campus. Then Jake pointed across an open farmer's field.
The car flew.
Theo looked at the cryostat cluster's housing. No wonder Jiggs had been having
trouble fixing it: he'd been going in through the wrong access port. The panel he'd
been working behind was still open but the potentiometers Jiggs used to fiddle with
were hidden behind another panel.
Theo tried to open the access door that should have let him get at the right
controls, but it wouldn't budge. After years of disuse in the dark, damp tunnel, the
door had apparently corroded shut. Theo rummaged in his toolkit looking for
something he could use to pry it open, but all he had were some screwdrivers that
proved inadequate to the task. What he really needed was a crowbar or something
similar. He swore in Greek. He could take the monorail back to the campus and get
the appropriate tool, but that seemed like such a waste of time. Surely there was
something down here in the tunnel that he could use. He looked back the way he'd
come; he hadn't noted anything like what he needed during the last few hundred
meters of his trip on the monorail but, of course, he wasn't really looking. Still, it
seemed to make more sense to continue on clockwise around the tunnel, at least a
short distance, and see if he could find something that would do the trick.
The far access station was an old concrete bunker in the middle of a farmer's
colza field. Moot's car settled down on the small driveway --there was an access
road leading out in the opposite direction --and he shut off its engine. He and Jake
got out.
It was noon, and, since this was October, the sun didn't get very high in the sky.
But at least the bees, which were a nuisance in summer, were gone. Up the
mountainsides there were mostly conifers, of course, but down here there were lots
of deciduous trees. The leaves on many of them had already changed color.
"Come on," said Jake.
Moot hesitated. "There's no chance of radiation, is there?"
"Not while the collider is turned off. It's perfectly safe."
As they came toward the blockhouse, a hedgehog scurried by, quickly hiding itself
in the ninety-centimeter colza shoots. Jake stopped short at the door. It was an oldfashioned
hinged door, with a deadbolt lock. But the door had been pried open; a
crowbar lay in the grass next to the blockhouse.
Moot moved to the door. "No corrosion," he said, indicating the metal exposed
where the lock had been broken. "This was done recently." He used the toe of his
fancy shoes to nudge the crowbar slightly. "The grass underneath is still green; this
must have happened today or yesterday." He looked at Jake. "Anything valuable
kept down there?"
"Valuable yes," said Jake. "But salable? Not unless you know of a black-market for
obsolete high-energy physics equipment."
"You say this collider hasn't been used recently?"
''Not for a few years."
"Might be squatters," said Moot. "Could someone live down there?"
"I --I suppose. It'd be cold and dark, but it is watertight." Moot had a pouch at
his hip; he pulled it open and removed a small electronic device, which he waved
over the crowbar. "Lots of fingerprints," he said. Jake looked over; he could see the
fingerprints fluorescing on the device's display screen. Moot pushed some buttons on
his device. After about thirty seconds, some text scrolled across the screen. "No
matches on file. Whoever did this has never been arrested anywhere in Switzerland
or the E.U." A pause. "How far away is Procopides?"
Jake pointed. "About five kilometers that way. But there should be a couple of
hovercarts parked here; we'll take one of those."
"Does he have a cellular? Can we phone him?"
"He's buried beneath a hundred meters of soil," said Jake. "Cell phones don't
work."
They hurried into the blockhouse.
Theo had walked a couple of hundred meters down the tunnel without finding
anything that would help him pry open the access door on the cryostat cluster. He
glanced back; the cluster itself had disappeared around the gentle curve of the ring.
He was about to give up in defeat and head back to the monorail when something
caught his eye up ahead. It was somebody else, working next to one of the
sextupole magnets. The person wasn't wearing a hardhat --a violation of
regulations, that. Theo thought about calling out to him, but the acoustics were so
bad in the tunnel he'd long ago learned not to bother trying to shout over any
distance. Well, it didn't matter who it was, as long as he had a more complete toolkit
than the one Theo had brought.
It took Theo another minute to get close to the man. He was working next to one
of the air pumps; the racket it made must have masked the sound of Theo
approaching. Sitting on the tunnel floor was a hovercart, a disk about a meter and a
half in diameter with two single chairs under a canopy. Hovercarts had been
developed for use on golf courses; they were much easier on the greens than oldfashioned
motorized carts.
Back in the old days, there were thousands of CERN employees whom Theo didn't
know on sight, but now, with just a few hundred, he was surprised to see somebody
he didn't recognize.
"Hey, there," said Theo.
The man --a thin white fellow in his fifties with white hair and dark gray eyes -swung
around, clearly startled. He did have a toolkit with him, but -
He'd opened a large access plate on the side of an air pump and had just finished
inserting a device in there --
A device that looked like a small, aluminum suitcase with a string of glowing blue
digits on its side.
Glowing digits that were counting down.
30
A series of lockers lined one wall of the blockhouse. Jake helped himself to a
yellow hard hat, and indicated that Moot should take one, too. There was an elevator
inside, as well as a staircase leading down. Jake pushed the call button for the
elevator; they waited an interminable time for the cab to appear.
"Whoever broke in must still be down there," he said. "Otherwise, the elevator
would have been waiting at the top."
"Couldn't he have taken the stairs?" asked Moot.
"I suppose, but it's a hundred meters --that's the equivalent of thirty floors in an
office building. Even going down, that's exhausting."
The elevator arrived and they got in. Jake pushed the button to activate it. The
ride was frustratingly slow; it took a full minute to descend to the tunnel level. Jake
and Moot disembarked. There was a hovercart parked here, and Jake started toward
it. "Didn't you say there should be two hovercarts here?"
"That's what I'd have expected, yes," said Jake.
Jake got into the hovercart's driver seat, and Moot took the passenger seat. He
turned on the cart's headlights and activated its ground-effect fans. The cart floated
up, and they headed counterclockwise along the tunnel, going as fast as the little
vehicle could manage.
Along the way, the tunnel straightened out for a distance; it did that near all four
of the large detectors, to avoid synchrotron radiation. In the middle of the straight
section, they saw the giant, twenty-meter-tall empty chamber that used to house
the Compact Muon Solenoid detector with its 14,000-ton magnet. At the time it had
been built, CMS had cost over a hundred million American dollars. After the
development of the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider, CERN had put CMS, as well as ALICE,
which used to reside in a similar chamber at another point in the tunnel ring, up for
sale. The Nipponese government bought them both for use at their KEK accelerator
in Tsukaba. Michiko Komura had supervised the dismantling of the massive machines
here and their reassembly in her homeland. The sound of the hovercart's motors
echoed in the vast chamber, big enough to house a small apartment building.
"How much longer?" asked Moot.
"Not long," said Jake.
They continued on.
Theo looked at the man, who was still crouching in the tunnel in front of the air
pump. "Mein Gott," said the man softly.
"You," said Theo, in French. "Who are you?"
"Hello, Dr. Procopides," said the man.
Theo relaxed. If the guy knew who he was, he couldn't be an intruder. Besides, he
looked vaguely familiar.
The man looked back down the tunnel the way he'd come. And then he reached
inside the dark leather jacket he was wearing and pulled out a gun.
Theo's heart jumped. Of course, years ago, after young Helmut had mentioned a
Glock 9-mm, Theo had looked for a picture of one on the Web. The boxy
semiautomatic weapon now facing him was just such a handgun; its clip could hold
up to fifteen rounds.
The man looked down at the pistol, as if he himself was surprised to see it in his
hand. Then he shrugged slightly. "A little something I picked up in the States -they're
so much easier to come by over there." He paused. "And, yes, I know what
you're thinking." He gestured at the aluminum suitcase with the blue LED timer.
"You're thinking maybe that's a bomb. And that's precisely what it is. I could have
planted it anywhere, I imagine, but I came a ways along the tunnel looking for a
place to secrete it, lest someone find it. Inside this machine here seemed like a
suitable spot."
"What --" Theo was surprised at how his voice sounded. He swallowed, trying to
get it back under control. "What are you trying to accomplish?"
The man shrugged again. "It should be obvious. I'm trying to sabotage your
particle accelerator."
"But why?"
He gestured at Theo with the gun. "You don't recognize me, do you?"
"You do look familiar, but ... "
"You came to visit me in Deutschland. One of my neighbors had contacted you;
my vision had shown me watching a newscast on videotape about your death."
"Right," said Theo. "I remember." He couldn't recall the man's name, but he did
remember the meeting, twenty years ago.
"And why was I watching that newscast? Why was the story about your death the
one story on that newscast that I'd fast-forwarded ahead to see? Because I was
checking to see if they had any evidence pointing to me. I'd never meant to kill
anyone, but I will kill you if I have to. It's only fair, after all. You killed my wife."
Theo began to protest that he'd done no such thing, but then it came to him. Yes,
he recalled his visit with this man. His wife had fallen down the stairs at a subway
station during the time-displacement event; she'd broken her neck.
"There was no way we could have known what would happen --no way we could
have prevented it."
"Of course you could have prevented it," snapped the man --Rusch, that was his
name. It came back to Theo: Wolfgang Rusch. "Of course you could have. You had
no business doing what you were doing. Trying to reproduce conditions at the birth
of the universe! Trying to force the handiwork of God out into the light of day.
Curiosity, they say, killed the cat. But it was your curiosity --and it's my wife who's
dead."
Theo didn't know what to say. How do you explain science --the need, the quest
--to someone who is obviously a fanatic? "Look," said Theo, "where would the world
be if we didn't --"
"You think I'm crazy?" said Rusch. "You think I'm nuts?" He shook his head. "I'm
not nuts." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He fumbled with
one hand to remove a yellow-and-blue laminated card from it and showed it to Theo.
Theo looked at it. It was a faculty ID card for The Humboldt University. "Tenured
professor," said Rusch. "Department of Chemistry. Ph.D. from the Sorbonne." That's
right --back in 2009, the man had said he taught chemistry. "If I had known your
role in all this back then, I wouldn't have spoken to you. But you came to see me
before CERN had gone public with its involvement."
"And now you want to kill me?" said Theo. His heart was pounding so hard he
thought it was going to burst, and he could feel sweat breaking out all over his body.
"That won't bring your wife back to life."
"Oh, yes it will," said Rusch.
He was mad. Dammit, why had Theo come down into the tunnel alone?
"Not your death, of course," said Rusch. "But what I'm doing. Yes, it will bring
Helena back. It's all because of the Pauli exclusion principle."
Theo didn't know what to say; the man was raving. "What?"
"Wolfgang Pauli," said Rusch, nodding. "I like to tell my students I was named for
him, but I wasn't --I was named for my father's uncle." A pause. "Pauli's exclusion
principle originally just applied to electrons: no two electrons could simultaneously
occupy the same energy state. Later, it was expanded to include other subatomic
particles."
Theo knew all this. He tried to hide his mounting panic. "So?"
"So I believe that the exclusion principle also applies to the concept of now. All
the evidence is there: there can only be one now --throughout all of human history,
we have all agreed on what moment is the present. Never has there been a moment
that some part of humanity thought was now, while another part thought it was the
past, and still another considered it to be in the future."
Theo lifted his shoulders slightly, not following where this was going.
