The God Particle (33 page)
8
Larry on a Greyhound bus, staring out the window, at the Martian landscape of southern Arizona. Drawn west not only by the torque of a gasoline engine, but also by the inexorable pull of female attraction. Led there by their navigational starlight.
His destination: Hollywood, California.
9
Kelly is spellbound as usual by Conan, and Mike, too tired to wait out the show, gives up on sex for the evening.
She invited him to stay in Richardson while he recovered from the gunshot wound, from the depressing reality of his post–NTSSC career, and one month led to two, and now they’ve settled into a rhythm that Mike finds mostly agreeable. If there’s any problem, it’s that he sometimes wants to reject it, the whole idea of a relationship with Kelly, because one cannot look at the sequence of events surrounding them and conclude that it was all pure coincidence. That he sat next to a Dallas news anchor on an airplane, that their local interview was picked up and broadcast nationally, thereby allowing Steve to find him, leading Steve to the super collider where he could confront his demons—these events seem to line up so well, in such organized fashion, that even a physicist like himself has trouble ignoring the preordained nature of it all. The inherent fate of it all. And still those words uttered by Steve, the words that confirm his core beliefs and at the same time frighten him like nothing else could:
There is no intelligence.
No intelligence, but perhaps the eventual outcome of incalculable particle interactions over time? A universe of perfect determinism?
He has considered leaving Kelly in protest, as a demonstration of his free will, but of course the deterministic view would mean even
that
event was preordained.
And now Kelly will be leaving for New York soon, beginning the network news chapter of her shooting-star life, and Mike will have to decide if he wants to follow her there. More fundamentally, he’ll have to decide how to proceed with life itself. Until now his existence has been defined by a painstaking particle-by-particle search for truth, but now there is something more interesting (and likely more elusive) to search for. The shortcut. The porthole that looks upon a new perception of reality.
He drifts, away from the nasal trumpet of Conan, away from her hand absently stroking his head, into the gloaming of near sleep. And flashing images: the near miss with a GMC truck on 75 today, the apple he ate for breakfast, the impossible memory of a towering blue roller coaster behind the NTSSC administrative office. And then deeper he goes, beyond the faux reality of dreams, consciousness fading, REM slowing, a flickering image of Steve Keeley’s smiling face, a brown-haired girl in a red dress, a building with
CABARET
spelled in blue letters. These images float past, tethered to his consciousness for mere seconds before pulling away. He will not remember them in the morning. But he will wake up with a little extra skip in his step, on the right side of the bed (so to speak), and he won’t know why, and maybe the slight adjustment in his brain’s network of neurons and chemical transmitters and memory configuration will induce him to visit the jewelry store, and perhaps afterward he’ll be in possession of a ring, and maybe later he’ll get down on his knee and ask a certain question, and it will be a while before he makes the connection between the ring purchase and these images, before he is granted access to the data, before the rules are presented in their miraculous elegance.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel was inspired by a nonfiction work written by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi.
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
is a book that weaves humor with lessons about physics and helped me understand the history and purpose of particle accelerators. It was published in 1993, just before the Superconducting Super Collider project in Waxahachie, Texas, was killed by Congress. The cancellation of this massive and important project was a brutal blow to thousands of high-energy physicists in the United States and abroad. In 2007, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe is scheduled to go online, and scientists there hope to learn more about the structure of our universe, including the possible existence of the Higgs boson, which Lederman called the “God particle.”
Other sources of inspiration and research for this book include Brian Greene’s
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality,
Edward O. Wilson’s
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge,
Ray Kurzweil’s
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence,
Diane Ackerman’s
An Alchemy of Mind,
and the Web site for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, www.amnh.org. I would also like to acknowledge the novel
Einstein’s Bridge
by John Cramer, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which helped me understand what life might have been like at the real SSC. Mike’s notion of a runaway chain reaction on page 284 was suggested to me by author and friend Matt Reiten. Larry’s ranting e-mails were inspired, in part, by music composed by the electronic band Juno Reactor. And finally, the line quoted by Karsten Allgäuer on page 153 was taken from
The Corrections,
by Jonathan Franzen.
Somewhat more than my first novel,
The God Particle
was largely fashioned from accepted theories in physics and other scientific disciplines. While much of what happens in the story is obviously speculative, research for this book opened my eyes to the amazing and sometimes bizarre realities of our everyday world. Useful links and information regarding experimental and theoretical physics, brain research, and other subjects mentioned in the book can be found on my personal Web site, www.richardcox.net.
August 5, 2002–October 6, 2004
Richard Cox
Tulsa, OK
R
ICHARD
C
OX
is the author of
Rift.
He grew up in Texas and currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is at work on his next novel. Visit the author’s website at
www.richardcox.net
.
ALSO BY RICHARD COX
Rift
The God Particle
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2005 by Richard Cox
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cox, Richard, 1970–
The God particle / Richard Cox.
p. cm.
“A Del Rey Books trade paperback original”—T.p. verso.
1. Scientists—Fiction. 2. Higgs bosons—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.O925G63 2005
813′.6—dc22 2005041337
eISBN: 978-0-345-48435-2
v3.0