“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.