He pushed the remains of his buttered English muffin away, signaled for another cup of coffee, and got out his box of Dunhills. He lit up, sucked in a deep lungful of smoke, tucked a loose end of his paisley ascot into his shirt collar, and cleared his throat. “We have twenty minutes before we leave for Tirku Glacier,” he said, “and it occurs to me that there may still be some unanswered questions about just why we are here. If so, please feel free to ask them."

He peered at them with warm sincerity and lifted his eyebrows to indicate that such questions were welcome. More than welcome.

Gerald Pratt's lean, weathered hand went slowly up. Everything Gerald Pratt did went slowly. In that way he reminded Tremaine of Pratt's brother James, killed in the avalanche in 1960. Physically, too, the resemblance was there if you looked for it: the bony nose-broken and poorly mended in Gerald's case-the long face, the lantern jaw. Was this what James would have come to if he'd lived? James, too, had sometimes been maddeningly measured in speech and manner, but there had been a spark, an intensity, flickering beneath that quiet surface. This the dark, gaunt, torpid Gerald lacked utterly. But Gerald was in his fifties, of course. James, his younger brother by a year or two, had never reached thirty. Ah, well, Tremaine thought with the tinge of melancholy that often came with his first cigarette of the day, there was something to be said for dying young.

He smiled tolerantly. “There's no need to raise our hands here, Mr. Pratt."

Pratt lowered his hand. “I'm no scientist,” he said in the laconic, deliberate way that had already begun to grate on Tremaine's nerves. “Comes to that, I'm not much of a reader either. So…” His cheeks hollowed as he drew on his pipe. “So…” One cloud, two clouds, three clouds of nauseous, yellowish-brown smoke emerged in slow procession.