"To the memory of three young people,” he said, “three brave young people who gave their lives-so full of promise-in the pursuit of the advancement of human knowledge. To Jocelyn Yount, to Steven Fisk, to James Pratt. We who remain behind…remain and grow old…we salute you."

He made as if to speak further, then stopped with a small shake of his head and raised his glass.

Five glasses besides his own were raised. Five throats besides his own gurgled with champagne. Here and there an eye glistened. It was a poignant moment, a moment satisfactorily replete with memories and emotions. It would, Professor Tremaine thought serenely, make a moving opening to his book, far better than the one he'd been planning.

In mid-September of 1989, in a warm and pleasant dining room, I looked out-make that gazed out. Make that gazed pensively out-across a chill, gray Bartlett Cove toward the ice-choked inlet where it had all happened so many years ago. I raised my glass. “To the memory of three young people,” I said, “three brave young people who-"

His train of thought interrupted, Professor Tremaine scowled. “What?"

No one responded, but he knew what he'd heard. “What a crock of shit,” somebody had said.

And unless he was very much mistaken, it had been uttered in the distinctly Teutonic tones of the eminent Dr. Anna M. Henckel.

The subsequent angry thump with which Professor Tremaine set his glass on the table was not quite loud enough to carry to the far end of the Glacier Bay Lodge dining room. There, at the only other occupied table-actually four tables pushed together-sat twelve men and two women in the gray and green uniforms of the National Park Service. And one tall, quiet man in cotton slacks and a much-laundered, pale blue sweatshirt. Most of those in uniform were engaged in a vigorous after-dinner argument on the merits of the conventional prusik sliding-friction knot versus those of the Kleimheist. The lone civilian, by contrast, was gazing (abstractedly rather than pensively) out the window at the placid, darkening waters of Bartlett Cove and the sunset-reddened glaciers of the Fairweathers beyond. Occasionally he lifted his coffee cup to his lips, or sighed, or crossed his restless legs, or uncrossed them.