Atlantis," DeeDee announced with an air of faint triumph.

"No!" shouted St. Cyr. "That was the _picture_! The mermaid came from
Atlantis, not Watt!"

"Tolliver didn't say he was coming from Atlantis," DeeDee murmured,
unruffled. "He said he was going to Atlantis. Then he was going to meet
Nick Martin at his house tonight and give him his contract release."

"When?" St. Cyr demanded furiously. "Think, DeeDee? What time did--"

"DeeDee," Martin said, stepping forward with suave confidence, "you
can't remember a thing, can you?" But DeeDee was too subnormal to react
even to a Disraeli-matrix. She merely smiled placidly at him.

"Out of my way, you writer!" roared St. Cyr, advancing upon Martin. "You
will get no contract release! You do not waste St. Cyr's time and get
away with it! This I will not endure. I fix you as I fixed Ed Cassidy!"

Martin drew himself up and froze St. Cyr with an insolent smile. His
hand toyed with an imaginary monocle. Golden periods were hanging at the
end of his tongue. There only remained to hypnotize St. Cyr as he had
hypnotized Watt. He drew a deep breath to unlease the floods of his
eloquence--

And St. Cyr, also too subhuman to be impressed by urbanity, hit Martin a
clout on the jaw.

It could never have happened in the British Parliament.

III

When the robot walked into Martin's office that evening, he, or it, went
directly to the desk, unscrewed the bulb from the lamp, pressed the
switch, and stuck his finger into the socket. There was a crackling
flash. ENIAC withdrew his finger and shook his metallic head violently.

"I needed that," he sighed. "I've been on the go all day, by the
Kaldekooz time-scale. Paleolithic, Neolithic, Technological--I don't
even know what time it is. Well, how's your ecological adjustment
getting on?"

Martin rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"Badly," he said. "Tell me, did Disraeli, as Prime Minister, ever have
any 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," Martin
said shortly.

"Then you provoked it," ENIAC countered. "A crisis--a situation of
stress--always brings a man's dominant trait to the fore, and Disraeli
was dominantly courageous. Under stress, his courage became insolence.
But he was intelligent enough to arrange his environment so insolence
would be countered on the semantic level. Mixo-Lydia, eh? I place i