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

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 techнnical 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 ofЧ"
"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 funcнtions 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 elementЧhe 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 youЧnor 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 EarthmanЧa flint fist-axe, say, or a cauldron for pouring boiling oil upon the stormers of walled citiesЧand 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 reimнburse 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 exнciting 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 amoeboid."
"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 intriнcate 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 amoeboids 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-pseudopodded. In order to succeed, they had to make the current arrest stick, which would give them the rightЧas previously injured partiesЧto 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 unнcomfortable position, but, no longer extraditable, would be entitled to its protecнtion 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 committedЧbut 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 witнness. 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 amoeboid's satisfactionЧincluding 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 overнmuchЧas 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 youngstersЧand we were parнticularly interested in getting away from the blurry drawings that have been used and reused in all textbooks, almost from the time of Leeuwenhoek. Mr. L'payr's series on the cycle of amoeboid reproduction was a godsend. In a sense, they made the first secнtion 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 juveнniles 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 questionЧwhich, by the way, appeared textually as drawingsЧreceived any premaнture erotic stimulation thereby. I will admit that, at the time of purchase, I did reнceive a distinct impression from the gentleman in the next cell that he and his kind considered the illustrations rather racyЧ"
"Well, then?"
"But that was his problem, not mine. After all, if I buy an artifact from an extraнterrestrial creatureЧa flint fist-axe, say, or a cauldron for pouring boiling oil upon the stormers of walled citiesЧand I use them both in completely peaceful and useнful pursuitsЧthe former to grub onions out of the ground and the latter to cook the onions in a kind of soupЧhave I done anything wrong?
"As a matter of fact, the textbook in question received fine reviews and outstandнing 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 sayЧ'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 disнguised 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 reнgion 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 satelliteЧit looked as if the civilization of disembodied intellects might eventually come to some approximaнtion 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 deliberнately 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.
It was, therefore with a warm feeling of a job well done that I returned to my headнquarters on Pluto in response to Pah-Chi-Luh's summons.
Needless to say, this feeling quickly changed to the most overpowering dismay. After getting the background from the overwrought corporal, I interviewed the Gtetan extradition force. They had been in touch with their home office and were threatenнing a major galactic scandal if the Patrol's arrest of L'payr was not upheld and L'payr remanded to their custody.
"Are the most sacred and intimate details of our sex life to be shamelessly flaunted from one end of the Universe to the other?" I was asked angrily. "Pornography is porнnographyЧa crime is a crime. The intent was thereЧthe overt act was there. We demand our prisoner."
"How can you have pornography without titillation?" L'payr wanted to know. "If a Chumblostian sells a Gtetan a quantity of krrgllwssЧwhich they use as food and we use as building materialЧdoes the shipment have to be paid for under the nutritive or structural tariffs? The structural tariffs obtain, as you well know, Sergeant. I deнmand immediate release!"
But the most unpleasant surprise of all awaited me with Blatch. The terrestrial was sitting in his cell, sucking the curved handle of his umbrella.
"Under the code governing the treatment of all races on Secretly Supervised Staнtus," he began as soon as he saw me, "and I refer not only to the Rigellian-Sagittarian Convention, but to the statutes of the third cosmic cycle and the Supreme Council decisions in the cases of Khwomo vs. Khwomo and Farziplok vs. Antares XII, I deнmand return to my accustomed habitat on Earth, the payment of damages according to the schedule developed by the Nobri Commission in the latest Vivadin controнversy. I also demand satisfaction in terms ofЧ"
"You seem to have acquired a good deal of knowledge of interstellar law," I comнmented slowly.
"Oh, I have, SergeantЧI have. Mr. L'payr was most helpful in acquainting me with my rights. It seems that I am entitled to all sorts of recompensesЧor, at least, that I can claim entitlement. You have a very interesting galactic culture, Sergeant. Many, many people on Earth would be fascinated to learn about it. But I am quite prepared to spare you the embarrassment which such publicity would cause you. I am certain that two reasonable individuals like ourselves can come to terms."
When I charged L'payr with violating galactic secrecy, he spread his cytoplasm in an elaborate amoeboid shrug.
"I told him nothing on Earth, Sergeant. Whatever information this terrestrial has receivedЧand I will admit that it would have been damaging and highly illegalЧwas entirely in the jurisdiction of your headquarters office. Besides, having been wrongfully accused of an ugly and unthinkable crime, I surely had the right to preнpare my defense by discussing the matter with the only witness to the deed. I might go further and point out that, since Mr. Blatch and myself are in a sense co-defenнdants, there could be no valid objection to a pooling of our legal knowledge."
Back in my office, I brought Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh up to date.
"It's like a morass," he complained. "The more you struggle to get out, the deeper you fall in it! And this terrestrial! The Plutonian natives who've been guarding him have been driven almost crazy. He asks questions about everythingЧwhat's this, what's that, how does it work. Or it's not hot enough for him, the air doesn't smell right, his food is uninteresting. His throat has developed an odd tickle, he wants a gargle, he needs aЧ"
"Give him everything he wants, but within reason," I said. "If this creature dies on us, you and I will be lucky to draw no more than a punishment tour in the Black Hole in Cygnus. But as for the rest of itЧlook here, Corporal, I find myself in agreeнment with the extradition party from Gtet. A crime has to have been committed."