“How were you right? What was the memory?”
“Well, I hit it backwards, kind of. I went back to Professor Kleimbocher’s analogy about the paleface inflicting firewater on the Indian. I’ve always felt that somewhere in that analogy was the solution. And suddenly, thinking of Professor Kleimbocher and watching those powerful creatures writhing their way in and around each other, suddenly I knew what was wrong. Not the analogy, but our way of using it. We’d picked it up by the hammer head instead of the handle. The paleface gave firewater to the Indian all right—but he got something in return.”
“What?”
“Tobacco. Now there’s nothing very much wrong with tobacco if it isn’t misused, but the first white men to smoke probably went as far overboard as the first Indians to drink. And both booze and tobacco have this in common—they make you awfully sick if you use too much for your initial experiment. See, Braganza? These Aliens out here in the desert reservation are sick. They have hit something in our culture that is as psychologically indigestible to them as… well, whatever they have that sticks in our mental gullet and causes ulcers among us. They’ve been put into a kind of isolation in our desert areas until the problem can be licked.”
“Something that’s as indigestible psychologically—What could it be, Hebster?”
The businessman shrugged irritably. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. Perhaps it’s just that they can’t let go of a problem until they’ve solved it—and they can’t solve the problems of mankind’s activity because of mankind’s inherent and basic differences. Simply because we can’t understand them, we had no right to assume that they could and did understand us.”
“That wasn’t all, Hebster. As the comedians put it—everything we can do, they can do better.”
“Then why did they keep sending Primeys in to ask for those weird gadgets and impossible gimcracks?”
“They could duplicate anything we made.”
“Well, maybe that is it,” Hebster suggested. “They could duplicate it, but could they design it? They show every sign of being a race of creatures who never had to make very much for themselves; perhaps they evolved fairly early into animals with direct control over matter, thus never having had to go through the various stages of artifact design. This, in our terms, is a tremendous advantage; but it inevitably would have concurrent disadvantages. Among other things, it would mean a minimum of art forms and a lack of basic engineering knowledge of the artifact itself if not of the directly activated and altered material. The fact is I was right, as I found out later.