Blue kept up, but he looked thin and frail compared to the booming, bovine gaijin around him, and every now and again he would turn away and cough deeply into a huge handkerchief, the phlegm liquid in his throat. He had visibly crumbled in the few years since Henry had seen him last, and that was a true pisser.

Blue wasn’t admitting to any of it, but the word was he had asthma, and maybe heart trouble. Which was why VDAP hadn’t allowed him out of Vancouver and into the field for a couple of years, and — no doubt — why Blue had been so keen to come for a jaunt to Britain, on Henry’s obscure and ambiguous invitation.

Blue was driven to keep working. Everyone who knew him knew that, and knew why. Kobe.

But that wasn’t Blue’s fault. Why the hell should he have to give up, to retire, to succumb to the betrayal of his body?

Henry felt a deep, unfocused anger boiling up inside him. Age. It was so damn medieval that they all had to submit to such a thing. He himself was already old enough to feel the weight of age descending on his own bones. It just went on and on, it seemed, wearing you down, taking out everybody from the best and brightest on down. And nobody got a reprieve, not so much as a day off from it.

He thought of the patch on Arthur’s Seat, spreading like the liver spots on the thin skin of Blue’s bird-boned hand. Was that what it was? — a sign that even the Earth, in the end, grew old?

You’ve drunk too much of this British piss, he thought. The next time he went to the bar he came back with Becks, which was the nearest they had to a clean American beer.

12

He arranged to meet Blue up on the Seat the next afternoon.

In the morning, with a mildly banging head, he made his way to the lab.

He made a run around the building, checking on the progress of his samples in the various labs. Here was the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, for instance, an anonymous grey box which looked like an industrial-strength photocopier, into which ground-up fragments of his rocks were fed in tiny platinum egg cups. X-ray fluorescence would tell him about elemental abundances in fine detail.

He was promised by the prep technician that his samples would be in place by the end of the day.