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it true that bananas are radioactive?” asked Herr Dybdahl’s assistant, a ravishing blonde with eyes the color of morning glories and an expression of rapt interest.
    “Now, now, Ursille. It can’t be or monkeys would glow in the dark.” Norris Frye chortled and patted her hand. He had recovered from his fright at the airport and had been flirting openly with Ursille from the moment they sat down to dinner.
    “But that is what I have heard,” said Ursille. “Is it not true, Dinah?”
    Dinah swallowed a mouthful of mashed rutabaga and washed it down with red wine. She was trying to chat up the geneticist on her left, a man named Peder Halverson, and she resented the interruption. “Small amounts of the isotope potassium-forty occur naturally in bananas, making them very slightly radioactive. It’s hardly enough to measure and the banana…”
    “Some say it’s an aphrodisiac,” chortled Frye. The senator knew more banana lore than he’d let on. He dug into his reindeer steak with gusto and Dinah noticed the band of white, naked flesh on the ring finger of his left hand. “Ever been to the U.S., Ursille? You’d love Hawaii. We call it the Aloha State. I could show you sights that would amaze you.”
    Dinah returned her attention to the geneticist. He was a fleshy man with a bulbous nose crisscrossed with red and blue spider veins like streets on a city map. “How long have you been in Longyearbyen, Peder?”
    “Not yet one year.”
    “What is it that you do, exactly?”
    “Genetics.”
    “What kind of genetics?”
    “I have rendered Hungarian oats immune to the Fusarium. The same technique will be applicable to millet. With the new genes I have inserted, spoilage will be retarded.”
    “You do this work for the Svalbard Vault?”
    “No, I am employed by…” His words were drowned out by a cacophony of riotous laughter in the main hotel dining room.
    The senators’ dining area had been sectioned off by mirrored privacy screens, but the screens didn’t shut out the noise. And with fourteen diners at the senators’ table and multiple conversations, some of them in Norwegian, Dinah found it hard to hear.
    “What did you say?”
    “The Griegs Foundation. We study the effects of Stachybotrys mycotoxins in wheat, maize, and vine fruits.”
    “It must be fascinating work, tinkering with genes and DNA. Will you be experimenting with the wheat and pumpkin seeds that the senators brought for deposit in the vault?”
    “ Nei . It is strictly forbuden unless…”
    There was another burst of noisy laughter.
    “Unless what, Peder?”
    A gaunt-faced man sitting across the table from Halverson said something to him in Norwegian and the two of them began to jabber excitedly, forgetting Dinah. She would have to pry the answer to “unless what” out of somebody else.
    At the far end of the table Colt Sheridan, Whitney Keyes, and Jake Mahler of Tillcorp were engaged in a discussion with a man who had something to do with the Global Diversity Trust whose name she’d missed. Senator Sheridan still looked confident and presidential, but Dinah thought she detected a trace of unease in the way he kept eyeing his watch. Tipton Teilhard III ignored his food and appeared to be taking notes on his iPad.
    She strained her ears. Mahler said something about cigars, which seemed to elicit frowns all around. After that, all she heard from that end of the table was an undifferentiated drone. Directly across from her, the gaunt-faced man had drawn Mahler’s attorney, Valerie Ives, into the conversation with Halverson. She sounded fluent and friendly, but she didn’t seem happy with the seating arrangement. Her eyes kept skewing down the table to Mahler. After a while, almost absent-mindedly, she transitioned to English. “Is the market for reindeer expanding since the Chernobyl disaster, Herr Gjertsen?”
    “ Ja . Not much radiation in the lichens and mosses now. Reinsdyr meat is good for human consumption. High-protein,