“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.

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.