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another corner of the lab. This was a weather simulator, with intricate sensors to measure rainfall, wind speed, barometric pressure. Banks of light bulbs along the top rim could re-create all manner of sunlight and moonlight, cloud cover and blue skies. They could make it snow, even, and during his orientation tour, the lab assistant said, “Watch,” before hitting a combination of buttons that caused an eclipse followed by a snowstorm that turned the glass box into a squall of white in an instant. “Now he’s just showing off,” said the supervisor who was guiding Jack around. “Wait,” added the assistant, “I can do a hurricane too.”
    Midsummer, weeks before the fair, Jack took Cynthia to the lab one night. He knew roughly when people would be there and he waited until it was late enough to be empty. The graduate students kept long hours, scattered around the lab with clipboards, but no one stayed too deep into the evening. If anyone wondered why he was there, he could always say he had come for more data sheets. He knew which filing cabinet they were kept in.
    When they walked in and he flipped the lights on, she paused, then rushed right up to the model of the river. “Holy shit,” she said. “I can’t believe you haven’t brought me here before.” She submerged her hand into the water, waved it around, splashed a miniature arbor on the western bank. “Clearer than the real one, I guess.”
    â€œNo mud,” said Jack.
    â€œI guess they didn’t want it exactly the same?” Cynthia said.
    Jack showed her the carefully stamped town names crawling up the sides and the elbow bends at mile fourteen and mile nineteen. At mile five was a one-lane bridge, its pilings and guardrails molded from spray-painted Styrofoam. The sign warning of its height restriction—eight feet—was there as well. “They had set builders from the film school make this whole thing,” he said.
    Cynthia walked one side, then the other. Town to town she wandered, peering at the houses and trailing a finger through the water. Occasionally she buried both her hands to her wrists. “We should put some fish in it,” she said.
    Jack laughed. “When I’m ready to quit, maybe.”
    â€œOh, come on,” she said, smiling. “They’ll never know it was us. And how fun would that be to come in here some morning expecting the same old thing and see pet-store fish swimming up and down? We could get the neon kind.”
    She took her hand out of the water, dried it on her jeans, and went to the vitrine. “What’s this?” she asked.
    Jack joined her. “Weather simulator,” he said. “They can make a typhoon if they want.”
    â€œReally?”
    He pointed to the control panel, padlocked. “Those buttons and dials, there are specific combinations for all these different conditions. Whatever you can dream up, they can do.”
    â€œBlizzards?” Cynthia asked.
    Jack nodded.
    â€œFunnel cloud?”
    â€œAnything,” Jack said. “It’s like magic.”
    â€œI want to move here,” she said. “The professors won’t care, right?”
    Tacked to the walls were maps and pie charts and bar graphs littered with pushpins. Geological surveys revealed the strata beneath the ground, while images from satellites gave long-range views.
    â€œSo this is where the data you collect goes,” Cynthia said. “Do you know what all this means?” She focused on two red and green axes overlaid on an old black-and-white photograph.
    â€œNo,” Jack said.
    â€œIt must mean a lot, though.”
    â€œWhy do you say that?”
    She was back at the indoor river now, on the northern terminus. “I don’t know, so many numbers and patterns. It must add up to something. Do the heads of the study know?”
    â€œThey’re only just in the middle of it. It’s supposed to go on