it seems that your legal system is designed backward. The root causes of human crime appear to my no-doubt-ignorant eyes to be poverty and your ability to become addicted to chemicals. But instead of treating these, you devote your energies at the other end, to punishing.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Walters. “But speaking of punishing, do you feel you can get a fair trial?”

Hask’s topknot moved in agitation while he mulled this over. “That is a difficult question. A human is dead—and someone must pay for that. I am not a human. It is perhaps easier to make me pay, and yet…”

“Yes?”

“I am different. But… but your race continues to grow. My lawyer is Dale Rice, and his skin is black. He has told me how his kind were enslaved, were denied the right to vote, to use public facilities, and so on. And yet, in his lifetime, much of that has changed—although I saw in jail that much of it remains, too, just below the surface. Can twelve human beings look upon an alien and judge without prejudice?” He shifted slightly, looking directly at the camera with his orange and green front eyes. “I think yes. I think they can.”