The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber

_And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night._ -- Dover Beach, _by Matthew Arnold_

I am not going to try to describe point by point all that happened the next half hour because there was too much of it and it involved all three of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, and although we were told a lot of things, we were seldom if ever told the why of them, and through it all was the constant impression that we were dealing with human beings (I almost left out the "human" and I'm still not absolutely sure whether I shouldn't) of vastly greater scope -- and probably intelligence too -- than ourselves.