Illegal Alien

Clete tipped his camera to look around the room. Illuminated panels were positioned on pedestals next to each slab. Each one had several animated bar charts and X-Y plots on it. Clete guessed they were medical readouts, monitoring the condition of the hibernating crew members. A careful study of the readouts might reveal a lot about Tosok physiology. Some of the panels had what looked like add-on pieces of equipment plugged into them; on others, three-holed connectors were exposed where no such equipment was in position. "I will turn up the heat," said Hask, "and they will wake. That one" — he pointed at a Tosok with a hide much bluer than Hask’s own—"is Kelkad, the captain of this ship."

It wasn’t cryonics — the kind of freezing for suspended animation humans had long dreamed off. Yes, this was cold — well below zero Celsius — but it was nowhere near absolute zero. The Tosoks seemed to have a natural ability to hibernate, just as many Earth animals did.

Clete was wearing blue jeans and a denim jacket; neither provided quite enough insulation against the cold. He looked around the room, still relishing the weightlessness. He found every detail of Tosok engineering fascinating. The only places he saw actual fasteners were where they were clearly meant to be undone for maintenance, like the bolts that secured the chair supports in the lander. Everything else seemed to have been molded in a single piece, mostly from ceramic, although there were a few places where metal was visible.

"They can hibernate for centuries without aid of equipment or drugs?" asked Clete.

"Yes."

Clete shook his head. "Y’know, before humans went into space we weren’t even sure we could survive there. After all, we’d always lived under Earth’s gravity — seemed reasonable that nature might’ve made some use of gravity feed, whether in our circulatory systems, our digestive systems, or somewheres else. But it didn’t. We can live just fine in zero gravity. The one part of us that does rely on gravity — the sense of balance, which is controlled by fluids in our inner ears — simply shuts down under zero-g. Dreamers like me, we thought this meant that as a race we were intended to go into space."

Hask’s translator had beeped a few times at unfamiliar words during Clete’s comments, but the alien clearly got the gist of what the human had been saying. "Interesting thought," he replied.

"But you guys," said Clete, "being able to shut down for centuries, having that ability built right into y’all. You can fake gravity in space, course, through centrifugal force or constant acceleration. But there ain’t nothing you can do about the time it takes for interstellar travel. With a natural suspended-animation ability, y’all sure got us beat. We might have been destined to go into planetary orbit, but your race seems to nave been destined to sail between the stars."

"Many of our philosophers would agree with that statement," said Hask. He paused. "But not all, of course." There was silence between them for several moments. "I am hungry," said the Tosok. That didn’t surprise Clete in the least; as far as he could tell, Hask hadn’t eaten since his lander had splashed down. "It will take several hours for the others to revive. Do you require food?"

"I brought some with me," said Clete. "Navy rations. Hardly gourmet vittles, but they’ll do."

"Come with me."

Clete and Hask killed time eating and talking. Clete found the Tosok approach to food utterly fascinating — not to mention disgusting — and he recorded it all on videotape. Eventually, the other Tosoks were revived enough to leave the hibernation chamber, and Clete heard the Tosok language for the first time as they spoke to each other. Although it contained many English-like sounds, it also included a snapping, a pinging, and something like two wooden sticks being clacked together. Clete doubted that a human could speak it without mechanical aids.

There was a lot of variation in skin color among the Tosoks. Hask’s skin was blue-gray. One of the others had a taupe hide, another a neutral gray.

Two had cyan skin. One was navy blue. Kelkad’s was a bit lighter than that.

Eye color seemed to vary widely; only one of the Tosoks had all four eyes the same color. They chattered endlessly, and one of the aliens took great interest in Clete, poking him in the ribs, feeling his skin and the hair on his head, and staring with two round eyes directly into Clete’s face from only inches away.

Hask seemed to be briefing the others. As far as Clete could tell, hand gestures didn’t play any significant role in Tosok communication but the tufts on the tops of each one’s head waved in complex patterns that seemed to add nuance to the spoken words. Hask’s monologue contained several instances of a word that sounded like kash-boom! Clete wonden if it was onomatopoeic, referring to the explosion that must have accompanied the collision in the Kuiper belt; apparently only Hask and the now-deceased Tosok had been revived during that.