wracked my brain for twenty-one years trying to figure it out --trying to determine
who I might have pissed off so much that they'd want me dead, or who could profit
from having me out of the way. But there's no one."
"No one?"
"Well, you know, you go crazy; you get paranoid. Something like this --it makes
you suspect everybody. Sure, for a time, I thought maybe my old partner, Lloyd
Simcoe, had done it. But I spoke to Lloyd just yesterday; he's in Vermont, and has
no plans to come over to Europe anytime in the near future."
"It's only --what? --a three-hour flight, if he takes a supersonic," said Drescher.
"I know, I know --but, really, I'm sure it's not him. But there is somebody out
there, some --what do you guys say? What's the phrase? Some person or persons
unknown who may indeed make an attempt on my life today. And I'm asking you -I'm
begging you, please --to keep that person or persons from getting at me."
"Where do you have to be today?"
"At CERN. Either in my office, in the LHC control center, or down in the tunnel."
"Tunnel?"
"Yeah. You must have heard of it: there's a tunnel at CERN twenty-seven
kilometers in circumference buried a hundred meters down; a giant ring, you know?
That's where the LHC is housed."
Drescher chewed on his lower lip for a moment. "Let me talk to my captain," he
said. He got up, crossed the room, and rapped his knuckles against a door. The door
slid aside, and Theo could see a stern, dark-haired woman within. Drescher entered,
and the door closed behind him.
It seemed he was gone for an eternity. Theo looked about nervously. On
Drescher's desk was a hologram of a young woman who might be his wife or
girlfriend, and an older man and woman. Theo recognized the older woman: Frau
Drescher. Assuming it was a recent shot --and, really, it must be; holocameras had
been priced out of reach of an honest cop until a couple of years ago --then the
decades had been kind to her. She was still a very attractive woman, content to let
her hair show its gray.
Finally, the door at the far end of the room opened again, and Detective Drescher
emerged. He crossed the busy squad room and returned to his desk. "I'm sorry," he
said, as he sat back down. "If someone had made a threat or something ... "
"Let me speak to your captain."
Drescher snorted. "She won't see you; half the time she won't even see me." He
softened his voice. "I am sorry, Mr. Procopides. Look --just be careful, that's all."
"I thought you --you, of all people --would understand."
"I'm just a cop," said Drescher. "I take orders." He paused, and a sly tone slipped
into his voice. "Besides, maybe coming here was a big mistake. I mean, what if I'm
the guy who shot you the first time out? Didn't Agatha Christie write a story like that
once, in which the detective was the killer? It'd be kind of ironic, then, you coming to
see me, no?"
Theo lifted his eyebrows. His heart was pounding, and he didn't know what to say.
Jesus Christ, he had been shot with a Glock, a gun favored by police officers all over
the world ...
"Don't worry," said Drescher, grinning. "I'm just kidding. Figured I deserved to
give you a fright after what you did to me all those years ago." But he did reach
down and use a couple of swipes of his index finger to erase the last few lines of the
transcript from the flatsie.
"Good luck, Mr. Procopides. Like I said, just be careful. For billions of people, the
future turned out unlike what their visions portrayed. I shouldn't have to tell you
this, you being a scientist and all, but there really is no good reason to think that
your vision is going to be the one that actually comes true."
Theo used his cellular phone to call his car, and when it arrived, he got back in.
Drescher was doubtless right. Theo felt embarrassed about his panic attack;
probably a bad dream the night before, coupled with anxiety about the upcoming
replication, had brought it on. He tried to relax, looking out at the countryside as his
car drove him back to the LHC control center. The tour bus was still there. It made
him a bit nostalgic. Globus Gateway buses were seen all over Western Europe, of
course. He'd never taken one of their tours himself, but as a horny teenager he and
a couple of his friends had always watched for them in July and August. North
American girls, looking for a summer of excitement, often traveled in such things;
Theo had enjoyed more than one romantic evening with an American schoolgirl
during his teenage years.
The pleasant memory faded to sadness, though; he was thinking of home, of
Athens. He'd only been back twice since Dim's funeral. Why hadn't he made more
time for his parents? Theo let his car find a vacant spot. He got out and headed into
the LHC control center.
"Oh, Theo," said Jake Horowitz, coming at him from the other end of the mosaiclined
corridor. "I've been trying to get hold of you. I called your car but it said you'd
been arrested or something."
"Funny car," said Theo. "Actually, I was just visiting --visiting someone I thought
was an old friend."
"There's a problem with the LHC that Jiggs doesn't know how to fix."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, something with one of the cryostat clusters --number four-forty, in octant
three."
Theo frowned. It had been years since the LHC had been cranked up to full power.
Jiggs, all of thirty-four, was head of the maintenance division; he'd never actually
seen the collider used at 14-TeV levels.
Theo nodded; cryostat controls were notoriously finicky. "I'll go have a look." In
the old days, when CERN had a staff of three thousand, Theo never would have gone
down into the LHC tunnel alone, but with his current skeleton crew, it seemed the
best way to apportion his limited manpower, and, well, it was probably the safest
place to be: sure, a crazy person might make it onto CERN's campus, looking to
shoot Theo, but doubtless such an intruder would be stopped long before he could
get down into the tunnel. Besides, no one but Jake and Jiggs --both of whom he
trusted completely --would even know that he was down there.
Theo took the elevator to the minus-one-hundred-meter level. The air in the
particle-accelerator tunnel was humid and warm, and smelled of machine oil and
ozone. The light was dim --a bluish white from overhead fluorescents punctuated at
regular intervals by yellow emergency lamps mounted on the walls. The throbbing of
equipment, the hum of air pumps, and the clack of Theo's heels against the concrete
floor all echoed loudly. In cross-section, the tunnel was circular, except for the flat
floor, and its diameter varied between 3.8 and 5.5 meters.
As he'd often done before, Theo Procopides looked down the tunnel in one
direction then turned and looked in the opposite direction. It wasn't quite straight.
He could see along it for a great distance, but eventually the walls curved away.
Hanging from the tunnel roof was the I-beam track for the monorail, and, hanging
from that, the monorail itself; Jiggs had left it parked here. The monorail consisted of
a cab big enough to hold a single person, three small cars each designed for cargo
rather than passengers, and a second cab, facing the opposite direction, capping the
end. The cargo cars weren't much more than hanging baskets made of metal painted
peacock-blue. Each cab was an open, orange frame with headlights mounted above
its sloping windscreen and a wide rubber bumper mounted below. The windscreens
sloped at a sharp angle.
The driver had to sit with his legs out in front of him; the cab wasn't tall enough
to accommodate a normally seated person. The name ORNEX --the manufacturer of
the monorail --was emblazoned across the cab's front. To either side of the name
were small red reflectors, and below it was a wide strip with black-and-yellow safety
markings; they wanted to be absolutely sure the cabs would be visible in the dim
tunnel. The monorail had been upgraded in 2020; it could manage about sixty
kilometers an hour now, meaning it could circumnavigate the tunnel in under thirty
minutes.
Theo got a tool box from one of the supply lockers in the staging area, put on his
yellow hard hat --even though he rarely went down into the tunnel, he was senior
enough that he'd been given his own personal hat. He placed the tool box in one of
the cargo cars, clambered into the cab that was facing in the direction he wanted to
go --clockwise --and set the train in motion, whirring away into the darkness.
Detective Helmut Drescher tried to get on with his work; he had seven open case
files to dig through, and Capitaine Lavoisier had been demanding he make some
more progress. But Moot's mind kept turning back to the plight of Theo Procopides.
The guy had seemed nice enough; he wished he could have helped him. He'd looked
to be in good shape, too, for a man who must have been almost fifty. Moot found the
flatsie that had recorded their earlier conversation; the biographical-data box about
Theo was still displayed. Born 2 March 1982 --so that would make him forty-eight.
Pretty old to be a boxer --besides, he had the wrong build for it. Maybe in whatever
alternative reality the visions had shown he'd been a coach or a referee, rather than
an actual fighter. But no --that didn't seem right. Moot didn't have the business card
with him that Theo had given him two decades ago, although he had saved it
through all intervening years, and had looked at it occasionally: it had clearly said
CERN on it. So, if he was already a physicist before the visions took place in 2009, it
seemed unlikely that he'd switch to a career in sports. But Moot remembered his
own vision vividly: the man in the smock --the medical examiner, he knew now -had
clearly said that Procopides was killed in the ring, and --
In the ring.
What was it Procopides had said earlier today? You must have heard of it. There's
a tunnel at CERN twenty-seven kilometers in circumference buried a hundred meters
down; a giant ring, you know?
He'd been a little kid --a little kid who watched boxing with his dad; a little kid
who loved the movie Rocky. He'd just assumed back then that "in the ring" meant
"in a boxing match," and he'd never given it any more thought since.
A giant ring, you know?
Shit. Maybe Procopides was in real danger. Moot got up from his desk and went
back to see Capitaine Lavoisier.
The defective cryostat cluster was ten kilometers away; it would take the monorail
about ten minutes to bring Theo there. The cab's headlight beams sliced into the
darkness. There were fluorescent lighting fixtures throughout the whole tunnel, but it
was pointless to illuminate all twenty-seven kilometers of it.
Finally, the monorail arrived at the location of the wonky cryostat cluster. Theo
stopped the train, disembarked, found the panel for controlling the local lighting, and
turned it on for fifty meters ahead and behind him. He then retrieved his tool kit and
headed over to the defective unit.
This time Capitaine Lavoisier acquiesced, giving Moot permission to act as Theo's
bodyguard until the end of the day. Moot took his usual unmarked car and drove to
CERN. He suspected CERN was like most places: the transponder signal from a staff
member's car would let it pass automatically through the gate, but Moot had to stop
and show his badge to the guard computer before the barrier was lifted. He also
asked the computer for direction; the CERN campus consisted of dozens of mostly
empty buildings. It took him about five minutes to find the LHC control center. He let
his car settle to the asphalt and hurried inside.
An attractive middle-aged woman with freckles was coming down a corridor lined
with a series of mosaics. Moot showed her his badge. "I'm looking for Theo
Procopides," he said.
The woman nodded. "He was here earlier today; let's see if we can find him."
The woman led the way deeper into the building; she tried a couple of rooms, but
Theo was in neither of them. "Let's try my husband's office," she said. "He and Theo
work together." They went down another corridor, and entered an office. "Jake, this
man's a police officer. He's looking for Theo."
"He's down in the tunnel," said Jake. "That damned cryostat cluster in octant
three."
"He may be in trouble," said Moot. "Can you take me to him?"
"In trouble?"
"In his vision, he is shot dead today --and I've got reason to believe it was down
in the tunnel."
"My God," said Jake. "Um, sure, sure --I can take you to him, and --damn! God
damn it, but he must have taken the monorail."
"The monorail?"
"There's a monorail that runs around the ring. But he'll have taken it ten
kilometers from here."
"There's only one train?"
"We used to have three more, but we sold them off years ago. We've only got one
left."
"You could fly over to the far access station," said the woman. "There's no road,
but you could easily fly over the farmers' fields."
"Right --right!" said Jake. He smiled at his wife. "Beautiful and brilliant!" He
turned to Moot. "Come on!"
Jake and Moot hurried down the corridors, through the lobby, and out into the
parking lot. "We'll take my car," said Moot. They got in, Moot hit the start button,
and the car rose off the ground. He followed Jake's instructions for getting out of the
