"That's a common misconception, Mr. President. Almost everyone died when the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground, but there were a few who managed to escape through the sewers. Most who tried it died from suffocation or drowning-the storm troopers put poison smoke candles in the sewers, and in some cases pumped them full of water also. But a few made it. That has been well-documented.

"What makes Mr. Mann so interesting, assuming his story is true, is that he was part of the uprising itself, not merely a resident of the ghetto at the time of the uprising. All known survivors of the ghetto-or I should say, all known survivors who are still alive today-were living in the ghetto but did not take an active role in the insurrection itself." The Assistant Director's eyes were alive.

"Can you check on the...authenticity of his claims?"

"We are doing that right now. From the names he gave us of the participants in his group and their occupations before the war, our researchers should be able to tell very shortly whether or not Mr. Mann is what he claims to be. From what they have found so far, it looks like Irwin Mann is the genuine article."

"How do the others at the Center feel about him for the position?"

"Mr. President, I would be less than honest if I told you all of them were as enthusiastic as I. There are some who would prefer a Holocaust scholar over any candidate who is not a full-time historian."

"But this Mr. Mann would be your first choice, Ben, provided his bona fides check out?" "Yes, sir."

"Even if the alternative was to offer you the spot?" The Assistant Director was startled by the question, but he answered quickly.

"Yes, Mr. President. No question. Some day I hope to be Director of the Center, I'll admit that. But for the Presidential liaison, the Center needs someone who can...inspire those not normally interested in our cause. America likes heroes. They're a big help with funding, if nothing else." He paused, then added what he suspected the President was already thinking. "And to be blunt, sir, I myself would prefer a position that would endure through a number of administrations."

"Good point," the President admitted. "His health okay?"

"He says it is, and he certainly doesn't have arthritis. His letter was hammered out on a manual typewriter as neatly as a government secretary from fifty years ago would have done it."

"You'll check him out for skeletons in his closet?" the Chief Executive asked. The Assistant Director smiled faintly.

"Yes, sir. We're fairly good at that."

"Hey, Eugene. Hey, fella," Henry Bowman said as he petted Allen Kane's dog, which was wagging his entire hindquarters along with his tail. Eugene was a mixed-breed that was half Australian Shepherd, and the animal was using every ounce of his self-control not to jump on his friend from Missouri.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Allen Kane yelled with a grin when Henry had removed his helmet and Kane saw who had ridden into his yard. Kane was in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, and was very greasy. He had been working on his howitzer, which was in between the old barn and the house, using the halogen floodlights mounted on the barn to illuminate the entire yard. "Afraid I'd forget to pick you up?" Henry squinted at his friend, who was only a silhouette. The brilliant lights made everything throw long shadows across the yard.

"The thought crossed my mind. No, after I hung up, I figured you'd be unable to resist working on your 105, so I came to help. I wanted to put some miles on this bike anyway, see if there were any bugs in it. I thought we'd take it with us; if we have any vehicle trouble out there, it'll sure beat hiking out for parts or help. I've still got some paperwork to do before we go, but I brought it with me. And I can help you load up."

"You just wanted an excuse to ride your 'sickle somewhere," Allen Kane laughed.

"That was part of it."

"Well, I'm glad you showed up. I got in a couple new night vision scopes that're supposed to be the nuts. SEAL Team Six wants a second opinion before they buy a bunch of 'em. I wanted to take at least one of them with us, but they've got to have them both back right away, so I'm shipping them out before we leave. I was using one of them last night, and the clarity was something else. I'll get cleaned up, and we'll see what you think." Henry nodded in reply, but he was staring at the howitzer sitting in the yard.

"Tell me about this thing."

"Oh, man, you're going to love it," Allen Kane said enthusiastically as he turned toward the surplus field piece. "Fires a thirty-seven pound bullet at fourteen hundred feet per second. Bore's mint. Got a little machining to do to fit the breech ring, but with the two of us, I think we can have it up and running tomorrow. Hey, quit standing around- I thought you said you came here to help." Henry smiled and walked over to his friend.

"Okay, Boss. Show me what to do."

June 4 "What are you doing with golf balls?" Henry asked his friend when he noticed the box of Titleists on the workshop shelf. Allen Kane laughed.

"Guy I know told me they were just a little bigger than 40mm. I'm going to try to make a steel case that holds a .32 blank, or something like that, and see if I can shoot them out of an M79. Should be a fun practice round, if it works."

"Hey, that sounds like something I'd think of," Henry said with a laugh. "Tell me if it works." "Got anything for me today?" they heard the UPS driver yell. Allen Kane got up from his chair inside the old barn which now housed his shop and went to the door.

"Yeah," he called back. "Just a second." He came back to where Henry was sitting. "That stuff of yours ready to go?"

"No, I've got a couple more hours of work yet. I'll stick it in an overnight envelope tomorrow, on our way out."

"Okay." Kane went to his shipping bench, where he picked up two long boxes, a square box, and his UPS shipping record book. He carried these out to the waiting truck and returned in less than a minute. "UPS come here every day?" Henry asked. Allen Kane's house in southern Indiana was about forty miles from the Kentucky border, and was situated amid lots of farmland.

"Mm-hmm."

"They charge any extra?"

"No, standard weekly rate, just like for an office building in Indianapolis."

"Yeah, same with me, but I'm not quite this far out in the sticks. Always surprises me all these overnight guys can give people like us the same service and still make money. What'd you just ship out?" Henry asked, changing the subject.

"The night vision stuff, of course. Shame it won't take it on a real gun," Kane observed. Allen and Henry had mounted one of the two prototype units on a single shot .50 caliber rifle the previous evening, and the image intensifier had broken after a hundred sixty rounds.

"Also a new-in-the-box M16 I nicked a guy thirty-five hundred for. Guy went nuts when he found out I had one hadn't been touched since '83. And a BAR that I re-watted for Stembridge."

Henry nodded. Stembridge Gun Rentals in Hollywood was the largest and oldest supplier of correct period weapons to filmmakers, and they relied heavily on Allen Kane and his unparalleled ability to restore old, incomplete machine guns and make them function better than they did when they were new.

The BAR had been a registered DEWAT with the chamber plugged and welded and the bolt welded open. Allen Kane had applied to re-activate the gun, then machined out the welds, replaced the bolt and barrel, fitted the correct bipod and flash hider for the period that the weapon had been manufactured, reparkerized the metal and refinished the wood. It was one of his least-involved restoration jobs.

"You doing any cheap DSHKs for them to rent to Stallone?" Henry asked with a grin.

"Fuck you," Allen replied good-naturedly. Henry had repeated a standing joke among NFA weapons dealers and manufacturers, and it was one that he himself had created.

The makers of modern action/war movies prided themselves on their attention to detail regarding the weapons used in their films. NFA weapons experts such as Henry and Allen could forgive artistic license, as when one of the characters in Predator fired long bursts from the hip out of a hand-carried GE Minigun fed from a backpack. They also understood that allowances had to be made if a movie included scenes involving weaponry of which no single remaining example existed. They drew the line, however, when big-budget films with well-known stars showed weaponry that was absolutely wrong for the scene.

The example that had made NFA dealers howl was Rambo III, a 1987 movie set in Afghanistan. The Russian heavy machine gun which the Soviets were using against the Mujahadeen was, of course, the 12.7mm DSHK, which had been put into service in the USSR in 1938. The gun had been revised slightly in 1946, and though the guns were rare in the U.S., several good examples were present at every Knob Creek shoot. Henry and Allen each owned both a 1938 and a 1946 model. The guns weighed well over 100 pounds without the mount, and fired a cartridge similar to but slightly larger than the U.S. .50 Browning.

The moviemakers, however, had not used DSHKs in the film. Instead, Rambo III had depicted Russian soldiers firing .30 caliber U.S. M60 machine guns (weight: 25 pounds) fitted with dummy barrel shrouds crudely fashioned to resemble the silhouette of the 12.7mm DSHK. Henry Bowman had immediately spread the rumor (utterly false) that it was Allen Kane who had effected the makeover and convinced the producers that no one would know the difference. Henry was amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent people who still believe d this story, and Allen Kane still got razzed about it.

"You still doing a lot of business with Stembridge?" Henry asked.

"More than ever," Kane said immediately. "They really got fucked in '86." The 1986 ban had made it impossible for the studios or their designees to legally manufacture full auto weaponry from scratch or from semiauto variants, as the Hollywood entities were not government or police agencies.

"Some of the studios are just ignoring the law entirely now," Kane went on. "Tim says they're hiring machinists to set up on-site, and manufacture machine guns for the duration of filming, then cut 'em up after all the gun scenes are done."

"Damn! Aren't they worried some fed will want to make a name for himself?"

"You'd think so, but they got so much money, they can probably buy off anyone. Anyway, it's not everyone doing it that way. Stembridge has been calling me all the time for stuff lately." Allen looked over at Henry. "You 'bout ready for lunch? I was going to go in the house and throw something together."

"Yeah, let me work on this a little longer. Twenty, thirty minutes, say?"

"You got it." Kane left the shop and walked towards the house.

Henry Bowman sat up in the straight-backed wooden chair and turned his attention back to the papers and yellow legal pad. He had been using one of Allen Kane's loading benches as a desk ever since he had arrived. So far, Henry had spent more time with a pen than with the keyboard of his computer. He was almost done with his assessment of a 3-D geologic imaging process that his stockbroker had asked him to evaluate.

The process was one patented by a small company, Petromag, whose stock was followed by only a handful of analysts. Henry's broker, who was always looking for companies that would grow faster than the economy as a whole, had picked up on it. Petromag's proprietary technique involved spatial analysis of belowground sound waves to determine the location of oil deposits. The company hired out its technicians to drilling companies for an up-front fee and a percentage of the future revenues of any wells that were drilled based on data generated by Petromag.

The company also had a small oil company which was a wholly owned subsidiary. This oil company had drilled seventeen exploratory wells in the past two years. Only three of them had been dry holes.

Henry's broker had explained that such results could still be due to luck, and wanted an impartial opinion as to whether the new process might possibly be as superior as the company claimed. The discovery that the broker had made was that the firm maintained a "library" of all the geologic data they had analyzed using their 3-D imaging process, but for accounting purposes, they were assigning a five-year life to each set of data.

Unless the maps were no good whatsoever, they would be valuable for an indefinite period of time, for the oil was not going anywhere. Thus, if the process worked at all, the current price of the stock did not reflect the true value of the company's 3-D map library.

Henry reached over to the battery charger sitting at the back of the bench and retrieved the cellular phone he had brought from Missouri. Allen Kane didn't like to be interrupted while he was working on guns, and he did not have a phone in his workshop. If he had, Henry would probably still have used his own cellular unit, as he did not generally use other people's things when his own were available. He folded out the mouthpiece, hit the POWER button, and tapped in the number.

"Bartram, Meeks."

"Yeah, Tina, this is Henry Bowman. Is Mitt there?"

"Just a moment."

"Hey, Henry. Where are you? I've been trying to get hold of you for two days now."

"I'm over at a friend's house right now. I've been studying the dope you sent me on Petromag-" "Yeah, that's what I've been trying to call you about. They-"

"Look, bottom line," Henry broke in, "I think the guys at Petromag are on to something. It may not be as vastly superior to previous technology as they claim, but it does look like an improvement over prior art.

"Put it this way: In Organic Chemistry final exams, college professors write down the beginning compounds and ending compounds, and ask you to write down all the intervening chemical reactions. When you don't know the answer and make something up that you think sounds plausible, they like to take a big red marker and write 'Magic!' in big letters on that part of your exam book.

"From what I can see, if these guys submitted the explanations you got for me to the appropriate professor, I don't think he'd get out his red pen. Nothing in the technical description is of the lead-into-gold type of science. That's the best I can do with what you sent, okay?"

"Well that's good news, but you're not finished. Petromag just announced a new addition to their process that they says gets rid of some of the false positives they were getting. Talked to their chief engineer yesterday, and he sent me a bunch more scans I want you to look at."

"Hell, Mitt, I'm about to go on vacation," Henry said plaintively. Even as he uttered the words, Henry Bowman knewhe would find some way to do what his broker wanted. Stewart Mittendorfer was very thorough in performing his own analysis, and he used any experts he could to get at the truth. His recommendations had tripled the value of Henry Bowman's portfolio over the last eight years. He was particularly good at judging when it was time to get out of a stock.

Mitt did not answer, and Henry knew that he could hold the phone for ten minutes and the broker would not speak until Henry broke the silence.

"Okay, I admit it," Henry said, "you got me really interested. How soon do I have to look at this new stuff? Yesterday?"

"Pretty much. This thing might pop any day now. Nobody follows this company right now, but..." he left the rest of the sentence unfinished.

"Let me call you back in an hour or so," Henry sighed. "I need to get my other messages first." "Your recorder wasn't turned on the last few times I tried to reach you," the broker said. "And you didn't have your cellular on, either. That's why I was going nuts."

Damn Henry thought. I did forget to turn on the recorder before I left. He began to mentally review who he needed to talk to before rendering himself incommunicado for two to three weeks.

"You going to be in the office for the next hour or two?" Henry asked.