the second at 12:00 noon Eastern, and --"
To the second, thought Theo.
To the second.
Jesus Christ.
CERN, of course, used an atomic clock. And the experiment was programmed to
begin at precisely 17h00 Geneva time, which is -
--is noon in Atlanta.
"As he has been for the last two hours, we have astronomer Donald Poort of
Georgia Tech with us," said Shaw. "He was to be a guest on CNN This Morning, and
we're fortunate that he was already here in the studio. Dr. Poort looks a little pale;
please forgive that. We rushed him onto the air before he had a chance to go
through makeup. Dr. Poort, thank you for agreeing to join us."
Poort was a man in his early fifties, with a thin, pinched face. He did indeed look
pallid under the studio lights --as though he hadn't seen the sun since the Clinton
administration. "Thanks, Bernie."
"Tell us again what happened, Dr. Poort."
"Well, as you observed, the phenomenon occurred precisely to the second at
noon. Of course, there are thirty-six hundred seconds in every hour, so the chances
of a random event occurring precisely at the top of the clock --to use a phrase you
broadcasters like --are one in thirty-six hundred. In other words, vanishingly small.
Which leads me to suspect that we are dealing with a human-caused event,
something that was scheduled to occur. But as to what could have caused it, I have
no idea ... "
Damn it, thought Theo. God damn it. It had to be the LHC experiment; it couldn't
be a coincidence that the highest-energy particle collision in the history of the planet
happened at precisely the same moment as the onset of the phenomenon.
No. No, that wasn't being honest. It wasn't a phenomenon; it was a disaster -
possibly the biggest one in the history of the human race.
And he, Theo Procopides, had somehow caused it.
Gaston Béranger, CERN's Director-General, came into the lounge at that moment.
"There you are!" he said, as if Theo had been missing for weeks.
Theo exchanged a nervous glance with Jake, then turned to the Director-General.
"Hi, Dr. Béranger."
"What the hell have you done?" demanded Béranger in angry French. "And
where's Simcoe?"
"Lloyd and Michiko went off to get Michiko's daughter --she's at the Ducommun
School."
"What happened?" demanded Béranger again.
Theo spread his hands. "I have no idea. I can't imagine what could have caused
it."
"The --the whatever it was occurred at precisely the scheduled time for your LHC
experiment to begin," said Béranger.
Theo nodded, and jerked a thumb at the TV. "So Bernard Shaw was saying."
"It's on CNN!" wailed the French man, as if all were now lost. "How did they find
out about your experiment?"
"Shaw didn't mention anything about CERN. He just --"
"Thank God! Look, you're not to say anything to anyone about what you were
doing, understand?"
"But --"
"Not a word. The damage is doubtless in the billions, if not the trillions. Our
insurance won't cover more than a tiny fraction of it."
Theo didn't know Béranger well, but all science administrators worldwide were
doubtless cut from the same cloth. And hearing Béranger go on about culpability
brought it all into perspective for the young Greek. "Dammit, there was no way we
could have known this would happen. There's no expert anywhere who could claim
that this was a foreseeable consequence of our experiment. But something has
occurred that has never been experienced before, and we're the only ones who have
even a clue as to what caused it. We've got to investigate this."
"Of course we'll investigate," said Béranger. "I've already got more than forty
engineers down in the tunnel. But we've got to be careful, and not just for CERN's
sake. You think there aren't going to be lawsuits launched individually and
collectively against every single member of your project team? No matter how
unpredictable this outcome was, there'll be those who will say it was a result of gross
criminal negligence, and we should be personally held accountable."
"Personal lawsuits?'
"That's right." Béranger raised his voice. "Everyone! Everyone, your attention
please."
Faces turned toward him.
"This is how we're going to handle this issue," he said to the group. "There will be
no mention of CERN's possible involvement to anyone outside the facility. If anyone
gets email or phone calls asking about the LHC experiment that was supposed to be
performed today, reply that its scheduled running had been delayed until seventeenthirty,
because of a computer glitch, and that, in the aftermath of whatever it was
that happened, it didn't get run at all today. Is that clear? Also, absolutely no
communication with the press; it all goes through the media office, understand? And
for God's sake, no one activates the LHC again without written authorization from
me. Is that clear?"
There were nods.
"We'll get through this people," said Béranger. "I promise you that. But we're
going to have to work together." He lowered his voice and turned back to Theo. "I
want hourly reports on what you've learned." He turned to go.
"Wait," said Theo. "Can you assign one of the secretaries to watch CNN?
Somebody should be monitoring this stuff in case anything important comes up.
"Give me a little credit," said Béranger. "I'll have people monitor not just CNN, but
the BBC World Service, the French all-news channel, CBC Newsworld, and anything
else we can pull off a satellite; we'll save it all on tape. I want an exact record of
what's reported as it happens; I don't want anyone inflating damage claims later."
"I'm more interested in clues as to what caused the phenomenon," said Theo.
"We'll look for that, too, of course," said Béranger. "Remember, update me every
hour, on the hour."
Theo nodded, and Béranger left. Theo took a second to rub his temples. Damn,
but he wished Lloyd were here. "Well," he said at last, to Jake, "I guess we should
start a complete diagnostic on every system here in the control center; we need to
know if anything malfunctioned. And let's get a group together and see what we can
make of the hallucinations."
"I can round some people up," said Jake.
Theo nodded. "Good. We'll use the big conference room on the second floor."
"Okay," said Jake. "I'll meet you there as soon as I can."
Theo nodded, and Jake left. He knew he should spring into action, too, but for a
moment he just stood there, still stunned by it all.
Michiko managed to pull herself together enough to try to call Tamiko's father in
Tokyo --even though it was not yet 4:00 A.M. there --but the phone lines were
jammed. It wasn't the sort of message one wanted to send by email, but, well, if any
international communications system was still up and running, it would be the
Internet, that child of the Cold War designed to be completely decentralized so that
no matter how many of its nodes had been taken out by enemy bombs, messages
would still get through. She used one of the school's computers and dashed off a
note in English --she had a kanji keyboard in her apartment, but none was available
here. Lloyd had to actually issue the commands to send the message, though:
Michiko broke down again as she was trying to click the appropriate button.
Lloyd didn't know what to say or do. Ordinarily, the death of a child was the
biggest crisis a parent could face, but, well, Michiko was surely not the only one
going through such a tragedy today. There was so much death, so much injury, so
much destruction. The background of horror didn't make the loss of Tamiko one whit
easier to bear, of course, but -
--but there were things that had to be done. Perhaps Lloyd never should have left
CERN; it was, after all, his and Theo's experiment that had likely caused all this.
Doubtless he'd accompanied Michiko not just out of love for her and concern for
Tamiko but also because, at least in part, he'd wanted to run away from whatever
had gone wrong.
But now --
Now they had to return to CERN. If anyone was going to figure out what had
happened --not just here but, as the radio reports and comments from other
parents he'd overheard indicated, all over the world --it would be the people at
CERN. They couldn't wait for an ambulance to come to take the body --it might be
hours or days. Surely the law was that they couldn't move the body, either, until the
police had looked at it, although it seemed highly unlikely that the driver could be
held culpable.
At last, though, Madame Severin returned, and she volunteered that she and her
staff would look after Tamiko's remains until the police came.
Michiko's face was puffy and red, and her eyes were bloodshot. She'd cried so
much that there was nothing left, but every few minutes her body heaved as if she
were still sobbing.
Lloyd loved little Tamiko, too --she would have been his stepdaughter. He'd spent
so much time comforting Michiko that he hadn't really had a chance to cry himself
yet; that would come, he knew --but for now, for right now, he had to be strong. He
used his index finger to gently lift Michiko's chin. He was all set with the words -duty,
responsibility, work to be done, we have to go --but Michiko was strong in her
own way, too, and wise, and wonderful, and he loved her to her very soul, and the
words didn't need to be said. She managed a small nod, her lips trembling. "I know,"
she said in English, in a tiny, raw voice. "I know we have to head back to CERN."
He helped her as she walked, one arm around her waist, the other propping her
up by the elbow. The keening of sirens had never stopped --ambulances, fire trucks,
police cars, warbling and wailing and Doppler shifting, a constant background since
just after the phenomenon had occurred. They made their way back to Lloyd's car
through the dim evening light --many of the streetlamps were out of commission -and
drove along the debris-littered streets to CERN, Michiko hugging herself the
whole time.
As they drove, Lloyd thought for a moment about an event his mother had once
told him about. He'd been a toddler, too young to remember it himself: the night the
lights went out, the great power failure in Eastern North American in 1965. The
electricity had been off for hours. His mother had been home alone with him that
night; she said everybody who had lived through that incredible blackout would
remember for the rest of their lives exactly where they were when the power had
failed.
This would be like that. Everyone would remember where they'd been when this
blackout --a blackout of a different sort --had occurred.
Everyone who had lived through it, that is.
By the time Lloyd and Michiko returned, Jake and Theo had gathered a group of
LHC workers together in a conference room on the second floor of the control center.
Most of CERN's staff lived either in the Swiss town of Meyrin (which bordered the
east end of the CERN campus), a dozen kilometers farther along in Geneva, or in the
French towns of St. Genis or Thoiry, northwest of CERN. But they had come from all
over Europe, as well as the rest of the world. The dozen faces now staring at Lloyd
were widely varied. Michiko had joined the circle, too, but was detached, her eyes
glazed. She simply sat in a chair, rocking slowly back and forth.
Lloyd, as project leader, led the debriefing. He looked from person to person.
"Theo told me what CNN's been saying. I guess it's pretty clear that there were a
variety of hallucinations worldwide." He took a deep breath. Focus, purpose --that's
what he needed now. "Let's see if we can get a handle on exactly what happened.
Can we go around the circle? Don't go into any detail; just give us a single sentence
about what you saw. If you don't mind, I'll take notes, okay? Olaf, can we start with
you?"
"Sure, I guess," said a muscular blond man. "I was at my parents' vacation home.
They've got a chalet near Sundsvall."
"In other words," said Lloyd, "it was a place you're familiar with?"
"Oh, yes."
"And how accurate was the vision?"
"Very accurate. It was exactly as I remembered it."
"Was there anyone else beside yourself in the vision?"
"No --which was kind of strange. The only reason I go there is to visit my
parents, and they weren't there."
Lloyd thought of the wizened version of himself he'd seen in the mirror. "Did you
--did you see yourself?"
"In a mirror or something, you mean? No."
"Okay," said Lloyd. "Thanks."
The woman next to Olaf was middle-aged and black. Lloyd felt awkward; he knew
he should know her name, but he didn't. Finally, he simply smiled and said, "Next."
"It was downtown Nairobi, I think," said the woman. "At night. It was a warm
evening. I thought it was Dinesen Street, but it looked too built-up for that. And
there was a McDonald's there."
"Don't they have McDonald's in Kenya?" asked Lloyd.
"Sure, but --I mean, the sign said it was McDonald's, but the logo was wrong.
You know, instead of the golden arches they had this big M that was all straight lines
--very modern looking."
"So Olaf's vision was of a place he'd often been to, but yours was of somewhere
