"Another plan? It would seem that your brain is cobwebbery with plans, Tragor."
"It is all part of the same Great Plan. We must make the Earthman and the Earthwoman slaves of love, we must break down all of their resistance. I believe I can accomplish that on Mars."
"How, Tragor? This is most interesting."
"When men and women have been subjected to a great and almost unendurable strain, when they expect every moment to be their last, when they have to struggle desperately to stay alive—amorous impulses often overwhelm them. Love becomes to them a refuge and a solace, a temptation impossible to resist. They have a saying for it on Earth. 'Let us drink, love and be merry, for tomorrow we die.'"
"I see. But the temptation would have to be very great, the love offering exceptional."
"Have we not Temples of Love on Mars? What if we should fill those temples with android men and android women? Expose both the Earthman and Earthwoman first to danger: see that they walk in the shadow of death. Frighten and terrify them, make them struggle desperately to survive. Drive them to the brink of despair by confronting them with unknown dangers on a planet alien to them. Then imprison them in a Temple of Love. It would not be a prison to them. It would be a garden of delight after such terrible experiences. They would be sure to succumb. They would yield themselves to all pleasure with no thought for each other."
As Tragor contemplated the images his own mind was conjuring up his eyes began to shine. "Imagine what it would be like. A man and a woman surrounded by a thousand temptations, every bursting fruit that voluptuousness can give birth to! On Earth there is no such paradise. But on Mars...."
For the first time the look of cold condemnation went out of the Chief Coordinator's eyes. He arose slowly, nodding, looking at Tragor with an unmistakable glint of admiration in his gaze. He raised his arm, and Tragor felt a great wave of relief and warm gratefulness flooding over him, for he knew that it was a gesture of benign dismissal and not a sentence of death.
"Very well, Tragor," the Chief Coordinator said. "You have my permission to take them both to Mars."
It was only when Tragor had left the Central Coordinating Compartment and was proceeding down the cold-lighted passageway which branched off from it that everything that he had been saying to Kraii rebounded on himself. He too had just been in great and terrible danger, fighting desperately to stay alive. And now he felt himself in need of love's solace. He had never needed a woman more, never needed the touch of a woman's hand and a woman's warm and eager lips with quite so compulsive an urgency.