Icy Clutches

'Or maybe heard it while he was still in the shower, and turned the water off.'

'No, because Pratt said four or five minutes went by after the shower got turned off.'

'Assuming Pratt's telling the truth.'

'True. Anyway, Tremaine calls out a hello and then—what?'

'Presumably he doesn't get an answer, he comes out of the bathroom, and he's killed by the intruder he's discovered.'

'Doing what?'

'Looking for the manuscript, I suppose.'

'Maybe,” John said.

'What else?'

'I'm not sure, Julian. I need to think about this some more.” They reached the lodge building and trotted up the short flight of steps. “Lunchtime.'

'Shall we stop by the Icebreaker Lounge first?'

'Little early in the day, isn't it? Anyway, the bar doesn't open till five. I've got some vodka in my room if you can't make it till then.'

'Very amusing, John. As a matter of fact I had something else in mind.'

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Chapter 17

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But I don't know who those bones belonged to,” Professor Worriner said simply. “I never did, except for one of them.'

Gideon restrained his dismay. “But the article said you identified them as James Pratt's and Steven Fisk's. You mean the paper got it wrong?'

'I'm afraid they slightly misrepresented what I said. Tell me, have you found the popular press particularly reliable in such matters?” He smiled, his gentle gray eyes suddenly lighting up. “Let me see, don't I recall a recent reference to some of your remarks in one of the national tabloids...?'

Gideon winced. Six months earlier he had given an abstruse all-university lecture ('Human Evolution: A Non- teleological Perspective') in which his thesis had been that, while the “logic” of evolution was comprehensible looking backwards, you couldn't use it to look ahead. Evolution—that is, adaptation—didn't “advance” or “progress'; it responded to the pressures of the moment. If there were a biological or reproductive advantage to being large, for example, humans would get larger. If there were an advantage to being small, they would get smaller. Somebody in the audience had raised his hand and asked a question: You mean we could all evolve into midgets? Yes, Gideon had said. Well, how long would something like that take, somebody else had wanted to know. It would depend, Gideon had told him. lf, for some unimaginable reason, everyone over five feet tall stopped having children right now, today, six-footers could be biological oddities in a few generations; by 2050, say.

Somehow, Inside Dope had gotten hold of it. “Scientist Says We're Becoming Midgets!” the headline had screamed from the checkout stands. “By A.D. 2050 Humans Will Be Four-Foot Freaks, Claims U. of Washington Professor.” With Gideon's picture. Copies were still making the rounds on campus. He'd be lucky if he lived it down by 2050.

'No, not wholly reliable,” he said, laughing. “All right, just what did you say?'

'I said that one of the fragments, which consisted of a third of a mandible, including two teeth, had been conclusively identified as coming from Steven Fisk—'

'Identified from dental work?'

'Of course. How else are we poor anthropologists to make conclusive identifications? We had a time tracking down the dentist, I can tell you that.” He broke a chocolate-chip cookie in half, then snapped one of the halves into two smaller pieces, placed one in his mouth, and chewed deliberately. The thin sheet of platysmal muscle at the front of his throat jumped. “There were several other fragments: the superior half of a right scapula, an almost complete left humerus, and a mid-shaft segment of a second left humerus. All were male.'

'Two left humeri? So you knew for sure you had at least two people.'

'Precisely. Two men, as I think you'll agree when you see the fragments. And inasmuch as there were only two males lost in the avalanche, and we already knew from the teeth that one was Steven Fisk, the other had to be James Pratt. Nothing too esoteric there.'

'But, except for the mandible, you couldn't say which bones belonged to which man.'

'No, not with certainty. Well, not even with uncertainty, if it comes to that. That is exactly what I put in my report, but the press was a little carried away.'

'Only a little, really. You did determine that you had the remains of two people, and you knew who they were. You just couldn't apportion the fragments piece by piece.” He shrugged. “Same problem I'm having.'

'It's kind of you to put it that way, but it throws a monkey wrench in what you hoped to learn, doesn't it? Would you care for some more coffee? It's Viennese roast; decaffeinated, I'm afraid.'

Kenneth Worriner was a tall, thin man of eighty-five; elegant and fragile, with skin like rice paper and hair as glossy and white as lamb's wool. With his courtly bearing, his prow of a nose, and his sunken cheeks he reminded Gideon of the pictures of Ramses II; or, more accurately, of the pictures of Ramses’ mummy. His clothes were more up-to-date than the Nineteenth Dynasty, but not by that much: a full, droopy bow tie, white flannel trousers and vest (with chain), and a dark-blue flannel blazer with a carefully folded handkerchief in the breast pocket.