Blind Lake

Back at Crossbank, Chris had toured the O/BECs from the gallery level. He hadn’t been invited into the works.

The sterile suit was comfortable as such things went — cool air piped in, a wide and transparent visor — but Chris still felt a little claustrophobic inside it. Charlie led him through an access door into the eerily quiet O/BEC chamber. The platens were white enameled cylinders each the size of a small truck. They were suspended on isolation platforms that would filter out any groundborne vibration short of a major earthquake. Strange, delicate machines. “It could end at any time,” Chris murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Something an engineer at Crossbank told me. He said he liked the rush, working with a process that could end at any time.”

“That’s part of it, for sure. These are technologies of a whole new order.” He stepped over a bundle of Teflon-insulated wires. “These machines are looking at planets, but ten years after that first NASA co

Or if they’re doing it, Chris thought. There was a fringe of hard-core skeptics who believed there was no real data behind the images: that the O/BECs were simply… well, dreaming.

“So,” Charlie said, “we really have two research projects going on at once: guys at the Plaza trying to sort out the data, and people here trying to figure out how we get the data. But we can’t look too closely. We can’t take the O/BECs apart or dose them with X-rays or anything invasive like that. You measure it, you break it. Blind Lake didn’t just duplicate the Crossbank installation; we had to walk our machines through the same development process, except we used the old high-def interferometers instead of the Galileo Array, deliberately stepping down the signal strength until the machines learned the trick, whatever that trick is. There are only two installations like this in the world, and efforts to create a third have been consistently unsuccessful. We’re balanced on the head of a pin. That’s what your guy at Crossbank was talking about. Something absolutely strange and wonderful is happening here, and we don’t understand it. All we can do is nurse it along and hope it doesn’t get tired and turn itself off. It could end at any time. Sure it could. And for any reason.”

He led Chris past the last of the O/BEC platens, through a series of chambers to a room where they stripped off their sterile suits.

“What you have to remember,” Charlie said, “is that we didn’t design these machines to do what they do. There’s no linear process, no A then B then C. We just set them in motion. We defined the goals and we set them in motion, and what happened after that was an act of God.” He folded the sterile suit crisply and left it on a rack for cleaning.

Charlie walked him through the busiest sector of the Alley, two huge chambers wallpapered with video surfaces, rooms full of attentive men and women hovering over mutable desktops. Chris was reminded of the old NASA facilities at Houston. “Looks like Mission Control.”

“For good reason,” Charlie said. “NASA used to control the Galileo Array with interfaces like these. When the problems got unmanageably bad they routed this stuff through the O/BECs. This is where we talk to the platens about alignment, depth of field, magnification factors, things like that.”

Down to the finest detail. A monitor on the far wall showed raw video. Lobsterville. Except Elaine was right. It was a ridiculous misnomer. The aboriginals didn’t look remotely like lobsters, except perhaps for their roughly textured skin. In fact Chris had often thought there was something bovine about them, something about their slow-moving indifference, those big blank cueball eyes.

Subject was in a food conclave, deep inside a dimly lit food well. Mossy growth and vegetable husks everywhere, and grub-like things crawled through the moist refuse. Watching these guys eat, Chris thought, was a great appetite killer. He turned back to Charlie Grogan.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “it could end at any time, that’s the truth. You’re staying at the community center, Ari tells me?”

“For now, anyway.”

“You want a ride back? I’m basically done here for the day.”

Chris checked his watch. Almost five o’clock. “Sounds better than walking.”

“Assuming they plowed the road.”

A good couple of inches of fresh snow had come down while Chris was inside the Alley, and the wind had picked up. Chris flinched from it as soon as he stepped outside. He had been born and raised in Southern California, and despite all the time he’d spent in the East, these harsh winter days still shocked him. It wasn’t just bad weather, it was weather that could kill you. Walk the wrong way, get lost, die of hypothermia before dawn.

“It’s bad this year,” Charlie admitted. “People say it’s the shrinking ice cap, all that cold water flowing into the Pacific. We get these supercharged Canadian fronts rolling through. You get used to it after a while.”

Maybe so, Chris thought. The way you get used to living under siege.

Charlie Grogan’s car was parked in the roofed lot, plugged into a charge socket. Chris slipped into the passenger seat gratefully. It was a bachelor’s car: the backseat was full of old QCES journals and dog toys. As soon as Charlie pulled out of the parking compound the tires slipped on compressed snow and the car fishtailed before it finally gripped the asphalt. Harsh sulfur-dot light columns marked the way to the main road, sentinals cloaked in vortices of falling snow.

“It could end at any time,” Chris said. “Kind of like the quarantine. It could end. But it doesn’t.”

“Have you turned off that little recorder yet?”

“Yes. You mean, is this for the record? No. It’s conversation.”

“Coming from a journalist…”

“I don’t work for the tabloids. Honest, I’m just mumbling. We can go on talking about the weather if you like.”

“No insult intended.”

“None taken.”

“You got a little burned on that Galliano thing, right?”

Now who’s pushing? But he felt he owed this man an honest response. “I don’t know if you can say that or not.”

“I guess if you say unflattering things about a national hero, you’re taking a certain risk.”

“I didn’t set out to tarnish his reputation. Much of it is deserved.” Ted Galliano had made national news twenty years ago by patenting a new family of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. He had also made a fortune founding a next-generation pharmaceutical trust to exploit those patents. Galliano was the prototype of the twenty-first century scientist-entrepreneur — like Edison or Marconi in the nineteenth, also products of the commercial environment of their day, also brilliant. Like Edison or Marconi, he had become a public hero. He had attracted the best genomic and proteinomic people to him. A child born today in the Continental Commonwealth could expect a lifetime of one hundred years or more, and no small part of that was due to Galliano’s antiviral and antigeriatric drugs.

What Chris had discovered was that Galliano was a ruthless and sometimes unscrupulous businessman — as Edison had been. He had lobbied Washington for extended patent protection; he had driven competitors out of the market or absorbed them through dubious mergers and leverage schemes; worse, Chris had uncovered several sources who were convinced Galliano had engaged in blatantly illegal stock manipulation. His last big commercial effort had been a genomic vaccine against artheriosclerotic plaque — never perfected but much discussed, and the prospect of it, however inflated, had driven Galtech stocks to dizzying heights. Ultimately the bubble had burst, but not before Galliano and friends cashed out.

“Could you prove any of this?”