Blind Lake

“Data encrypted into photographs or images.” He didn’t remind Weingart that he, Ray, had testified at those hearings. Information warfare had been a hot topic at the time. The Luddite lobby had feared that Blind Lake might import some pernicious alien self-replicating digital program or, for God’s sake, a deadly meme, which would then spread through terrestrial data routes wreaking unknowable havoc.

Wary as he often was of Blind Lake’s groping into the unknown, the idea was preposterous. The aboriginals of UMa47/E could hardly know they were being spied on… and even if they did, images processed at the Lake had traveled, however mysteriously, at the conventional speed of light. It would need both an impossible perceptivity and a ridiculously patient desire for revenge for them to react in any hostile way. Still, he had been forced to admit, dangerous steganography was not an absolute impossibility, at least in the abstract. So a series of contingency plans had been written into the already immense web of security plans surrounding the Lake. Even though, in Ray’s opinion, it was the biggest crock of astronomical shit since Girolamo Fracastoro’s theory that syphilis was caused by the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

Had those bullshit edicts actually been called into effect? “One problem with that idea,” he told Weingart. “No provocation. We haven’t downloaded anything suspicious.”

“Not yet, anyway,” Weingart said.

“You know something I don’t?”

“Hardly. But let’s say if there was a problem at Crossbank—”

“Come on. Crossbank is looking at oceans and bacteria.”

“I know, but if—”

“And we’re imaging completely different targets in any case. Their work doesn’t reflect on ours.”

“No, but if there was a problem with the process somehow—”

“Something endemic to the Eye, you mean?”

“If there was some kind of problem with the O/BECs at Crossbank, DoE or the military might have decided to put us under a precautionary quarantine.”

“They could at least have warned us.”

“Information jamming is two-way. No in, no out. We have to assume they don’t want so much as a carrier wave getting through.”

“That doesn’t preclude a warning.”

“Unless they were in a hurry.”

“This is ridiculously speculative, and I hope you and Shulgin haven’t been spreading it around. Rumors can cause panic.”

Weingart looked like he wanted to say something, but bit it back.

“Anyway,” Ray said, “it’s out of our hands. The pressing question is what we can do for ourselves until somebody unbuttons the fence.”

Weingart nodded and began to read from his list. “Supplies. We pipe in our drinking water, and that hasn’t been interrupted, but without intervention we’ll run short of some foodstuffs before the end of the week and face a starvation-level crisis by the end of November. I’m assuming we’ll be resupplied, but it might be a good idea to segregate our surplus and maybe even post guards over it in the meantime.”

“I can’t imagine this… siege… going on until Thanksgiving.”

“Well, but we’re talking ‘what-if’ here—”

“All right, all right. What else?”

“Medical supplies, same deal, and the on-campus clinic isn’t set up to deal with serious or widespread illness or injuries. If we had a fire we’d have to ship burn victims to a major hospital or suffer needless fatalities. Not much we can do about that, either, except ask the medical staff to make contingency plans. Plus, if the quarantine is prolonged, people are going to need emotional counselling. We already have some folks with urgent family matters on the outside.”

“They’ll live.”

“Lodging. There are a couple hundred day workers sleeping in the gym, not to mention visiting journalists, a handful of contractors, and anybody who happened to be here on a day pass. Long-term, if this is a long-term quarantine, it might be better to see if we can billet those people out. There are people living on-campus who have spare rooms or guest quarters available, and it wouldn’t be hard to round up volunteers. With a little luck we could have everybody sleeping on a bed, or at least a pullout sofa. Sharing bathrooms instead of fighting over the showers at the community center and lining up for the jakes.”

“Look into it,” Ray said. After a moment’s thought he added, “Put together a list of volunteers, but bring it to me before you talk to them. And we’ll have to compile an inventory of day workers and guests to go with it.”

There was more of this — minutiae that could be easily delegated, for the most part, all predicated on a prolonged lockdown Ray couldn’t seriously envision. A month of this? Three months? It was unimaginable. His certainty was tempered only by the nagging fact that the lockdown had already gone on an unreasonably long time.

Sue Sampel tapped at the door while Weingart was summing up. “We’re not finished,” Ray called out.

She leaned into the room. “I know, but—”

“If Shulgin is here, he can wait a few minutes.”

“He’s not here, but he called to cancel. He’s headed down to the south gate.”

“The south gate? What’s so fucking important about the south gate?”

She smiled infuriatingly. “He said you’d understand if you took a look out your window.”

The huge eighteen-wheeled vehicle — powder-black and heavily armored — crawled along the road toward Blind Lake like an immense pill bug, timid for all its layered defenses. Where the driver’s cab should have been there was only a blunt cone fitted with sensors. The truck was reading the road, gauging its location according to buried transponders and GPS numbers. There was no human driver. The truck was driving itself.

By the time Chris and Elaine neared the south gate the road was already mobbed with off-duty day workers and office staff and a gaggle of high school kids. A pair of Civilian Security vans pulled up and discharged a dozen men in gray uniforms, who began waving the crowd back to what they deemed a safe distance.

The fence surrounding Blind Lake’s i

The gate that barred the road was hinged to swing open on a signal from the guardhouse or from a coded transponder. The guardhouse itself was a concrete bunker with slit windows, sturdy as bedrock but currently vacant; the resident guard had been pulled out when the lockdown went into effect.

Chris wormed his way to the front of the crowd, Elaine following with her hands on his shoulders. At last they came up against the highway barriers the security men were muscling into place. Elaine pointed out a car just arriving: “Isn’t that Ari Weingart? And I think the guy with him is Raymond Scutter.”

Chris took note of the face. Ray Scutter was an interesting story. Fifteen years ago he had been a prominent critic of astrobiology, “the science of wishful thinking.” The Martian disappointment had lent Ray’s point of view a great deal of credibility, at least until the Terrestrial Planet Finders began to yield interesting results. The Crossbank/Blind Lake breakthroughs had made his pessimism look shortsighted and mean-spirited, but Ray Scutter had survived through a combination of graceful backpedalling and a convert’s enthusiasm. The genuinely solid contributions he made to the first wave of geological and atmospheric surveys had not only rescued his career but allowed him to move up through the bureaucracy to important administrative positions at Crossbank and now the Lake. Ray Scutter would have made an interesting subject, Chris thought, but he was supposed to be hard to approach, and his public pronouncements were so predictably banal that better journalists than Chris had written him off as a lost cause.