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 that
be? 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 the
failures in our experiment, but our aim is to strike an average, so if
you'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 my
brain?"

"That wouldn't help you a bit," the robot said. "Besides, it's not the
purpose of the experiment. Now--"

"One moment. Disraeli can't cope with a medievalist like St. Cyr on his
own level, but if I had Ivan the Terrible's reactive thresholds, I'll
bet I could throw a bluff that might do the trick. Even though St. Cyr's
bigger than I am, he's got a veneer of civilization ... now wait. He
trades on that. He's always dealt with people who are too civilized to
use his own methods. The trick would be to call his bluff. And Ivan's
the 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 impress
the character-matrix, of Ivan the Terrible on my mind, and then I'm
going 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 more
important. I don't _look_ like Disraeli, but people have been reacting
to me as though I were George Arliss down to the spit-curl. A good big
man can always lick a good little man. But St. Cyr's never been up
against a really uncivilized little man--one who'd gladly rip out an
enemy's heart with his bare hands." Martin nodded briskly. "St. Cyr will
back down--I've found that out. But it would take somebody like Ivan to
make 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 you
couldn'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 for
robot-coercion. To him, men _were_ machines--and what was ENIAC?

"Let's talk this ove