planets were the cradles of a new and horrible type of civilization. On the other inhabited worlds every conceivable type of tyranny had come into being, sustained by the disciplinary circuit which put every citizen at the mercy of his government throughout every moment of his life.

On most worlds kings and oligarchs reveled in the primitive satisfaction of arbitrary power. There is an instinct still surviving among men which allows power, as such, to become an end in itself, and when it is attained to be exercised without purpose save for its own display. Some men use power to force abject submission or fawning servility or stark terror.

In the Empire of Greater Sinab there was merely the novelty that the rulers craved adulation—and got it. The rulers of Sinab were without doubt served by the most enthusiastic, most loyal, most ardently co-operative subjects ever known among men.

Every member of the male population of Sinab—where women were considered practically a lower species of animal—could look forward confidently to a life of utter ease on one planet or another, served and caressed by solicitous females, with no particular obligation save to admire and revere his rulers and to breed more subjects for them.

It made for loyalty, but not for undue energy. There was no great worry about the progress of the splendid plan for a greater Sinab. All went well. The planet Khiv Five had been beamed from space some nine days since.

Every man upon the planet had died in one instant of unholy anguish, during which tetanic convulsions of the muscles of his heart burst it while the ligaments and anchorages of other muscles were torn free of his skeleton by the terrific contraction of muscle fibres.

Every woman on Khiv Five was still in a state of frantic grief which would become despair only with the passage of time. It was strange that two guard-ships circling Khiv Five no longer reported to headquarters but it was unthinkable that any harm could have come to them. Records showed that no other planet had practised space travel for centuries or millennia.

Only the Empire of Sinab had revived the ancient art for purposes of conquest. There was no reason to be solicitous, so the Empire of Sinab waited somnolently for time to pass, when colonists would be called up to take over the manless Khiv Five and all its cities and its women.

There was another small planet called Ades, next in order for absorption into the Empire. 

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