"William Tenn - Party Of The Two Parts" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

In other words, Mr. Osborne Blatch.
This elderly teacher of adolescent terrestrials insisted throughout all my interroнgations 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 umнbrella 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!"
"WhatЧerЧwhat 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 umнbrella 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, HoyЧand the affidavits I'm sending along will substanнtiate itЧthat 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 techнnological 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 Interнstellar 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 Frenchнman 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 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 aback, Blatch merely raised both eyebrows inнterrogatively 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, Roy, what they were like. Cheap prints, calculated to excite the grossest amoeboid passions. The Gtetans, as you may have heard, reproduce by simple asexual fission, but only in the presence of saline solutionЧsodium 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 reнlaxed 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 nothнing to the imagination, a sketch of the sodium chloride molecule had been superimнposed 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 sibнling chromosomesЧwhile, in the fifth, with the division completed and the two nuclei at opposite ends of the reproducing individual, the entire cytoplasmic body had beнgun 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 amoeboid minors, but they believed that he had taken the photographs himself and that the model had been his own brotherЧor 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 goneЧand 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 commuнnity, it was a minute quantity and extremely inexpensive. Also, as he had scrupuнlously 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 phoнtographs were only a small part of what he hoped to get out of the amoeboid. 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 ripple in terrestrial law or technology behind him, we all relaxed gratefully. The case was removed from TOP PRIORITYЧFULL ATTENTION 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 problemЧdelaying 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 meЧI have ultimate responsibility for everything that tranнspires 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 Galacнtic 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 probнlem. 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 communнing 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 agreeнment 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 civiнlization 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 ratioнnal 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 CommitteeЧhis disguised status for the last deнcade 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 uniнversities. 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 beforeЧpublished, available to everyone on Earth, and especially to minors! He told me afнterward, 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 conventionalЧand, incidentally, fatЧto think of raising a respectable family. Not muchЧjust two of him. If things continнued 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 withЧ"
"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. HereЧexamine 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.