"It is better than dropping a mercurite bomb. We got to interstellar space first and met another people as racially jealous as we are: your people. We could have made a landing openly, but if we had, the warfare you're threatening would have happened long ago. And there would be nothing left of either of our people but smouldering planets to mark the meeting-place of two stellar peoples."
"You can say this, knowing that no Solan has the barest inkling of how this doodad in the hold can permit us to travel faster than light?"
Carolyn looked at him contemptuously. "You're an idealist, Charles," she said. "I'll tell you what would happen. You'd greet us with cheers and invite us in—long enough to steal our warp-generator. You'd trade us your medical science for our chemistry and your electronics for our gravities, and then you'd meet us face to face to prove to yourselves that even though you got a second-place start, you could move faster and hit harder than we could. You'd carry your war to us, and we'd carry our war to you, and there would be cause and effect, and attack and retaliation, with each blow a bit more vicious until your people would be planting mercurite at the same time we were. And then, as I say, the next interstellar race to visit this region of the sky would find the radioactive remains of two ex-cultures. I know, because both our people come of the same stock."
"All right," he snapped. "So you've justified your actions to yourself."
"Of course. Everybody is self-justified."
"And you justify the doping of our race by calling it better than meeting us face to face."
"Remember your own history. Even before the First Atomic War everybody realized that warfare was a bankrupt measure, to be undertaken only after all else failed. You conducted your conflicts under cover, by boring from within, by undermining the national structure. Similarly, when your people have been lowered in resistance, we shall move in quietly and make of you an asset to our economy, instead of a ruined structure that must be helped."
"Wonderful. However, I don't cotton to the idea of being an abject supplicant to your superior kind."
There was a yelp from behind him and he whirled to see Norma Hannon about to letter something on Brenner's forehead.