Before his eyes appeared the tiny, illuminated and clear image of Adolf Hitler, addressing the hired flunkies who constituted the Reichstag of the late 1930s. Der Fuhrer was in a sardonic, jovial, mocking, excited mood. This famous scene--and every Yance-man knew it by heart--was the moment in which Hitler answered the plea from President Roosevelt of the United States that he, Hitler, guarantee the frontiers of a dozen or so small nations of Europe. One by one Adolf Hitler read off the nations comprising this list, his voice rising with each, and with each the hired flunkies jeered in synchronization with their leader's mounting frenzy of glee. The emotionality of it all--der Fuhrer, overcome with titanic amusement at this absurd list (later he was to invade, systematically, virtually every nation named), the roars of the flunkies... Joseph Adams watched, listened, felt inside him a resonance with the roars, a sardonic glee in company with Hitler's-- and at the same time he felt simple, quite childlike wonder that this scene could ever have truly taken place. And it had. This clip, from Episode One of Documentary A, was--crazily enough, considering its fantastic nature--authentic.

Ah, but now came the artistry of the Berlin film maker of 1982. The scene of the Reichstag speech dimmed, and there segued in, clearer and clearer, another scene. That of hungry, empty-eyed Germans during the Depression of the Weimar days, the pre-Hitler days. Unemployed. Bankrupt. Lost. A defeated nation without a future.

The aud-track commentary, the purring but firm voice of the trained actor whom Gottlieb Fischer had hired--Alex Sourberry or some such name--began to lift into being, to superimpose its aural presence as interpretation of the visual. And the visual, now, consisted of an ocean scene. The Royal Navy of Great Britain, as it maintained the blockade into the year following World War One; as it deliberately and successfully starved into permanent stuntedness a nation which had long ago surrendered--and was now utterly helpless.

Adams halted the scanner, sat back, lit a cigarette.

Did he really need to listen to the firm, purring voice of Alexander Sourberry to know the message of Documentary A? Did he have to sit through all twenty-five hour-long episodes and then, when the ordeal was over, turn to the equally long and intricate version B? He knew the message. Alex Sourberry for version A; some East German professional equal of Sourberry for version B. He knew _both_ messages... because, just as there existed two distinct versions, there existed two distinct messages.

Sourberry, at the moment the scanner had been shut off, giving Adams a respite which he thanked god for, had been about to demonstrate a remarkable fact: a connection between two scenes set apart in history by twenty-odd years. The British blockade of 1919 and the concentration camps of the starving, dying skeletons in striped clothes in the year 1943.

It was the British who had brought about Buchenwaid, was Gottlieb Fischer's revised history. Not the Germans. The Germans were the _victims_, in 1943 as much as in 1919. A later scene in Documentary A would show Berliners, in 1944, hunting in the woods surrounding Berlin, searching for nettles to make into soup. The Germans were starving; all continental Europe, all people inside and outside the concentration camps, were starving. Because of the British.

How clear it was, as this theme emerged throughout twenty-five expertly put-together episodes. This was the "definitive" history of World War Two--for the people of Wes-Dem, anyhow.

_Why run the thing?_ Adams asked himself as he sat smoking his cigarette, trembling with muscular and mental weariness. I know what it shows. That Hitler was emotional, flamboyant, moody, and unstable, but of course; it was natural, the film lied. Because he was pure and simply a genius. Like Beethoven. And we all admire Beethoven; you have to forgive a great world figure genius type its eccentricities. And, admittedly, Hitler was at last pushed over the edge, driven into psychotic paranoia... due to the unwillingness of England to understand, to grasp, the looming, _real_ menace--that of Stalinist Russia. The peculiarities of Hitler's personal character (after all, he had been subjected to great and prolonged stress during World War One and the Weimar Depression period, as had all Germans) had misled the rather phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon peoples into imagining that Hitler was "dangerous." Actually--and in episode after episode, Alex Sourberry would purr out this message--the Wes-Dem TV viewer would discover that England, France, Germany and the United States should all have been allies. Against the authentic evil-doer, Josef Stalin, with his megalomaniacal plans for world conquest... proved by the actions of the USSR in the postwar period--a period in which even Churchill had to admit that Soviet Russia was _the_ enemy.

--And had been all along. Communist propagandists, fifth columnists in the Western Democracies, however, had deceived the people, even the governments... even Roosevelt and Churchill, and right up into the postwar world. Take, for instance, Alger Hiss... take the Rosenbergs, who had stolen the secret of The Bomb and given it to Soviet Russia.

Take, for instance, the scene which opened episode four of version A. Advancing the spool, Joseph Adams halted it at this episode and put his eyes to the scanner, this modern technological crystal ball into which one gazed to know--not the future--but the past. And...

Not even the past. Instead, this fake which he now witnessed.

Before his eyes a film sequence, narrated by the maddeningly ubiquitous Alex Sourberry and his oily, skillful murmur. A scene vital to the overall moral of version A which Gottlieb Fischer, backed angelwise by the Wes-Dem military establishment, had wished to drive home--in other words this was the _raison d'être_ of the whole twenty-five hour-long episodes of version A.

The scene enacted in miniature before him showed the meeting of the heads-of-state, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. The location: Yalta. Ominous, fateful Yalta.

There they sat, the three world leaders,s in adjoining chairs, to be photographed; this was an historic occasion the magnitude of which was intolerable. And no one alive could afford to forget it, because here--Sourberry's voice purred--the momentous decision was made. You are now seeing it with your own eyes.

_What_ decision?

In Joseph Adams' ears the professional smooth voice whispered, "At this spot, at this moment, the deal was hatched which was to decide the future fate of mankind down unto generations yet unborn."

"Okay," Adams said aloud, startling the harmless Yance-man using the scanner across from him. "Sorry," Adams apologized, and then merely thought, did not speak it aloud, _Come on, Fischer. Let's see the deal. Like they say; don't just tell us; show us. Put up or shut up. Prove the basic contention of this great prolonged "documentary" or get out_.

And he knew, because he had seen it so many times before, that the film producer was going to show it.

"Joe," a woman's voice said, close to him, shattering his taut attention; he sat back, glanced up, found himself confronted by Colleen.

"Wait," he said to her. "Don't say anything. For just one second." Again he put his eyes to the scanner, fervid and frightened, like some poor tanker, he thought, who in his phobic terror has caught--imagines, rather--the Stink of Shrink, the olfactory harbinger of death. But I am not imagining this; Joseph Adams knew. And the horror inside him grew until he could stand not a bit more; and yet he continued to watch, and all the time, Alexander Sourberry murmured and whispered away, and Joseph Adams thought, _Is this how it feels down below, to them? If they get the intimation, the scent, of what it truly is they're seeing? That what is given them is our adaptation of this_--and this petrified him.