Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

hasn’t mentioned this to me. I swear to God, he’s like some fucking Slavic clam. What exactly is a ‘data quarantine’ meant to accomplish?”
    “The regs were written back when Crossbank was just beginning to pull images. It’s one of those paranoid scenarios from the congressional hearings. The idea was that Crossbank or Blind Lake might download something dangerous, obviously nothing physical, but a virus or a worm of some kind… you know what steganography is?”
    “Data encrypted into photographs or images.” He didn’t remind Weingart that he, Ray, had testified at those hearings. Information warfare had been a hot topic at the time. The Luddite lobby had feared that Blind Lake might import some pernicious alien self-replicating digital program or, for God’s sake, a deadly meme, which would then spread through terrestrial data routes wreaking unknowable havoc.
    Wary as he often was of Blind Lake’s groping into the unknown, the idea was preposterous. The aboriginals of UMa47/E could hardly know they were being spied on… and even if they did, images processed at the Lake had traveled, however mysteriously, at the conventional speed of light. It would need both an impossible perceptivity and a ridiculously patient desire for revenge for them to react in any hostile way. Still, he had been forced to admit, dangerous steganography was not an absolute impossibility, at least in the abstract. So a series of contingency plans had been written into the already immense web of security plans surrounding the Lake. Even though, in Ray’s opinion, it was the biggest crock of astronomical shit since Girolamo Fracastoro’s theory that syphilis was caused by the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.
    Had those bullshit edicts actually been called into effect? “One problem with that idea,” he told Weingart. “No provocation. We haven’t downloaded anything suspicious.”
    “Not yet, anyway,” Weingart said.
    “You know something I don’t?”
    “Hardly. But let’s say if there was a problem at Crossbank—”
    “Come on. Crossbank is looking at oceans and bacteria.”
    “I know, but if—”
    “And we’re imaging completely different targets in any case. Their work doesn’t reflect on ours.”
    “No, but if there was a problem with the
process
somehow—”
    “Something endemic to the Eye, you mean?”
    “If there was some kind of problem with the O/BECs at Crossbank, DoE or the military might have decided to put us under a precautionary quarantine.”
    “They could at least have warned us.”
    “Information jamming is two-way. No in, no out. We have to assume they don’t want so much as a carrier wave getting through.”
    “That doesn’t preclude a warning.”
    “Unless they were in a hurry.”
    “This is ridiculously speculative, and I hope you and Shulgin haven’t been spreading it around. Rumors can cause panic.”
    Weingart looked like he wanted to say something, but bit it back.
    “Anyway,” Ray said, “it’s out of our hands. The pressing question is what we can do for ourselves until somebody unbuttons the fence.”
    Weingart nodded and began to read from his list. “Supplies. We pipe in our drinking water, and that hasn’t been interrupted, but without intervention we’ll run short of some foodstuffs before the end of the week and face a starvation-level crisis by the end of November. I’m assuming we’ll be resupplied, but it might be a good idea to segregate our surplus and maybe even post guards over it in the meantime.”
    “I can’t imagine this…
siege…
going on until Thanksgiving.”
    “Well, but we’re talking ‘what-if’ here—”
    “All right, all right. What else?”
    “Medical supplies, same deal, and the on-campus clinic isn’t set up to deal with serious or widespread illness or injuries. If we had a fire we’d have to ship burn victims to a major hospital or suffer needless fatalities. Not much we can do about that, either, except ask the