"Lunko was not only an actor, but a producer and clever playwright as well. He might have achieved fame and fortune legitimately, but he became greedy. He teamed up with a shady character named Krascbik who ran a private investigating agency, specializing in social scandals. Krascbik's men would study the private life of influential individuals and dig out their scandals. They would provide Lunko with slow-motion camera studies of them so he could learn the peculiarities of their carriage, mannerisms, voice, and all their other idiosyncracies. "Lunko's next step would be to write a scurrilous play based on the confidential information provided by Krascbik, and put it in rehearsal, using characters that resemble the actual principals...." "But that's libel," objected Neville, "why couldn't you haul him in?" "Blackmail, young man, is a delicate matter to handle. The injured party shrinks from publicity and usually prefers to pay rather than have his scandal aired. Lunko never actually publicly produced any of those nauseous plays. His trick was to invite the victim to a preview--a dress rehearsal, then let Nature take its course. Invariably, the victim was frightened and tried to induce him to call off the presentation. Lunko would protest that the play had been written in good faith and had already cost him a great deal of money. The pay-off, of course, was always big. Lunko drove many people to the brink of ruin. "One man did refuse to play with him, and turned the case over to us. Lunko carried out his threat and produced the show, much to the delight of the scandal-mongers. It was outrageously libelous and we promptly closed the joint and took him in...." "And then...." "And then," croaked O'Hara, rolling his pop-eyes toward the ceiling and pursing his lips, "and then we let him go. He had a trunkful of data on many, many important people. Some of them, I hate to tell you, were my seniors in this very Service. We could do nothing about it, for, unfortunately, all the stuff he had on them was true. We might have sent him to the mines for a short term, but he would have retaliated by standing our entire civilization on its head with his exposures. We compromised by letting him escape and go into exile. The understanding was that he was never to come inside the orbit of Mars. A while after that, he was reported killed in a landslide on Europa. We shut the book and proceeded to forget him." "He mimicked the character exactly?" "Not exactly. Just enough to clearly indicate them. Although, I am convinced that, if he chose, he could have taken off any person he had studied, with enough fidelity to fool anybody except perhaps a man's own wife."