The voice said, “Hey, bud! C’mere!”
He turned around curiously and surveyed the rubble to his right. All that was left of the building that had once been there was the lower half of the front entrance. Since everything else around it was completely flat, he saw no place where a man could be standing.
But as he looked, he heard the voice again. It sounded greasily conspiratorial and slightly impatient. “C’mere, bud. C’mere!”
“What—er—what is it, sir?” he asked in a cautiously well-bred way, moving closer and peering in the direction of the voice. The bright street light behind him, he said, improved his courage as did the solid quality of the very heavy old-fashioned umbrella he was carrying.
“C’mere. I got somep’n to show ya. C’mon!”
Stepping carefully over loose brick and ancient garbage, Mr. Blatch came to a small hollow at one side of the ruined entrance. And filling it was L’payr or, as he seemed at first glance to the human, a small, splashy puddle of purple liquid.
I ought to point out now, Hoy—and the affidavits I’m sending along will substantiate it—that at no time did Mr. Blatch recognize the viscous garment for a spacesuit, nor did he ever see the Gtetan ship which L’payr had hidden in the rubble behind him in its completely tenuous hyperspatial state.
Though the man, having a good imagination and a resilient mind, immediately realized that the creature before him must be extraterrestrial, he lacked overt technological evidence to this effect, as well as to the nature and existence of our specific galactic civilization. Thus, here at least, there was no punishable violation of Interstellar Statute 2,607,193, Amendments 126 through 509.
“What do you have to show me?” Mr. Blatch asked courteously, staring down at the purple puddle. “And where, may I ask, are you from? Mars? Venus?”
“Listen, bud, y’know what’s good for ya, y’don’t ast such questions. Look, I got somep’n for ya. Hot stuff. Real hot!”
Mr. Blatch’s mind, no longer fearful of having its owner assaulted and robbed by the neighborhood tough it had originally visualized, spun off to a relevant memory, years old, of a trip abroad. There had been that alley in Paris and the ratty little Frenchman in a torn sweater …
“What would that be?” he asked.
A pause now, while L’payr absorbed new impressions.
“Ah-h-h,” said the voice from the puddle. “I ’ave somezing to show M’sieu zat M’sieu weel like vairry much. If M’sieu weel come a leetle closair?”
M’sieu, we are to understand, came a leetle closiar. Then the puddle heaved up in the middle, reaching out a pseudopod that held flat, square objects, and telepathed hoarsely, “’Ere, M’sieu. Feelthy peekshures.”
Although taken more than a little aback, Blatch merely raised both eyebrows interrogatively and said, “Ah? Well, well!”
He shifted the umbrella to his left hand and, taking the pictures as they were given to him, one at a time, examined each a few steps away from L’payr, where the light of the street lamp was stronger.
When all the evidence arrives, you will be able to see for yourself, Hoy, what they were like. Cheap prints, calculated to excite the grossest ameboid passions. The Gtetans, as you may have heard, reproduce by simple asexual fission, but only in the presence of saline solution—sodium chloride is comparatively rare on their world.
The first photograph showed a naked ameba, fat and replete with food vacuoles, splashing lazily and formlessly at the bottom of a metal tank in the completely relaxed state that precedes reproducing.
The second was like the first, except that a trickle of salt water had begun down one side of the tank and a few pseudopods had lifted toward it inquiringly. To leave nothing to the imagination, a sketch of the sodium chloride molecule had been superimposed on the upper right corner of the photograph.
In the third picture, the Gtetan was ecstatically awash in the saline solution, its body distended to maximum, dozens of pseudopods thrust out, throbbing. Most of the chromatin had become concentrated in chromosomes about the equator of the nucleus. To an ameba, this was easily the most exciting photograph in the collection.
The fourth showed the nucleus becoming indented between the two sets of sibling chromosomes—while, in the fifth, with the division completed and the two nuclei at opposite ends of the reproducing individual, the entire cytoplasmic body had begun to undergo constriction about its middle. In the sixth, the two resultant Gtetans were emerging with passion-satisfied languor from the tank of salt water.
As a measure of L’payr’s depravity, let me pass on to you what the Gtetan police told me. Not only was he peddling the stuff to ameboid minors, but they believed that he had taken the photographs himself and that the model had been his own brother—or should I say sister? His own one and only sibling, possibly? This case has many, many confusing aspects.
Blatch returned the last picture to L’payr and said, “Yes, I am interested in buying the group. How much?”
The Gtetan named his price in terms of the requisite compounds available in the chemistry laboratory of the high school where Blatch taught. He explained exactly how he wanted them to be prepared and warned Blatch to tell nobody of L’payr’s existence.
“Uzzerwise, when M’sieu gets ’ere tomorrow night, ze peekshures weel be gone, I weel be gone—and M’sieu weel have nozzing to show for his trouble. Comprenez?”
Osborne Blatch seems to have had very little trouble in obtaining and preparing the stuff for which L’payr had bargained. He said that, by the standards of his community, it was a minute quantity and extremely inexpensive. Also, as he had scrupulously always done in the past when using school supplies for his own experiments, he reimbursed the laboratory out of his own pocket. But he does admit that the photographs were only a small part of what he hoped to get out of the ameboid. He expected, once a sound business arrangement had been established, to find out from which part of the Solar System the visitor had come, what his world was like and similar matters of understandable interest to a creature whose civilization is in the late phases of Secretly Supervised Status.
Once the exchange had been effected, however, L’payr tricked him. The Gtetan told Blatch to return on the next night when, his time being more free, they could discuss the state of the Universe at leisure. And, of course, as soon as the Earthman had left with the photographs, L’payr jammed the fuel into his converters, made the necessary sub-nuclear rearrangements in its atomic structure and, with the hyperspace-drive once more operating under full power, took off like a rilg out of Gowkuldady.
As far as we can determine, Blatch received the deception philosophically. After all, he still had the pictures.
When my OP office was informed that L’payr had left Earth in the direction of the Hercules Cluster M13, without leaving any discernible rippled in terrestrial law or technology behind him, we all relaxed gratefully. The case was removed from TOP PRIORITY—FULL ATTENTION BY ALL PERSONNEL rating and placed in the PENDING LATENT EFFECTS category.
As is usual, I dropped the matter myself and gave full charge of the follow-up to my regent and representative on Earth, Stellar Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh. A tracer beam was put on L’payr’s rapidly receding ship and I was free to devote my attention once more to my basic problem—delaying the development of interplanetary travel until the various human societies had matured to the requisite higher level.