"I have never had the pleasure of making your acquaintance," Foote said politely (Yance-men, as a general rule, enjoyed this sort of bending-the-knee). "However I know your reading matter. Extraordinary."

Lantano said, "We would like an artiforg. A pancreas."

"Oh dear."

"You can locate one. Dug up. We will pay highly."

"There aren't any." Foote thought, _Why? Who needs it? You? Did your ex-tanker friend bore to the surface for it? Probably the latter, and you are being charitable or anyhow going through the motions_. "Not a chance, Mr. Lantano." And then an idea came to him. "Allow me," he said, "to visit your villa, however, for a few moments. I have some maps, military maps from the war, which indicate areas not dug into which conceivably might contain stored artiforgs; these were U.S. Air Force hospitals in remote places. Alaska, North Canada. On the old picket line fringes and on the East Coast. Perhaps between us--"

"Fine," Lantano agreed. "What about nine p.m. at my villa? Nine as computed by my time-zone here. For you that would be--"

"Sir, I can count time," Foote said. "I'll be there. And I'm sure, with your extraordinary abilities, you'll be able to make use of these maps. You can dispatch your own leadies if you wish, or my corporation can--"

"At nine tonight, my time, then," Lantano said, and rang off.

"Why?" Cencio asked Foote, after a pause.

Foote said, "To plant the continual vid monitor."

"Of course." Cencio flushed.

"Run that animated sequence again," Foote said thoughtfully, "of Lantano at middle-age. Stop it at the point where he is aged the most. I noticed a quality about him, just now, on the vidscreen..."

As he again set up the magnifying equipment, the film, the animator, the projector, Cencio said, "What quality?"

"It seemed to me," Foote said, "that Lantano, as he aged, began to resemble someone. I could not place who, but someone I know well." As he had faced even the young Lantano on the big vidscreen he had experienced it, the _déjâ vu_.

A moment later, in the darkened room, he was viewing a still of Lantano at middle-age, but seen from above; again the angle was bad, and always would be, when the photographing instrument was so vertically oriented, as a satellite naturally had to be. But--he could discern it anyhow, because, as the satellite made its pass, both Lantano and the ex-tanker came to a halt and peered up.

"I know who," Cencio said, suddenly. "Talbot Yancy."

"Except that he's dark," Foote said. "This man here."

"But if that skin-bleach were applied, that wartime dermal--"

"No, Yancy is considerably older. When we get a good shot of Lantano at say sixty-five, not fifty, then maybe we'll have something." _And when I have got inside his villa_, Foote knew, _we will thereafter have operating the equipment to produce that shot. And this will be tonight; only a few more hours_.

_What is this Lantano?_ he asked himself.

And got no answer.

At least--not yet.

But over the years he had learned to be patient. He was a professional; he would, in Lantano's incomplete villa, establish a video monitor which sooner or later would tell him additional facts, and ultimately one day, hopefully not too long from now, the pivotal fact would emerge, and all would be tied together: the deaths of Davidson, Hig and Lindblom, the destruct of the two leadies, the peculiar aging of Lantano--and, as he aged, that even queerer fact that he grew more and more to resemble a plastic and metal dummy bolted to a wooden desk in New York City... oh, Foote thought; then that would explain that peculiar and up to now anomalous strip of film which showed the origin of the destruct beam that took out the two leadies. It was we had thought, someone _resembling_ Talbot Yancy.

It was David Lantano at the extreme old end of his oscillation; _we have seen it already_. The key fact had already emerged.

Brose, he thought, you have made a major mismove; you have lost your monopoly on the contents of the advanced weapons archives. Someone else has gotten hold of time-travel equipment and he is using it to destroy you. How did he get hold of it? That doesn't matter; _that he has it_: that's the point.

"Gottlieb Fischer," he said aloud. "The idea for Yancy originated with him; so the crisis is actually in the past." And he who possesses the ability to travel in time has access to the past, he realized. There is a junction, a connection, between David Lantano, who or whatever he is, and Gottlieb Fischer, back in 1982 or '4 or right up to Fischer's death; but no later than his death... and probably slightly before Fischer began his work on the Yancy _Prinzip_, his variation on the _Führer Prinzip_: his new solution to the problem of who shall lead, since, if men are too blind to govern themselves, how can they be trusted to govern others? The answer is der Führer, as every German knows, and Gottlieb Fischer was a German. Brose then stole the idea from Fischer, as we all know, and turned that idea into an actuality; the dummy, one in Moscow and one in New York, bolted to the oak desk, programmed by the computer which in turn is fed speeches by well trained elite idea men--all that can be legitimately credited to Stanton Brose, but what we did not guess is that Gottlieb Fischer stole _his_ part, the original germinal concept, from someone else.

Sometime near the year 1982, the German film producer _saw Talbot Yancy_. And derived his Führer, not from his own creativity, his artistic genius, but from simple observation. And who would Gottlieb Fischer, circa 1982, be seeing? Actors. Hundreds of them. Sorted over to play roles in his two vast phony documentaries--actors picked especially for their ability to portray world leaders. In other words, actors who had that _charisma_, the magic.

To Cencio he said slowly, thoughtfully, plucking his lower lip, "I think, if I comb versions A and B, the two Fischer works of invention, I will in one of the faked scenes, sooner or later, come across a Talbot Yancy. In makeup, of course; doing a character role." Playing Stalin, he decided. Or Roosevelt. Any of them--or all. What the documentaries lacked were proper credits; who played what great world leader: we need that list, and that list does not and never did exist; it was carefully _not_ made.

Cencio said, "We own our own prints of the two versions, you realize."

"All right. Go through them and extract each of the faked scenes. Separate them from the authentic clips that--"

Cencio laughed sardonically. "Good lord. Save us." He shut his eyes, rocked back and forth. "Who, honestly, can _ever_ do that? No one knew then, knows now, will know--"

True; a good point. The _whole_ point, in fact. "All right," Foote said. "Just start running them. Until you catch a glimpse of the Protector. He'll be one of the great charismatic leaders, one of the big four; he won't be Mussolini or Chamberlain, so you can bypass them." God in heaven, he thought; suppose he's the "Hitler" who lands in the Boeing 707 fanjet at Washington, D.C. to hold secret conversations with F. D . R.? _Is that what rules the millions of tankers today_, the actor who struck Gottlieb Fischer as just right to undertake the task of impersonating Adolf Hitler?

It could, however, be a bit part. The role of some general. Even one of those "G.I. Joe" scenes in the foxholes.

"It'll take me weeks," Cencio said, obviously realizing the same thing. "And do we have weeks? If people are being killed--"

"Joseph Adams is protected," Foote said. "And Brose--too bad if he gets it; more power to his hidden enemy."

--His hidden enemy who is obviously and clearly David Lantano. But that merely led back to his original inquiry; who or what is David Lantano?

Anyhow now he had a partial answer--at least ad hoc. It had yet to be tested. David Lantano, at the extreme old age end of his oscillation, was hired by Gottlieb Fischer to play a part--or was at least interviewed--in one or the other versions of the 1982 documentaries; there, that was his hypothesis. And now to test it.