"Heads."
It came up heads.
"Damn," said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and
standing up.
The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.
* * * * *
Kelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. "Look, Igor," he
said, "do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you
know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?"
"It is a risk we have to take," Beliakoff said stonily.
"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?
Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them."
"Look," Beliakoff said patiently, "you know that Mala is a
semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control
conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the
approved list."
"Yeah," Kelly said vaguely. "Silly sort of rule."
"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways
to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can
find."
"Seems like a good idea. We _have_ got a real good culture."
"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,
with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why
they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,
warp it into something harmful."
"They'll learn," Kelly said.
"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be
devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the
culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South
Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and
American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?
Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of
others."
"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it," Kelly
said. "All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political
organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?"
"The Malans," Beliakoff said grimly, "have never had a war."