don't always watch the commercials," Clarey admitted.

"Oh, well, we all have our little failings." Spano leaned forward, his voice now pitched to persuasive decibels. "Normally, of course, you wouldn't stoop to hypocrisy to gain friends, and quite right, too—people should accept you as you are or they wouldn't be worthy of becoming your friends. But this is different. You have to be what they want, because you want something from them. You'll have to suffer rebuffs and humiliations and never show resentment."

"In other words," Clarey said, "a secret agent is supposed to forget all about such concepts as self-respect."

"If necessary, yes. But here self-respect doesn't enter into it. These aren't people and they don't really matter. You wouldn't be humiliated, would you, if you tried to pat a dog and it snarled at you?"

"Steff, he's got to think of them as people until he's definitely given them a clean bill of health," Han Vollard protested. "Otherwise, the whole thing won't work."

"Well," the general temporized, "think of them as people, then, but as inferior people. Let them snoop and pry and sneer. Always, at the back of your mind, you'll have the knowledge that this is all a sham, that someday they'll get whatever it is they deserve. You might even think of it as a game, Clarey—no more personal than when you fail to get the gardip ball into the loop."

"I don't happen to play gardip, General," Clarey reminded him coldly. Gardip was strictly a U-E pastime. And, in any case, Clarey was not a gamesman.

He was put through intensive indoctrination, given accelerated courses in the total secret agent curriculum: Self-Defense and Electronics, Decoding and Resourcefulness, Xenopsychology and Acting.

"There are eight cardinal rules of acting," the robocoach told him. "The first is: Never Identify. You'll never be able to become the character you're playing, because you aren't that character—the playwright gave birth to him, not your mother. Therefore—"

"But I'm only going to play one role," Clarey broke in. "All I need to know is how to play that role well and convincingly. My life may depend on it."

"I teach acting," the robocoach said loftily. "I don't run a charm school. If you come to me, you learn—or, at least, are exposed to—all I have to offer. I refuse to tailor my art to any 

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