Robert Sawyer - Illegal Alien

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.”

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 what exactly was your basic work in this area?”

Smathers seemed to be warming slightly. “Well, simply, that all life-rorms, 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 don’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 cafe 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.