The main street had played up to the Blind Lake theme with more gusto than taste. The two-story brick commercial buildings appeared to date from the middle of the last century, yellow brick pressed from local river-bottom clay, and they might have been attractive if not for the wave of hucksterism that had overtaken them. The “lobster” theme was everywhere, inevitably. Lobster plush toys, holographic lobster window displays, lobster posters, lobster cocktail napkins, ceramic garden lobsters…

Elaine followed his gaze and guessed his thought. “You should have had dinner at the Mariott,” she said. “Lobster fucking bisque.”

He shrugged. “It’s only people trying to make a buck, support their families.”

“Cashing in on ignorance. I really don’t get this whole lobster thing. They don’t look anything at all like lobsters. They don’t have an exoskeleton and God knows they don’t have an ocean to swim around in.”

“People have to call them something.”

“People may have to call them something, but do they have to paint them onto neckties?”

The Blind Lake work had been massively vulgarized, undeniably so. But what bothered Elaine, Chris believed, was the suspicion that somewhere among the nearer stars some reciprocal act might be taking place. Plastic caricatures of human beings lolling behind glazed windows under an alien sun. Her own face, perhaps, imprinted on a souvenir mug from which unimaginable creatures sipped mysterious liquids.

The van was a dusty blue electric vehicle that had been sent from Blind Lake. The driver didn’t seem to want to talk but might be listening, Chris thought, trying to feel out their “positions” — the public relations office doing a little undercover work. Conversation was awkward, therefore. They rolled out of town along the interstate and turned off onto a two-lane road in silence. Already, despite the lack of obvious markers beyond the PRIVATE ROAD — U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY and DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY signs, they were in privileged territory. Any unregistered vehicle would have been stopped at the first (hidden) quarter-mile checkpoint. The road was under constant surveillance, visual and electronic. He recalled something Lacy had said: at the Lake, even the prairie dogs carry passes.

Chris turned his head to the window and watched the landscape scroll past. Dormant farmland gave way to open grassland and rolling meadows sprinkled with wildflowers. Dry country, but not desert. Last night a storm had rumbled through town while Chris sheltered with Lacy in her apartment. Rain had swept the streets clean of oil, filled the storm drains with soggy newsprint and rotting weeds, provoked a late blush of color from the prairie.

A couple of years ago lightning had ignited a brush fire that came within a quarter mile of Blind Lake. Firefighters had been shipped in from Montana, Idaho, Alberta. It had all looked very photogenic on the news feeds — and it emphasized the fragility of the fledgling New Astronomy — but the risk to the facility had never been great. It was just another case, the scientists at Crossbank had grumbled, of Blind Lake grabbing the headlines. Blind Lake was Crossbank’s glamorous younger sister, prone to fits of vanity, hypnotized by the paparazzi…

But any evidence of the fire had been erased by two summers and two winters. By wild grass and wild nettles and those little blue flowers Chris couldn’t name. By nature’s enviable talent for forgetting.

They had started at Crossbank because Crossbank should have been easier.

The Crossbank installation was focused on a biologically active world circling HR8832 — second planet from that sun, depending on how you tallied up the ring of planetesimals circling half an AU inward toward the star. The planet was an iron-cored, rocky body with 1.4 times the mass of the Earth and an atmosphere relatively rich in oxygen and nitrogen. Both poles were frigid agglutinations of water ice at temperatures occasionally cold enough to freeze out CO₂, but the equatorial regions were warm, shallow seas over continental plates and rich with life.

That life was simply not glamorous. It was multicellular but purely photosynthetic; evolution on HR8832/B seemed to have neglected to invent the mitochondria necessary for animal life. Which is not to say that the landscape was not often spectacular, particularly the huge stromatolite-like colonies of photosynthetic bacteria that rose, often two or three stories tall, from the green sea-surface mats; or the fivefold symmetry of the so-called coral stars, anchored to the sea-beds and floating half-immersed in open water.

It was an exquisitely beautiful world and it had captured a great deal of public attention back when Crossbank was the only installation of its kind. The equatorial seas yielded stunning sunsets every 47.4 terrestrial hours on average, often with stratocumulus clouds billowing far higher than any on Earth, cloud-castles extracted from a Victorian bicycle ad. Time-adjusted twenty-four-hour video loops of the equatorial seascape had been popular as faux windows for a few years.

A beautiful world, and it had yielded a host of insights into planetary and biological evolution. It continued to produce extraordinarily useful data. But it was static. Nothing much moved on the second world of HR8832. Only the wind, the water, and the rain.

Eventually it had been labeled “the planet where nothing happens,” a phrase coined by a Chicago Tribune columnist who considered the whole New Astronomy just one more federally funded font of gaudy but useless knowledge. Crossbank had learned to be wary of journalists. Visions East had negotiated at length to get Chris, Elaine, and Sebastian inside for a week. There had been no guarantee of cooperation, and it was probably only Elaine’s rep as a solid science journalist that had finally sold the public relations staff. (Or Chris’s reputation, perhaps, that had made them so difficult to convince.)

But the Crossbank visit had been generally successful. Both Elaine and Sebastian claimed to have done good work there.

For Chris it had been a little more problematic. The head of the Observation and Interpretation Department had flatly refused to speak to him. His best quote had come from the kid in the cafeteria. It could end at any time. And even the kid in the cafeteria had finally leaned forward to eyeball Chris’s name badge and said, “You’re the guy who wrote that book?”

Chris had confessed that he was, yes, the guy who wrote that book.

And the kid had nodded once and stood up and carried his half-eaten lunch to the recycling rack without saying another word.

Two surveillance aircraft passed overhead during the next ten minutes, and the van’s dashboard all-pass transponder began to blinking spastically. They had crossed any number of checkpoints already, well before they reached the steel and accordion-wire fence that snaked into the prairie in both directions, the steel and cinderblock guardhouse from which a uniformed officer stepped to wave them to a stop.

The guard examined the driver’s ID and then Elaine’s and Sebastian Vogel’s, finally Chris’s. He spoke into his personal microphone briefly, then supplied the three journalists with clip-on badges. At last he waved them through.

And they were inside. As simple as that, barring the weeks of negotiation between the magazine and the Department of Energy.

So far it was just one stretch of rolling wild grass separated from another by chain-link fence and barbed wire. But the entry was more than figurative; it carried, at least for Chris, a genuine sense of ceremony. This was Blind Lake.

This was practically another planet.

He looked back as the van gathered speed and saw the gate glide shut with what he would remember, much later, as a terrible finality.