e of time which would have been
very long indeed for any Earthly mind those monstrous being considered
as one multi-ply intelligence every newly-exposed phase and facet of the
truth. At the end, they knew the Arisians as well as the Arisians knew
them. The All-Highest then called a meeting of all the minds of Eddore.

"... hence it is clear that these Arisians, while possessing minds of
tremendous latent capability, are basically soft, and therefore
inefficient," he concluded. "Not weak, mind you, but scrupulous and
unrealistic; and it is by taking advantage of these characteristics that
we shall ultimately triumph."

"A few details, All-Highest, if Your Ultimate Supremacy would deign," a
lesser Eddorian requested. "Some of us have not been able to perceive at
all clearly the optimum lines of action."

"While detailed plans of campaign have not yet been worked out, there
will be several main lines of attack. A purely military undertaking will
of course be one, but it will not be the most important. Political
action, by means of subversive elements and obstructive minorities, will
prove much more useful. Most productive of all, however, will be the
operations of relatively small but highly organized groups whose
functions will be to negate, to tear down and destroy, every bulwark of
what the weak and spineless adherents of Civilization consider the
finest things in life--love, truth, honor, loyalty, purity, altruism,
decency, and so on."

"Ah, love ... extremely interesting. Supremacy, this thing they call
sex," Gharlane offered. "What a silly, what a meaningless thing it is! I
have studied it intensively, but am not yet fully enough informed to
submit a complete and conclusive report. I do know, however, that we can
and will use it. In our hands, vice will become a potent weapon indeed.
Vice ... drugs ... greed ... gambling ... extortion ... blackmail ...
lust ... abduction ... assassination ... ah-h-h!"

"Exactly. There will be room, and need, for the fullest powers of every
Eddorian. Let me caution you all, however, that little or none of this
work is to be done by any of us in person. We must work through echelon
upon echelon of higher and lower executives and supervisors if we are to
control efficiently the activities of the thousands of billions of
operators which we must and will have at work. Each echelon of control
will be vastly greater in number than the one immediately above it, but
correspondingly lower