Hask moved in to take a seat. Frank looked at the seven aliens. They’d seen a lot of Earth. Although an effort had been made to present the best side of humanity, there had been no doubt that some of the worst had been displayed, too. The Tosoks had encountered poverty and pollution, and they knew that the security people were there to protect them from the possibility that a human being might want to do them harm.
Still, the violence humanity was capable of had all been abstract to this point. But now—now they had to be told.
“My friends,” said Frank, into the sea of round, disk-like eyes, “I have bad news.” He paused. Damn, he wished Tosoks made facial expressions; he still wasn’t good at deciphering the waving of their cranial tufts. “Clete is dead.”
There was silence for several moments.
“Do humans normally die without warning?” asked Kelkad. “He seemed healthy.”
“He didn’t die of natural causes,” said Frank. “He was murdered.”
Seven pocket computers beeped, slightly out of sync with each other.
“Murdered,” repeated Frank. “It means killed by another human being.”
Kelkad made a small sound. His computer translated it as “Oh.”
*7*
“Sir,” said Lieutenant Perez, stepping into the opulent office on the eighteenth floor of the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts Building, “we, ah, have a bit of a situation here.”
District Attorney Montgomery Ajax looked up from his immaculate glass-topped desk. “What is it?”
“I’d like to go over the criminalist’s report on the Calhoun murder with you.”
Ajax was silver-haired with pale blue eyes and a long, deeply tanned face—a Bahamas tan, not a California one. “Something out of the ordinary?”
“You could say that, sir.” He placed a photograph on the DA’s desk. It showed a bloody U-shaped mark on a gray carpet.
“What’s that? A horseshoe?”
“We didn’t know what to make of it, sir. I thought maybe it was a heel mark, but the criminalist says no. But, well, have a look at this, sir.” He placed a newspaper clipping next to the photograph. It contained a black-and-white photograph of Kelkad making his foot impressions at Mann’s Chinese Theatre. The imprint was almost identical in shape to the bloody mark.
“Christ almighty,” said Ajax.
“My thoughts exactly, sir.”
“Is there any way to tell which Tosok made the bloody footprint?”
“Possibly, although the print is not detailed.”
“Is there any other evidence to implicate a Tosok?”
“Well, Calhoun’s leg was severed with some sort of extremely sharp instrument. It went through the leg without compressing the muscle at all, and seemed to hardly catch on the bone. It cut through the femoral artery, and because it was a clean cut, Calhoun simply gushed blood out of it.”
“And?”
“And the guys in the lab can’t think of any human tool that could have done the trick. The slicing open of the abdomen seemed to be done mechanically as well. But the rib spreading—well, that seemed to be done manually. The cut edges of the ribs were razor sharp, and Feinstein found some chemicals on one of the rib tips that he couldn’t identify. It might be Tosok blood.”
The DA had already seen the crime-scene photographs. “Okay,” said Ajax. “But whichever Tosok did it must have gotten soaked with human blood. Surely if it was one of the Tosoks, it would have had to have cleaned itself up somehow.”
Perez nodded. “I thought of that, too.”
“And?”
“And I interviewed all of the Tosoks today. But one of them looked different from any of the ones I’d seen on TV. You know they all had blue or gray hides, right?”
Ajax nodded.
“Well, this one had a silver-white hide.”
“Like it had bleached itself clean?”
“More than that,” said Perez. “I’m told it had shed its skin.”
“Like a bloody snake, eh?”
“Yes, sir. Like a bloody snake.”
The DA considered. “You know,” he said slowly, “there is another possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“A frame-up.” Ajax paused. “Not everybody liked Calhoun.”
“If it is a frame-up, it would have to be someone who is part of the entourage traveling with the Tosoks. No one else could get into the USC dorm.”
Ajax nodded. “True. Better check into their backgrounds.” A pause. “Start with Smathers.”
“Smathers?”
“I saw Calhoun show him up on national TV. That’s got to sting.”
“Will do.”
“Be thorough, Perez. If I’m going to have to lay charges against an alien, I want to be dead certain we’re right.”
Frank was walking across the USC campus, passing by the Von KleinSmid Center. He looked up briefly at the one-hundred-and-seventy-six-foot tower visible through the portico; the tower was crowned by a five-thousand-pound gridwork globe, like a world picked clean.
Frank knew all about being picked clean; he had been divorced for five years, and his twelve-year-old daughter was with his ex-wife in Maryland.
It was the day before Christmas; the campus was almost deserted. Frank was used to it being cold at Christmas; he’d grown up in Canandaigua, New York, where winters were marked by bitter temperatures and hip-deep snow. But the path he was on was lined with palm trees, and Frank was more than warm enough in his black nylon windbreaker with the NASA logo on its back.
Christmases were the worst; Frank never got Maria at Christmas. He’d actually been looking forward to this one—Clete had no family, either, and so they’d planned to mark the day together. They’d even been planning to exchange presents; Frank had bought Clete a trio of pewter starships from the Franklin Mint—a classic Enterprise, an original Klingon battle ship, and a Romulan Bird of Prey. Together, they’d cost six hundred dollars; far too much, really, but it had made Frank feel good to order them.
And now—
He made it a few more paces before he realized what was happening. If this had been upstate New York—if this had been proper Christmas weather—his breath might have escaped in great shuddering clouds, but here, in this warmth, palm trees obscenely decorated with Christmas lights, his sobs were escaping invisibly.
Clete and Frank had met in grad school; they’d been friends for twenty years.
God, how he’d miss him.
Frank found a bench beneath a palm, and lowered himself on to it, cutting his face in his hands.
Merry Christmas, he thought.
And cried some more.
Three hours later Perez returned to DA Ajax’s office. “Okay, I’ve got the scoop on Smathers.”
“Go.”
“When PBS was contemplating making a new astronomy series, they wanted someone who could fill Carl Sagan’s shoes. Their first choices were Cletus Calhoun… and Packwood Smathers.”
“Why’d they go with Calhoun?”
“It depends who you ask. One executive I spoke to there said it was his just-plain-folks image: PBS was under a lot of fire from Congress, you know. They were calling it an elitist service. The network was doing everything it could to appear more populist, in hopes of not getting its appropriation slashed further.”
“Makes sense,” said Ajax. “Heck, even I watched Great Balls of Fire!, and science always turned me off. But Calhoun was entertaining as hell.”
“Right. But the other guy I talked to said they’d heard Smathers was difficult to work with, and that there were some improprieties in his research. He’d been a little too liberal, supposedly, with taking credit for work done not just by his grad students—which is par for the course, apparently—but also by other professors. They were afraid that might come out. Great Balls of Fire! was a coproduction with NHK—the Japanese television network. You know how the Japanese are about personal honor; they’d never be able to broadcast the show if there were a scandal about the host.”