"No, no, no. I'm a robot. Don't you understand anything?"
"I don't even know who I am, now," Martin said. "For all I know, I'm a faun and you're a human child. I don't think this Scotch is doing me as much good as I'd—"
"Your name is Nicholas Martin," the robot said patiently. "And mine is ENIAC."
"Eniac?"
"ENIAC," the robot corrected, capitalizing. "ENIAC Gamma the Ninety-Third."
So saying, he unslung a sack from his metallic shoulder and began to rummage out length upon length of what looked like red silk ribbon with a curious metallic lustre. After approximately a quarter-mile of it had appeared, a crystal football helmet emerged attached to its end. A gleaming red-green stone was set on each side of the helmet.
"Just over the temporal lobes, you see," the robot explained, indicating the jewels. "Now you just set it on your head, like this—"
"Oh no I don't," Martin said, withdrawing his head with the utmost rapidity. "Neither do you, my friend. What's the idea? I don't like the looks of that gimmick. I particularly don't like those two red garnets on the sides. They look like eyes."
"Those are artificial eclogite," the robot assured him. "They simply have a high dielectric constant. It's merely a matter of altering the normal thresholds of the neuron memory-circuits. All thinking is based on memory, you know. The strength of your associations—the emotional indices of your memories—channel your actions and decisions, and the ecologizer simply changes the voltage of your brain so the thresholds are altered."
"Is that all it does?" Martin asked suspiciously.