"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."
Farradyne shook his head angrily. "We're not inclined to ruin—"
"Stop sounding like one of King Arthur's Knights. Men of sense and good judgment don't request their enemies to meet them on a field of honor. Instead, a state of war is assumed and from that instant on, A is looking for a chance to stab B in the back because he knows that B will cut him off at the hips if he turns his back for a moment. Honor on the battlefield is accorded only to a defeated enemy; up to the time he is defeated, anything goes. And if both sides know that open warfare means total destruction, the process on either side is one of boring from within, or gnawing at the foundation. But this a bad place to get involved in a discussion of ethics. Where do we go from here?"
"If I knew how to run that ka-dodie in the Lancaster we'd head for Sol—if I knew where Sol was from here."
"And how about Howard?"
"I don't know about Clevis," he told her. "The thing to do would be to hike home as fast as we could and spill our tale to the people who would know what to do about it. Let's face it, Norma. They can mingle with Terrans because they can speak our language. But I couldn't mingle with them to locate Howard. I'd be picked up in a minute."
"So how do we get back?"