Regin Naylo smiled. It would have been an odd-looking facial grimace to an Earthman, for it turned the corners of his pencil-thin lips down and furrowed the skin of his head between the gleaming eyes and the low, ragged hairline. Viggon Sarri said, "What do you find so amusing?" Regin replied, "If they are individually important, then the culture finds the individual important, as opposed to the insect-type which wouldn't mind losing a few billions so long as the inner hive is intact, or the anarchistic culture where the loss of a unit is not even noticed, because every one of them is so preoccupied with his own affairs that he can take no time to consider the next man." "Right. So what?" "I say let's hit 'em while they're all occupied in tracking down the survivors of this wreck." Faren Twill grunted sourly, "Ever try to interfere with a dog and her pups? You get bitten whether you mean good or ill. If you care for my opinion you'll ... Or do you give a damn?" "Go ahead." "I say we just slide in there quietly and collect the lifeships. Then, later, we can go in boldly and establish our superior position." Regin Naylo shook his head superciliously. "I say we should hit 'em with all we've got and establish our physical superiority. Look, Faren, either way this gang of subhumans is going to end up in some form of servitude to us. Let's make it the quick and dirty way and save manpower. Besides, what can they possibly have that we want?" Twill shrugged. "Any subject race is a good market." Naylo laughed. "I'd rather shove it down their throats by taxation. Then we'd collect without having to give them a string of uranium beads for exchange." Faren Twill asked Viggon Sarri for his opinion. Viggon said, without changing expression, "There are races that will not abide the idea of collaboration, and there are races that either revolt or die under any superior government. It has been my lifework to expand the Bradian culture, one way and another, across the galaxy. When we finish with this problem here, another world--in this case another series of colonized worlds--will enter one of the forms of economic relationships with Brade. Whether we blast in and smash them, or ooze in and coerce them quietly; take them over, or hail them as an ally." "Ally?" roared Regin Naylo scornfully. "This bunch of primitives who haven't even got an infrawave detector?" "Ally?" snarled Faren Twill disgustedly. "This people who cannot protect their spacecraft from warp failure?" Viggon Sarri held up his doubly-prehensile hand. "Either of you may be right," he said. "But remember that we do have time. So we'll wait until we know more about their basic character before we take any course. Go consult Linus Brein. Watch his computations and his evaluations. Come back when you have more complete data for your own evaluation." Naylo and Twill left together. Viggon Sarri called Brein on the ultra-infrawave.