"How was the savage wolf tamed to become the loyal, friendly dog? Did ancient man try to exterminate the wolves that came to his caves and carried off his young? Perhaps he tried. But he learned, perhaps accidentally, another way of conquest. He found the wolf's cubs, and learned to love them. He brought the cubs home and cared for them tenderly and his own children played with them and fed them and loved them.

"It took time, but eventually there were no more wild wolves to trouble man, because he had discovered a great friend, the dog. And man plus dog could handle wolf with ease. Dog forgot in time what his forebears were and became willing to defend man against his own kind--because man loved him.

"It happened again and again. Agricultural man hated the wild horse that ate his grain and trampled his fields. But he learned to love the horse, too, after a while. Again--no more wild horses."

"But you can't take a predatory, savage pirate and love him into decency!" Cameron protested.

"No," Venor agreed. "It is too difficult ordinarily at that level, and wasteful of time and resources. But I didn't say that is what happened.

You don't tame a wolf by loving it, but the _cubs_--yes. And even pirates have cubs, who are susceptible to being loved.

"The first weapon was hate. But after learning the futility of it, sentient creatures discovered another, the succeeding evolutionary emotion. It is pure savagery in its destructive power, a thousand times more effective in annihilating the enemy.

"You've thought 'Love thy enemy' was a soft, gentle, futile doctrine!

Actually, instead of merely killing the enemy it twists his personality, destroys his ident.i.ty. He continues to live, but he has lost his integrity as an ent.i.ty. The wolf cub never becomes an adult wolf. He becomes Dog.

"It is not a doctrine of weakness, but the ultimate weapon of destruction. It can be used to induce any orientation desired in the mind of the enemy. He'll do everything you want him to--because he has your love."

"How did you apply that to the Markovians?" asked Joyce in almost a whisper.

"It was one of the most difficult programs we have ever undertaken,"

said Venor. "There were comparatively few of us and such a tremendous population of Markovians. We had predicted long ago, even before the organization of the Council, the situation would grow critical and dangerous. By the time the Council awoke to the fact and started its futile debates we had made a strong beginning.

"We arranged to be in the path of a Markovian attack on one of the worlds where our work was completed. The Markovians were only too happy to take us into slavery and use us as victims in their brutal sports."

"You didn't deliberately fall into a trap where you allowed yourselves to be killed and tortured by them?" exclaimed Cameron.

Venor smiled. "The Markovians thought we did. We could hardly do that, of course. Our numbers were so small compared with theirs that we wouldn't have lasted very long. And, obviously, it would have been plain stupid. There is one key that must not be forgotten: An effective use of love requires an absolute superiority on the levels attainable by the individual to be tamed. So, in this case, we had to have power to keep the Markovians from slaughtering us or we would have been unable to accomplish our purpose.

"Teleportation is of obvious use here. Likewise, psychosomatic controls that can handle any ordinary wound we might permit them to inflict. We gave them the illusion of slaughtering and torturing us, but our numbers did not dwindle."

"Why did you give them such an illusion?" Joyce asked. "And you say you _permitted_ them to inflict wounds--?"

Venor nodded. "We were in their households, you see, employed as slaves and a.s.signed the care of their young. The cubs of the wolf were given into our hands to love--and to tame.

"These Markovian children were witnesses to the supposed torture and killing of those who loved them. It was a tremendous psychic impact and served to drive their influence toward the side of the slaves. And even the adults slowly recognized the net loss to them of doing away with servants so skilled and useful in household tasks and caring for the young. The games and brutality vanished spontaneously within a short time. Markovians, young and old, simply didn't want them any longer.

"During the maturity of that first generation of young on whom we expended our love our position became more secure. These were no longer wolves. They had become dogs, loyal to those who had loved them, and we could use them now against their own kind. Influences to abandon piracy against other peoples began to spread throughout the Nucleus.

"Today the Markovians are no longer a threat capable of holding the Council worlds in helpless fear. They long ago ceased their depredations. Their internal stability is rising and is almost at the point where we shall be able to leave them. Our work here is about finished."

"Surely all this was unnecessary!" Joyce said. "With your powers of teleportation and other psionic abilities you must possess it should have been easy for you to _control_ the Markovians directly, force them to cease their piracy--"

"Of course," said Venor. "That would have been so much easier for us.

And so futile. The Markovians would have learned nothing through being taken over by us and operated externally. They would have remained the same. But it was our desire to change them, teach them, accomplish genuine learning within them. It is always longer and more difficult this way. The results, however, are more lasting!"

"_Who_ are you people--_what_ are you?" Cameron said with sudden intensity. "You have teleportation--and how many other unknown psychic powers? You have forced us to believe you can tame such a vicious world as the Markovian Nucleus once was.

"But where is there a life of your own? With all your powers you must live at the whim of other cultures. Where is _your_ culture? Where is your own purpose? In spite of all you have, your life is a parasitical one."

Venor smiled gently. "Is not the parent--or the teacher--the servant of the child?" he said. "Has it not always been so if a species is to rise very far in its conquest of the Universe?

"But this does not mean that the parent or teacher has no life of his own. You ask where is our culture? The culture of _all_ worlds is ours.

We don't have great cities and vast fleets. The wolf cubs build these for us. They carry us across s.p.a.ce and shelter us in their cities.

"Our own energies are expended in a thousand other and more profitable ways. We have sought and learned a few of the secrets of life and mind.

With these we can move as you were moved, when we choose to do so. From where I sit I can speak with any of our kind on this planet or any world of the entire Nucleus. And a few of us, united in the effort, can touch those in distant galaxies.

"What culture would you have us acquire, that we do not have?" Venor finished.

Without answer, Cameron arose and strode slowly to the window, his back to the room. He looked out upon the rude wooden huts and the towering forest beyond. He tried to tell himself it was all a lie. Such things couldn't be. But he could feel it now with increasing strength, as if all his senses were quickening--the benign aura, the indefinable wash of power that seemed to lap at the edge of his mind.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Joyce's face, almost radiant as she, too, sensed it here in the presence of the Ids.

Love, as a genuine power, had been taught by every Terran philosopher of any social worth. But it had never really been tried. Not in the way the Ids understood it. Cameron felt he could only guess at the terrible discipline of mind it required to use it as they did. The a.n.a.logy of the wolf cubs was all very well, and man had learned to go that far. But there is a difference when your own kind is involved, he thought.

Perhaps it was out of sheer fear of each other that men continued to try to sway with hate, the most primitive of all their weapons.

It's easy to hate, he thought. Love is hard, and because it is, the tough humans who can't achieve it and have the patience to manipulate it must scorn it. The truly weak ones, they're incapable of the stern and brutal self-discipline required of one who loves his enemy.

But men had known how. Back in the caves they had known how to conquer the wolf and the wild horse. Where had they lost it?

The vision of the buildings and the forest with its eternal peace was still in his eyes. What else could you want, with the whole Universe in the palm of your hand?

He turned sharply. "You tricked us into betraying ourselves to Marthasa, and you said that you planned it this way when you first heard of our coming. But you have not yet said why. Why did you want us to see what you had done?"

"You needed to have evidence from the Markovians themselves," said Venor. "That is why I led you to the point where the admission would be forced from them. The problem you came to solve is now answered, is it not? Is there anything to prevent you returning to Earth and writing a successful paper on the mystery of the Markovians?"

"You know very well there is," said Cameron with the sudden sense that Venor was laughing gently at him. "Who on Earth would believe what you have told me--that a handful of meek, subservient Ids had conquered the mighty Markovian Nucleus?"

He paused, looking at Joyce who returned his intense gaze.

"Is that all?" said Venor finally.

"No that is not all. After taking us to the heights and showing us everything that lies beyond, are you simply going to turn us away empty-handed?"

"What would you have us give you?"

"This," said Cameron, gesturing with his hand to include the circle of all of them, and the community beyond the window. "We want what you have discovered. Is your circle a closed one--or can you admit those who would learn of your ways but are not of your race?"

Venor's smile broadened as he arose and stepped toward them, and they felt the warm wave of acceptance from his mind even before he spoke.

"This is what we brought you here to receive," he said. "But you had to ask for yourselves. We wanted men of Earth in our ranks. There are many races and many worlds who make up the Idealists. That is why it is said that the Ids do not know the home world from which they originally came.

It is true, they do not. We are citizens of the Universe.

"But we have never been represented by a native of Earth, which needs us badly. Will you join us, Terrans?"