Norma shook her head slowly. "Put the shoe on the other foot, Charles. Suppose you and your kind had come upon these people—how would you see them?"
"As possible allies and friends, and—"
"Balderdash. You'd have seen them as possible customers, and people to be exploited, and maybe enemies after you knew their history. Their attitude is as arrogant as ours, and their personal justification is as high. By some lucky break they got to interstellar travel before we did and so they automatically place us in an inferior position; but they know that this doesn't make us a push-over. We are scientifically capable of discovering their interstellar drive at any moment, and why we haven't is probably just a matter of our not combining the right sciences. Our knowledge of medicine is far wider than theirs, for instance."
"How can you know this?" he asked.
Norma slipped open a few buttons at her throat and slipped her dress down from one shoulder. There was a tiny circular white 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 takes place when we take our anti-cancer immunization. That thing they have yet to discover."
"But—"
"Oh, they use our immunization," she said, slipping the dress up. "But they use it as an African witch doctor might use a typhoid serum. The thing you have to remember, Charles, is that if Terrans had gotten there first there would have been the same conflict, but started by 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. So both sides know that open warfare means total destruction and the process is one of boring from within, or gnawing at the foundation. But this is no place to get involved in a discussion of ethics, Charles. Where do we go from here?"