Jim peers out through eyepieces that have some kind of head’s-up display, green and violet visuals from covert low-frequency sensors giving him a fairly good view of the night world, though the colors are out of a bad drug hallucination. And he can’t see Arthur at all. The suit’s sauna effect is intense, he’s soaked with sweat.

They get up to climb the east side of the riverbed. Jim is cooking. The world looks as if it’s under very turbid green and violet water. “Thus they crossed the Lake of Fire…” Oh, it is weird, weird.

Here on the Newport Beach side, occupying the site of an old oil field now gone dry, is the physical plant of Parnell Airspace Corporation: fully lit (each light a white-green magnesium flare in Jim’s bizarre field of vision), surrounded by a high fence that is electrically defended so conspicuously that the barbed wire on top can only be for decoration, or nostalgia—a symbol, like the mark of a brand over a modern cattle factory.

Jim bumps into Arthur, crouches beside him, puts down the box that he’s been carrying or pushing along with him. It’s heavy. The buildings of the Parnell complex are still some three or four hundred yards away, dark masses on a green plain of concrete, which is dotted here and there by lavender cars.

Arthur crawls up to the fence and gently hangs on it what looks like a tennis racket without a handle. The frame adheres to the fence, and the wire mesh of the fence caught inside the frame falls away. The frame is now giving out the proper response to the fence’s sensors, convincing them that no hole exists—so Arthur has explained to Jim as they prepared for their raid.

“Where do you get all this stuff?” Jim asked at the time.

“We have our suppliers,” Arthur said. “This is the crucial item here, the solvent missile.…”