of concrete surrounding a steel door in the tunnel wall.
'Where does that door go?' she inquired.
'It leads to another tunnel that connects to the hydroelectric system. When the flow through the tunnels is slow earlier in the year, we can open the door, ford a little stream, and go places farther into the system. But this time of year, the water rises, so we keep the door shut.'
'You can get to the power plant from here?'
'There are tunnels all through the mountain and under the ice cap, but only the dry ones are accessible. The others carry the water
to the plant. A regular river flows under the glacier and the current can become quite brisk. We don't normally work this late in the season. Melting water flows in the natural cavities between the ice and the rock, creates pockets and slows down our research. But our work took longer this spring than we thought it would.'
'How do you get air down here?' Skye said, sniffing at the dampness.
'If we were to keep going past the lab and under the glacier for another kilometer more or less, eventually we would come to a large opening on the far side of the ice. It was used to bring in the trailers for the lab and staff. It's been left open like a mine entrance. Air flows in from there.'
Skye shivered in the dank cold. 'I admire your determination. This is not the most pleasant place to work.'
LeBlanc's deep laugh echoed off the dripping walls. 'It's most un-pleasant, very boring, and we're always soaked to the bone. We take a few trips into the sunlight during our three-week stays here, but it's depressing to have to return to the caves, so we tend to stay in the lab, which is dry and well lit. It's equipped with computers, vacuum pumps for filtering sediments, even a walk-in freezer so we can work on ice samples without having them melt. After working an eighteen-hour day, you shower and crawl into bed, so the time goes by fast. Ah, I see that we're almost there.'
Like the living quarters, the lab trailers were nestled in a carved-out section of wall. As LeBlanc stepped up to the nearest lab, the door opened and a tall thin figure stepped out. The sight of Renaud rekindled Skye's simmering wrath. He actually resembled a praying mantis more than a roach. He had a triangular face, wide at the top, with a pointed chin. His nose was long and his eyes small and close together. His thinning hair was a pallid red.
Renaud greeted Skye with the limp, moist handshake that had triggered her revulsion the first time she met him.
'Good morning, my dear Mademoiselle Labelle. Thank you for coming to this damp, dark cave.'
'You're welcome, Professor Renaud.' She glanced around at the inhospitable surroundings. 'This environment must suit you well.'
Renaud ignored the veiled suggestion that he had crawled out from under a rock and ran his eyes up and down Skye's well-put-together body as if he could see through her heavy clothing. 'Anyplace where you and I are together suits me well.'
Skye stifled her gag reflex. 'Perhaps you can tell me what was so important that you had to pull me away from my work.'
'With pleasure.' He reached over to take her by the arm. Skye stepped out of reach and linked her arm through LeBlanc's.
'Lead on,' she said.
The glaciologist had been watching the verbal fencing with mirthful-eyes. His mouth widened in a toothy grin and he and Skye walked arm in arm to a steep flight of rough wooden stairs. The stairs led up to a tunnel about twelve feet high and ten feet wide.
Approximately twenty paces from the stairs, the tunnel branched out into a Y. LeBlanc escorted Skye down the right-hand passageway. Water was streaming along a shallow channel that had been cut in the tunnel floor for drainage. A black rubber hose about four inches in diameter ran alongside one wall.
'Water jet,' LeBlanc explained. 'We collect the drainage water, heat it up and spray it on the ice to melt it. The ice is like putty at the bottom of the glacier. We're constantly melting it, otherwise it would re-form at the rate of two to three feet a day.'
'That's very fast,' Skye said.
'Very. Sometimes we go as far as fifty meters into the glacier and we have to be alert so the ice doesn't close behind us.'
The tunnel ended in an icy slope about ten feet high. They clambered up the slippery rock surface on a ladder and entered an ice cave with space enough to hold more than a dozen people. The walls and
ceiling were bluish white except for areas that were covered with dirt scraped up by the movement of the glacier.
'We're at the bottom of the glacier,' LeBlanc said. 'There is nothing but ice above our heads for eight hundred feet. This is the dirtiest part of the ice floe. It gets cleaner the more you drill into it. I must leave now to do an errand for Monsieur Renaud.'
Skye thanked him and then her attention was drawn to the far wall where a man in a raincoat was spraying the ice with a hot water hose. The melting ice generated clouds of steam, which made the damp air in the room even harder to breathe. The man turned off the jet when he saw he had visitors and came over to shake hands.
'Welcome to our little observatory, Mademoiselle Labelle. Hope the trip from the outside wasn't too arduous. My name is Hank Thurston. I'm Bernie's colleague. This is Craig Rossi, our assistant from Uppsala University,' he said, gesturing at a young man in his early twenties, 'and that's Derek Rawlins, who's writing about our work for Outside magazine.'
As Skye shook hands, Renaud brushed by the others and went over to the wall to examine a vaguely human figure that was locked in the ice.
'As you can see, this gentleman has been frozen for some time,' Renaud said. Glancing at Skye, he said, 'Not unlike some of the women I have encountered.'
No one laughed at the joke. Skye stepped past Renaud and ran her fingers around the perimeter of the dark shape. The limbs were twisted in grotesque positions.
'We found him when we were enlarging the cave,' Thurston explained.
'He looks more like a bug on a windshield than a man,' Skye said.
'We're lucky he's not just a big greasy smear,' Thurston said. 'He's in pretty good shape, considering. The ice at the bottom of a glacier, and anything in it, is squeezed like putty by hundreds of tons of pressure.'
Skye peered at the vague form. 'Are you assuming that he was on top of the glacier at one point?'
'Sure,' Thurston said. 'With a valley glacier like Le Dormeur or some of the others you'll find in the Alps, a reasonable amount of snowfall moves pretty fast through the ice.'
'How long would it take?'
'My guess is that it would take a hundred years, more or less, to get from the top to the bottom of Le Dormeur.' It would only work for an object near the head of the glacier high in the mountains, where ice flows vertically as well as horizontally.'
'Then it's possible that he was a climber who fell into a crevasse?'
'That's what we thought at first. Then we took a closer look.'
Skye put her face closer to the ice. The body was dressed almost entirely in dark leather, from his boots to the snug Snoopy-type cap.
Tufts of fur lining poked out here and there. A gun holster, pistol still in it, hung from a belt.
Her gaze moved up to the face. The features were unclear through the ice, but the skin was burnished to a dark copper color, as if he had lain out in the sun too long. The eyes were covered with a pair of goggles.
'Incredible,' she whispered, then stepped back and turned to Renaud. 'But what does this have to do with me?'
Renaud smiled and went over to a plastic storage container and reached inside. He grunted as he lifted out a steel helmet. 'This was found near the man's head.'
Skye took the helmet and studied the intricate design engraved on the metal, pursing her lips in thought. The visor was formed into the face of a man with a large nose and a bushy mustache. The crown was engraved with ornate, interlocking flowers and stems, and mythical creatures revolved like planets around a stylized three-headed eagle. The eagle's mouths were open in a defiant scream and bundles of spears and arrows were clutched in its
