The Karg looked at her with the interested expression of a coroner who sees his customer twitch. - Keith Laumer

M-magic? Lafayette stuttered.
"Nonsense. Electronics."

It was a nasty little village, poverty-stricken, ugly, hostile, much like little towns in all times and climes.

It's a failing of your culture, Foster said, that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You're too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all 'established facts.'