It was a plan that had to succeed or Martian hopes would go down into everlasting night and darkness. It was a plan for the conquest of Earth by infiltration. But it was not the infiltration of spies and fifth-columnists. Not even the infiltration of skillfully trained saboteurs. It was a quite different kind of infiltration. To perfect the Great Plan five hundred women had been captured and studied. And five hundred men. Their desires, hopes, dreams, intelligence native and acquired, manner of thinking, loving, dressing, walking, eating, sleeping; their habits and methods of choice in every aspect of living, taste in women--or, in the case of the women, men. Sex proclivities, sex drives, physical appeal, were all approached scientifically, and the effects of enhancement of the sex urge and what happens when it is enormously diminished by accident or design. The Earth people were kept in captivity for eight months and then released, with all knowledge of what had happened to them blotted from their minds. Five hundred men. Five hundred women. Living models. Living models for--what? Only the Martians knew. The Great Plan was protected, guarded, veiled in secrecy. But now one man was about to know, to be tested, to enter into the inner workings of the Plan. His name was David Loring and he was an artist and he was a man of very great talent, perhaps even a man of creative genius. One man alone first and then ten thousand men, the wielders of political and social power, statesmen, generals, industrialists of the first rank, influential moulders of public opinion, atomic physicists, the key men in a hundred laboratories. Ten thousand men who could strategically determine, by the power invested in them whether human civilization should resist or surrender when the Martian mask was lowered and Martian intentions were made unmistakably plain. Ten thousand men who must be made to say: "We must surrender. We shall. The Martians will not destroy us. They wish only to live with us in peace, in a world so strangely beautiful that we cannot understand why we were content to live in the world as it was,--with its poverty and wars and widespread human misery. We have received from the Martians a living gift that has transformed our lives and made us men indeed. Let us surrender freely and joyfully, with everlasting gratefulness to the gift-bearers." Ten thousand women too, in high places, in the front ranks of industry and politics, women of enormous wealth, of great and commanding talents who had found no man to please them, or had foolishly allowed themselves to believe that they did not need men to enrich their lives and continuously adore them. Ten thousand women who must also be made to say: "Let us surrender with gratitude, for in the world as it was there was no true happiness for career women. Now all that is changed and we are deliriously happy."