have caused the time displacement, or to suggest theoretical models to explain the
Flashforward. It was a beautiful spring day --cool, but with great mountains of
cumulonimbus in the bright blue sky rivaling the peaks to the east of the campus.
At last he entered the admin building and made his way down to Béranger's office.
Of course, he'd made an appointment (for which he was now fifteen minutes late);
CERN was a huge operation, and there was no way in which you could just drop in on
its Director-General.
Béranger's secretary told Lloyd to head right in, and Lloyd did just that. The
office's third-floor window looked out over the CERN campus. Béranger rose from
behind his desk and took a seat at the long conference table, much of which was
covered with experimental logs related to the Flashforward. Lloyd sat down on the
opposite side.
"Oui?" said Béranger. Yes? What is it?
"I want to go public," said Lloyd. "I want to tell the world about our role in what
happened."
"Absolument pas," said Béranger. No way.
"Dammit, Gaston, we have to come clean at some point."
"You don't know that we're at fault, Lloyd. You can't prove it --and nobody else
can, either. The phones have been ringing off the hook, of course: I imagine every
scientist in the world is getting calls from the media asking for opinions about what
happened. But nobody has connected it to us yet --and hopefully nobody will."
"Oh, come on! Theo says you came storming over to the LHC control center right
after the Flashforward --you knew it was us from the very first moment."
"That's when I thought it was a localized phenomenon. But once I learned it was
worldwide, I reconsidered. You think we were the only facility doing something
interesting at that time? I've checked. KEK was running an experiment that had
started just five minutes before the Flashforward; SLAC was doing a set of particle
collisions, too. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up a burst at just before
17h00; there was also, just before 17h00, an earthquake in Italy measuring threepoint-
four on the Richter scale. A new fusion reactor came online in Indonesia at
precisely 17h00 our time. And there was a series of rocket-motor tests going on at
Boeing."
"Neither KEK nor SLAC can produce energy levels close to what we were doing
with the LHC," said Lloyd. "And the rest are hardly unusual events. You're grasping
at straws."
"No," said Béranger. "I'm conducting a proper investigation. You're not sure --not
to a moral certainty --that it was us, and until you are, you're not saying a word."
Lloyd shook his head. "I know you spend your days pushing paper around, but I
thought in your heart you were still a scientist."
"I am a scientist," said Béranger. "This is about science --good science, the way
it's supposed to be done. You're ready to make an announcement before all the facts
are in. I'm not." He paused, took a breath. "Look," he said, "people's faith in science
has already been shaken enough over the years. Way too many science stories have
turned out to be frauds or hype."
Lloyd looked at him.
"Percival Lowell --who just needed better lenses and a less-active imagination -claimed
to see canals on Mars. But there were no canals there.
"We're still dealing with the aftermath of one idiot in Roswell who decided to
declare that what he was looking at was the remains of an alien spaceship, instead of
just a weather balloon.
"Do you remember the Tasaday? The stone-age tribe discovered in New Guinea in
the 1970s that had no word for war? Anthropologists were falling all over themselves
to study them. Only one problem --they were a hoax. But scientists were too quick
to want to get on talk shows and didn't bother to look at the evidence."
"I'm not trying to get on a talk show," said Lloyd.
"Then we announced cold fusion to the world," said Gaston, ignoring him.
"Remember that? The end of the energy crisis, the end of poverty! More power than
humanity would ever need. Except it wasn't real --it was just Fleischmann and Pons
jumping the gun.
"Then we started talking about life on Mars --the antarctic meteorite with
supposed microfossils, proof that evolution had begun on another planet besides
Earth. Except that it turned out the scientists had spoken too soon again, and the
fossils weren't fossils at all, but just natural rock formations."
Gaston took a breath. "We've got to be careful here, Lloyd. You ever listened to
anybody from the Institute for Creation Research? They spout absolute gibberish
about the origin of life, but you can see people in the audience nodding their heads
and agreeing with them --the creationists say the scientists don't know what they're
talking about, and they're right, half the time we don't. We open our mouths too
early, all in some desperate bid for primacy, for credit. But every time we're wrong -every
time we say we've made a breakthrough in the fight for a cure for cancer or
we've solved a fundamental mystery of the universe and then have to turn around a
week or a year or a decade later and say, oops!, we were wrong, we didn't check our
facts, we didn't know what we were talking about --every time that happens we give
a boost to the astrologers and creationists and New Agers and all the other ripoff
artists and charlatans and just plain nut cases. We are scientists, Lloyd --we're
supposed to be the last bastion of rational thought, of verifiable, reproducible,
irrefutable proof, and yet we're our own worst enemies. You want to go public --you
want to say CERN did it, we displaced human consciousness through time, we can
see the future, we can give you the gift of tomorrow. But I'm not convinced, Lloyd.
You think I'm just an administrator who is trying to cover his ass, indeed, the
collective ass of all of us, and of our insurers. But that's not it --or, to be honest,
that's not entirely it. Dammit, Lloyd --I'm sorry, more sorry than you can possibly
imagine, about what happened to Michiko's daughter. Marie-Claire gave birth
yesterday; I shouldn't even be here --thank God her sister is staying with us --but
there's so much to be done. I've got a son now, and even though I've only had him
for a matter of hours, I could never stand losing him. What Michiko has faced --what
you're facing --is beyond imagining to me. But I want a better world for my son. I
want a world in which science is respected, in which scientists speak from hard data
not wild speculations, in which when someone reports a science story the people in
the audience will sit up and take notice because something new and fundamental
about the way the universe works is being revealed --rather than having them roll
their eyes and say, geez, I wonder what they're claiming this week. You don't know
for a fact --for an honest-to-God fact --that CERN had anything to do with what
happened ... and until you --until I know that, no one is giving a press conference.
Is that clear?"
Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, closed it, then opened it again. "And if I can
prove that CERN had something to do with it?"
"You're not to reactivate the LHC --not at 1150-TeV levels. I'm reshuffling the
experimental queue. Anyone who wants to use the LHC for proton-proton collisions
may do so, once we finish all the diagnostics, but no one is firing up that accelerator
for nuclear collisions until I say so."
"But --"
"No buts, Lloyd," said Béranger. "Now, look, I've got a ton of work to do. If
there's nothing else ... ?"
Lloyd shook his head, and left the office, left the administration building, and
headed back.
More people stopped Lloyd on his way back; it seemed there was a new theory
being put forth every few minutes and old ones being shot down just as frequently.
At last Lloyd returned to his office. Waiting on his desk was the initial report of the
engineering team that had been scouring the entire twenty-seven kilometers of the
LHC tunnel, looking for any abnormality in the equipment that might have accounted
for the time displacement; so far, nothing unusual had cropped up. And the ALICE
and CMS detectors had also received clean bills of health, passing every diagnostic
test run on them to date.
There was also a copy of the front page of the Tribune de Genève waiting;
someone had placed it there and had circled a particular story:
Man Who Had Vision Dies
Future Not Fixed, Professor Says
MOBILE, ALABAMA (AP): James Punter, 47, was killed in an automobile accident
today on the I-65. Punter had previously recounted a precognition vision to his
brother Dennis Punter, 44.
"Jim had told me all about his vision," said Dennis. "He was at home --the same
house he lived in today --in the future. He was shaving, and had the fright of his life
when he saw himself in the mirror, all old and wrinkled."
Punter's death has wide-ranging implications, says Jasmine Rose, a philosophy
professor at the State University of New York at Brockport.
"Ever since the visions occurred, we've been arguing about whether they
portrayed the real future or only one possible future, or, indeed, whether they might
simply be hallucinations," she said.
"Punter's death clearly indicates that the future is not fixed; he had a vision and
yet is no longer around to see that vision come true."
Lloyd was still steamed from his encounter with Béranger, and he found himself
crumpling up the newspaper page and throwing it across his office.
A philosophy professor!
Punter's death didn't prove a thing, of course. His account was entirely anecdotal.
There was no supporting evidence for it --no newspaper or TV show glimpsed that
could be compared with others' accounts of the same things, and no one else had
apparently seen him in their visions. A forty-seven-year-old could easily be dead in
twenty-one years. He could have made up the vision --and a very unimaginative
one it was, too --rather than revealing that he hadn't had one. As Michiko had said,
Theo had probably ruined his chances of ever getting life insurance by revealing his
own lack of a vision; Punter might have decided it was better to pretend to have a
vision than admit that he was going to be dead.
Lloyd sighed. Couldn't they have gotten a scientist to address this issue? Someone
who understands what really constitutes evidence?
A philosophy professor. Give me a fucking break.
Michiko was doing most of the work related to setting up the Web site; Theo was
running computer simulations of the LHC collision on a separate PC in the same
room, making himself available as needed to help Michiko. Of course, CERN had all
the latest authoring tools, but there still was much to be done by hand, including
writing up descriptions of various lengths to submit to the hundreds of different
search engines available worldwide. She figured they would have everything ready to
go in another day.
A window popped up on Theo's monitor announcing that he had new mail.
Normally, he would have ignored it until a more convenient time, but the subject line
demanded immediate attention: "Betreff: Ihre Ermordung," German for "Re: Your
Murder."
Theo told the computer to display the message. The whole thing was in German,
but Theo had no trouble reading it. Michiko, looking over his shoulder, didn't read
any German, though, and so he translated it for her.
"It's from a woman in Berlin," said Theo. "It says something like, 'I saw your
posting forwarded to a newsgroup I read. You're looking for people who might know
something about your murder. Well, a person who lives in the same apartment
building I do knows something about it. We all' --it's congregated, gathered,
something like that --'we all gathered in the lobby after whatever it was happened,
and shared our visions. A fellow --I don't know him that well, but he lives one floor
above me --had a vision of watching a television newscast about the murder of a
physicist at, I thought he said, Lucerne but when I read your posting I realized he'd
actually said CERN, which, I confess, I'd never heard of. Anyway, I've forwarded a
blind copy of your message to him, but I don't know if he'll get in touch with you or
not. His name is Wolfgang Rusch, and you can reach him at ... ' That's what it says."
"What are you going to do?" asked Michiko.
"What else? Contact this guy." He picked up the phone, dialed his billing code for
personal long-distance calls, then tapped out the number that was still glowing on
his screen.
11
NEWS DIGEST
A national day of mourning has been declared in the Philippines, to
honor President Maurice Maung and all the other Filipinos who died during
the Flashforward.
A group calling itself the April 21 Coalition is already lobbying Congress
to approve a memorial on the Washington, D.C. mall in honor of the
Americans killed during the Flashforward. They propose a giant mosaic,
depicting a view of Times Square in New York City, as it will apparently be
in 2030, based on accounts of thousand of people whose visions depicted
that locale. There would be one tile in the mosaic for each individual who
perished in the event, with each tile laser inscribed with an individual's
name.
Castle Rock Entertainment has announced a delay in the release of its
much-anticipated summer blockbuster Catastrophe "until a more
appropriate time."
