The nearby town of Two Rivers accepted the facility without complaint. Two Rivers had begun life as a mill town, survived as a hunting and fishing town, and had recently become an alternative to the suburbs for white-collar workers who commuted by fax and modem. The main street had been refurbished with imitation brickwork and gas lights, and a gourmet coffee shop had opened up next to the Baskin-Robbins. Lately there had been complaints about water-skiers chasing the ducks out of Lake Merced. Sports fishermen complained and hired charter planes to carry them farther from the encroachments of civilization, but the town was prospering for the first time in thirty years.

The construction of the research facility provoked little comment from the Town Council. Construction crews and equipment came up the highway and approached the site from the west along a corduroy logging road, often at night. There had been some expectation that the project would create employment among the townspeople, but that hope soon flickered and dimmed. Staff were trucked in as quietly as the concrete and cinder blocks; the only local work was temporary and involved the laying of high-capacity water and power lines. Even when the facility was up and running—doing whatever clandestine work it did—its employees stayed away from town. They lived in barracks on federal property; they shopped at a PX. They came into Two Rivers to arrange fishing trips, occasionally, and one or two strangers might stop by the bars or take in a movie at the Cineplex in the highway mall; but as a rule, they didn’t mingle.

One of the few townspeople who expressed any curiosity about the facility was Dexter Graham, a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School. Graham told his fiancee, Evelyn Woodward, that the installation made no sense. “Defense spending is passe. According to the papers, all the research budgets have been slashed. But there they are. Our own little Manhattan Project.”