Illegal Alien

"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 gri

"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 gri

"But when A and B are as close as they ever get" (he drew his arms rogether) "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.

*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’s 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 every 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, gri

"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 begi

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 life-times."