"The success of the Plan—" he began, and stopped, frightened by the look on the Chief Coordinator's face.
"Yes, Tragor. Go on."
"It was not a complicated plan. But it was a brilliant one, carefully thought out, and I was sure it would succeed. We would take captive five hundred men and five hundred women and study them with every laboratory technique available to us. We would use them as models—to discover as much as we could about the human race. Then we would free them, with all knowledge of what had happened to them blotted from their minds."
"Yes, I know. Go on, Tragor."
"We would use our new knowledge to fashion men and women miraculously perfect in body and mind—living, breathing androids who could be controlled by us with a disk-like mechanism embedded in their flesh. They could be controlled by us at will, robbed of all volition and made almost mindless if we decided to send a charge of energy pulsing through the disks. Their very thoughts and desires could be controlled, regulated."
"Perfect men and women, yes," Kraii said thoughtfully. "But more than that, of course."
"Far more than that. Android women so beautiful it would be impossible for Earthmen to resist them, so beautiful they would enslave all men instantly with their white and clinging arms, their rose-tinted breasts, the swelling voluptuousness of—"
"You forget yourself, Tragor. No description is necessary. There is no need for you to become erotically stirred by an android, an artificial robot-woman created in our own laboratories. You know what they are."
"Yes, of course. I do know. But Earthmen do not. Our plan was to make Earthmen slaves of love and obedient to our bidding, to forge about them chains of love they would be powerless to break. Only Earthmen in high places, naturally, for we were not concerned with the rest. Only the rulers, the powerful who are in a position to control the destinies of nations and surrender Earth without a struggle. Our androids would command them to obey us, and they would have no choice. Men so enslaved would be completely at our mercy."
"And women too."