MORAL EQUIVALENT

By KRIS NEVILLE

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Why shouldn't a culture mimic another right down to the last little detail? Because the last detail may be just that—the final one!

The planet Lanit II had dwindled to a luminous speck. They were in clear space now, at Breakoff Point. Beliakoff held the ship in position while Kelly set dials for the jump into the hyperspatial drift opening, which deep-space men knew as the Slot.

Beliakoff cracked his bony knuckles nervously. "Now, Johnny," he said, "easy this time. Real easy. Gentle her into it. She's not a new ship. She resents being slammed into the Slot."

"She'll take it," Kelly said, with a boyish grin of almost suicidal abandon.

"Maybe she will, but how about us? You sort of creased the Slot getting us off Torriang. A little closer and—"

"I was still getting the touch. You ought to be glad I'm an instinctive astrogator."

He set the last dial with a rapid twirl and reached for the kissoff switch.

"You're out two decimal points," said Beliakoff, who worried about such trifles. "Enough to ionize us."

"I know, I know," Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. "I was just touching it for luck. Here we go!"

He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected, college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty alien would ever marry his daughter.

Kyne had no daughter.

Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port.

"How about that?" 

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