brain, where tiny stiles still moved and readjusted until
he no longer felt in the least like Nicholas Martin. Who did he feel
like, then? What had happened?

He recalled the neurons whose beady little eyes he had fancied he saw
staring brightly into, as well as out of, his own. Or had he? The memory
was vivid, yet it couldn't be, of course. The answer was perfectly
simple and terribly logical. ENIAC Gamma the Ninety-Third had told him,
somewhat ambiguously, just what his ecological experiment involved.
Martin had merely been given the optimum reactive pattern of his
successful prototype, a man who had most thoroughly controlled his own
environment. And ENIAC had told him the man's name, along with several
confusing references to other prototypes like an Ivan (who?) and an
unnamed Uighur.

The name for Martin's prototype was, of course, Disraeli, Earl of
Beaconsfield. Martin had a vivid recollection of George Arliss playing
the role. Clever, insolent, eccentric in dress and manner, exuberant,
suave, self-controlled, with a strongly perceptive imagination....

"No, no, no!" DeeDee said with a sort of calm impatience. "Be careful,
Nick. Some other chair, please. I have my feet on this one."

"T-t-t-t-t," said Raoul St. Cyr, protruding his thick lips and snapping
the fingers of an enormous hand as he pointed to a lowly chair against
the wall. "Behind me, Martin. Sit down, sit down. Out of our way. Now!
Pay attention. Study what I have done to make something great out of
your foolish little play. Especially note how I have so cleverly ended
the solo by building to five cumulative pratt-falls. Timing is all," he
finished. "Now--SILENCE!"

For a man born in the obscure little Balkan country of Mixo-Lydia, Raoul
St. Cyr had done very well for himself in Hollywood. In 1939 St. Cyr,
growing alarmed at the imminence of war, departed for America, taking
with him the print of an unpronounceable Mixo-Lydian film he had made,
which might be translated roughly as _The Pores In the Face of the
Peasant_.

With this he established his artistic reputation as a great director,
though if the truth were known, it was really poverty that caused _The
Pores_ to be so artistically lighted, and simple drunkenness which had
made most of the cast act out one of the strangest performances in film
history. But critics compared _The Pores_ to a ballet and praised
inordinately the beauty of its leading lady, now known to the world as
DeeDee Fle