Blue laughed. “So small that if I cussed a cat I’d get hair in my mouth. It’s fine, my friend. I have my tatami mat and my happy coat and my portable family shrine, though I’m not sure where I will place it. The shower stall, perhaps. I think this place has a certain charm. Did you know it used to be a coaching inn? And you can see how old it is, so old it has had time to subside. Think about that, Henry. This place is probably older than all but two or three buildings on your whole continent.”

“But not Japan.”

“Not Japan, no.”

“Well, these old Brit places are better than they used to be, I guess. At least you get a shower in your room now. But—”

“But you can’t polish a turd.”

Henry grinned. “I’m glad to have you here, my friend.”

Blue eyed Henry. “I take it you don’t want to talk about work.”

“Not until tomorrow. I need you refreshed. I need your clear thinking.”

“There are no live volcanoes in Scotland,” Blue pointed out. “Not for three hundred million years.”

“I know. And I don’t think we have one now. What we have is—”

“What?”

“Something not right.”

“It scares you.”

“Yes, it does,” Henry said.

Blue grunted and raised his glass. “But that is for tomorrow. For tonight, we will do what old men like us always do, which is to talk about old times. Tell me, do you still hear from the Pinatubo team?”

Pinatubo was a volcano in the Philippines. Henry and Blue had been part of a joint team of USGS and Philippine volcanologists who had gone out to assess the danger of eruption. Because of the accuracy of their characterization of the hazards and their prediction of eruption, more than fifty thousand people had been evacuated to safety, days before Pinatubo’s devastating eruptions.

Henry, fresh from college, had done little more than carry the gear, but it had been his first exposure to real field work, and to a major geological event. And to what it could do to people.

So they gassed about that.

“Not that we were so smart about Pinatubo,” Henry said. “You remember Sister Assumpta?”

Blue laughed. “Of course.” This was the nun who had walked into the Philippine Institute of Volcanology to tell the assembled scientists, peering at their instruments in the artificial light there, that, begging their pardon, the mountain had just exploded. And so it had, clearly visible from her village; but that nun’s soft-spoken message was the first warning anybody had.

So they talked about that for a while. Then Henry went up to buy some more drinks, and they talked about the time in Colombia when Blue had absent-mindedly walked over terrain so hot that when he took off his boots his socks were smoking… and so on.