ut it's well worth--"

"_Pjrzqxgl!_" roared St. Cyr in his native tongue, and he lumbered up
from the chair, brandishing the microphone in an enormous, hairy hand.

Deftly Martin reached out and twitched it from his grasp.

"Stop the film," he ordered crisply.

It was very strange. A distant part of his mind knew that normally he
would never have dared behave this way, but he felt convinced that never
before in his life had he acted with complete normality. He glowed with
a giddy warmth of confidence that everything he did would be right, at
least while the twelve-hour treatment lasted....

* * * * *

The screen flickered hesitantly, then went blank.

"Turn the lights on," Martin ordered the unseen presence beyond the
mike. Softly and suddenly the room glowed with illumination. And upon
the visages of Watt and St. Cyr he saw a mutual dawning uneasiness begin
to break.

He had just given them food for thought. But he had given them more than
that. He tried to imagine what moved in the minds of the two men, below
the suspicions he had just implanted. St. Cyr's was fairly obvious. The
Mixo-Lydian licked his lips--no mean task--and studied Martin with
uneasy little bloodshot eyes. Clearly Martin had acquired confidence
from somewhere. What did it mean? What secret sin of St. Cyr's had been
discovered to him, what flaw in his contract, that he dared behave so
defiantly?

Tolliver Watt was a horse of another color; apparently the man had no
guilty secrets; but he too looked uneasy. Martin studied the proud face
and probed for inner weaknesses. Watt would be a harder nut to crack.
But Martin could do it.

"That last underwater sequence," he now said, pursuing his theme. "Pure
trash, you know. It'll have to come out. The whole scene must be shot
from under water."

"Shut up!" St. Cyr shouted violently.

"But it must, you know," Martin went on. "Or it won't jibe with the new
stuff I've written in. In fact, I'm not at all certain that the whole
picture shouldn't be shot under water. You know, we could use the
documentary technique--"

"Raoul," Watt said suddenly, "what's this man trying to do?"

"He is trying to break his contract, of course," St. Cyr said, turning
ruddy olive. "It is the bad phase all my writers go through before I get
them whipped into shape. In Mixo-Lydia--"

"Are you sure he'll whip into shape?" Watt asked.

"To me this is now a personal matter," St. Cyr