The God Particle (16 page)

“And Mike would lose his chance for Nobel. Which is all he seems to talk about anymore.”

“He told me he didn’t care about Nobel,” Samantha says.

“Yeah, he tells everyone that. He doesn’t want to come across as single-minded. He’s afraid people will think he’s shallow.”

“I guess he doesn’t want me here because he’s afraid he might have to share the spotlight. Because if my luminosity improvements are the difference. . . .”

“Yeah,” Larry says. “I know. But Mike thinks your luminosity review is a waste of time. He’s confident it’s the software, that loosening the triggers is the key.”

“He said that?”

Larry looks away as if suddenly uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Mike is my friend.”

“Maybe so,” Samantha agrees. “But he’s also in charge of the Higgs search at a twelve-billion-dollar particle accelerator and shouldn’t be playing favorites with the methodology. He should be open to any idea that might help.”

“He is. It’s just . . . I don’t know.”

“
I
know. He’s threatened by me. Because of Nobel or because I’m a woman or whatever. We’ll see what he has to say when I produce Higgs.”

“Don’t say anything, okay? I don’t want him to lose trust in me.”

“I won’t. Don’t worry about that.”

He stands there looking at her. Allows himself to smile with her.

“I’m glad we had this talk, Larry. I think we’ll work well together.”

“Me, too.”

“You want to get a drink after work?”

A spike of exhilaration and gooseflesh he hopes isn’t obvious.

“Sure.”

“Great. But let’s go to Wichita Falls. I’m already tired of the bars around here.”

“Fantastic, then,” Larry says.

7

Mike sits through the Monday morning round of dreadful staff meetings, presentations in dark rooms describing the previous week’s lack of progress toward Higgs. He tries to ignore the feeling of things slipping through his fingers. Entertains himself with fantasies of the moment when breakthrough might be achieved, when he might win back Donovan’s confidence in him and more importantly prove to jealous physicists around the world that he is, in fact, qualified to be here, that he brings something memorable to the field of experimental physics. And then he’s got Larry to worry about; Larry, who always manages to get himself in trouble when he finds an unwilling woman who strikes his fancy. Hell, Mike might as well call himself a stalker now, too, e-mailing Kelly after she specifically told him she wasn’t available. Interesting how he can lecture Larry on following Amy around and then sit here, praying that a woman he met on an airplane will write him back. Interesting how he’ll sting Larry by bringing up Rachelle, and then walk straight back to his computer after the morning meetings to check his e-mail. How he’ll sit here watching the system tray for more envelopes, which occasionally arrive, tantalizing him, only to turn out to be a subordinate’s vacation request or a new HR policy or last week’s GEM cockpit chart. And this is ridiculous. He can’t just sit here and worry about a stupid e-mail message when he should be fighting for his goddamned job. Is he really going to allow Samantha to win Donovan’s approval uncontested? Let her take his job?

He picks up the phone and reaches his boss.

“This is Landon.”

“You have any plans for lunch?”

Donovan doesn’t answer right away. And then, “Nothing specific. I was thinking of taking out Samantha. Is this about her?”

“No, Landon, it’s about the Higgs search. And what I’m going to do to make it a success.”

Donovan spends a moment considering this. “If that’s the case,” he says, “I should bring Samantha. So she doesn’t get any farther behind than she already is.”

“I’d prefer if it were just you and me, actually. There are some personal issues I’d like to discuss as well.”

“So this
is
about Samantha.”

“Are you free for lunch or not?”

“Sure, Mike. I’ll stop by your office around 11:30.”

8

Donovan is the world’s biggest fan of Tony Roma’s Original Baby Back Ribs. Mike can’t remember a lunch date with his boss that didn’t involve barbecue sauce under his fingernails and pork between his teeth and the lemony smell of Wet Naps (because you can’t order anything else on the menu, not when you’re with Donovan—he considers such betrayal a personal affront to his culinary tastes). And while they wait for their meaty entrées among a flurry of annoyingly enthusiastic waitstaff, Mike steps immediately into the confrontation he avoided on the way over.

“Did you bring Samantha here to replace me?”

“Right to the point, I see.”

“Because if you did, I think it’s a mistake. She may be a wizard at luminosity, and maybe it’s a good idea to replace Paul Funk if we have her, but she isn’t the best person to run this facility.”

“Most high-energy physicists think the same thing about you.”

Mike nods. “Yes, and we both know that. You knew that when you hired me. I don’t understand what’s changed.”

“Nothing’s changed. I didn’t bring Samantha here to replace you.”

“So am I being paranoid, then? Because I get the feeling if I don’t produce something soon, I may not be around to produce anything at all.”

Mike expects an immediate answer, hopes for it, something like
Yes, Mike, you’re being paranoid.
But Donovan doesn’t say anything for a long time. And what he does finally say, he says without the bravado that is normally smeared across his words like grease.

“Mike, you’ve done a great job here. You’ve done everything I’ve asked you, and you’ve been honest with me, and you’ve treated me with respect even though it must bug the shit out of you when I try to stick my nose into the physics. But you have to understand that I have investors to answer to. And they may know—as you explained this morning—that it takes time to do this sort of science. They may know this, but it doesn’t make them any less demanding. And when they demand from me, I demand from you. That’s how the world works.”

Just then the ribs arrive, delivered by a glassy-eyed girl wearing a stained striped shirt. Conversation ceases as Donovan dives into the slab of meat.

“You guys need anything else?” the waitress asks.

“More Wet Naps,” Donovan mumbles.

Later, as they both push aside caveman plates of clean bones, Mike asks his boss why he chose Samantha in the first place.

“You gotta love Wet Naps,” Donovan answers. “I always ask for extras and then put them in my car, in my golf bag, wherever. They’re so refreshing.”

Mike picks up the plastic wrapper of his Wet Nap and finds a phone number and web address on the reverse side.

“You could probably order a whole case of them from the manufacturer,” he says. “Then you could keep them everywhere.”

“What a fucking great idea,” Donovan says sincerely. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”

“That’s me,” Mike mumbles. “I’m the idea guy.”

Donovan leans forward a little and lowers his volume. “Look, Mike. Samantha came recommended, all right? I may have poured six billion of my own dollars into this machine, but I still answer to someone, same as you.”

And now Donovan looks around, like someone in a movie, as if he’s worried about surveillance. “Something’s going on. This woman, I was asked to take her on nearly a year ago, and I declined. I have no interest in replacing the people you hire. But over the past few months the pressure has gotten stronger and stronger until I finally didn’t have any choice. I don’t know what the big deal is, but this guy . . . he wanted her here, and so here she is. All right? And she’s going to have her hand in everything. Her title may be Beam division head, but her influence will reach a lot farther than that.”

“Landon—”

“And the Grid? I can’t just. . . . That thing is the most powerful computer system in the world, Mike. If I ask for more money—”

“Why do you have to ask?”

“Because I’m broke, that’s why! I sunk everything I had into this machine and it wasn’t enough. I had commitments from hundreds of investors, and then after we broke ground they began pulling out. A few here, a few there, and pretty soon it was looking like the first super collider all over again—dig some of the hole and then run out of money.”

“Why did so many investors pull out?”

“I don’t know. But I kept pouring in money to keep the proj-ect going, hoping for a miracle. And about the time I was ready to throw in the towel, I got one. A big investor. Someone I’d never heard of, believe it or not. And here we are.”

Mike leans back in his seat and looks around the restaurant. It’s not lost on him that this building, these people, they’re all here because of Landon and his secret investor. He wonders what that must feel like, to directly influence so many lives, to change the course of history for an entire town.

“Why are you telling me this now?” he asks.

“Because I’m afraid things might change. I told you before I didn’t bring Samantha here to replace you, but that’s only part of the truth. Just because I don’t want to replace you doesn’t mean it can’t happen. My suggestion to you is to come up with some results. Anything, even if it’s just a tease, to get this guy off my back. But I can’t upgrade the Grid for you right now.”

“How do you expect me to do the job if I don’t have the right tools?”

“You’ve got the most powerful accelerator in the world,” Donovan snaps. “That isn’t enough?”

“But if we aren’t evaluating the data properly—”

Donovan leans forward, crosses his arms in front of him. “I mentioned this to Samantha, you know.”

“You mentioned what?”

“About upgrading the Grid. You know what she said? She said we have more than we need. She said we have a surplus of computing power and storage. Our dedicated network of processors dwarfs what they’re planning to use when the new detector at CERN goes live next year.”

Mike says nothing. Waits.

“She said if there is any problem with the Grid, it’s the software. Either it’s not optimized well enough or there are weaknesses in the design.”

This is a direct indictment of Larry, who oversees the Grid and the hundreds of developers whose applications run on it.

“She’s already looking into the program structure, even the code. Don’t tell Larry.”

“What do you mean, don’t tell him? You’re going to let her meddle in his affairs and not even tell him?”

“There’s no way to know how he would react. The guy’s a little high strung, Mike.”

“Landon.”

“I know this is a lot to take in. I know it. I wish I had better news. I know you got this fucking collider up and running more quickly than anyone thought possible. I know that. But some people’s memories are shorter than mine.”

Donovan stands and stuffs a handful of Wet Naps into the pocket of his slacks. A handful of free Wet Naps into a pair of five-hundred-dollar slacks. And before Mike can wriggle his way out of the booth, his boss leans down and adds, “Find me something, Mike. I can’t be any more honest with you than that.”

9

Donovan, back in his office after lunch. Sitting there, staring at his computer monitor, watching the stock ticker crawl by. Reads a little business news on Bloomberg, checks out the headlines on CNN. Sometimes he wonders what it’s all for. What really matters. Since he was a kid it was money, always money. Lemonade stand. Lawn mowing. Bike repair. There seemed to be something alluring and nearly evolutionary about equating success with quantifiable units—I have more bananas than you, I killed more buffalo than you, I control more square miles of Europe than you—so whatever Donovan could do to make money, he did. Worked shit jobs in high school. Alienated his friends by selling Amway in college. His prayers were to the gods of capitalism, his goal to achieve financial immortality. And someone up there must have listened, because one day the market noticed his little, self-funded telecom venture, and the exploding Internet economy turned him into a ten-figure man.

With the money came a kind of power. The ability to direct thousands of employees, the means to purchase companies and land and control a chunk of the Internet backbone. It was heady stuff for a while. But at some point Donovan realized that the most celebrated men weren’t simply powerful—they were also benevolent. They championed causes for the greater good of humanity. Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Jesus—these men are who Donovan yearned to be compared to, not Bill Gates. He saw Congressional shortsightedness as his ticket to true greatness. The United States of America doesn’t have enough money to fund the advancement of particle physics? Landon Donovan does! He would be the answer to short-term politicians and their pork barrels. He would bypass the corruption-saturated lawmaking process and build the super collider on his own. Proving once again the power of human ingenuity. The inherent success of the American dream.

Instead he exposed the illusion, the hidden lie of capitalism. And what hypocrisy that would seem to be, coming from a man of his wealth, but how else to explain the utter lack of interest in his endeavor, the disregard for his grand idea? The stories he told Mike at lunch shame him, because lack of funding wasn’t necessarily the problem. The real barrier turned out to be something much more sinister and subversive—the old money power structure.

He couldn’t secure building permits from local governments. No cooperation from the state of Texas. Laughter from the U.S. Department of Energy. Wealthy benefactors looked the other way when he tried to arrange financial partnerships. Donovan would have been forced to give up the idea altogether if not for the call from Abraham Lange, if not for the man’s six billion dollars and—more important—his magical ability to open doors. A week after their agreement the civil barriers suddenly vanished. Permits were miraculously issued. Land ownership somehow clarified itself. Contractors jockeyed for the chance to bid on the tunnel and the detectors and the hangar-size buildings. It was amazing to Donovan that even in America, even when you built a powerful and relevant company from scratch, even when you were worth almost seven billion dollars, you could still be made to stand outside in the rain, you could be rejected by the old guard simply because you hadn’t been born into—