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Plateau.”
    “Well, sort of a tent. An inflatable habitat airdropped from Beijing. Rechargeable fuel cells, heat at night, all the satellite channels.”
    “Just like Roy Chapman Andrews?”
    “Hey,” she said. “I’m a journalist, not a martyr.”
     
     
     

Chapter Five
     
     
    To Marguerite’s dismay, and Tessa’s grave disappointment, video and download reception did not improve over the weekend. Nor was it possible to put a call or net connection through beyond the fenced perimeter of Blind Lake.
    Marguerite assumed this was some new incarnation of Blind Lake’s elaborate security protocols. There had been several such shutdowns back at Crossbank during the time Marguerite had worked there. Most had lasted only a few hours, though one such occasion (an unauthorized overflight that turned out to be nothing more than a private pilot who’d burned out both his nav chips and his transponders) had created a minor scandal and sealed the security perimeter for nearly a week.
    Here at Blind Lake the shutdown was, at least for Marguerite, not much of an inconvenience, at least so far. She hadn’t planned to go anywhere, and there was nobody on the outside to whom she urgently needed to speak. Her father lived in Ohio and called her every Saturday, but he was savvy about security issues and wouldn’t worry unduly when he couldn’t get hold of her. It was a problem for Tessa, however.
    Not that Tess was one of those kids who lived in front of the video panel. Tess liked to play outside, though she mostly played alone, and Blind Lake was one of the few places on Earth where a child could wander unaccompanied with negligible fear of drugs or crime. This weekend, though, the weather wasn’t cooperating. A crisp, sunlit Saturday morning gave way by noon to rolling asphalt-colored clouds and brief, violent squalls of rain. October sounding the horn of winter. The temperature dropped to a chilly ten degrees Centigrade, and although Tess ventured out once—to the garage, to root through a box of dolls not yet unpacked from the move—she was quickly back inside, shivering under her flannel jacket.
    Sunday was the same, with wind gusting around the eaves troughs and piping through the bathroom ceiling vent. Marguerite asked Tess if there was anyone from school she’d like to play with. Tess was dubious at first but finally named a girl called Edie Jerundt. She wasn’t certain about the spelling, but there were, thank goodness, only a few J’s in the Blind Lake intramural access directory.
    Connie Jerundt, Edie’s mother, turned out to be a sequence analyst from Imaging who promptly volunteered to bring Edie over for a play date. (Without even asking Edie, who was, Marguerite had to assume, just as bored as Tess.) They arrived within the hour. Mother and daughter looked so much alike they might have been Russian dolls, one nesting comfortably inside the other, distinct only in their dimensions. Both were mousy and wide-eyed and tousle-haired, features softened by Connie’s adulthood but concentrated, grotesquely, in Edie’s small face.
    Edie Jerundt had brought along a handful of recent downloads, and the two girls settled down immediately in front of the video panel. Connie stayed a quarter of an hour, making nervous conversation about the lengthy security shutdown and how inconvenient it was proving—she had hoped to make a trip into Constance for some early Christmas shopping—then excused herself and promised to stop by and pick up Edie before five.
    Marguerite watched the two girls as they sat in the living room staring at the video panel.
    The downloads were a bit babyish for Tess,
Panda Girl
adventures, and Edie had brought along those image-synched glasses that were supposed to be bad for your eyes if you wore for them for more than a few hours. Both girls flinched from the enhanced 3-D action sequences.
    Apart from that they might have been alone. They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, inclined at