"He looks exactly the way he does on television,” Julie said. “Will you just look at that tan?"

"He didn't get it around here,” the pallid Tibbett said, managing to make it sound like an accusation.

"What's he doing here?” Gideon asked. “The lodge is closed for the season, isn't it?"

"Technically, yes, but it's kept open for Park Service training at this time of year, and he just horned in, to put it candidly. The man doesn't have a scruple about bypassing regulations. A friendly telephone call to his good friend the deputy secretary of the interior, and here he is with his entourage, working on his great opus."

That would explain Tibbett's animosity. The assistant superintendent was not a man to look with favor on the bypassing of regulations.

"Opus? Is he writing a book?” Julie asked.

"Yes. You've probably heard about his being involved in an avalanche here at Glacier Bay years ago?"

Julie nodded. “He was the only survivor."

It had happened almost three decades before, but it was everyday knowledge. Tremaine, who had been heading a botanical research team, had been trapped in a crevasse on Tirku Glacier for a day and a night. Later, he had used this ordeal as the cornerstone of his career. It was a rare episode of “Voyages” that didn't have some reference to it, however oblique. The pitted facial scars from a barrage of two-hundred-mile-an-hour ice spicules and the limp caused by the loss of three toes to frostbite had added to his allure, visible reminders of a life filled with danger and exotic adventure. His eaglelike profile and elegant, nasal baritone hadn't hurt either. He had begun appearing on talk shows in the seventies, had introduced “Voyages” with immediate success in the mid-eighties, and had been America's best-known science popularizer ever since. Somewhere along the way he had left his academic pursuits-some said his academic integrity-behind him, although guests on his show were still instructed by the producer to address him as “professor."