She had raised her eyes and was looking at him steadily again, with an unexpected warmth and sympathy in her gaze. "It is not a mistake to think of love as the most important thing in life. I agree with you. It is. There is a greatness in living that only love can make complete and glorious. Even though I am not completely human I know that without desire, without the need to give and receive love, my brain and heart would shrivel. But not all women feel that way. And not all men. There are some men who so despise love that they think of it as shameful, the physical act of love as a degradation." "I know," Loring said. "And they are tragically crippled men." "You are not crippled," she said. "That is why you were chosen. They had to make a test first, a carefully controlled exploratory--" She hesitated, an evanescent smile hovering for the barest instant on her lips and then vanishing, leaving her eyes even more deeply troubled.--"The technical term for it, in human laboratory experiments is, I believe, 'test run.' They had to make a test run with just one man and one woman before my great beauty could be transformed into a weapon for the conquest of Earth." Loring stared at her wordlessly, stunned, unbelieving. He would have liked to trust his reason completely, to dismiss what she had said as the meaningless ranting of a madwoman. But somehow he couldn't quite ignore the look of desperate appeal in her eyes, her aspect of absolute sanity. He had turned deathly pale. "You must believe me," she went on quickly. "I am risking destruction by telling you this. They have a plan for world conquest which is audacious beyond anything the human mind could have conceived, audacious and terrible, with every detail coldly thought out, weighed, decided upon. I will become not one woman, but many. I am the first, but there will be others. A thousand women with my lips and hair and eyes, and my white and beautiful limbs that almost brought you to your knees in adoration. A thousand women like me will be laboratory-created. "A thousand women and a thousand men. Your Janice saw the man when she awoke this morning. There are men who only have to look once at a woman and she begins to tremble. Her breathing quickens and she knows only the insensate joy of immediate and complete surrender." Her lips were trembling slightly and she cast an apprehensive glance toward the door, then went on quickly. "Your Janice is a very strong-willed young woman. When she saw the stranger in her room she was startled and frightened at first. That was only to be expected. She had just awakened and it was only natural for her to experience nothing but fear for a moment. Then she lost her fear but she was not instantly and overwhelmingly drawn to him. She should have been, but she wasn't. She was very strongly attracted to him, but she did not lose control."