She folded the paper. “That’s it.”

The check had come while she had been talking, and Gideon laid the amount on the table. “So,” he said. “Can I interest you in a sunset walk along the Promenade?”

“Does it come with a Cornish clotted-cream ice cream cone?”

“But of course.”

“I know it’s awful of me to say it,” she said soberly as they arose, “but this year’s meeting will be a lot more… well, civil, relaxed… without Edgar’s being there, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm,” Gideon said.

“‘Mm’? Is that different than ‘hm’?”

“A minor dialectical variant.”

The meeting of which they spoke, and the reason for their being in this remote corner of England, was the Consortium of the Scillies, the wonderfully inaptly named brainchild of American multimillionaire and noted eccentric Vasily Kozlov. Kozlov, who had come to the United States from the Soviet Union as a non-English-speaking twenty-eight-year-old, had struggled his way through evening high school and community college in only five years, and then gotten a job as a low-level laboratory technician in the research division of a soap and detergent company in New Jersey, where he’d worked for nearly five years. In his spare time, the brilliant, inquisitive Kozlov had come up with a revolutionary way of determining the surface tension of liquids by measuring the reflected variance of light intensity at different points on the surface. When he had offered to sell his method to the company, the chemists who were his superiors had laughed off the skinny guy with the wild hair, the two-year degree, the mad-Russian accent, and the grandiose ideas. Kozlov had quit his job, moved back in with his parents in Brooklyn at the age of thirty-eight, and spent the next several years refining his technique and trying to sell it to other companies and to the United States government. But he had been baffled and frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and scientific indifference.