"It is true that your operations as Lo Sung of Uighar were not constrained. As Mithridates of Pontus--as Sulla, Marius, and Nero of Rome--as Hannibal of Carthage--as those self-effacing wights Alcixerxes of Greece and Menocoptes of Egypt--as Genghis Khan and Attila and the Kaiser and Mussolini and Hitler and the Tyrant of Asia--you were allowed to do as you pleased. Similar activities upon Rigel Four, Velantia, Palain Seven, and elsewhere were also allowed to proceed without effective opposition. With the appearance of Virgil Samms, however, the time arrived to put an end to your customary pernicious, obstructive, and destructive activities. I therefore interposed a barrier between you and those who would otherwise be completely defenseless against you." "But why now? Why not thousands of cycles ago? And why Virgil Samms?" "To answer those questions would be to give you valuable data. You may--too late--be able to answer them yourself. But to continue: you accuse me, and all Arisia, of cowardice; an evidently muddy and inept thought. Reflect, please, upon the completeness of your failure in the affair of Roger's planetoid; upon the fact that you have accomplished nothing whatever since that time; upon the situation in which you now find yourself. "Even though the trend of thought of your race is basically materialistic and mechanistic, and you belittle ours as being 'philosophic' and 'impractical', you found--much to your surprise--that your most destructive physical agencies are not able to affect even this form of flesh which I am now energizing, to say nothing of affecting the reality which is I. "If this episode is the result of the customary thinking of the second-in-command of Eddore's Innermost Circle ... but no, my visualization cannot be that badly at fault. Overconfidence--the tyrant's innate proclivity to underestimate an opponent--these things have put you into a false position; but I greatly fear that they will not operate to do so in any really important future affair." "Rest assured that they will not!" Gharlane snarled. "It may not be--exactly--cowardice. It is, however, something closely akin. If you could have acted effectively against us at any time in the past, you would have done so. If you could act effectively against us now, you would be acting, not talking. That is elementary--self-evidently true. So true that you have not tried to deny it--nor would you expect me to believe you if you did." Cold black eyes stared level into icy eyes of Norwegian blue. "Deny it? No. I am glad, however, that you used the word 'effectively' instead of 'openly'; for we have been acting effectively against you ever since these newly-formed planets cooled sufficiently to permit of the development of intelligent life." "What? You have? How?"