"No, wait. Do not interrupt me, Tragor. You have failed tragically. Now I am going to ask you to be very frank. I want you to tell me in your own words just why you were so sure the Plan would succeed, and why I had to discover for myself, indirectly, that you had made a serious, perhaps fatal, blunder." Tragor's mouth had gone very dry. He tried to swallow, but there was a tight constriction in his throat. "I may have made a few mistakes," he heard himself saying. "But everyone makes mistakes. There is still hope...." "I could enter into a long discussion with you, Tragor," Kraii said. "I could take the tragedy of your failure from the beginning and carry it forward step by step. But nothing would be gained by that. I want you to summarize, very briefly, the whole intent and purpose of the plan. I want you to hear _you_ explain it. I am familiar with it, of course, or I would not be where I am. But I want to hear about it again from its chief architect." The full, ghastly truth dawned on Tragor then--the awful certainty that he was on trial for his life. He might never leave the compartment with the blood warm in his veins. He might never see another sunrise, on Mars or on Earth, never experience again all the joys of the flesh; never feast and dine and dance and hold a beautiful woman in a fierce and ardent embrace. He saw himself crying out in agony, his flesh blackened by the fiery blast of a hand-gun, blood streaming from a horrible, gaping wound in his chest. He knew that he must talk fast and talk convincingly, if he hoped to go on living. And he knew that he had to keep it brief. "The success of the Plan--" he began, and stopped, frightened by the look on the Chief Coordinator's face. "Yes, Tragor. Go on." "It was not a complicated plan. But it was a brilliant one, carefully thought out, and I was sure it would succeed. We would take captive five hundred men and five hundred women and study them with every laboratory technique available to us. We would use them as models--to discover as much as we could about the human race. Then we would free them, with all knowledge of what had happened to them blotted from their minds." "Yes, I know. Go on, Tragor." "We would use our new knowledge to fashion men and women miraculously perfect in body and mind--living, breathing androids who could be controlled by us with a disk-like mechanism embedded in their flesh. They could be controlled by us at will, robbed of all volition and made almost mindless if we decided to send a charge of energy pulsing through the disks. Their very thoughts and desires could be controlled, regulated." "Perfect men and women, yes," Kraii said thoughtfully. "But more than that, of course." "Far more than that. Android women so beautiful it would be impossible for Earthmen to resist them, so beautiful they would enslave all men instantly with their white and clinging arms, their rose-tinted breasts, the swelling voluptuousness of--"