The God Particle (32 page)

Kelly kneels over Mike, crying, begging for help.

Larry stands there, watching Mike die.

He knows something else is happening here. He can feel something wrong, the hum, in his bones and in his mind.

He could just let go. Let it all go.

But he also imagines the look on Kelly’s face when he appears in the room. An unexpected savior.

He opens the door and steps inside.

7

He’s awake now, his mind somehow free.

Steve does not want to destroy the super collider, but he sees no alternative.

In a perfect world, the benefits of a machine would far outweigh the costs, but this situation is far from perfect. A man desperately searching for meaning is a dangerous man, and Steve cannot allow him access to the machine, can allow no one access to it until mankind has truly accepted the concepts of logic and reason and the value of all life. And so he concentrates on the particles as they circle around the ring millions of times per second, concentrates so that he can direct them elsewhere, focus them through field, and the energy begins to run farther away from him, it whips around the room like a live wire, vaporizing everything in its path, he must get it under control, must focus it where he can do some kind of good, and he no longer possesses the strength to open his mouth, but he must make them understand, he can send them this, transmit this to them, and—

8

You have to run! Now!

Run!

Kelly hears footsteps behind her, and there is Larry, and she cries her thanks even as he threads his arms under Mike’s. Kelly grabs Mike’s feet and together they lurch out of the room, reaching the main hallway just as the lights go out. She sees Steve lying on the ground and she doesn’t want to leave him, either, but of course they cannot stay. They reach the glass exit doors almost running, and she guides Larry toward Mike’s car, fully aware that something is terribly out of control.

Donovan and Dobbelfeld have vanished.

They load Mike into the backseat, where Larry fishes the car key out of his pocket and then climbs into the driver’s seat. Kelly opens the door on the other side just as the car starts.

Larry backs out of the parking spot and points them away from the administrative building, accelerating.

They speed through the night, toward the exit. But will it be enough? The ring surrounds the town. Its circumference is fifty-four miles. They’ll never get away in time.

9

Mike hears it now, an alternating, whipping sound pitching high and low, like an enormous jump rope orbiting around a giant, phantom girl.

Like the metallic resonance of a long, flexible handsaw being flayed back and forth.

Like the subsonic rumble of a tornado.

And he watches the sky through the rear window as they drive away, half expecting it to light up with explosion, cringing as he waits for the shock wave to push his car off the road. It’s unimaginable that his brief contact with Steve Keeley has come to this. That the miracle of his fantastic perception should be so rudely and abruptly ended by selfishness and violence. Anger pushes through the shock and pain of his bullet wound and he doesn’t know where to direct it. Who should be responsible for destroying man’s extraordinary chance to find stunning breakthroughs in physics, in the search for human truth?

The men who created Steve, after all, are his destroyers.

10

Kelly’s breath hitches as they reach the highway and turn right. She glances behind them, from where they came, looking for fire or smoke, but instead she sees more of that bluish-yellow light, whipping about like an unmanned garden hose shooting a jet of water everywhere. Tearing holes in the administrative building, vaporizing asphalt and grass and trees, even disappearing into the night sky. But gradually the jet seems to focus, the unorganized beam tightening, and then it disappears, perhaps underground.

And Kelly somehow knows that when the sun rises on this place in the morning, the fifty-four-mile ring will be gone.

EPILOGUE

1

From the front page of the
Dallas Morning News,
two days later:

TRAGEDY, MAYHEM AT NTSSC IN OLNEY
Physics campus in lockdown after mysterious accident

Staff and Wire Reports

OLNEY, TX—Officials at the North Texas Superconducting Super Collider have shut down the $12 billion facility as the FBI investigates a mysterious explosion at the administrative office complex near the southernmost point of the 54-mile ring. Early reports from state and local authorities indicated a possible security breach, and foul play is suspected in the baffling destruction of the NTSSC 90,000-square-foot nerve center, which is located six miles south of Olney. Word also spread of possible damage to the ring, a collection of nearly 9,000 dipole magnets located in an elliptical tunnel 200 feet underground. The type of damage and how it may have occurred is not known at this time, but one government official, who chose to remain anonymous, spoke of a “power surge” at the facility so large that the bloom was detected by an orbiting NASA satellite. The cause of the possible surge is unknown at this time.

Just last week the NTSSC announced a possible breakthrough in the search for the Higgs boson, an elusive particle referred to by some as the God particle . . .

2

From the
L.A. Times,
another day later:

VALENCIA MAN MISSING
By Chera Lopez,
Times
Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES—Steve Keeley, 34, of Valencia, is missing after apparently driving away from his home earlier this week. Keeley was last seen by a neighbor who claimed Keeley backed quickly out of his home and sped away, leaving his garage door open.

According to his mother, Betty, of Grand Island, Nebraska, Keeley suffered severe head trauma last month while on a business trip in Zurich. Keeley was employed until recently by Automotive Excellence, a Swiss-based auto parts manufacturer. A representative from AE would not comment on Keeley’s sudden departure from the company two weeks ago, and strangely, no record of Keeley’s hospital stay in Zurich could be found. Keeley also never visited his physician regarding the reported head injury, although a local psychiatrist, Dr. Shelly Taylor, admitted to seeing him twice over the past two weeks. Dr. Taylor has been contacted by Valencia police and possibly the FBI about Keeley’s disappearance, but when asked to comment by the
Times,
she declined.

3

From
swissinfo
(English version) twelve more days later:

Pharmaceutical Researcher Missing
swissinfo October 28, 2005 7:58 am

Prominent Geneva scientist Karsten Allgäuer, also a board member for pharmaceutical giant Rubisco, has been reported missing by his brother, Daniel. Sources close to Mr. Allgäuer indicate that he made a trip to the United States on 29 September. There is no information at this time regarding the nature of Allgäuer’s trip to the USA or when he planned to return.

4

In Dallas, Abraham Lange reads these stories and curses himself for underestimating the seriousness of Allgäuer’s work. After nearly sixty years of fits and starts, enduring failure upon failure, after watching intelligent and reasoned men go to such lengths in their desperate pursuit of the secret, of the truth, he had nearly given up on the research. Allgäuer in later years had grown increasingly erratic. Willis marched his followers into the south Texas prairie and vanished with them. But still, the resolve of these two men, these old friends, had been strong, and their sporadic successes had been tantalizing.

Then Lange arrives in Olney.

He can scarcely credit what he discovers there.

He must locate Allgäuer and Dobbelfeld. They must find a way to continue this research. Not here, not considering what’s left of the facility, but the Large Hadron Collider is coming online at CERN in 2007, and this means another chance for breakthrough.

Another chance to finally seize the truth.

5

At United Regional in Wichita Falls, Kelly sits in an uncomfortable hospital chair, sea-green vinyl mounted to a skeleton of aluminum, waiting for Mike to wake up.

His surgery stretched several hours, and afterward the doctor, a young, overweight man from Pakistan, declared the procedure “very much successful.”

And so she waits, her mind reliving the implausibility of the previous twelve hours, an extraordinary sequence of events she can hardly believe really happened to her.

They turned north after leaving the NTSSC campus, speeding toward and through Olney, reaching over 130 miles an hour as they rushed toward Wichita Falls. Larry squealed through town and somehow found United Regional, where he dropped them off at the emergency entrance and then left to park the car. He promised Kelly he would be back shortly to sit with her, to keep her company as they waited for the ER staff to evaluate Mike, but he never returned. Later, while Mike was in surgery, she explored the parking lot until she found Mike’s car, unlocked, with the keys still in the ignition. She has no idea why Larry would do such a thing.

Kelly hears a noise from the bed and looks up to find Mike blinking, his eyes surely struggling to focus, his mind working to understand where he is and why.

“So I’m not dead yet,” he says to her. His voice is broken like a poor mobile phone connection.

“Not yet,” she says, rising to greet him.

He smiles. She leans down and kisses his dry lips.

“That’s a good reason to wake up,” he says. “During surgery I kept trying to decide whether or not to go through that tunnel. Toward the light. If I’d known you were going to be here, it would have been a much easier choice.”

“There was a tunnel?” she asks.

“Just kidding.”

“Right. Ha fucking ha.”

“So what happened to Larry? I know he ended up at the super collider somehow. Was he in the car with us when we left?”

“He helped me carry you to the car and drove us to the hospital. I tried asking him why he was at the office that time of night, but he wouldn’t answer. And then, after he dropped us off at the emergency entrance, he just disappeared.”

“Larry has been having problems, Kelly. Emotional problems.”

“What kind of emotional problems? For how long?”

“For as long as I’ve known him,” Mike says. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

“Do you think he’ll be all right? Where will he go?”

“I have no idea.”

Later, after the doctor drops by to check on him, after Kelly returns from the hospital cafeteria with some substandard rotisserie chicken, she asks him about the night before.

“What the hell happened back there, Mike?”

“I don’t know.”

“That light. That blue light. Do you know what it was?”

“I don’t know. Steve tapped into the energy of the super collider somehow.”

“But the detector isn’t beneath your office, right? It has to be on the ring somewhere.”

“The GEM isn’t below the office, no, but it’s not far away, either. We built the administrative offices nearby since it’s the primary detector.”

“So what did he do?”

“I don’t know. The implications of matter and energy fields, the interaction between them, are something we obviously don’t understand very well. What happened doesn’t seem possible to me, but the thing with the drinking glass didn’t seem possible, either.”

“I felt him talking to me,” Kelly says. “He kept telling me to run.”

“I felt it, too. I’m sure . . . I mean, there has to be a scientific explanation for what he could do, for what happened there. There is so much research to do, so much we have to learn. Our understanding of the universe is constrained by what we can see and what we can deduce with current knowledge. Mathematics, relativity, quantum physics . . . these things expand human understanding, because many of their outcomes don’t jibe with reality as we perceive it. You don’t see the world as an infinite dance of particles, but that’s what it is . . . at least as far as we know. Who knows what forces, what structures exist that our current math and physics can’t resolve? If you brought a person from the days of Ben Franklin and showed him the world today, he would think we live in a world full of magic. The sound of Mozart from tiny, hidden speakers in someone’s living room? What about television? Airplanes? Microwave ovens? They would seem like witchcraft, like miracles. And these are inventions of the twentieth century. Imagine what life will be like in twenty years. In fifty.”

Kelly shakes her head. “I still don’t understand about your building, though. I don’t understand what he did with the super collider, with the particles.”

“I don’t either,” Mike says. “I’d like to find out what’s left out there.”

But when Mike tries to get Donovan on the phone, he can’t. And several days later, when the Pakistani doctor reluctantly releases him from the hospital, NTSSC security will not allow them inside the gates.

6

Later that day Mike’s cell phone rings, and he answers, hoping it will be Donovan.

“Mr. McNair, my name is Abraham Lange. Do you know who I am?”

“No. Should I?”

“I’m responsible for the construction of your facility. Landon Donovan did not possess the resources to do it on his own, so I stepped in and helped him.”

Mike remembers his conversation with Donovan about the investors that pulled out, how he spent all his money on the project and it still wasn’t enough.

“What do you want?” he asks Lange.

“I would like to understand what happened at my facility. I want to know if you can shed some light on what happened.”

“I don’t know how I could do that,” Mike says. “I can’t even get on campus.”

“There’s no reason to come here. Everything is gone.”

“It can’t
all
be gone,” Mike says. “There must be debris, remains of the buildings, something.”

“The detectors still exist. The buildings where these people work are mostly intact. All scientists and technicians are still alive. But the ring is gone, and there are bizarre abnormalities on the grounds.”

“So there
is
something to see.”

“There are stripes of brown weeds through our lawns of manicured grass. Trees that look to have been shorn in half, yet the ground beneath them is not damaged—just different. Some of the campus roads are . . . This is difficult for me to believe, but there are places where the asphalt is gone and there is just . . . red dirt. All the roads out here were red dirt and gravel before we paved them.”

“What are you saying?” Mike asks.

“There is an old yellow house here, Mr. McNair. Where the main administrative building was, there is an old house. And a corrugated steel barn of some kind. Some old cars.”

“What? That doesn’t . . . you’re not—”

“We found a newspaper on the porch. Fresh and bound with a rubber band like it was delivered yesterday. The date was April 10, 1979.”

“I don’t think I believe that,” Mike remarks. “Can’t I come out there and—”

“Your girlfriend is a news reporter. I don’t think so.”

“I won’t . . . I mean, we won’t—”

“Do you know what happened in this region on April 10, 1979?”

“No.”

“There was a series of devastating tornadoes. One of the worst outbreaks in U.S. history. The tornado that ravaged Wichita Falls was arguably the worst ever to hit a populated area.”

“So someone is playing a joke, then,” Mike says. “Leaving that paper.” But he doesn’t believe what he’s saying even as the words come out of his mouth. A yellow house? A barn? A newspaper from the past?

“Did you know that Karsten Allgäuer lived in Wichita Falls in 1979? And that he performed secret research at Sheppard Air Force Base? Did you know there was an F5 tornado that hit the base in 1964?”

“What does that have to do with the super collider? What was your relationship with Allgäuer? Didn’t you know what he was up to?”

“I fund many projects, Mr. McNair. I cannot personally oversee every one of them.”

“Mr. Lange, why are you—”

“I can hardly believe what happened here,” Lange says. “These time anomalies. The implications are staggering.”

“Then let me come out there and inspect the grounds myself,” Mike says.

“No. And do not tell anyone what I have revealed to you today. If you do, I will find out, and you will be sorry. Do not underestimate my ability to monitor you, or my resolve. Good day, Mr. McNair.”

7

Mike’s anger, his sense of loss for the scientific community and the world, is not quick to dissipate. He imagines his life so far as a winding marathon route, a road through stretches bright and dark, marked by occasional checkpoints, on the way to eventual demise—the same doomed existence endured by every human ever to walk the earth. But then suddenly, in a flash of insight, he had been shown a shortcut, a secret door through which he might have seen the grand finish line in resplendent glory. And just as suddenly someone had slammed that door shut, shut tight, and now he must try to figure out how to open it again.

There are secrets out there, and he will likely spend his life searching for them.

But he also comes to realize that while the loss is devastating for the advancement of science and human understanding, for his own doomed existence in the universe, he has a duty to recognize what happened to the people that night at the super collider. The questions he asks about the universe may be important to him, but there is something just as important—if smaller in scope—to consider. To mourn.

The loss of a life.

At work, Kelly is able to access law enforcement–style investigative software and easily produces the names and phone number of Steve’s parents. The next morning Mike places a phone call to Grand Island, Nebraska. A woman answers the phone.

“Is this Betty Keeley?”

“Yes, it is. Who is this?”

“Mrs. Keeley, my name is Mike McNair. I was the head physicist at the super collider in Olney, Texas. Are you familiar with that facility?”

Betty does not answer for a moment. And then, very quietly, “Yes.”

“I’m calling to tell you about your son,” Mike says. “He was an extraordinary man.”