The foreperson looked at Pringle. "Your Honor, you instructed us in the law. But, well, we couldn’t bring ourselves to apply it." He looked to Ziegler again. "Hask didn’t mean to kill Calhoun, so it wasn’t premeditated. Still, we could have found him guilty of a lesser charge, like involuntary manslaughter. But if we’d found him guilty, there might have been an appeal — the defense can appeal guilty verdicts, but the prosecution can’t appeal innocent ones, isn’t that right, judge?"

Pringle nodded. "In most cases, that’s essentially correct."

"So we let him go. We let him go so he wouldn’t be jailed; after all, we all agreed he presented no threat to anyone else." The foreperson looked at the other jury members, then turned back to the judge. He shrugged a little. "Yes, the rest of the crew are now in prison — but Kelkad did send a message to his home world, and other Tosoks will be coming to Earth at some point. Who knows what changes there have been in Tosok society in two hundred years? We thought that if these new Tosoks saw that we are a reasonable, compassionate, and forgiving people, then maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t wipe our planet clean of life."

"I don’t understand," said Frank. He stopped the grinning Dale before the lawyer stepped out of the courtroom into the crowd of waiting reporters. "What is — what did Ziegler call it? — ‘jury nullification’? What’s that?"

"The jury is the conscience of the community," said Dale. "They can do whatever they damn well please."

"But the judge said they had to follow the law, whether they agreed with it or not."

Dale shrugged. "Judges always say that — but, in fact, there’s no legislation to that effect, and plenty of precedent to the contrary. The jury never has to explain or justify its decision to anyone, and there’s no mechanism for punishing jurors for making a verdict that goes against the evidence. If they want to let someone go free, they’re entitled to do that."

"Thank God for juries," said Frank.

"For once," said Dale, still grinning from ear to ear, "I agree with you."

*39*

No one expected to see another Tosok ship anytime soon. After all, the message Kelkad had sent from Earth to Alpha Centauri had to take 4.3 years to get to its destination, and the fastest any reply — whether a ship, or simply another message — could arrive was another 4.3 years later.

Or so people had thought.

But in the intervening two hundred years, the Tosoks had apparently discovered a way to outwit Einstein. The new vessel appeared without warning in orbit near the Tosok mothership just four and a half years after Kelkad had sent his message. Some astronomers declared they had detected a flash of Cerenkov radiation just as the ship appeared, and others were muttering things about hyperspace and tardyon/tachyon translations.

The new arrival was eighty meters long, and there were no right angles anywhere in its construction. Its hull was smooth — no vents, no projections, no apparent windows — and a mural had been painted on it. It was abstract, and no one was quite sure at first what it depicted. Only when it was imaged with cameras that saw well into the ultraviolet did the image become apparent.

The starboard side of the ship depicted a landscape of crystal mountains, what might have been treelike things with trunks made of chains of spheres, and a lake with either a giant floating city or boat in it, or an island every centimeter of which was covered by majestic spires and towers.

The port side showed what was obviously the Milky Way galaxy, as well as Andromeda, and the two Magellanic Clouds.

The alien ship simply orbited Earth for two days, but finally a small translucent sphere bubbled up out of its surface, then separated from it.

The sphere simply dropped to the Earth at a speed of about five hundred kilometers an hour — fast, but not nearly fast enough to make for a fiery passage through the atmosphere. It slowed when it was about three kilometers up, and settled gently as a feather in the United Nations plaza, next to one of the Tosok landers; Hask and Seltar spent much time at the UN these days. Whether the new arrivals were aware of the significance of the UN, or had simply located the Tosok lander with some sort of scanner, no one could say for sure.

UN and U.S. troops were waiting for the spherical craft. Tanks and bazookas were trained on it. It was unlikely that either could destroy the ship, but if more Tosoks came out, Earth would not go down without a fight.

The current U.S. president was in the underground command center in Virginia, built for use in case of nuclear war. Frank Nobilio was with him.

They were in contact with the troops in New York via communications satellite, and were watching the live video feed being provided by CNN.