*30*
Dale Rice came into the courtroom. He looked at the new juror. Of course, he’d been in the room since the beginning, but this was his first day as an actual voting member of the panel. He was an Asian man, perhaps twenty-five or thirty. There was nothing in his face to convey which way he would vote. Dale smiled at him — a warm smile, a 'trust me' smile, a 'we’re all in this together' smile. It couldn’t hurt.
The day had been devoted to minor witnesses and arguing points of law.
Dale got home after nine P.M., exhausted — as he was more and more these days; he couldn’t deny his age.
Years ago, after having received a Los Angeles County 'Lawyer of the Year' award, Dale Rice was asked by a reporter 'whether he was proud today to be a Black American.'
Dale gave the reporter the kind of deadly cross-examinational stare normally reserved for lying police officers. 'I’m proud every day to be a Black American,' he said.
Still, there weren’t many times when it was an actual advantage to be African-American. He was used to the screwups in restaurants. Waitresses bringing him the wrong meal — mixing up his order with that of the only other black person in the entire place. White people constantly confused him with other black men, men who, except for their skin color, looked nothing like him, and were often decades younger.
But the one time it perhaps was to his advantage to be big and black was when he wanted to go for late-night walks. Even here in Brentwood, most people were afraid to be out on the streets after midnight, but Dale knew that no one would try to mug him, and since he rarely got home from the office before nine p.m., he was grateful that at least the streets weren’t denied to him after dark, as they were to so many others. Of course, there was always the problem of police cars pulling up to him and asking to see his ID — for no good reason other than it was night, and he was black, and this was a rich white neighborhood.
Tonight, as he walked along, he thought about the case. The evidence against Hask seemed compelling. His lack of an alibi; his having shed his skin the night of the murder; the fact that he was experienced at dissection, having recently carved up the body of the dead Tosok, Seltar; the video showing him wielding precisely the sort of cutting device used to commit the crime — and his musings on that video about his people having given up too much by no longer hunting their own food.
Dale continued along the sidewalk. Up ahead, coming toward him, a white man was walking a small dog. The man caught sight of Dale, and crossed over to the other side of the road. Dale shook his head. It never ended — and it never ceased to hurt.
Judge Pringle should never have allowed the jury to watch Stant shed his skin. Perhaps that alone would be grounds for an appeal, should the likely happen and the jury find Hask guilty. And even if Ziegler hadn’t been able to raise the point in the courtroom at that moment, she’d doubtless make it in her closing argument: Hask and Stant were half brothers, and their regular shedding should have been closely synchronized. That it wasn’t was apparent proof that Hask’s shedding had been induced — and why else induce it on the day of the murder, except that he himself had committed the crime?
Dale’s footsteps echoed in the night. A few dogs, behind high stone fences, barked at him, but he didn’t mind that; dogs barked equally at everyone. If Dale’s life hadn’t been so busy, he’d have liked to have had a dog of his own.
Or a wife, for that matter.
He’d been engaged during law school, but he and Kelly had broken up before he’d graduated. She’d seen then what the work was like, the commitment, the fact that there really was room for nothing else in his life beside his career. Dale thought of her often. He had no idea what had become of her, but he hoped, wherever she was, that she was happy.
He was approaching a corner, a pool of light shining on the concrete sidewalk from the street lamp overhead. He stepped into the light and began walking now down the perpendicular street.
And then it hit him — how all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit together.
Christ, if he was right—
If he was right, then Hask
And he could prove it.
Of course, Hask would not cooperate. But it wouldn’t be the first time Dale had saved a client despite the client’s wishes. As he headed down that dark street Dale felt sure he knew who Hask was protecting.
He’d already arranged to examine Smathers tomorrow, but after that he would call Dr. Hernandez. And then—
Dale turned around and headed back home, moving as fast as his ancient form would allow.
*31*
'State and spell your name, please,' said the clerk.
The square-headed man with white hair and a white beard leaned into the microphone on the witness stand. 'Smathers, Packwood. S-M-A-T-H-E-R-S.'
Dale could have called someone else at this point, but by using Smathers as an expert witness for the defense, he hoped to communicate to any jurors who had gotten wind of Smathers’s attempts to devise a method to execute a Tosok that Smathers did not, in fact, necessarily believe Hask was guilty; it would, after all, be particularly damning if the jury believed that a member of the Tosok entourage thought Hask had indeed killed Calhoun.
Dale moved over to the lectern. 'What is your profession, sir?'
'I’m a professor of exobiology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto.'
Dale introduced Smathers’s massive CV into evidence, then: 'Dr. Smathers, you heard Reverend Brisbee’s discourse on the human eye. Do you agree with it?'
'No, sir, I don’t.'
'You don’t believe that the complexity of the human eye represents clear proof of divine creation?'
'No, sir.'
'Your Honor,' said Ziegler, rising. 'We object to this. What has the nature of the eye got to do with this case?'
'Your Honor,' said Dale, 'Ms. Ziegler has put much emphasis on the missing parts of Dr. Calhoun’s body. Surely we’re entitled to explore whatever reasons there might be for those particular parts to be taken.'
'I’m inclined to grant some latitude,' said Pringle, 'but don’t let this go on too long, Mr. Rice.'
'I shall be the very soul of brevity, Your Honor,' said Dale, with a small bow. 'Now, Dr. Smathers, you heard the reverend’s contention that the eye could not possibly have evolved in stages. I can have the court reporter read back the exact quote, if you like, but I believe the gist of it was, ‘What good is half an eye? What good is a quarter of an eye?’ Do you agree with that?'
Smathers smiled and spread his hands. 'Today, we consider a one-eyed man to be at least partially disabled: he has a drastically reduced field of view including no peripheral vision on one side of his body, and, of course, he has no depth perception, since depth perception is a function of stereoscopic vision — which requires two simultaneous views of the same scene from slightly different angles.'
Smathers paused, and took a drink of water from the glass on the witness stand. 'Well, there’s an old saying, sir. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. If nobody else had two eyes, one eye would be a spectacular improvement over no eyes. You wouldn’t be considered disabled; rather, you’d be considered incredibly advantaged.'
'But, still,' said Dale, 'that one eye is a miraculous creation, no?'
'Not really. A human eye consists of a lens for focusing light; a retina, which is a delicate, light-sensitive membrane at the back of the eye — sort of like the eye’s ‘film’; and the optic nerve for transferring information to the brain. The reverend is right, of course, that three such complex structures couldn’t simultaneously appear as the result of a single mutation. The eye, evolutionarily, started out as light-sensitive tissue — which had the ability to distinguish light from shadow. Now, that’s not half an eye. That’s not a quarter of an eye. It’s the tiniest, least significant fraction of an eye. There’s nothing miraculous about light-sensitive cells. Our skin is full of their precursors; you tan because of exposure to ultraviolet light, after all. Well, not you, sir, but—'
'Go on, Doctor.'
'Well, this tiny, barest fraction of an eye is enough to make you king if everyone else is totally blind. What good is a partial eye? If it lets you detect that some creature is coming toward you — a creature that might eat you — if it lets you sense that, even as an indistinct shadow, so that you can get away before it’s upon you, well, yes, that’s an advantage, and yes, evolution would select for it.
'And as time goes by, if a transparent membrane developed over those light-sensitive cells, to protect them from damage, well, if that membrane lets you keep your light-sensitive cells when others are losing theirs, then, yes, that’s an advantage, and evolution would select for it.
'And if that transparent membrane became thicker in the middle by random chance, and that thickness had the effect of focusing the light somewhat, giving you a slightly sharper view of whatever was approaching, then, yes, that’s an advantage, and evolution would select for it, too.
'Bit by bit, tiny change by tiny change, you do go from no vision at all to a highly sophisticated eye, like the one we possess. In fact, in Earth’s fossil record, it seems that vision didn’t evolve once — it appears that it evolved as many as sixty different times. It takes all sorts of forms: our single-lens eyes, the compound eyes of insects, the lensless pinhole-camera eyes of nautiluses. Yes, the eye evolved, on its own, unguided, unplanned, through natural selection.'
'But the eye is so refined, Doctor, so sophisticated. Do you really believe it isn’t the handiwork of God?'
Smathers looked out at the courtroom. 'About half the people I see here today are wearing glasses; I’ll bet of the remaining half, a goodly number are wearing contact lenses. Now, it may be a miracle that LensCrafters can make glasses in about an hour, but I’d have actually expected an omnipotent God to have designed eyes that focused properly on their own, without mechanical aids.
'Of course, one could argue that God never intended us to watch TV all night long, or to read so much, or to sit in front of computers, or to do delicate work with our hands. But poor eyesight is not just a modern ailment. The ancient Indians of North America used to have their own eye tests. The second-last star in the handle of the Big Dipper is actually a double star. On a clear night, a person with normal vision should be able to easily see a second, fainter star very close to the main one; that’s the test the Indians used.
'And the ancient Greeks used the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades star cluster in Taurus the Bull as an eye test — could you see all seven? Well, today, even with normal vision, only six are clearly visible — one of the Pleiades stars has dimmed over the millennia. But the fact that ancient peoples had eye tests proves that poor vision is hardly something new.'
Dale glanced at the jury, then looked back at the Canadian scientist. 'Still, Dr. Smathers, surely the question of focus is a minor one. Surely, in its overall design, the perfection of the eye demonstrates the existence of a divine creator?'
'No, it does not,' said Smathers. 'The eye, in fact, is incompetently designed. No engineer would ever do it that way. Remember I mentioned three fundamental components — the lens, the retina, and the optic nerve?
