Adams said, "It's in the scene where Hitler makes one of his secret flights to Washington, D.C. during the war to confer with Roosevelt."

"Oh yes. Fischer got the idea from Hess' flight to--"

"The important secret meeting between Roosevelt and Hitler. In May of 1942. Where Roosevelt--with Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prinz Batten von Battenberg, representing Britain--informs Hitler that the Allies will hold back the Normandy landings for at least a year so that Germany can use all her armies on the Eastern Front to defeat Russia. And tells him, too, that the plot-points of all supply convoys carrying war material to Russian northern ports will be regularly made known to the German Intelligence under Admiral Canaris, so that Nazi subs can sink them wolf-packwise. You remember the blurred distance shots that a 'Party comrade employed at the White House' made of that meeting... Hitler and Roosevelt seated together on the sofa, and Roosevelt assuring Hitler that he had nothing to worry about; the Allied bombing will be done at night so as to miss their targets, all information from Russia as to their military plans, troop dispositions and so forth will be available to Berlin within twenty-four hours of their entering U.K. and U.S. hands, via Spain."

"They converse in German," Colleen said. "Right?"

"No," he said angrily.

"In _Russian?_ So the Pac-Peop audience can understand it? It's been so long since I--"

Adams said harshly. "It's the arrival of Hitler at the 'secret U.S. Air Force base near Washington, D.C.' that the technical error occurs, and it's incredible that no one's noticed it. First of all, in World War Two there was no U.S. Air Force."

She stared at him.

"It was still called the Army Air Corps," Adams said. "Not yet a separate branch of the military. But that's nothing; that could be a minor error in the aud commentary--a mere nothing. Look." He swiftly removed the spool from the scanner, picked up the spool of version B; eyes to the scanner he deftly ran the spool, on and on, until he arrived at the scene, in episode sixteen, that he wanted; he then sat back and motioned her to follow the scene.

For a time Colleen was silent as she watched. "Here comes his jet now," she murmured. "In for the landing, late at night, at the--yes, you're right; the commentator is calling it a 'U.S. Air Force base,' and I dimly recall--"

"His _jet_," Adams grated.

Halting the spool, Colleen looked up at him.

"Hitler lands secretly in the U.S. in May of 1942," Adams said, "in a Boeing 707 fan-jet. Those didn't come into use until the mid-i 960s. There was only one jet plane extant during World War Two, a German-made fighter, and it never saw service."

"Oh my god," Colleen said, open-mouthed.

"But it worked," Adams said. "People in Pac-Peop believed it--by 1982 they were so used to seeing jets that they forgot that in '42 there were only what they called--" He couldn't remember.

"Prop planes," Colleen said.

"I think I can see," Adams said, "why the master monad of the archives referred me back to these, to the original source. All the way back to the work of Gottlieb Fischer, the first Yance-man; the man in fact who dreamed up the idea of Talbot Yancy." But who, unfortunately, had not lived to see the simulacrum actually built--and brought by the two power blocs into use. "The monad wanted me to see," he said, "that my anxiety about the quality of my work is undue. Excessive, because our work, our collective, historic efforts from the very beginning, starting with these two documentaries, _has been marred_. When you and I go out to fake things you and I and all the rest of us are just plain bound, at some place, sooner or later, to slip up."

"Yes." She nodded. "We're just mortals. We're not perfect."

"But the strange thing is," Adams said, "I didn't have that feeling about David Lantano. I had a fear reaction and now I see why. He's different. He is--or could be--perfect. Not like us. So what does that make him? Not a human?"

"God knows," Colleen said, nervously.

"Don't say that," he said. "For some reason I don't care to think about God in connection with David Lantano." Maybe, he thought, because the man is so close to the forces of death, living there as he does in that hot-spot, seared day after day by the radiation. As if, although it's burning him, killing him, he's imbibing back some mystical power.

He was again aware of his own mortality, the delicate stability of forces that, from the bio-chemical level on up, permitted a human being to exist.

But David Lantano had learned to live at the heart of those forces, and even to draw on them. How had he done this? Lantano, he thought, has a right to draw on something beyond our range; I'd just like to know how he manages it; I'd like to do it, too.

To Colleen he said, "I've learned the thing from these spoils of Fischer's two documentaries of 1982 that I'm supposed to learn, so I guess I can knock off." He rose, picked up the spools. "What I learned was this. Earlier today I saw and heard a speech by a twenty-two-year-old young new Yance-man and it scared me, and then I scanned these two versions of Fischer's 1982 documentary, and what I learned was this."

She waited, expectantly, with feminine, earth-mother patience.

"Even Fischer," he said, "the greatest of us all, couldn't have competed with David Lantano." This was what he had learned, certainly. But he was--at least right now--not sure exactly what it meant.

He had a feeling about it, however. One of these days he and the Yance-man class as a whole, including Brose himself, were going to find out.

A sensitive rugged little device, operating on a sonarlike principle and attached to his suit, a sort of geologic version of what a submarine might employ, told Nicholas St. James as he labored away with the undersized portable scoop that he had toiled at last to within a yard of the surface.

He ceased work, trying to become at least temporarily calm. Because, he realized, in approximately fifteen minutes from now I will break through and then I will be stalked.

It hardly appealed to him, this instinctive knowledge that very quickly now he would become a quarry.

Something artificial and complicated, with thousands of accurate miniaturized components, with feedback and backup systems, with percept-extensors, power sources that were self-contained and virtually eternal, and, worst of all, tropisms that involved the essential quality of life: the factor called _warmth_.

The unhappy fact was simply this: that by being alive he attracted attention; this was the reality of the surface of Earth, and he had to be prepared for it, because he was going to have to enter into a dodge, a flight. He could not fight. There was no way to win. Either he evaded or he died. And the evasion must begin the instant he broke through, and, here in the stuffy darkness of the narrow tunnel, as he breathed canned air and clung insectlike to the spikes driven into the tunnel side itself, he thought that perhaps it's already too late.

Perhaps already, even before he broke through, he had been detected. The vibrations of his little overworked heated-up, about-to-give-out portable scoop. Or his breathing. Or--and always to this, the grotesque basic malign misuse of the basis of life--his body-heat might have triggered off an autonomic mine (he had seen them on TV) and the mine would already have detached itself from the spot at which it had screwed itself in until it had become invisible... detached itself and was now crawling over the rubble that littered Earth's surface like the bad remains of some dirty, gigantic, psychopathic, everybody-stewedand-falling-down all-night party. Crawling so that it would intersect, meet him at the locus, the exact point, at which he broke through. Utter perfection, he thought, in the synchronization of time and space as coordinates between himself and it. Between what he was doing and what _it_ was doing.