The God Particle (9 page)

6

Minutes later, a knock on his door.

A figure moving toward him, tiptoeing into his office, the way a mime might imitate the move onstage. Why the hell is she doing that?

“Hi, Serena,” he says.

“I didn’t want to bother you,” she whispers.

“Glad to see one of us made it back from Zurich safely.”

Serena shifts her weight from leg to leg. Scratches the back of one calf with the other foot.

“I was
really
shocked to hear what happened. I should never have left you alone, Steve. I am
so
very sorry.”

“Hey,” he says, “don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.
I’m
the one that shouldn’t have let you leave. I wasn’t much of a gentleman.”

“I wouldn’t go
that
far, Steve. But anyway, I’m sorry for . . . for what I said to you about Janine. I had no right. I hope we can still be friends.”

“Of course we can.” Steve turns away from his computer and looks directly at her. “Look, it takes a lot of guts to do what you did in Zurich. To put yourself on the line, tell someone the truth even though they might not feel the same way. I admire you for doing that, even though in our case it maybe wasn’t the best timing.”

She just stares at him. And if he senses a hint of noise in the room, noise that could be coming from nowhere but his own head, Steve isn’t obligated to acknowledge it.

“You can’t act the way your heart feels all the time,” he adds. “But when it seems right, go for it. What you said that night was right: You’ve only got one life to live, so live it.”

“Obviously you didn’t get back here when you expected,” she says to him. “How did the proposal with Janine go?”

“I had to postpone it,” he tells her and points to his head.

“Oh, of course. Well, I really appreciate what you’ve said. You were right—I was mortified that night and pretty much have been since. But now I feel better. You’re being really cool about this.”

Serena steps forward and leans down, gives him a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she says. “I don’t know how to repay you.”

“No need at all. But Serena, can you let everyone know today’s staff meeting is postponed?”

“It is? Why?”

“I need to prepare for my interview tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yep. Jim just told me this morning.”

The noise again, a surge of it, distorting a couple of words spoken from outside his office: Simon Slater.

He thinks.

“Well, good luck then,” Serena says. “I’ll bet you’ll knock ’em dead!”

7

Somehow it seems to rear its ugly head every day, the truth of human duality, the battle between logic and instinct. Mankind struggles to further understand the world but can’t escape his need to propagate the species, or to dominate the herd. Here is Larry Adams, a gifted physicist with a deep understanding of the event selection process in large particle detectors, a genius with the software algorithms used to decide which collisions are worth recording for analysis and which are discarded, and he seems more worried about Mike’s conversation with a television news anchor than their struggling search for Higgs. Here is Landon Donovan, the arrogant billionaire who arranged the funding for this one-of-a-kind private research facility, and his meddling management keeps getting in the way of their research.

This latest surprise is the most disturbing of all. Mike’s trip to Atlanta, after all, was something Donovan scheduled only two weeks ago, a visit to Centauri headquarters to answer questions about their research and development on a quantum microprocessor. But the practical production of such a chip is surely years away, and it’s at least possible that Donovan sent him out of town while he removed Paul and installed Samantha.

Until this morning, Mike had believed Samantha a candidate to direct the upcoming Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a particle accelerator on the border of Switzerland and France. Her success there is widely recognized, and Mike doubts she would have left her position just to become Mike’s Beam division head.

She’s here because she wants his job. Donovan surely knows this, so what the hell does he think he’s doing?

And what is Mike going to do about it?

It’s not like he can turn up the power on the super collider, it’s not like he can
will
Higgs into the detector. The work on this project is meticulous by design, a painstaking effort that requires enormously complex analysis of almost unimaginable amounts of information. The NTSSC as a whole produces enough data in a year to fill 40 million CDs, and even with their linked network of 150,000 Pentium CPUs—what they’ve taken to calling the “Texas Grid”—sifting through it all is a time-consuming process. The effort required just to maintain their cadre of processors is mind-boggling, and yet somehow he must manage both the teams that produce this kind of data and those who consume it.

If it were simply a matter of organizing the production and flow of information, Mike would be at ease. If it were only a matter of fine-tuning the hierarchy of physicists, of steering the general direction of the Higgs search, Mike would consider himself a perfect fit for the job.

It’s the human drama that complicates matters, that prevents the super collider from running like the well-oiled machine he once envisioned. Sure, he’s led teams before, but nothing could have prepared him for the sheer scope of the NTSSC. It’s as much a city as a scientific facility. Theoretical and experimental physicists, technicians, engineers, maintenance teams, business and clerical staff, political lobbyists, and members of the senior management team—like Landon Donovan and Mike—all working together within the fifty-four-mile oval circumference of the super collider. Nearly nine thousand dipole magnets accelerating protons along a closed path, traveling in opposite directions at velocities that approach the speed of light, colliding inside an underground detector as big as an eight-story building. It’s an extraordinary machine designed for an extraordinary task and populated, unavoidably, by humans with ordinary lives.

Humans who often produce remarkable ideas and sometimes make boneheaded mistakes. Who look to him for guidance.

A crazy thought, this.

Most days, Mike eats lunch on campus. He likes to visit the various NTSSC cafeterias and talk with regular physicists, men and women who spend their days with their sleeves rolled up, who are the belts and gears of this massive experimental machine. He wants to be a real person to them, not just a spokesman who makes strategic decisions and issues press releases. He recognizes the need for team structure, for management hierarchy, but he also dreams of a facility without layers of privilege, an organization of scientists whose only goal is the advancement of knowledge.

As much as he enjoys the responsibility for this immense effort, Mike sometimes longs for the simpler times at Fermilab, where he spent most of his time solving physics problems instead of coaching the efforts of others. This is something he could never admit to anyone, of course, especially not American scientists or (God forbid) Landon Donovan. To confess his lukewarm desire for power in this, his chosen field, would be tantamount to surrendering his male genitalia. To admit that he’d rather not spend his entire afternoon (and probably his evening) guiding a Japanese television crew around the facility would mark him as a man with no passion for success. And yes, sometimes he does enjoy the attention and the privilege, he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t, and maybe he just needs a little time to himself after that stunt Donovan pulled with Samantha Aizen this morning. Maybe he’ll head over to Quizno’s and have lunch away from this place.

The heat outside is a rough and tangible thing, the silence somehow unnerving. It’s a feeling that has been with Mike since his first visit to north Texas, the sense of rawness, a place where the Old West and present-day America seem to coexist. The whole region is a wasteland, after all, a barbed-wire grid of mesquite thicket and abandoned oil wells, where temperatures range from 120 degrees in the summer to below zero in the winter. Cattle wander flat pastures, watching the locals drive by in their dusty pickup trucks and Chevrolet sedans. Farmers tend desperate crops. This is the life that people from the left and right coasts imagine when they think of Texas—old men gathering before sunrise at the local Dairy Queen, ropy young men racing around town in dually pickups with four rear tires, shotguns mounted to back windows, fist-size belt buckles and epidermal Wranglers, mullets and cowboy hats, country music and tornadoes. Dallas and Houston may be shimmering, gridlocked monuments to Sunbelt suburbia, Austin perhaps a cultural destination for those unwilling to head east or west, but this area south of the Red River and northwest of Fort Worth is truly the hard, forgotten Texas of Larry McMurtry novels.

But Olney, for years on the verge of extinction after emptying its pockets to rogue oil speculators in the mid-eighties, is now an oasis in this desolate landscape. The arrival of NTSSC dollars sparked a boom that brought in new industry and housing and increased the population from three thousand to fifteen thousand in less than five years. Tumbleweeds still occasionally blow down Main Street, but now they roll past Whataburger and Tony Roma’s and brightly lit Conoco affiliates. There is even a budding nightlife—one dance club and a few upscale bars—and the most popular of the latter is Eva’s, where a striking business major from Arizona State University mixes spectacular cocktails and employs the best-looking waitresses this side of Wichita Falls.

The administrative offices and GEM detector are located near the southernmost point of the ring—roughly six miles south of Olney—and it’s about a ten-minute drive from the parking lot of his building to the center of downtown. During the drive, Mike reviews (in spite of himself) the standard NTSSC visitor presentation he’ll be giving to the Japanese television crew this afternoon. How the machine was funded exclusively by private dollars. How it was born from the ashes of a similar project abandoned by the United States Department of Energy and is the most costly civilian scientific experiment in history. How the original SSC design documentation was first acquired by Landon Donovan in 1995, two years after funding for the government project was halted by Congress. Donovan, famous for transforming Centauri Cystems from a struggling telecom startup to a global leader in microprocessor development and owner of the biggest fiber network in the world, spent two years building an international sponsorship consortium that would eventually raise the twelve billion dollars necessary to build the NTSSC. It’s widely speculated that Donovan diverted as much as three billion dollars from Centauri to reach his monetary goal (okay, he’ll leave that part out), and Mike believes that his boss championed the project in large part to get a much-needed credibility boost to signal his superiority over that well-known technology giant from the Pacific Northwest.

He’ll talk about their special partnership with the Department of Energy, how they cooperate with the government in a way that could be compared to a typical federal contractor. He’ll impress them with the manpower of the NTSSC (two thousand physicists, a thousand technicians, and several hundred other non-technical personnel). He won’t mention how Donovan discourages his employees from living outside of Olney, or that a variety of draconian rules regarding tardiness and attendance have been in effect since NTSSC construction began, or that many of the physicists commute from Wichita Falls anyway, where shopping malls and television affiliates and some small modicum of culture can be found, if you look hard enough.

“Hey, Mike.”

He’s standing in line at Quizno’s, waiting to order. He turns around and sees Amy Cantrell, who has just stepped inside. She smiles and he smiles back, pretending (as he always does) to ignore her unsophisticated sex appeal, her wide hips and pushed-up breasts.

“Long line,” she says. “Can you order a sandwich for me?”

“Sure. What would you like?”

She picks out something and then waits for him at a table. He calculates the personal cost of ordering his food to go, of apologizing to Amy for not having time to stay and eat, then decides it’s not the best course of action.

“Don’t you usually eat on campus?” Amy asks when he arrives with their lunch.

“I do. But I think it’s going to be a late night, so I wanted to get away for a little while.”

“Some quiet time?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, sorry for bugging you like this,” she tells him. “But to be honest I followed you here from the office. I was hoping you’d stop somewhere.”

“What’s up?”

“I wanted to talk to you about something, but I didn’t want to do it at work.”

“What is it? Is something wrong?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure how to bring this up, because I know you guys are friends. But it’s . . . well, it’s Larry.”

“Larry? Adams?”

“Yeah,” Amy admits. “I know he’s a smart guy. You wouldn’t have picked him for his job otherwise. I’m sure he does a great job. But . . . well, he makes me pretty uncomfortable at work.”

“Visits your desk a lot?”

“All the time. At least a couple of times every day.”

“Has he ever said anything offensive to you?”

“No, but . . . I don’t know.”

“Amy,” Mike says. “If Larry makes you uncomfortable, I’ll say something to him. You should never have to deal with that where you work. But I also know you have a fair number of visitors to your desk, and if I single him out—”

“I don’t ask for guys to stop by my desk. I’m just there trying to do my job.”

Mike is familiar with Amy’s reputation as a somewhat well-traveled girl. But he also realizes this information probably came to him by way of Larry.

“I’m not saying you do, Amy. Every person in the office has the same right to come in and do their job and not be harassed. What I’m saying is that if I’m going to talk to Larry—and not anyone else—then it would help if I knew what makes him different than the guys you aren’t complaining about.”

She nods. “The problem is I can’t really put my finger on it. Other guys, they seem harmless to me. Some guys have asked me out. I’ve gone on a few dates. I guess if Larry would just come out and ask me, that would make it okay. But instead he just stands there and . . . well, he
stares,
Mike. At my chest. Like, ‘Hello? My face is up here, Larry!’ And his eyes, they just seem
mean
to me. His mouth smiles when he talks to me, but his eyes don’t.”