“The kind who had enough sense to know that the paleface had not the slightest interest in saving him from slow and painful cultural anemia. The kind of Indian, also, whose instincts were sufficiently sound so that he was scared to death of innovations like firewater and wouldn’t touch the stuff to save himself from snake bite. But the kind of Indian—”
“Yes? Go on!”
“The kind who was fascinated by the strange transparent container in which the firewater came! Think how covetous an Indian potter might be of the whisky bottle, something which was completely outside the capacity of his painfully acquired technology. Can’t you see him hating, despising and terribly afraid of the smelly amber fluid, which toppled the most stalwart warriors, yet wistful to possess a bottle minus contents? That’s about where I see myself, Braganza—the Indian whose greedy curiosity shines through the murk of hysterical clan politics and outsiders’ contempt like a lambent flame. I want the new kind of container somehow separated from the firewater.”
Unblinkingly, the great dark eyes stared at his face. A hand came up and smoothed each side of the arched mustachio with long, unknowing twirls. Minutes passed.
“Well. Hebster as our civilization’s noble savage,” the SIC man chuckled at last. “It almost feels right. But what does it mean in terms of the overall problem?”
“I’ve told you,” Hebster said wearily, hitting the arm of the bench with his open hand, “that I haven’t the slightest interest in the overall problem.”
“And you only want the bottle. I heard you. But you’re not a potter, Hebster—you haven’t an elementary particle of craftsman’s curiosity. All of that historical romance you spout—you don’t care if your world drowns in its own agonized juice. You just want a profit.”
“I never claimed an altruistic reason. I leave the general solution to men whose minds are good enough to juggle its complexities—like Kleimbocher.”
“Think somebody like Kleimbocher could do it?”
“I’m almost certain he will. That was our mistake from the beginning—trying to break through with historians and psychologists. Either they’ve become limited by the study of human societies or—well, this is personal, but I’ve always felt that the science of the mind attracts chiefly those who’ve already experienced grave psychological difficulty. While they might achieve such an understanding of themselves in the course of their work as to become better adjusted eventually than individuals who had less problems to begin with, I’d still consider them too essentially unstable for such an intrinsically shocking experience as establishing rapport with an Alien. Their internal dynamics inevitably make Primeys of them.”