Norma shook her head coolly. "That's emotion, Charles. I don't know
exactly what their purpose is, but I do understand that this is a
conflict of eventual survival, and rule of an economic empire."
"But--"
Norma shook her head. "Try the shoe on the other foot, Charles. Suppose
you had come upon these people with the rest of your kind--how would
you see them?"
"As possible allies and friends."
"Balderdash! You'd have seen them as possible customers and people to
be exploited and maybe enemies after you'd seen their history. Their
attitude is as arrogant as ours and their personal justification as
high. By some obscure luck of science they got to interstellar travel
before we did and they automatically place us in an inferior position,
but they also know that this inferiority is not so great as to make
us a pushover. We are scientifically capable of discovering their
interstellar drive at any moment, and why we have not is probably just
a matter of our not combining the right sciences. Our knowledge of
medicine is far vaster than theirs, for instance."
"How can you know this?" he asked.
Norma opened a few buttons at her throat and slipped her dress down
over one shoulder. There was a small circular bandage stuck to one
spot. "They took a sample of me," she said. "Because I seem to be
immune to several diseases that should give me trouble. When I asked
about this, they told me that they hoped to discover just what cell
change took place when we take our anti-cancer immunization. This thing
they have yet to discover. Oh they use our immunization," she said,
slipping the dress up but forgetting to rebutton it, "but they use it
as an African witch doctor might use a typhoid serum."
She nodded as she went on thinking, "This thing you have to remember,
Charles, that if Terrans had arrived there first there would have been
the same conflict, but conducted from the other side."