Thus, six Earth months later, when the case broke wide open, Pah-Chi-Luh handled it himself and didn’t bother me until the complications became overwhelming. I know this doesn’t absolve me—I have ultimate responsibility for everything that transpires in my Outlying Patrol District. But between relatives, Hoy, I am mentioning these facts to show that I was not completely clumsy in the situation and that a little help from you and the rest of the family, when the case reaches the Old One in Galactic Headquarters, would not merely be charity for a one-headed oafish cousin.
As a matter of fact, I and most of my office were involved in a very complex problem. A Moslem mystic, living in Saudi Arabia, had attempted to heal the ancient schism that exists in his religion between the Shiite and Sunnite sects, by communing with the departed spirits of Mohammed’s son-in-law, Ali, the patron of the first group, and Abu Bekr, the Prophet’s father-in-law and founder of the Sunnite dynasty. The object of the mediumistic excursion was to effect some sort of arbitration arrangement in Paradise between the two feuding ghosts that would determine who should rightfully have been Mohammed’s successor and the first caliph of Mecca.
Nothing is simple on Earth. In the course of this laudable probe of the hereafter, the earnest young mystic accidentally achieved telepathic contact with a Stage 9 civilization of disembodied intellects on Ganymede, the largest satellite of the planet Jupiter. Well, you can imagine! Tremendous uproar on Ganymede and in Saudi Arabia, pilgrims in both place flocking to see the individuals on either end of the telepathic connection, peculiar and magnificent miracles being wrought daily. A mess!
And my office feverishly working overtime to keep the whole affair simple and religious, trying to prevent it from splashing over into awareness of the more rational beings in each community! It’s an axiom of Outlying Patrol Offices that nothing will stimulate space travel among backward peoples faster than definite knowledge of the existence of intelligent celestial neighbors. Frankly, if Pah-Chi-Luh had come to me right then, blathering of Gtetan pornography in human high-school textbooks, I’d probably have bitten his heads off.
He’d discovered the textbooks in the course of routine duties as an investigator for a United States Congressional Committee—his disguised status for the last decade or so, and one which had proved particularly valuable in the various delaying actions we had been surreptitiously fighting on the continent of North America. There was this newly published biology book, written for use in the secondary schools, which had received extremely favorable comment from outstanding scholars in the universities. Naturally, the committee ordered a copy of the text and suggested that its investigator look through it.
Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh turned a few pages and found himself staring at the very pornographic pictures he’d heard about at the briefing session six months before—published, available to everyone on Earth, and especially to minors! He told me afterward, brokenly, that in that instant all he saw was a brazen repetition of L’payr’s ugly crime on his home planet.
He blasted out a Galaxy-wide alarm for the Gtetan.
L’payr had begun life anew as an ashkebac craftsman on a small, out-of-the-way, mildly civilized world. Living carefully within the law, he had prospered and, at the time of his arrest, had become sufficiently conventional—and, incidentally, fat—to think of raising a respectable family. Not much—just two of him. If things continued to go well, he might consider multiple fission in the future.
He was indignant when he was arrested and carried off to the detention cell on Pluto, pending the arrival of an extradition party from Gtet.
“By what right do you disturb a peace-loving artisan in the quiet pursuit of his trade?” he challenged. “I demand immediate unconditional release, a full apology and restitution for loss of income as well as the embarrassment caused my person and ego. Your superiors will hear of this! False arrest of a galactic citizen can be a very serious matter!”
“No doubt,” Stellar Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh retorted, still quite equable, you see. “But the public dissemination of recognized pornography is even more serious. As a crime, we consider it on a level with—”
“What pornography?”
My assistant said he stared at L’payr for a long time through the transparent cell wall, marveling at the creature’s effrontery. All the same, he began to feel a certain disquiet. He had never before encountered such complete self-assurance in the face of a perfect structure of criminal evidence.
“You know very well what pornography. Here—examine it for yourself. This is only one copy out of 20,000 distributed all over the United States of North America for the specific use of human adolescents.” He dematerialized the biology text and passed it through the wall.
L’payr glanced at the pictures. “Bad reproduction,” he commented. “Those humans still have a long way to go in many respects. However, they do display a pleasing technical precocity. But why show this to me? Surely you don’t think I have anything to do with it?”
Pah-Chi-Luh says the Gtetan seemed intensely puzzled, yet gently patient, as if he were trying to unravel the hysterical gibberings of an idiot child.
“Do you deny it?”
“What in the Universe is there to deny? Let me see.” He turned to the title page. “This seems to be A First Book in Biology by one Osborne Blatch and one Nicodemus P. Smith. You haven’t mistaken me for either Blatch or Smith, have you? My name is L’payr, not Osborne L’payr, nor even Nicodemus P. L’payr. Just plain, old, everyday, simple L’payr. No more, no less. I come from Gtet, which is the sixth planet of—”
“I am fully aware of Gtet’s astrographic location,” Pah-Chi-Luh informed him coldly. “Also, that you were on Earth six of their months ago. And that, at the time, you completed a transaction with this Osborne Blatch, whereby you got the fuel you needed to leave the planet, while Blatch obtained the set of pictures that were later used as illustrations in that textbook. Our undercover organization on Earth functions very efficiently, as you can see. We have labeled the book Exhibit A.”
“An ingenious designation,” said the Gtetan admiringly. “Exhibit A! With so much to choose from, you picked the one that sounds just right. My compliments.” He was, you will understand, Hoy, in his element—he was dealing with a police official on an abstruse legal point. L’payr’s entire brilliant criminal past on a law-despising world had prepared him for this moment. Pah-Chi-Luh’s mental orientation, however, had for a long time now been chiefly in the direction of espionage and sub rosa cultural manipulation. He was totally unprepared for the orgy of judicial quibbles that was about to envelop him. In all fairness to him, let me admit that I might not have done any better under those circumstances and neither, for that matter, might you—nor the Old One himself!
L’payr pointed out, “All I did was to sell a set of artistic studies to one Osborne Blatch. What he did with it afterward surely does not concern me. If I sell a weapon of approved technological backwardness to an Earthman—a flint fist-axe, say, or a cauldron for pouring boiling oil upon the stormers of walled cities—and he uses the weapon to dispatch one of his fellow primitives, am I culpable? Not the way I read the existing statutes of the Galactic Federation, my friend. Now suppose you reimburse me for my time and trouble and put me on a fast ship bound for my place of business?”
Around and around they went. Dozens of times, Pah-Chi-Luh, going frantically through the Pluto Headquarters law library, would come up with a nasty little wrinkle of an ordinance, only to have L’payr point out that the latest interpretation of the Supreme Council put him wholly in the clear. I can myself vouch for the fact that the Gtetans seem to enjoy total recall of all judicial history.