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Swift was about to offer some caustic remark at Boyd’s expense and then checked herself, realizing that for once she agreed with him. Rebecca had developed diarrhoea, and despite the fact that the squeeze cage was cleaned several times a day, the smell was sometimes overpoweringly bad.

‘What do you expect an Abominable Snowman to smell like?’ laughed Mac, who was busy labelling his films.

Jameson, reading a book, looked up and said, ‘She can’t help it.’

‘The rest of us go outside,’ persisted Boyd. ‘Why can’t she?’

‘As soon as her stitches are healed,’ said Jameson, ‘we’ll have to let her go. But until then we owe it to her and to Esau to keep a close eye on them. After all, they didn’t ask to be captured.’

‘When will that be?’ demanded Boyd.

Jameson looked inquiringly at Jutta.

‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Hoo-hoooo-hooooo-hooooo!’

Boyd left his game of solitaire and began to pace around the cage.

‘I think I’ll have gone crazy by then. Can’t you tell her to shut up? I thought Jack said that the yetis knew sign language. I mean, what’s the sign for shut your goddamn mouth?’

Jack swung his legs off the camp bed and sat up slowly.

‘They do sign,’ he said. ‘I saw them.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ said Cody, his enthusiasm undiminished by Boyd’s ill-tempered remarks. ‘I’ve tried to sign to her but without success. I expect it’s just that the signs she knows belong to a different convention, that’s all.’

He put down his tape recorder and stretched wearily.

‘I guess that’s enough for one day,’ he said, and collecting his well-thumbed paperback copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he returned to Lawrence and the revolt of the desert.

Boyd stopped his pacing and began to search for something in his rucksack.

Swift stood up from the circle of chairs grouped around the cage and went to sit beside Jack.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him.

‘A lot better, thanks. You know, Boyd’s right. It does stink in here. I don’t think I’ll ever get the stink of them out of my nostrils.’

‘That’s for sure,’ said Boyd. Glancing around the clamshell, he saw that nobody was paying Rebecca any attention. Cody was now deep inside his book. Warner was working on his desktop PC. Jutta was listening to some music on her Walkman. The sirdar was looking at an old magazine and drinking a cup of his disgusting brew. Boyd nodded to himself: This was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He stepped closer to the cage and almost absently began to pass the small electronic box he had collected from his rucksack up and down the fur on Rebecca’s back. About the size of a photographer’s light meter, the device was a radiometer, a sophisticated kind of Geiger counter. On the lowest range setting, the radiometer was picking up a very small reading from Rebecca’s fur, as if she might have come into contact with something radioactive. He put his arm through the bars of the cage, bringing the radiometer as close to Rebecca’s hands as he dared. This time the needle flickered significantly.

Cody glanced up from his book and caught sight of the electronic device in Boyd’s hands.

‘Jon? What is that you’re holding there?’ he asked.

Boyd took his eyes off the radiometer for only a second, but it was all the time Rebecca needed to snatch it away. She barked excitedly and, turning her back on Boyd, began to examine the radiometer with interest.

‘Damn it,’ scowled Boyd. Not that it really mattered. He had the answer to his question. He smiled at Cody. ‘She really does like shiny things, doesn’t she? A regular mockingbird.’

Cody got up from his chair and leaned toward the edge of the cage, trying to see exactly what it was that Rebecca had stolen.

‘What is that thing?’

Swift, leaving Jack’s bedside, walked tentatively toward the cage. Boyd was looking shifty and uncomfortable, as if he had just been caught doing something of which he was slightly ashamed.

‘Oh, it’s just a radiometer,’ he shrugged. ‘I wanted to take a base reading from us all, just in case the nukes do go off and I have to start checking everyone for radiation levels.’

‘That’s very noble of you,’ said Swift. ‘But I can’t say that I’ve noticed you checking anyone.’

‘Maybe not everyone.’

Swift pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows. Folding her arms defensively, she stood in front of Boyd and looked him squarely in the eye.

‘Or maybe not anyone.’

Boyd grinned at her and shook his head as if in pity. ‘Swifty. Really. Now why do you say that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just a feeling I have about you, Boyd. It’s the same feeling I get when I walk under a ladder.’

‘Do you have a suspicious mind? Every time it thinks something it wants to read you your rights first.’ Aware that everyone was watching him now, Boyd kept grinning, as if the persistence of his smile would prove his innocence. ‘Cabin fever,’ he added. ‘That’s what it is, cabin fever. The gold prospectors used to get it in the Yukon.’

‘C’mon, will you. Swift?’ said Jack, coming to Boyd’s aid. ‘Why are you riding him? What’s wrong with a little planning ahead? Boyd’s right. If the bombs do start going off, it would be useful to know if we ended up showing some signs of contamination.’

‘Isn’t it Boyd who’s always saying we’ll be safe up here?’ she returned. ‘So why the need for any reading at all?’

‘Speaking for myself,’ said Jutta, ‘I’d like to know if I was contaminated or not.’

‘Okay,’ said Swift. ‘So would I.’ She stared back at Boyd. ‘Tell us. What was the result? Of these checks you performed on us all? Sorry, on only some of us.’

Boyd glanced into the cage and saw that Rebecca had the radiometer in her mouth and was now chewing it gently. He shook his head.

‘It was nothing. I mean, hardly significant. Just the normal you’d expect from people who been at quite a high altitude.’ He grinned. ‘You know, we’re a lot nearer space up here. And space is radioactive.’

‘Hoo-hoooo-hoooo-hoooo!’

Deciding that she couldn’t eat it, Rebecca threw Boyd’s radiometer out of her cage. It spun across the floor of the clamshell toward Swift, colliding with her boot.

Swift bent down, retrieved the unit, wiped it free of Rebecca’s saliva, and then stood up, wearing a disbelieving smile.

‘Let’s just see now, shall we?’ She glanced at the radiometer. ‘A few toothmarks, but it seems undamaged. I think I know how to work one of these things. It’s kind of like a Geiger counter without the exciting science-fiction sound effects, isn’t it?’

Depressing the control button, she passed the radiometer over her own torso and then over Jack’s.

‘You’re right, Boyd. Nothing so far.’

Boyd watched her take a reading from everyone under the clamshell. There seemed no point in losing his temper over what she was doing.

Now she was checking Jutta, Warner, and then Jameson, and all the time shaking her head.

‘Swift, I think you’re being very insulting about this,’ Boyd said patiently.

She waved the unit in front of the sirdar, Mac and Jameson. ‘Guys, you’re clean too.’ Quickly she checked Boyd himself. ‘Now you, Boyd. No reading? Well, that’s a relief.’

‘It’s like I was saying,’ said Boyd. ‘It was just a precaution. A base reading. Like a control sample. Just to check the thing was working properly.’

Gently he tried to take the radiometer from her, but Swift was already pushing it through the bars of the squeeze cage.

‘Wait a minute, we can’t forget Rebecca, can we?’