"This is better than Einstein's brain in the beer cooler."

"That was just lost. This was hidden," Barnes said. He placed the slide, with care, on the yellowed papers and new chromosome maps. In the conference room's corner, an armed guard watched every move, his hand near his holster.

"It was just a dumb rhyme," Allen said. "'Goering he had two but very small, Himmler had something sim'lar, poor old Goebbels had no balls at all.'"

Silence. Allen tapped away two inches of ash, and puffed. "Okay. Let's say that I'm bored, you're not insane, and I don't have time to reread Illuminatus. Who else has this?"

Barnes skimmed the list. "Two South American labs got samples. Russia had three and now has two. That's how the CIA got its share. And look! France got some, but it was smuggled to New Caledonia in 1965, so Australia got some."

"And the CIA has this slide and frozen sperm?" Allen asked.

"Russia's samples are still frozen. Australia and South America thawed their slices thirty years ago. This file doesn't say what the CIA did."

"Did you ask?"

"I can't."

Allen sighed. "Is Richard Seed Jewish?"

"I don't know and I don't care."

Silence. "Mengele could never have convinced Hitler to half castrate himself."

"Mengele didn't; it was Heydrich. Read the file. In '43, after Stalingrad, he described Mengele's experiments. Transplants with twins. And he said sterilization tests were the converse of potency tests. He couldn't convince Hitler it would work; he convinced him Mengele's garbage meant that it could work, that a bunch of baby Hitlers, once technology caught up, could rescue a fallen Reich."

"But who wants a bunch of baby Hitlers?" asked Allen. "Or grown-up ones? They'd fight all the time, just like the other Nazis. They'd be bad politicians, living off false reputations thanks to propaganda."

"Who wants a bunch of Kennedys?" asked Barnes. "We've had plenty of those, and we lived."

"Yeah, but we've only had one or two at a time," said Allen. "And the Nazis worked as a whole government because they were specialized. Goering ran the air force, Bormann the party, Himmler the Gestapo, Rosenberg the eastern countries . . . all power-hungry, all paranoid, but each knew their own stuff. Hitler was a demagogue, not a manager. He didn't know war, he didn't know economics, he didn't know science. He was a lousy artist who became a rabble-rouser. A bunch of Hitlers could never run a government."

"If Australia and the CIA," Barnes said - they jerked their heads briefly toward the guard - "thawed out their samples, they must have used them."

"What else would you do with it?" Allen whispered. "I don't care whether it's artificial insemination or gene analysis or a cloning attempt, you don't waste Hitler sperm."

"But why would Australia want it? Why would we?" hissed Barnes. "Any country has plenty of bad politicians already. Home-grown ones."

"Do we need more rabble-rousers?"

"Maybe some people want more effective ones." He pushed at the papers. "I can't deal with this today."

"So. Let's meet tomorrow with the CIA liaison, and ask more questions. Smiley," said Allen to the armed man in the corner, "we're done; thanks."

Getting up, they unlocked the door and reentered the welcomingly cluttered halls of their lab - only to be smacked by Lopez, who stumbled down the hall, half-waving in apology, still talking to his usual gaggle of grad students.

"Idiot," Allen muttered, brushing himself.

"He brings in the grants," said Barnes.

"I hate him," Allen said. "And that's a dumb-looking mustache on him."