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Party of the Two Parts
William Tenn
GALACTOGRAM FROM STELLAR SERGEANT O-DIK-VEH, COMMANDER OF
OUTLYING PATROL OFFICE 1OO1625, TO HEADQUARTERS DESK SERGEANT
HOY-VEH-CHALT, GA-LACTIC PATROL HEADQUARTERS ON VEGA XXI—(PLEASE
NOTE: THIS IS TO BE TRANS-MITTED AS PERSONAL, NOT OFFICIAL, MESSAGE
AND AS SUCH WILL BE CHARGED THE USUAL HYPERSPACE RATES)
My Dear Hoy:
I am deeply sorry to trouble you again, but, Hoy, am I in a jam! Once more, it's not something that I
did wrong, but something I didn't do right—what the Old One is sure to wheeze is "a patent dereliction of
obvious duty." And since I'm positive he'll be just as confused as I, once the prisoners I'm sending on by
slow light-transport arrive (when he reads the official report that I drew up and am transmitting with them,
I can see him dropping an even dozen of his jaws), I can only hope that this advance message will give
you enough time to consult the best legal minds in Vegan Headquarters and get some sort of solution
worked out.
If there's any kind of solution available by the time he reads my report, the Old One won't be nearly
as angry at my dumping the problem on his lap. But I have an uneasy, persistent fear that Headquarters is
going to get as snarled up in this one as my own office. If it does, the Old One is likely to remember what
happened in Out-lying Patrol Office 1001625 the last time—and then, Hoy, you will be short one
spore-cousin.
It's a dirty business all around, a real dirty business. I use the phrase advisedly. In the sense of
obscene, if you follow me.
As you've no doubt suspected by now, most of the trouble has to do with that damp and irritating
third planet of Sol, the one that many of its inhabitants call Earth. Those damned chittering bipeds cause
me more sleeplessness than any other species in my sector. Sufficiently advanced technologically to be
almost at Stage 15—self-devel-oped interplanetary travel—they are still centuries away from the usually
concur-rent Stage 15A—friendly contact by the galactic civilization.
They are, therefore, still in Secretly Supervised Status, which means that I have to maintain a staff of
about two hundred agents on their planet, all encased in clumsy and uncomfortable protoplasmic
disguises, to prevent them from blowing their silly selves up before the arrival of their spiritual millennium.
On top of everything, their solar system only has nine planets, which means that my permanent
headquarters office can't get any farther away from Sol than the planet they call Pluto, a world whose
winters are bearable, but whose summers are unspeak-ably hot. I tell you, Hoy, the life of a stellar
sergeant isn't all gloor and skubbets, no matter what Rear Echelon says.
In all honesty, though, I should admit that the difficulty did not originate on Sol III this time. Ever
since their unexpected and uncalled-for development of nuclear fission, which, as you know, cost me a
promotion, I've doubled the number of un-dercover operatives on the planet and given them stern
warning to report the slight-est technological spurt immediately. I doubt that these humans could invent so
much as an elementary time-machine now, without my knowing of it well in advance.
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 amoeboid race who manufacture a fair brand of ashkebac, which they
 
export to their neighbors on Rugh IX and XII. They are a highly individu-alistic 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 de-lightful 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, there-fore, 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 an-other 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 hermeti-cally 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 hyper-space. 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 amoeboid 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 be-tween 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 in-terstellar 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 amoeboid 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. Natu-rally, 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 pseudo-pods on a
substantial amount of fuel very soon, he'd be a dead amoeboid. 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 stop-ping 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 quan-tity 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 civi-lization, or (2) providing the inhabitants of Earth with any technological stimulus.
L'payr later said that be 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 the 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 neigh-borhood 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 though 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 opera-tion, 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 amoeboid and became
danger-ously 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 interro-gations 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 um-brella 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 um-brella 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 substan-tiate 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 tech-nological 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 Inter-stellar 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 French-man 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 in-terrogatively 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 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 re-laxed 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 noth-ing to the imagination, a sketch of
the sodium chloride molecule had been superim-posed 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.
 

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