“But that requires a ship. I don’t have one. If I did, I don’t know the way back, or how to fly a spaceship.”
“That is a pity,” the alien answered. “Go!”
“Wait a minute.” Calhoun risked angering the alien by balking but he needed information and he doubted that very many other aliens spoke English. The time to learn was now. “You can’t just throw me out without telling me why you’re treating me this way…”
“Correct. So I will tell you. We are throwing you out because you are a murderer.”
“This is my punishment?”
“You could say that, I suppose,” the alien replied. “Though actually any physical punishment is up to your victim’s kinsmen, if they choose to inflict any. We have notified them that you will be at large. If they do in fact come for you they alone will decide what this will be, and they will administer it. This is their right. It was the custom of our primitive ancestors.”
“That’s insane. I didn’t murder him. He attacked me. He had a weapon. He was trying to kill me. I had a right to defend myself.”
“He had no weapon. He could hardly see you. What he carried was a light—what your people call a flashlight. We see a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the ultraviolet. Your single sun is feeble even when visible. When it sets we need artificial light in order to see.”
“Then he should have said so—he should have explained. You certainly aren’t having any trouble.”
“That’s because I’m a specialist. I’ve spent years studying your culture and I understand it. But only a few of us can speak a human language and he was not one of them. Besides, you gave him no opportunity to explain. You simply cut him down. That was murder, even by the standard of your race. You should know that, since you claim expertise in such matters.”
Calhoun started to complain, then stopped, when suddenly it occurred to him that this alien was right. He was a lawyer, though to be honest with himself, not a very good one. In a situation this tight, guile might get him farther than dueling with the dead alien’s kinsmen.
“Are you telling me that wager of law is permitted?”
“I do not recognize the term, but then even I do not completely understand your culture.”
“Trial by combat—ever hear of that? Humans used to do that, long ago. If the accused won he went free. Is that the idea?”
“More or less,” the alien answered, after a short hesitation.
“I see. Well now, how about giving me back my gun?”
“We do not have it. It remains at the scene of your crime.”
“What? How can I fight them without it?”
“Get another weapon.”
“How, if I can’t even talk to you people?”
“That is your problem. Find ways. We don’t use money so you can’t buy a weapon, but you could steal one, or steal something to trade for one. We know you can steal. Your own people have accused you of that on more than one occasion.”
Despite the circumstances Calhoun was momentarily embarrassed. He did have a fairly extensive criminal record, mostly drug-related, but he had once been prosecuted for finding some automobile parts that weren’t lost. “How do you know I do?”
“We’ve been visiting Earth for a long time. It seemed wise to us to be very wary with your kind so we learned all we could about you. Before the Internet such things were more difficult. Now, we surf with the best of them so gathering information is easy. Technologically, we are a century or more beyond you. Just before we brought you here we hacked into the Texas DPS network. We got not only records, but comments. One commentator remarked that you were ‘nuts’; that you always wore black because you fantasized you were Pat Garrett.”
“That’s a lie. I just like black suits.”
“The role suits you. Garrett was quite an unsavory person even though he wasn’t a Texas lawyer.”
Calhoun glared at the alien for a moment.
The alien demonstrated how well informed he really was. “Your behavior has precedent. After all, John Wesley Hardin was a member of the Texas Bar, wasn’t he? How many people did he kill?”
“I don’t know,” Calhoun replied. He had to admit this alien knew his history.
But the alien also seemed to be falling right into the spirit of the discussion, and that was good because the longer Orville could keep him talking the more he would learn and the better his chances would become. He was already groping for a thread of logic. It had occurred to him that the alien’s acquaintance with Earthly law represented an opportunity and he wanted a way to exploit it. Suddenly, he had it.
“You can’t try me,” he announced smugly. “You had no right to kidnap me and bring me here. I didn’t commit any crime here. Only the State of Texas has a right to charge me because everything happened back there.”
For a moment the alien was silent.
Clearly, it was thinking. Calhoun could only hope that it knew and understood the concept of jurisdiction.
When the alien did speak, it did so with a tone Calhoun hoped was abashment. “We have you, we can do as we wish.”
“Yours is an immoral race, then,” Calhoun chided. “You criticize me. How are you better?”
“You have needlessly taken a life. That is a crime everywhere.”
“Maybe so, but that is not the point. The question is not what happened but who has the right to complain about it. Your people were on Earth illegally. You say you respect our law? That isn’t true. Our law forbids aliens to enter our country without permission. You violated our sovereignty by being there. Now you want to violate it some more by trying me under your system. What kind of hypocrites are you people?”
“Our purpose is benevolent,” the alien replied. “We are studying a spatial anomaly that may be part of one of the rarest phenomena in the universe, a stargate resident on a planetary surface. If we are right you humans are a fortunate people.”
“And your people came to steal it, right?”
Calhoun waited. Inwardly, he was sneering. If the aliens were stupid enough to fall for that line he was on the way out. He could tell the alien was bothered by what he had just said but that he was not quite sold. Calhoun unleashed another salvo. “We have an old saying,” he told the alien. “Might does not make right.”
“Perhaps not,” the alien replied. “But might does make rights. I admit the distinction is subtle but it is nevertheless very real. Realistically, were we to return you to Earth and surrender you to the state of Texas for trial, that trial would be farcical.”
The alien paused. “Yes, we know about that, too. There, you will be among your own kind, and your kind deal in drugs and political corruption. Lies, deceit, bribery, extortion, everything that is reprehensible to a truly moral society you and your allies see as the tools of a trade. You use them to destroy the lives of those who crave addictive substances. It is you who are the hypocrite.”
Again, the alien paused and pondered.
Calhoun became concerned. For a while there, he had been on a roll, and beginning to believe the technique of playing to the alien’s ethics had a chance of success. Now, he wasn’t so sure. It needed work, more stark, rigid logic, the kind this one was demonstrating his species found difficult to resist. “It is still my right to be tried there,” he argued, “if at all, and tried under the law of the forum, not by some alien code with which I have no acquaintance.”
Calhoun gazed into the alien’s face. He could, of course, recognize no meaningful expression; still, the alien’s hesitation was encouraging. Perhaps it was time for a little fine tuning. A good con-man, and he saw himself as one of these, knew when to set the hook. “When you do come out of the closet, how can you expect my people to trust you?”
The alien paused only a moment longer, then he pointed down the corridor and said, “Return to your cell. Though you represent the worst we have ever encountered on your world, there still is some logic in what you say. I will consult with our leadership. If they agree with you, and if your victim’s kinsmen consent, perhaps we can reach an accommodation.”