“Yeah. Besides that.”

With a sigh Pauline plucked one data plaque from a jumble of the wide, wafer-thin reading devices. This one was dialed to the latest issue of Nature … a page in the letters section.

“Oh, that,” Jen observed. She had come here to the hermetic, air-conditioned pyramid of London Ark, in order to escape the flood of telephone and Net calls piling up at her own lab. Inevitably, one would be from the director of St. Thomas’s, inviting her to a pleasant lunch overlooking the river, where he’d once again hint that an emeritus professor in her nineties really ought to spend more time in the country, watching ultraviolet rays turn the rhododendrons funny shades of purple, instead of gallivanting around the globe poking her nose into other researchers’ business and making statements about issues that were none of her concern.

Had anybody else spoken as she had, at last week’s World Ozone Conference in Patagonia, they would have returned home to more than mere letters and phone calls. In today’s political climate, the gentlest outcome might have been forced retirement. Good-bye lab in the city. Good-bye generous consultancies and travel allotments.

That little Swedish medal certainly did have its compensations. To become a laureate was a little like being transformed into that famous nine-hundred-pound gorilla — the one who slept anywhere it wanted to. Glimpsing her own tiny, wiry reflection in the laboratory window, Jen found the metaphor delicious.

“I only pointed out what any fool should see,” she explained. “That spending billions to blow artificial ozone into the stratosphere isn’t going to solve anything. Now that greedy idiots have stopped spewing chlorine compounds into the air, the situation will correct itself soon.”

“Soon?” Pauline was incredulous. “Decades is soon enough to restore the ozone layer? Tell that to the farmers, who have to fit their livestock with eye covers.”