Gentle Invaders

by Hans Stefan Santesson

  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—et—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 somp’n to show you. 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, ya’know what’s good for ya, y’don’t ast such questions. Look, I got somep’n for ya. Hot stuff. Real hot I”

  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 revelant 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 little closair?”

  M’sieu, we are to understand, came a Ieetle closair. 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 alack, 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, dozen 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 what 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 ripple in terrestrial law or technology behind him, we all relaxed gratefully. The case was removed from top priority—pull 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 representativ
e 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.

  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, All, 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 agreement 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 places 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 I 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 them. 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 to 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, AH 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 Mm 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 Mm for this moment. Pah-CM-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 I 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.

  “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. 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,