We waited three days to make our move; my side was still tender, but Jess' medicine had healed it to a thin scar.
He fitted me out with a set of shiny black long johns that turned out to be lightweight scuba gear and led the way by back routes down into the depths of the city to a high blank wall with lights far up on it and that grim look that prisons and military installations have.
"This is the outer perimeter wall of the reserve," Jess said. I looked up at the top, fifty feet up in deep shadow.
"How do we get over it?"
"We don't, of course. We circumvent it. Come along."
I trailed him to the end of the alley, and we were facing a chest-high wall with lots of dark, cold air beyond it. I looked over it, saw black water swirling twenty feet below.
"A pleasant evening for a swim," Jess said. He pulled off his jacket and produced a slim-barreled gun from somewhere and made clicking sounds with it, checking the action. I stripped down to my frogman suit and turned up the heat control a notch higher. Jess looked me over to be sure I hadn't left my seat flap hanging down, and vaulted up on the coping of the wall, agile as a squirrel.
"Stay clear of the rungs when you dive," he said. "And be sure to keep your comset open. Its range is only about a hundred feet, under water." He gave me a casual wave, like a movie star dismissing a fan, and tilted over the edge. I hopped up on the wall, swung both legs over, and kicked off without looking, feet-first.
It seemed like a long fall before I hit water as hard as a sidewalk and felt myself tumbling in a strong current that sucked the heat out of me like a blotter. I straightened myself out facing upstream and looked for Jess. It was like swimming in an inkwell. I found my heat control and thumbed it up, then tried my water jets.
"Use more power," Jess' voice tinned very faintly in my left ear. "You're drifting off."
I found the controls and used them and Jess guided me his way. When I was three feet from him, I saw the faint phosphorescent outline of his suit. He was hanging onto a mossy pipe projecting from the retaining wall.
"We have a brisk little swim ahead of us," he told me. "The duct I was hoping to use is blocked, but there should be another, a hundred and forty meters upstream."
It was a half-hour battle. Once I angled out a little too far and the tide took me and rolled me half a dozen times before I got my keel under me again. After a while the wall beside me changed from mossy concrete to rusted metal.
"Steer for the lights," Jess transmitted. A minute or two later, I saw a greenish arc glowing off to my right that turned out to be the open mouth of a six-foot conduit. There were some symbols painted on it in luminous pink and a mechanism bolted to the side. Jess was perched on the housing, tinkering. I heard him say "ah" and the louvers that blocked the mouth pivoted and I could see light coming from inside the duct. Water was boiling out of it like a millrace. He headed in, using the hand rungs, and I followed. The miniature pump strapped to my back hummed and the straps sawed under my arms. We passed up a pair of side branches and the duct narrowed. There was a glow-strip along the side here, with more symbols. Jess checked each one we came to, after a while held up and said, "There should be a hatch here."
I flattened myself against the curved wall and held on and watched while he checked over the section ahead. Then his head and shoulders disappeared. I came up beside him and his legs went up inside a vertical shaft a yard in diameter. There were rungs there. I hauled myself up after him and after ten feet, the shaft angled and we were coming out of water into open air.
"I suppose this is a maintenance lock," Jess said. It was a square room, twenty feet on a side, with motor-operated valves all over one wall and color-coded piping on the other ones. I could hear pumps throbbing somewhere. The ceiling shed a glow like phosphorescent mold on Jess' face. In the tight black suit, he looked like a detail from Hieronymus Bosch.
I was looking at a panel set between banked valves.
"Try this," I said.
Jess looked at me, said nothing. He unclipped a tool kit from his belt and went to work. Five minutes later he grinned at me and turned something slowly and the look of strain tightened. Beyond the wall, something made a solid snick.
"That's it," he said.
I went past him and pushed on the panel and a section of wall slid back and I was looking into a silent corridor with a row of green ceiling lights that stretched away into distance.
"So much for the impregnability of ETORP," Jess said. "We're inside the Ice Palace. There are a thousand Blackies patrolling a few feet overhead, but we seem to have this level to ourselves. Now what?"
I didn't answer him right away. I was looking at the corridor, and feeling little icy fingers running up my backbone.
"Did you ever walk into a strange place and have the feeling you'd been there before?" I spoke carefully, so as not to shatter a fragile thought.
"It's called the déjà vu," Jess said, watching me.
"There's something down there," I said. "Something I won't like."
"What is it, Steve?" Jess' voice was like a freezing man breathing on the dying spark of his last match.
"I don't know," I said. I looked along the hall, but it was just a hall now. I pointed toward the far end.
"Come on, Jess," I said. "I don't know whether it's a hunch or a nightmare, but I think what we want's that way."
"There's dust here," Jess said. "This section's not in use, hasn't been for a long time."
The corridor ran for a couple of hundred feet and ended in a right-angle turn with a cubbyhole full of shelves. There was nothing on them but dust. Under the shelves there was a row of hooks designed for coats, but no coats were hanging on them. Jess stamped on the floor, looked at the ceiling.
"There must be a route leading from here," he said. "This appears to be a dressing room, where special protective clothing was donned."
I was looking at the hooks. Something about them bothered me. I counted them. Twelve. I got a grip on the third from the right and pulled down. It felt pretty solid. I pushed up hard, and it clicked and folded back. Jess was watching me with his mouth open. I fingered the next one, then took hold of the fifth in line, flipped it up. I could feel a little sweat on my forehead under the mask. I reached for the hanger between the other two and lifted it and something made a crunching sound and the wall on the right jumped open half an inch.
"How did you know, Steve?"
"I don't know," I said, and pushed the door open and went through into a place I'd seen somewhere, a long time ago, in a dream of another life.
It was a wide room with walls that were cracked and waterstained, with green mold growing in little tufts along the cracks. There were cracks across the floor, too, and some curled chips of perished plastic were all that was left of the composition tiles. I saw this by the light of a small hand flash that Jess played over the floor and held on a door across the room.
I went across to it and turned the old-fashioned doorknob and went into a small office drifted half an inch deep in dust and scraps of paper as brown as autumn leaves. There was a collapsed jumble of leather scraps and rusted springs in one corner that had been a big chair. Across from it was a teakwood desk. There was a small bowl on the desk with a little dust at the bottom, and a shred of something that might have been a flower stem, once.
"Daisies," I said. "White daisies."
"Steve, do you know this place?" Jess whispered.
"It's my old plant," I said. "This was my office."
I went to the desk, opened the drawer, and took out a bottle. A scrap of label read EMY ARTIN.
"What else do you remember, Steve?"
I was looking at a picture frame hanging on the wall. The glass was dirty but intact, but there was nothing behind it but a little ash. I lifted it down and uncovered a steel plate with a round knob, set in the wall. It was a safe, and the door was ajar.
"Someone's been here before you," Jess' voice grated.
I reached far back in the safe and felt over the upper surface, found a pinhole. "I need a wire," I said. Jess checked a pouch at his belt and produced one. I poked it up in the hole and it snicked and the back of the safe tilted forward into my hand. There was a drawer behind it. I pulled it out. Except for a few flakes of dry black paint, it was empty.
"What did you expect to find here?" Jess asked me.
"I don't know." I blew into the empty steel box and the paint chips danced and whirled up into my face. I started to toss it aside and found myself looking at the bottom of the drawer. The paint there was dry, peeling.
"What is it?" Jess was watching my face.
"There was no paint on the inside," I said. "It's black carballoy. . . ." I picked at the paint with a fingernail, and more of it flaked away and I was looking at words etched in the hard metal: