“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 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 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 you—nor 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 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?”