Blind Lake (3 page)

“I don’t know. I’m sure it’s nothing.” But she frowned and stood a moment, watching. Then she took Tessa’s hand. “Let’s go home, shall we?”

Tess nodded, suddenly eager for the warmth of her mother’s house, for the smell of fresh laundry and takeout food, for the reassurance of small enclosed spaces.

The campus of the Blind Lake National Laboratory, its scientific and administrative offices and supply and retail outlets, had been constructed on the almost imperceptibly gentle slope of an ancient glacial moraine From the air it resembled any newly built suburban community, peculiar only in its isolation, served by a single two-lane road. At its center, adjacent to a partially enclosed retail strip called the mallway, was an O-shaped ring of ten-story concrete buildings, Hubble Plaza. This was where the interpretive work of the Blind Lake facility was done. The Plaza, with its narrow escutcheon windows and its grassy enclosed park, was the brain of the installation. The beating heart was a mile east of the inhabited town, in an underground structure from which two massive cooling towers rose into the brittle autumn air.

This building was officially the Blind Lake Computational Array, but it was commonly called Eyeball Alley, or the Alley, or simply the Eye.

Charlie Grogan had been chief engineer at the Alley since it had been powered up five years ago. Tonight he was working late, if you could call it “working late” when it was his regular custom to stick around well after the day shift had gone home. There was, of course, a night shift, and a supervising engineer to go with it (Anne Costigan, whose abilities he had come to respect). But it was precisely this relaxation of his official vigilance that made the after-hours shift rewarding. He could catch up on paperwork without risk of interruption. Better, he could go down into the hardware rooms or the O/BEC gallery and hang out with the hands-on guys in a non-official capacity. He enjoyed spending time in the works.

Tonight he finished filling out a requisition form and told his server to transmit it in the morning. He checked his watch. Ten to nine. The guys in the stacks were due for a break. Just a walk-through, Charlie promised himself. Then home to feed Boomer, his elderly hound, and maybe catch some downloads before bed. The eternal cycle.

He left his office and rode an elevator two levels deeper into the underground. The Alley was quiet at night. He passed no one in the sea-green lower-level hallways. There was only the sound of his footsteps and the chime of the transponder in his ID tag as he crossed into restricted areas. Mirrored doors offered him unwelcome reminders of his age—he had turned forty-eight last January—the creeping curvature of his spine, the paunch that ballooned over his belt buckle. A fringe of gray hair stood out against his dark skin. His father had been a light-skinned Englishman, taken by cancer twenty years ago; his mother, a Sudanese immigrant and Sufi scholar, had survived him by less than a year. Charlie resembled his father more than ever these days.

He detoured through the O/BEC gallery—though, like “staying late,” it was probably wrong to call it a “detour.” This was one of the stations of his habitual nightly walk.

The gallery was constructed like a surgical theater without the student seating, a ring-shaped tiled hallway fitted with sealed glass windows on its inner perimeter. The windows overlooked a circular chamber forty feet deep. At the bottom of the chamber, serviced by columns of supercooled gases and bundles of light pipes and monitoring devices, were the three huge O/BEC platens. Inside each tubular platen were rank upon rank of microscopically thin gallium arsenide wafers, bathed in helium at a temperature of -451° Fahrenheit.

Charlie was an engineer, not a physicist. He could maintain the machines that maintained the platens, but his understanding of the fundamental process at work was partial at best. A “Bose-Einstein Condensate” was a highly ordered state of matter, and the BECs created linked electron particles called “excitons,” and excitons functioned as quantum gates to form an absurdly fast and subtle computing device. Anything beyond that
Reader’s Digest
sketch he left to the intense and socially awkward young theorists and graduate students who cycled through Eyeball Alley as if it were a summer resort. Charlie’s job was more practical: he kept it all working, kept it cool, kept the I/O smooth, fixed little problems before they became big problems.

Tonight there were four maintenance guys in sterile suits down in the plumbing, probably Stitch and Chavez and the new hands cycling through from Berkeley Lab. More people than usual… he wondered if Anne Costigan had ordered some unscheduled work.

He walked the circumference of the gallery once, then followed another corridor past the solid-state physics labs to the data control room. Charlie knew as soon as he stepped inside that something was up.

Nobody was on break. The five night engineers were all at their posts, feverishly scrolling systems reports. Only Chip McCullough looked up as Charlie came through door, and all he got from Chip was a glum nod. All this, in the few hours since his shift had officially ended.

Anne Costigan was here, too. She glanced up from her handheld monitor and saw him standing by the door. She held up a finger to the junior supervisor—
one second
—and strode over. Charlie liked this about Anne, her economy of motion, every gesture purposeful. “Christ, Charlie,” she said, “don’t you ever
sleep
?”

“Just on my way out.”

“Through the stacks?”

“Came for coffee, actually. But you guys are busy.”

“We had a big spike through the I/O’s an hour ago.”

“Power spike?”

“No, an
activity
spike. The switchboard lit up, if you know what I mean. Like somebody fed the Eye a dose of amphetamine.”

“It happens,” Charlie said. “You remember last winter—”

“This one’s a little unusual. It settled down, but we’re doing a systems check.”

“Still making data?”

“Oh, yeah, nothing
bad
, just a blip, but… you know.”

He understood. The Eye and all its interrelated systems hovered perpetually on the brink of chaos. Like a harnessed wild animal, what the Eye needed was not maintenance so much as grooming and reassurance. In its complexity and unpredictability, it was very nearly a living thing. Those who understood that—and Anne was one of them—had learned to pay attention to the small things.

“You want to stick around, lend a hand?”

Yes, he did, but Anne didn’t need him; he would only get underfoot. He said, “I have a dog to feed.”

“Tell Boomer hello for me.” She was clearly anxious to get back to work.

“Will do. Anything I can get you?”

“Not unless you have a spare phone. Abe’s out on the coast again.” Abe was Anne’s husband, a financial consultant; he made it to Blind Lake maybe one month out of three. The marriage was troubled. “Local calls are okay, but I can’t get through to L.A. for some reason.”

“You want to borrow mine?”

“No, not really; I tried Tommy Gupta’s; his didn’t work either. Something wrong with the satellites, I guess.”

Strange, Charlie thought, how everything seemed to have gone just slightly askew tonight.

For the fifth time in the last hour, Sue Sampel told her boss she hadn’t been able to put his call through to the Department of Energy in Washington. Each time, Ray looked at her as if she had personally fucked up the system.

She was working way late, and so, it seemed, was everybody else in Hubble Plaza. Something was up. Sue couldn’t figure out what. She was Ray Scutter’s executive assistant, but Ray (typically) hadn’t shared any information with her. All she knew was that he wanted to talk to D.C., and the telecoms weren’t cooperating.

Obviously it wasn’t Sue’s fault—she knew how to punch a number, for God’s sake—but that didn’t prevent Ray from glaring at her every time he asked. And Ray Scutter packed a killer glare. Big eyes with pinpoint pupils, bushy eyebrows, flecks of gray in his goatee… she had once thought he might be handsome, if not for his receding chin and slightly pouchy cheeks. But she didn’t entertain that thought anymore. What was the expression?
Handsome is as handsome does
. Ray didn’t
do
handsome.

He turned away from her desk and stalked back to his inner office. “Naturally,” he growled over his shoulder, “I’ll be blamed for this somehow.”

Y
³
, Sue thought wearily. It had become her mantra in the months she’d been working for Ray Scutter. Y
³
:
Yeah, yeah, yeah
. Ray was surrounded by incompetents. Ray was being ignored by the research staff. Ray was thwarted at every turn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Once more, for good measure, she attempted the Washington connection. The phone popped up an error message: SERVER UNAVAILABLE. Same message came up for any phone, video, or net connection outside the local Blind Lake loop. The only call that
had
gone through was to Ray’s own house, here in town—letting his daughter know he’d be late. Everything else had been incoming: Security, Personnel, and the military liaison.

Sue might have been worried if she’d been a little less tired. But it was probably nothing. All she wanted to do right now was get back to her apartment and peel off her shoes. Microwave her dinner. Smoke a joint.

The terminal buzzed again—according to the screen announcement, a call from Ari Weingart over at Publicity and Public Relations. She picked up. “Ari,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

“Your boss around?”

“Present but not keen to be disturbed. Is this urgent?”

“Well, yeah, kind of. I’ve got three journalists here and nowhere to put them.”

“So book a motel.”

“Very funny. They’re on a three-week pass.”

“Nobody penciled this into your calendar?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Sue. Obviously, they ought to be sleeping in the guest quarters in the Visitor Center—but Personnel filled those beds with day workers.”

“Day workers?”

“Duh! Because the buses can’t get out to Constance.”

“The
buses
can’t get out?”

“Have you been in an isolation booth the last couple of hours? The road’s closed at the gatehouse. No traffic in or out. We’re in total lockdown.”

“Since when?”

“Roughly sunset.”

“How come?”

“Who knows? Either a plausible security threat or another drill. Everybody’s guessing it’ll be sorted out by morning. But in the meantime I have to billet these folks somewhere.”

Ray Scutter’s reaction to the problem would be more indignant fuming, certainly nothing helpful. Sue thought about it. “Maybe you could call Site Management and see if they’ll open up the gym in the rec center. Put in some cots for the night. How’s that sound?”

“Fucking brilliant,” Ari said. “Should have thought of it myself.”

“If you need authority, cite mine.”

“You’re a gem. Wish I could hire you away from Ray.”

So do I
, Sue thought.

Sue stood and stretched. She walked to the window and parted the vertical blinds. Beyond the roofs of the worker housing and the darkness of the undeveloped grassland she could just make out the road to Constance, the lights of emergency vehicles pulsing eerily by the south gate.

Marguerite Hauser thanked whatever benevolent fate it was that had put her into a town house (even if it was one of the smaller, older units) on the northeastern side of the Blind Lake campus, as far as possible from her ex-husband Ray. There was something reassuring about that ten-minute drive as she took Tess home, closing space behind her like a drawbridge over a moat.

Tess, as usual, was quiet during the ride—maybe a little quieter than usual. When they picked up chicken sandwiches at the drive-through outlet in the commercial strip, Tess was indifferent to the menu. Back home, Marguerite carried the food and Tess hauled her tote bag inside. “Is the video working?” Tess asked listlessly.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Wasn’t working at Daddy’s house.”

“Check and see. I’ll put the food on plates.”

Eating in front of the video panel was still a novelty for Tess. It was a habit Ray had not permitted. Ray had insisted on eating at the table: “family time,” inevitably dominated by Ray’s daily catalogue of complaints. Frankly, Marguerite thought, the downloads were better company. The old movies especially. Tess liked the black-and-white ones best; she was fascinated by the antique automobiles and peculiar clothing.
She’s a xenophile
, Marguerite thought.
Takes after me
.

But Marguerite’s video panel proved as useless as Ray’s had presumably been, and they had to make do with whatever was in the house’s resident memory. They settled on a hundred-year-old Bob Hope comedy,
My Favorite Brunette
. Tess, who would ordinarily have been full of questions about the twentieth century and why everything
looked
like that, simply picked at her food and gazed at the screen.

Marguerite put a hand on her daughter’s forehead. “How do you feel, kiddo?”

“I’m not sick.”

“Just not hungry?”

“I guess.” Tess scooted closer, and Marguerite put an arm around her.

After dinner Marguerite cleaned up, put fresh linen on the beds, helped Tess sort out her schoolbooks. Tess flicked through the blue-screen entertainment bands in a moment of misplaced optimism, then watched the Bob Hope movie a second time, finally announced she was ready for bed. Marguerite supervised her toothbrushing and tucked her in. Marguerite liked her daughter’s room, with its small west-facing window, the bed dressed in a pink fringed comforter, the watchful ranks of stuffed animals on the dresser. It reminded her of her own room back in Ohio many years ago, minus the well-meaning volumes of
Bible Stories for Children
her father had installed in the vain hope that they might provoke in her a piety she had conspicuously lacked. Tessa’s books were self-selected and tended toward popular fantasy and easy science. “You want to read a while?”