"True, First Lord. But every operator and operation is now tightly screened. Oh, if I could only go out there myself ..." "Hold, fool! Your thought is completely disloyal and un-Strettly." "True, oh First Lord Thinker Zoyar. I will forthwith remove my unworthy self from this plane of existence." "You will not! I hereby abolish that custom. Our numbers are too few by far. Too many have failed to adapt. Also, as Second Thinker, your death at this time would be slightly detrimental to certain matters now in work. I will myself, however, slay the unfit. To that end repeat The Words under my peyondiring." "I am a Strett. I will devote my every iota of mental and of physical strength to forwarding the Great Plan. I am, and will remain, a Strett." "You do believe in The Words." * * * * * "Of course I believe in them! I _know_ that in a few more hundreds of thousands of years we will be rid of material bodies and will become invincible and invulnerable. Then comes the Conquest of the Galaxy ... and then the Conquest of the Universe!" "No more, then, on your life, of this weak and cowardly repining! Now, what of your constructive thinking?" "Programming must be such as to obviate time-lag. We must evaluate the factors already mentioned and many others, such as the reactivation of the spacecraft which was thought to have been destroyed so long ago. After having considered all these evaluations, I will construct a Minor Plan to destroy these Omans, whom we have permitted to exist on sufferance, and with them that shipload of despicably interloping humans." "That is well." Zoyar's mind seethed with a malevolent ferocity starkly impossible for any human mind to grasp. "And to that end?" "To that end we must intensify still more our program of procuring data. We must revise our mechs in the light of our every technological advance during the many thousands of cycles since the last such revision was made. Our every instrument of power, of offense and of defense, must be brought up to the theoretical ultimate of capability." "And as to the Great Brain?" "I have been able to think of nothing, First Lord, to add to the undertakings you have already set forth." "It was not expected that you would. Now: is it your final thought that these interlopers are in fact the descendants of those despised humans of so long ago?" "It is." "It is also mine. I return, then, to my work upon the Brain. You will take whatever measures are necessary. Use every artifice of intellect and of ingenuity and our every resource. But abate this intolerable nuisance, and soon." "It shall be done, First Lord." * * * * * The Second Thinker issued orders. Frenzied, round-the-clock activity ensued. Hundreds of mechs operated upon the brains of hundreds of others, who in turn operated upon the operators.