III
When the robot walked into Martin's office that evening, he, or it, wentdirectly to the desk, unscrewed the bulb from the lamp, pressed theswitch, and stuck his finger into the socket. There was a cracklingflash. ENIAC withdrew his finger and shook his metallic head violently.
"I needed that," he sighed. "I've been on the go all day, by theKaldekooz time-scale. Paleolithic, Neolithic, Technological--I don'teven know what time it is. Well, how's your ecological adjustmentgetting on?"
Martin rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"Badly," he said. "Tell me, did Disraeli, as Prime Minister, ever haveany dealings with a country called Mixo-Lydia?"
"I have no idea," said the robot. "Why do you ask?"
"Because my environment hauled back and took a poke at my jaw," Martinsaid shortly.
"Then you provoked it," ENIAC countered. "A crisis--a situation ofstress--always brings a man's dominant trait to the fore, and Disraeliwas dominantly courageous. Under stress, his courage became insolence.But he was intelligent enough to arrange his environment so insolencewould be countered on the semantic level. Mixo-Lydia, eh? I place itvaguely, some billions of years ago, when it was inhabited by giantwhite apes. Or--oh, now I remember. It's an encysted medieval survival,isn't it?"
Martin nodded.
"So is this movie studio," the robot said. "Your trouble is that you'verun up against somebody who's got a better optimum ecological adjustmentthan you have. That's it. This studio environment is just emerging frommedievalism, so it can easily slip back into that plenum when an optimummedievalist exerts pressure. Such types caused the Dark Ages. Well,you'd better change your environment to a neo-technological one, wherethe Disraeli matrix can be successfully pro-survival. In your era, onlya few archaic social-encystments like this studio are feudalistic, so gosomewhere else. It takes a feudalist to match a feudalist."
"But I can't go somewhere else," Martin complained. "Not without mycontract release. I was supposed to pick it up tonight, but St. Cyrfound out what was happening, and he'll throw a monkey-wrench in theworks if he has to knock me out again to do it. I'm due at Watt's placenow, but St. Cyr's already there--"
"Spare me the trivia," the robot said, raising his hand. "As for thisSt. Cyr, if he's a medieval character-type, obviously he'll knuckleunder only to a stronger man of his own kind."
"How would Disraeli have handled this?" Martin demanded.
"Disraeli would never have got into such a situation in the firstplace," the robot said unhelpfully. "The ecologizer can give you theideal ecological differential, but only for your own type, becauseotherwise it wouldn't be your optimum. Disraeli would have been afailure in Russia in Ivan's time."
"Would you mind clarifying that?" Martin asked thoughtfully.
"Certainly," the robot said with great rapidity. "It all depends on thethreshold-response-time of the memory-circuits in the brain, if youassume the identity of the basic chromosome-pattern. The strength ofneuronic activation varies in inverse proportion to the quantativememory factor. Only actual experience could give you Disraeli'smemories, but your reactivity-thresholds have been altered untilperception and emotional-indices approximate the Disraeli ratio."
"Oh," Martin said. "But how would _you_, say, assert yourself against amedieval steam-shovel?"
"By plugging my demountable brain into a larger steam-shovel," ENIACtold him.
* * * * *
Martin seemed pensive. His hand rose, adjusting an invisible monocle,while a look of perceptive imagination suddenly crossed his face.
"You mentioned Russia in Ivan's time," he said. "Which Ivan would thatbe? Not, by any chance--?"
"Ivan the Fourth. Very well adjusted to his environment he was, too.However, enough of this chit-chat. Obviously you'll be one of thefailures in our experiment, but our aim is to strike an average, so ifyou'll put the ecologizer on your--"
"That was Ivan the Terrible, wasn't it?" Martin interrupted. "Look here,could you impress the character-matrix of Ivan the Terrible on mybrain?"
"That wouldn't help you a bit," the robot said. "Besides, it's not thepurpose of the experiment. Now--"
"One moment. Disraeli can't cope with a medievalist like St. Cyr on hisown level, but if I had Ivan the Terrible's reactive thresholds, I'llbet I could throw a bluff that might do the trick. Even though St. Cyr'sbigger than I am, he's got a veneer of civilization ... now wait. Hetrades on that. He's always dealt with people who are too civilized touse his own methods. The trick would be to call his bluff. And Ivan'sthe man who could do it."
"But you don't understand."
"Didn't everybody in Russia tremble with fear at Ivan's name?"
"Yes, in--"
"Very well, then," Martin said triumphantly. "You're going to impressthe character-matrix, of Ivan the Terrible on my mind, and then I'mgoing to put the bite on St. Cyr, the way Ivan would have done it.Disraeli's simply too civilized. Size is a factor, but character's moreimportant. I don't _look_ like Disraeli, but people have been reactingto me as though I were George Arliss down to the spit-curl. A good bigman can always lick a good little man. But St. Cyr's never been upagainst a really uncivilized little man--one who'd gladly rip out anenemy's heart with his bare hands." Martin nodded briskly. "St. Cyr willback down--I've found that out. But it would take somebody like Ivan tomake him stay all the way down."
"If you think I'm going to impress Ivan's matrix on you, you're wrong,"the robot said.
"You couldn't be talked into it?"
"I," said ENIAC, "am a robot, semantically adjusted. Of course youcouldn't talk me into it."
Perhaps not, Martin reflected, but Disraeli--hm-m. "Man is a machine."Why, Disraeli was the one person in the world ideally fitted forrobot-coercion. To him, men _were_ machines--and what was ENIAC?
"Let's talk this over--" Martin began, absently pushing the desk-lamptoward the robot. And then the golden tongue that had swayed empires wasloosed....
"You're not going to like this," the robot said dazedly, sometime later."Ivan won't do at ... oh, you've got me all confused. You'll have toeyeprint a--" He began to pull out of his sack the helmet and thequarter-mile of red ribbon.
"To tie up my bonny grey brain," Martin said, drunk with his ownrhetoric. "Put it on my head. That's right. Ivan the Terrible, remember.I'll fix St. Cyr's Mixo-Lydian wagon."
"Differential depends on environment as much as on heredity," the robotmuttered, clapping the helmet on Martin's head. "Though naturally Ivanwouldn't have had the Tsardom environment without his particularheredity, involving Helena Glinska--there!" He removed the helmet.
"But nothing's happening," Martin said. "I don't feel any different."
"It'll take a few moments. This isn't your basic character-pattern,remember, as Disraeli's was. Enjoy yourself while you can. You'll getthe Ivan-effect soon enough." He shouldered the sack and headeduncertainly for the door.
"Wait," Martin said uneasily. "Are you sure--"
"Be quiet. I forgot something--some formality--now I'm all confused.Well, I'll think of it later, or earlier, as the case may be. I'll seeyou in twelve hours--I hope."
The robot departed. Martin shook his head tentatively from side to side.Then he got up and followed ENIAC to the door. But there was no sign ofthe robot, except for a diminishing whirlwind of dust in the middle ofthe corridor.
_Something began to happen in Martin's brain...._
Behind him, the telephone rang.
Martin heard himself gasp with pure terror. With a sudden, impossible,terrifying, absolute certainty he _knew_ who was telephoning.
_Assassins!_
* * * * *
"Yes, Mr. Martin," said Tolliver Watt's butler to the telephone. "MissAshby is here. She is with Mr. Watt and Mr. St. Cyr at the moment, but Iwill give her your message. You are detained. And she is to call foryou--where?"
"The broom-closet on the second floor of the Writers' Building," Martinsaid in a quavering
voice. "It's the only one near a telephone with along enough cord so I could take the phone in here with me. But I'm notat all certain that I'm safe. I don't like the looks of that broom on myleft."
"Sir?"
"Are you _sure_ you're Tolliver Watt's butler?" Martin