Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online

scurried downstairs to hunt for her shoes.
    Tess remained at the mirror, twining her hair around her right forefinger.
    “Tess?”
    The hair made a glossy curl from fingernail to knuckle, then fell away.
    “Tess? Did you have a good time with Edie?”
    “I guess.”
    “Maybe you should tell her so.”
    Tess shrugged.
    “Maybe you should tell her now. She’s downstairs, getting ready to go.”
    But by the time Tess had loped down to the front door, both Edie and her mother were already gone.
     
     
    By Monday, what had begun as a tedious inconvenience began to feel more like a crisis.
    Marguerite dropped Tess off at school on her way to Hubble Plaza. The crowd of parents in the parking lot—including Connie Jerundt, who waved at Marguerite from her car window—boiled with rumors. Since there was no local emergency to account for the shutdown, something must have happened outside, something big enough to create a security crisis; but what? And why hadn’t anyone been told?
    Marguerite refused to take part in the speculation. Obviously (or at least it seemed obvious to Marguerite), the logical thing to do was to get on with the work at hand. It might not be possible to talk to the outside world, but the outside world was still providing Blind Lake’s power and presumably still expected Blind Lake’s people to go about their business. She kissed Tess good-bye, watched her daughter walk a long stochastic loop through the playground, and drove off when the bell sounded.
    The rain had stopped but October had taken charge of the weather, a cold wind blowing out of a gem-blue sky. She was glad she had insisted on a sweater for Tess. For herself she had selected a vinyl windbreaker, which proved inadequate on the long hike from the Hubble Plaza parking facility to the lobby of the east wing. Snow before long, Marguerite thought, and Christmas coming, if you looked past the looming headland of Thanksgiving. The change in the weather made the quarantine that much more unsettling, as if isolation and anxiety had rolled in with the thin Canadian air.
    As she waited for the elevator Marguerite caught a glimpse of Ray, her ex-husband, ducking into the lobby convenience shop, probably for his morning fix of DingDongs. Ray was a man of fiercely regular habits, one of them being DingDongs for breakfast. Ray used to go to amazing lengths to guarantee his supply, even during business trips or on vacation. He packed DingDongs in Tupperware in his carry-on luggage. A day without DingDongs brought out the worst in him: his petulance, his near-tantrums at the slightest frustration. She kept her eye on the shop entrance while the elevator inched down from the tenth floor. Just as the bell chimed, Ray emerged with a small bag in his hand. The DingDongs, for sure. Which he would devour, no doubt, behind the closed door of his office: Ray didn’t like to be seen eating sweets. Marguerite pictured him with a DingDong in each fist, nibbling at them like a mad squirrel, dribbling crumbs over his starched white shirt and funereal tie. She stepped into the elevator with three other people and punched her floor promptly, making sure the door closed before Ray could run for it.
     
     
    Marguerite’s own work—though she loved it and had fought hard to get it—sometimes made her feel like a voyeur. A paid, dispassionate voyeur; but a voyeur nonetheless.
    She hadn’t felt that way at Crossbank; but her talents had been wasted at Crossbank, where she had spent five years distilling botanical details from archival surveys, the kind of scut-work any bright postgraduate student could have done. She could still recite the tentative Latin binomials for eighteen varieties of bacterial mats. After a year there she had grown so accustomed to the sight of the ocean on HR8832/B that she had imagined she could smell it, smell the near-toxic levels of chlorine and ozone the photochromatic assays had detected, a sour and vaguely oily smell, like drain cleaner.