Robert Sawyer - Illegal Alien

“How was it damaged?”

“As we approached the orbit of your planet Neptune, a chunk of ice impacted the fusion engine.”

“Is the damage irreparable?”

“No. With the proper parts, it can be fixed.”

“Are you capable of manufacturing the proper parts aboard your mothership?”

“No.”

“Could humans manufacture the proper parts here on Earth?” asked Dale.

“With guidance from us, yes. In fact, they are doing that even as we speak.”

“Let me get this straight, Mr. Rendo. Without human goodwill, you and your crew are stranded here, unable to ever return home, is that right?”

“That is correct.”

“So the last thing you Tosoks would want to do is to make us humans angry, lest we be unwilling to help you?”

“Objection,” said Ziegler. “The witness can only speak on his own behalf.”

“Sustained.”

“Chief Engineer,” said Dale, “speaking personally, since you require our help to get home, is it not in your best interest to treat us well?”

“Absolutely.”

“Just so there’s no misunderstanding, killing someone would not be considered treating them well in Tosok society, would it?”

“Like Captain Kelkad, I wish for you humans to think well of Tosok society. I would like to be able to tell you that murder is unknown on my world, but it is not. But committing murder most certainly would not be the appropriate thing to do to one from whom we wanted help.”

“Thank you, Rendo. I’m sure the jury appreciates your candor and honesty. Your witness, Ms. Ziegler.”

Linda Ziegler stood up and moved to the lectern. “Hello, Mr. Rendo.”

“Hello, Ms. Ziegler.”

“I’m curious about the accident that befell your ship.”

“What would you like to know?”

“I wonder how it is that such advanced beings as yourselves would not have prepared for the possibility of collisions in space?”

“We were prepared for the possibility of micrometeoroid collisions in the inner solar system, by which point our crew would be revived from its long sleep and therefore able to deal with them. We had expected the outer solar system to be virtually empty, and so our ship was undertaking only the most cursory of automated monitoring. We knew about your Oort cloud, of course—the halo of cometary material that surrounds your sun at a distance of up to one hundred thousand times your planet’s orbital radius, but we had not known about the disk of cometary nuclei, ice, and other junk approximately forty times your orbital radius from the sun.”

Ziegler consulted her notes, refreshing herself on the briefing she’d had on this topic. “We call that region ‘the Kuiper belt.’ ” She looked at the jurors. “The jury may have heard of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but that is a different phenomenon; the Kuiper belt is much farther out, past the orbit of Neptune.” She turned back to Rendo. “Our theories of planetary formation suggest that any star with planets is likely to have such a region surrounding it.”

“And we have learned from that insight,” said Rendo. “Dr. Calhoun explained short-period comets to me, which, I understand are debris from the Kuiper belt that has fallen in toward the inner solar system. I suspect such comets are spectacular to behold, but my world has never seen one, at least not in all of Tosok recorded history.” Rendo paused, as if considering how best to make his point. “Alpha Centauri is a triple star system, Ms. Ziegler. Each of these three stars has a gravitational effect on matter orbiting beyond a certain distance from the others. From what I learned from Dr. Calhoun, I would say it was likely that Alpha Centauri A, B, and C did indeed have Kuiper belts left over after they coalesced out of primordial dust and gas, just as such a belt was left over after your sun did the same. But the gravitational dance of A and B long ago cleared out each other’s Kuiper belts. Without the clue of having seen short-period comets in our own sky, it never occurred to us that a disk of debris would ever have existed close in to our own sun, let alone around other suns. The accident did indeed occur as I described, we do indeed need human assistance, and as I told Mr. Rice, none of my people would have jeopardized that assistance by committing murder.”

Ziegler realized she wasn’t helping her cause. “No further questions,” she said.

Something about the courtroom discussion of the orbital dynamics of the Alpha Centauri system was bothering Frank Nobilio, but he wasn’t exactly sure what. Of course, Frank wasn’t an astronomer himself (his doctorate was in the history of science), but he’d taken one undergrad astronomy course. Still, there was something that didn’t quite add up. In the past, when he’d had an astronomical question, Frank had simply put it to Cletus Calhoun, but now that wasn’t possible.

Or was it?

Frank drove out to KCET, the Los Angeles PBS affiliate. The people there were only too happy to give him access to a viewing room, with a thirty-one-inch TV and a stereo VCR. Frank’s memory was right: there had been an episode on this very topic. He sat in the dark, sipping Diet Pepsi from a can.

The screen filled with a corporate logo. “This program,” said a female voice, “is made possible by a grant from the Johnson Johnson Family of Companies, and by annual financial support from viewers like you.”

The camera started tight on a campfire, then pulled back to show that it was surrounded by primitive, beetle-browed humans. Sparks rose from the fire, and the camera titled up, following them as they continued up toward the moonless night sky. The sparks soon disappeared, but the sky was filled with stars, the Milky Way arching overhead. The camera kept tilting up, and the pounding rhythm of Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano started in the background. Soon the camera was zooming into space, then the image flipped around to show Earth’s nightside and, rising over its curving edge, the sun. The camera moved in toward the sun, its spotted face filling the screen, a prominence arching up from the surface. Lewis’s voice belted out the words “Goodness gracious! Great balls of fire!” The prominence fell back toward the surface of the sun, but the series title was left in flaming letters glowing in space: GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!

The camera moved through space as the song continued, past a bloated red giant star adjacent to a black hole, which was pulling material from it; past a binary star system; past a pulsar flashing on and off; through the Pleiades, their blue light diffused by the nebulosity surrounding them…

A second title appeared: WITH CLETUS CALHOUN. Jerry Lee Lewis sang the words “Great Balls of Fire!” once more, and the credit sequence ended.

After a brief fade to black, the image of Clete himself came up, all gangly limbs and goofy smile. It was twilight, and he was standing on a boardwalk at the edge of a subtropical swamp.

A third title appeared: PROGRAM 3: JUST OVER YONDER.

“Evening, y’all,” said Clete, smiling. Frank felt his eyes stinging. God, how he missed that man. In the darkened room, it was almost like he was really there with him.

“Y’all know I come from the South,” continued Clete, looking straight into the camera—straight at Frank. “From Tennessee, t’be ’zact. But tonight we’ve up and gone even farther south than that—just ’bout as far south as a body can go and still be in the good ol’ U.S. of A. We’re here in Everglades National Park, right down near the tip o’ Florida.” In the background, an egret flew against the pink sky, its long legs and neck not unlike those of Calhoun himself. “We’ve come on down here to see something y’all can’t see farther north.” He pointed with a skinny arm and the camera followed until it had centered its view on a bright star, just above the horizon, framed between two bulrushes.