Blind Lake Read Free Page B

another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.
    The yellow-windowed bus stopped at the distant guardhouse. A second bus pulled up behind it. Tess waited for the guard to wave the buses through. Almost a thousand people worked days at Blind Lake—clerks and support staff and the people who ran the stores—and the guard always waved the buses through.
    Tonight, however, the buses stopped and stayed stopped.
    Tess
, the wind said. Which made Tess think about Mirror Girl and all the trouble that had caused her back at Crossbank…
    “Tess!”
    She jumped involuntarily. The voice had been real. Her mother’s.
    “Sorry if I scared you—”
    “It’s okay.” Tess turned and was pleased and reassured by the sight of her mother coming across the broad, neat lawn. Tessa’s mother was a tall woman, her long brown hair somewhat askew around her face, her ankle-length skirt flirting with the wind. The setting sun turned everything faintly red: the sky, the town houses, her mother’s face.
    “You have your stuff?”
    “At the front door.”
    Tess saw her mother glance away toward the distant road. Another bus had come up behind the first two, and now all three were motionless at the gate.
    Tess said, “Is something wrong with the fence?”
    “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.
     
     
     

Chapter Three
     
     
    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