“…Garomma’s administrative toy…”

“…Garomma’s fool of a spiritual valet…”

“…nothing but a footstool, a very ubiquitous footstool, mind you, but a footstool nonetheless on which rests Garomma’s mighty heel…”

“…poor, colorless, jittery slob …”

“…when Garomma sneezes, Moddo sniffles…”

But from that menial, despised position, to be the real source of all policy, the maker and breaker of men, the de facto dictator of the human race…

He brought his hand up once more and smoothed at his forehead. The headache was getting worse. And the official celebration of complete control was likely to take another hour yet. He should be able to steal away for twenty or thirty minutes with Loob the Healer, without getting Garomma too upset. The Servant of All had to be handled with especial care at these crisis points. The jitters that had been induced in him were likely to become so overpowering that he might try to make a frantic decision for himself. And that possibility, while fantastically dim, must not be given a chance to develop. It was too dangerous.

For a moment, Moddo listened to the young man in front of them rattle on about modes and means, skew curves and correlation coefficients, all the statistical jargon that concealed the brilliance of the psychological revolution that he, Moddo, had wrought. Yes, they would be there another hour yet.

Thirty-five years ago, while doing his thesis in the Central Service of Education Post-Graduate Training School, he had found a magnificent nugget in the accumulated slag of several centuries of mass-conditioning statistics; the concept of individual application.

For a long while, he had found the concept incredibly difficult to close with: when all your training has been directed toward the efficient handling of human attitudes in terms of millions, the consideration of one man’s attitudes and emotions is as slippery a proposition as an eel, freshly caught and moribundly energetic.