"An infected mosquito bite,” Walter said, “despite which I was heroically bent on continuing my mission.” A pause for another forced chuckle. “But our glorious leader, in his greater wisdom, forbade it. I ask you: What could I do but submit as gracefully as I could?” He concluded this annoying performance with an exasperating tattoo played out on his abdomen.

How inexplicable were human emotions! Tremaine almost shook his head with wonderment. For almost three decades, it appeared, Walter had maintained this foolish resentment against him because-well, why? Because Tremaine had almost certainly kept him from being killed in the avalanche, wasn't that what it amounted to? Was that what the man would have preferred? Not that it wouldn't have been what he deserved, inasmuch as it was his fault they had to be out there in the first place.

In any case, Tremaine's insistence that he remain behind had surely been correct. The infected bite had been ugly, with long streaks of brilliant red radiating from the wrist almost to the armpit. Walter had been on penicillin for ten days afterward. With a condition like that, one remained quiet; one did not stimulate blood circulation by scrambling up and down glacial flows. Even if he had survived the avalanche, he would probably have come away with gangrene. Was that what he wanted?

And yet Tremaine sympathized to some extent. There was something undeniably absurd about being kept from a rendezvous with destiny by a mosquito bite. But then that was the sort of person Walter was; a man of limited scope and inconsequential vision, fated by a feeble character to be stymied by minor obstacles. He had hardly protested very vigorously that morning when Tremaine “forbade” him from continuing. What could Tremaine have done if this whale of a man had insisted on going with them? Clamped him in irons? But of course he hadn't insisted at all. He'd merely whined and submitted, as the manuscript made quite clear-one of several things poor Walter was not going to be very happy about.