No, this time it all started on Rugh VI, the world known to those who live on it as Gtet. If you consult your atlas, Hoy, you’ll find Rugh is a fair-sized yellow dwarf star on the outskirts of the Galaxy, and Gtet an extremely insignificant planet which has only recently achieved the status of Stage 19—primary interstellar citizenship.

  The Gtetans are a modified ameboid race who manufacture a fair brand of ashkebac, which they export to their neighbors on Rugh IX and XII. They are a highly individualistic people and still experience many frictions living in a centralized society. Despite several centuries of advanced civilization, most Gtetans look upon the Law as a delightful problem in circumvention rather than as a way of life.

  An ideal combination with my bipeds of Earth, eh?

  It seems that a certain L’payr was one of the worst troublemakers on Gtet. He had committed almost every crime and broken almost every law. On a planet where fully one-fourth of the population is regularly undergoing penal rehabilitation, L’payr was still considered something quite special. A current Gtetan saying, I understand, puts it, “You’re like L’payr, fellow—you don’t know when to stop!”

  Nonetheless, L’payr had reached the point where it was highly important that he did stop. He had been arrested and convicted for a total of 2,342 felonies, just one short of the 2,343 felonies which, on Gtet, make one a habitual criminal and, therefore, subject to life imprisonment. He made a valiant effort to retire from public life and devote himself to contemplation and good works, but it was too late. Almost against his will, as he insisted to me under examination in my office, he found his mind turning to foul deeds left undone, illegalities as yet unperpetrated.

  And so one day, quite casually—hardly noticing, as it were—he committed another major crime. But this one was so ineffably ugly, involving an offense against the moral code as well as civil legislation, that the entire community turned against L’payr.

  He was caught selling pornography to juvenile Gtetans.

  The indulgence that a celebrity may enjoy turned to wrath and utter contempt. Even the Gtetan Protective Association of Two Thousand Time Losers refused to raise funds for his bail. As his trial approached, it became obvious to L’payr that he was in for it. His only hope lay in flight.

  He pulled the most spectacular coup of his career—he broke out of the hermetically sealed vault in which he was being guarded around the clock (how he did this, he consistently refused to tell me up to the time of his lamented demise or whatever you want to call it) and escaped to the spaceport near the prison. There, he managed to steal aboard the pride of the Gtetan merchant fleet, a newly developed interstellar ship equipped with two-throttle hyperspace drive.

  This ship was empty, waiting for a crew to take it out on its maiden run.

  Somehow, in the few hours at his disposal before his escape was known, L’payr figured out the controls of the craft and managed to lift it off Gtet and into hyperspace. He had no idea at this time that, since the ship was an experimental model, it was equipped with a transmitting device that kept the spaceport informed of its location.

  Thus, though they lacked the facilities to pursue him, the Gtetan police always knew exactly where he was. A few hundred ameboid vigilantes did start after him in old-fashioned, normal-drive ships, but after a month or so of long and fatiguing interstellar travel at one-hundredth his speed, they gave up and returned home.

  For his hideout, L’payr wanted a primitive and unimportant corner of the Galaxy. The region around Sol was ideal. He materialized out of hyperspace about halfway between the third and fourth planets. But he did it very clumsily (after all, Hoy, the best minds of his race are just beginning to understand the two-throttle drive) and lost all of his fuel in the process. He barely managed to reach Earth and come down.

  The landing was effected at night and with all drives closed, so that no one on the planet saw it. Because living conditions on Earth are so different from Gtet, L’payr knew that his mobility would be very limited. His one hope was to get help from the inhabitants. He had to pick a spot where possible contacts would be at maximum and yet accidental discovery of his ship would be at minimum. He chose an empty lot in the suburbs of Chicago and quickly dug his ship in.

  Meanwhile, the Gtetan police communicated with me as the local commanding officer of the Galactic Patrol. They told me where L’payr was hidden and demanded extradition. I pointed out that, as yet, I lacked jurisdiction, since no crime of an interstellar nature had been committed. The stealing of the ship had been done on his home planet—it had not occurred in deep space. If, however, he broke any galactic law while he was on Earth, committed any breach of the peace, no matter how slight

  “How about that?” the Gtetan police asked me over the interstellar radio. “Earth is on Secretly Supervised Status, as we understand it. It is illegal to expose it to superior civilizations. Isn’t L’payr landing there in a two-throttle hyperspace-drive ship enough of a misdemeanor to entitle you to pick him up?”

  “Not by itself,” I replied. “The ship would have to be seen and understood for what it was by a resident of the planet. From what we here can tell, no such observation was made. And so long as he stays in hiding, doesn’t tell any human about us and refrains from adding to the technological momentum of Earth, L’payr’s galactic citizenship has to be respected. I have no legal basis for an arrest.”

  Well, the Gtetans grumbled about what were they paying the star tax for, anyway, but they saw my point. They warned me, though, about L’payr—sooner or later his criminal impulses would assert themselves. He was in an impossible position, they insisted. In order to get the fuel necessary to leave Earth before his supplies ran out, he’d have to commit some felony or other—and as soon as he did so and was arrested, they wanted their extradition request honored.

  “The filthy, evil-minded old pervert,” I heard the police chief mutter as he clicked off.

  I don’t have to tell you how I felt, Hoy. A brilliant, imaginative ameboid criminal at large on a planet as volatile culturally as Earth! I notified all our agents in North America to be on the alert and settled back to wait it out with prayerfully knotted tentacles.

  L’payr had listened to most of this conversation over his own ship’s receiver. Naturally, the first thing he did was to remove the directional device which had enabled the Gtetan police to locate him. Then, as soon as it was dark again, he managed, with what must have been enormous difficulty, to transport himself and his little ship to another area of the city. He did this, too, without being observed.

  He made his base in a slum tenement neighborhood that had been condemned to make way for a new housing project and therefore was practically untenanted. Then he settled back to consider his problem.

  Because, Hoy, he had a problem.

  He didn’t want to get in any trouble with the Patrol, but if he didn’t get his pseudopods on a substantial amount of fuel very soon, he’d be a dead ameboid. Not only did he need the fuel to get off Earth, but the converters—which, on this rather primitive Gtetan vessel, changed waste matter back into usable air and food—would be stopping very soon if they weren’t stoked up, too.

  His time was limited, his resources almost non-existent. The spacesuits with which the ship was furnished, while cleverly enough constructed and able to satisfy the peculiar requirements of an entity of constantly fluctuating format, had not been designed for so primitive a planet as Earth. They would not operate too effectively for long periods away from the ship.

  He knew that my OP office had been apprised of his landing and that we were just waiting for some infraction of even the most obscure minor law. Then we’d pounce—and, after the usual diplomatic formalities, he’d be on his way back to Gtet, for a nine-throttle Patrol ship could catch him easily. It was obvious that he couldn’t do as he had originally planned—make a fast raid on some human supply center and collect whatever stuff he needed.

  His hope was to make a trade. He’d have to find a human with whom he could deal and offer something that, to this particular human in any case, was worth the quantity of fuel L’payr’s ship needed to take him to a less policed corner of the Cosmos. But almost everything on the ship was essential to its functioning. And L’payr had to make his trade without (1) giving away the existence and nature of the galactic civilization, or (2) providing the inhabitants of Earth with any technological stimulus.

  L’payr later said that he thought about the problem until his nucleus was a mass of corrugations. He went over the ship, stem to stern, again and again, but everything a human might consider acceptable was either too useful or too revealing. And then, just as he was about to give up, he found it.

  The materials he needed were those with which he had committed his last crime!

  According to Gtetan law, you see, Hoy, all evidence pertaining to a given felony is retained by the accused until the time of his trial. There are very complicated reasons for this, among them the Gtetan juridical concept that every prisoner is known to be guilty until he manages, with the aid of lies, loopholes and brilliant legalisms, to convince a hard-boiled and cynical jury of his peers that they should, in spite of their knowledge to the contrary, declare him innocent. Since the burden of proof rests with the prisoner, the evidence does likewise. And L’payr, examining this evidence, decided that he was in business.

  What he needed now was a customer. Not only someone who wanted to buy what he had to sell, but a customer who had available the fuel he needed. And in the neighborhood which was now his base of operations, customers of this sort were rare.

  Being Stage 19, the Gtetans are capable of the more primitive forms of telepathy—only at extremely short ranges, of course, and for relatively brief periods of time. So, aware that my secret agents had already begun to look for him and that, when they found him, his freedom of action would be even more circumscribed, L’payr desperately began to comb through the minds of any terrestrials within three blocks of his hideout.

  Days went by. He scuttled from mind to mind like an insect looking for a hole in a collector’s jar. He was forced to shut the ship’s converter down to one-half operation, then to one-third. Since this cut his supply of food correspondingly, he began to hunger. For lack of activity, his contractile vacuole dwindled to the size of a pinpoint. Even his endoplasm lost the turgidity of the healthy ameboid and became dangerously thin and transparent.

  And then one night, when he had about determined to take his chances and steal the fuel he needed, his thoughts ricocheted off the brain of a passerby, came back unbelievingly, examined further and were ecstatically convinced. A human who not only could supply his needs, but also, and more important, might be in the market for Gtetan pornography!

  In other words, Mr. Osborne Blatch.

  This elderly teacher of adolescent terrestrials insisted throughout all my interrogations that, to the best of his knowledge, no mental force was used upon him. It seems that he lived in a new apartment house on the other side of the torn-down tenement area and customarily walked in a wide arc around the rubble because of the large number of inferior and belligerent human types which infested the district. On this particular night, a teachers’ meeting at his high school having detained him, he was late for supper and decided, as he had once or twice before, to take a short cut. He claims that the decision to take a short cut was his own.

  Osborne Blatch says that he was striding along jauntily, making believe his umbrella was a malacca cane, when he seemed to hear a voice. He says that, even at first hearing, he used the word “seemed” to himself because, while the voice definitely had inflection and tone, it was somehow completely devoid of volume.

  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.