“But you do admit selling pornography yourself to the Earthman Osborne Blatch?” the stellar corporal bellowed at last.
“Pornography, pornography,” L’payr mused. “That would be defined as cheaply exciting lewdness, falsely titillating obscenity. Correct?”
“Of course!”
“Well, Corporal, let me ask you a question. You saw those pictures. Did you find them exciting or titillating?”
“Certainly not. But I don’t happen to be a Gtetan ameboid.”
“Neither,” L’payr countered quietly, “is Osborne Blatch.”
I do think Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh might have found some sensible way out of the dilemma if the extradition party had not just then arrived from Gtet on the special Patrol ship which had been sent for it. He now found himself confronted with six more magnificently argumentative ameboids, numbering among them some of the trickiest legal minds on the home planet. The police of Rugh VI had had many intricate dealings with L’payr in the Gtetan courts. Hence, they took no chances and sent their best representatives.
Outnumbered L’payr may have been, but remember, Hoy, he had prepared for just these eventualities ever since leaving Earth. And just to stimulate his devious intellect to maximum performance, there was the fact that his was the only life at stake. Once let his fellow ameboids get their pseudopods on him again, and he was a gone protozoan.
Between L’payr and the Gtetan extradition party, Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh began to find out how unhappy a policeman’s lot can become. Back and forth he went, from the prisoner to the lawyers, stumbling through quagmires of opinion, falling into chasms of complexity.
The extradition group was determined not to return to their planet empty-pseudopoded. In order to succeed, they had to make the current arrest stick, which would give them the right—as previously injured parties—to assert their prior claim to the punishment of L’payr. For his part, L’payr was equally determined to invalidate the arrest by the Patrol, since then he would not only have placed our outfit in an uncomfortable position, but, no longer extraditable, would be entitled to its protection from his fellow citizens.
A weary, bleary and excessively hoarse Pah-Chi-Luh finally dragged himself to the extradition party on spindly tentacles and informed them that, after much careful consideration, he had come to the conclusion that L’payr was innocent of any crime during his stay on Earth.
“Nonsense,” he was told by the spokesman. “A crime was committed. Arrant and unquestioned pornography was sold and circulated on that planet. A crime has to have been committed.”
Pah-Chi-Luh went back to L’payr and asked, miserably, how about it? Didn’t it seem, he almost pleaded, that all the necessary ingredients of a crime were present? Some kind of crime?
“True,” L’payr said thoughtfully. “They have a point. Some kind of crime may have been committed—but not by me. Osborne Blatch, now …”
Stellar Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh completely lost his heads.
He sent a message to Earth, ordering Osborne Blatch to be picked up.
Fortunately for all of us, up to and including the Old One, Pah-Chi-Luh did not go so far as to have Blatch arrested. The Earthman was merely held as a material witness. When I think what the false arrest of a creature from a Secretly Supervised world could lead to, especially in a case of this sort, Hoy, my blood almost turns liquid.
But Pah-Chi-Luh did commit the further blunder of incarcerating Osborne Blatch in a cell adjoining L’payr’s. Everything, you will observe, was working out to the ameboid’s satisfaction—including my young assistant.
By the time Pah-Chi-Luh got around to Blatch’s first interrogation, the Earthman had already been briefed by his neighbor. Not that the briefing was displayed overmuch—as yet.
“Pornography?” he repeated in answer to the first question. “What pornography? Mr. Smith and I had been working on an elementary biology text for some time and we were hoping to use new illustrations throughout. We wanted larger, clear pictures of the sort that would be instantly comprehensible to youngsters—and we were particularly interested in getting away from the blurry drawings that have been used and re-used in all textbooks, almost from the time of Leewenhoek. Mr. L’payr’s series on the cycle of ameboid reproduction was a godsend. In a sense, they made the first section of the book.”
“You don’t deny, however,” Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh inquired remorselessly, “that, at the time of the purchase, you knew those pictures were pornographic? And that, despite this knowledge, you went ahead and used them for the delectation of juveniles of your race?”
“Edification,” the elderly human schoolteacher corrected him. “Edification, not delectation. I assure you that not a single student who studied the photographs in question—which, by the way, appeared textually as drawings—received any premature erotic stimulation thereby. I will admit that, at the time of purchase, I did receive a distinct impression from the gentleman in the next cell that he and his kind considered the illustrations rather racy—”
“Well, then?”
“But that was his problem, not mine. After all, if I buy an artifact from an extraterrestrial creature—a flint fist-axe, say, or a cauldron for pouring boiling oil upon the stormers of walled cities—and I use them both in completely peaceful and useful pursuits—the former to grub onions out of the ground and the latter to cook the onions in a kind of soup—have I done anything wrong?
“As a matter of fact, the textbook in question received fine reviews and outstanding commendations from educational and scientific authorities all over the nation. Would you like to hear some of them? I believe I may have a review or two in my pockets. Let me see. Yes, just by chance, I seem to have a handful of clippings in this suit. Well, well! I didn’t know there were quite so many. This is what the Southern Prairie States Secondary School Gazette has to say—’A substantial and noteworthy achievement. It will live long in the annals of elementary science pedagoguery. The authors may well feel …’ ”
It was then that Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh sent out a despairing call for me.
Fortunately, I was free to give the matter my full attention, the Saudi Arabia-Ganymede affair being completely past the danger point. Had I been tied up …
After experimenting with all kinds of distractions, including secret agents disguised as dancing girls, we had finally managed to embroil the young mystic in a tremendous theological dispute on the exact nature and moral consequences of the miracles he was wreaking. Outstanding Mohammedan religious leaders of the region had lined up on one side or the other and turned the air blue with quotations from the Koran and later Sunnite books. The mystic was drawn in and became so involved in the argument that he stopped thinking about his original objectives and irreparably broke the mental connection with Ganymede.
For a while, this left a continuing problem on that satellite—it looked as if the civilization of disembodied intellects might eventually come to some approximation of the real truth. Luckily for us, the entire business had been viewed there also as a religious phenomenon and, once telepathic contact was lost, the intellect who had been communicating with the human, and had achieved much prestige thereby, was thoroughly discredited. It was generally believed that he had willfully and deliberately faked the entire thing, for the purpose of creating skepticism among the more spiritual members of his race. An ecclesiastical court ordered the unfortunate telepath to be embodied alive.