Donald was still silent. The film had shaken him more than he cared to admit, and his cheeks were still moist with tears. What is it, he asked himself, that moves me so much? The fact that this really happened, and that the names of all the hundreds of people he had seen die—even if in a studio reenactment—were still on record? No, it had to be something more than that, because he was not the sort of man who cried easily…

Edith hadn’t noticed. She had called up the first logged sequence on the monitor screen, and was looking thoughtfully at the frozen image.

“Starting with Frame 3751,” she said. “Here we go—man lighting cigar—man on right screen ditto—end on Frame 4432—whole sequence forty-five seconds—what’s the client’s policy on cigars?”

“Okay in case of historical necessity; remember the Churchill retrospective? No way we could pretend he didn’t smoke.”

Edith gave that short laugh, rather like a bark, that Donald now found more and more annoying.

“I’ve never been able to imagine Winston without a cigar—and I must say he seemed to thrive on them. After all, he lived to ninety.”

“He was lucky; look at poor Freud—years of agony before he asked his doctor to kill him. And toward the end, the wound stank so much that even his dog wouldn’t go near him.”

“Then you don’t think a group of 1912 millionaires qualifies under ‘historical necessity’?”

“Not unless it affects the story line—and it doesn’t. So I vote clean it up.”

“Very well—Algorithm Six will do it, with a few subroutines.”

Edith’s fingers danced briefly over the keyboard as she entered the command. She had learned never to challenge her partner’s decisions in these matters; he was still too emotionally involved, though it was now almost twenty years since he had watched his father struggling for one more breath.