“Frame 6093,” said Edith. “Cardsharp fleecing his wealthy victims. Some on the left have cigars, but I don’t think many people would notice.”

“Agreed,” Donald answered, somewhat reluctantly. “If we can cut out that cloud of smoke on the right. Try one pass with the haze algorithm.”

It was strange, he thought, how one thing could lead to another, and another, and another—and finally to a goal which seemed to have no possible connection with the starting point. The apparently intractable problem of eliminating smoke, and restoring hidden pixels in partially obliterated images, had led Edith into the world of Chaos Theory, of discontinuous functions, and trans-Euclidean meta-geometries.

From that she had swiftly moved into fractals, which had dominated the mathematics of the Twentieth Century’s last decade. Donald had begun to worry about the time she now spent exploring weird and wonderful imaginary landscapes, of no practical value—in his opinion—to anyone.

“Right,” Edith continued. “We’ll see how Subroutine 55 handles it. Now Frame 9873—just after they’ve hit… This man’s playing with the pieces of ice on deck—but note those spectators at the left.”

“Not worth bothering about. Next.”

“Frame 21,397. No way we can save this sequence! Not only cigarettes, but those page boys smoking them can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen. Luckily, the scene isn’t important.”

“Well, that’s easy; we’ll just cut it out. Anything else?”

“No—except for the sound track at Frame 52,763—in the lifeboat. Irate lady exclaims: ‘That man over there—he’s smoking a cigarette! I think it’s disgraceful, at a time like this!’ We don’t actually see him, though.”

Donald laughed.

“Nice touch—especially in the circumstances. Leave it in.”