The God Particle (26 page)

There is no question in Steve’s mind now that he was somehow misled by Dr. Dobbelfeld, that something terrible and unjust happened to Svetlana, so his plan cannot include contact with anyone associated with his hospital stay. Another possibility is to visit his local physician, but the first thing
he’ll
want to do is contact Dobbelfeld. And if Steve volunteers his conspiracy theory, here come drugs or the psychiatric hospital again. Taken together, these scenarios effectively eliminate anyone who can be reasonably expected to assist him.

He needs this physicist in Texas to help him understand. To get him close to the beam and help him understand what it means.

He needs to know what it is that he sees.

And what to do with it.

3

A little while later Steve arrives home and heads immediately to the closet in his guest room, where a black Lands’ End suitcase stands waiting. He tosses in a few shirts, some pants and shorts, a pile of boxers. In the bathroom he fills his leather travel bag with a razor and shaving cream, toothbrush and toothpaste, and is on his way back to the suitcase when he senses his pursuers again. Watching from somewhere nearby.

He still can’t see them, has no idea what to look for or where they might be. But this time they know Steve is on to them.

With more time, some narrow window between his decision to leave and their new intelligence, he could have fashioned a plan. Something covert, perhaps steal a neighbor’s car, something. Now he’ll have to simply find his way to the freeway and then hope to lose them in traffic. Steve knows the city well, surface streets as well as the controlled-access grid, and hopes that his pursuers do not. They’re probably from Zurich, after all.

The field seems to emerge from nowhere as he makes his way to the garage. The walls shimmer with it, the floor almost translucent beneath his feet. He imagines the men are standing at the end of the street, and he fancies he can see them from here, through adjacent houses and those farther away. He reaches the garage and pushes the glowing red button to open the garage door, watching—seemingly in slow motion—uncountable electrons streaming from the button to a microchip in the door opener, persuading it to engage the chain drive. Atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen flood the garage and mix with the stale air already present. He throws the suitcase into the back seat of his Infiniti, climbs behind the wheel, and backs carefully out of his garage.

It occurs to him again: Perhaps insanity is reality no one else can see.

Because the world is alive. The field is everywhere at once, everywhere he looks, although he isn’t at all seeing it. It is simply
there,
in those trees and that parked car and in the grooved patterns of residential stucco.

But now he’s not being attacked by it. Now he’s using it.

He senses the car’s energy, can feel the slight deceleration through time as he moves through space. He can detect changes in the surface of the road, in the temperature and pressure of the tires.

The men are not at the end of his street, but they must be somewhere nearby. He’ll have to watch for them closely, because they will surely try to stop him from entering the freeway, where he can disappear into traffic and be lost forever.

But he does enter the freeway, accelerating onto the entrance ramp with no sign of surveillance anywhere. The field flickers inside him, all around him. It seems he is able to anticipate the maneuvers of other drivers before they make them. Traffic slows, each lane moving at speeds independent of one another, and he darts from one lane to the next, picking the fastest one at will.

He cannot, of course, simply head for LAX and purchase a flight to Dallas. Travel via mass transit will leave behind a trail too easy to follow. Instead he’ll have to drive, a two-day journey across the blasted desert landscapes of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and Steve finds himself looking forward to the raw solitude such a road trip will provide. Because sitting at home isn’t solitude. Not with the sprawling multiverse of satellite-provided television at his fingertips.

Soon he reaches Interstate 10, signaling the true beginning of his long trek east. Thirteen hundred or so miles, all the way to Olney, Texas, where he hopes to—if not find answers—at least understand what questions to ask. Where he hopes to feel the beam.

In the rearview mirror he spots a gold Honda Accord. It hovers a few car lengths back in the adjacent right lane. From here he can’t really see through the windshield, cannot determine if the front seat contains (two) Swiss goons. But the Accord is following him, of that he feels sure, which means he cannot permit it to pursue him through the suburbs and out of civilization. Because they could take him easily in the desert. With no one around to witness the abduction it would be a piece of cake for a couple of Swiss thugs like these guys.

So he begins to look for creases in the traffic, gaps his car might fit through, and gradually works his way into the far right lane. The Accord edges closer, remaining in its own lane and almost pulling even with Steve’s Infiniti. This is his chance. He watches the Accord, watches the highway, watches the exit for Citrus Road approaching. He’s in Covina now, about halfway to San Bernardino, and he’s going to take this exit, bearing down upon it as the Accord continues driving in its own lane. He’s surprised at their position—because if he exits now they will lose him—but still he waits until the last possible second before jerking the wheel to the right, violating a triangle of parallel white lines and nearly broadsiding a car halfway down the off-ramp. But he uses the field to save himself, sensing the driver’s reaction to him and veering out of his way. Chuckles to himself as the frightened man flips the bird at him, laughing not out of disrespect but because he has achieved success. Has escaped the interstate and deceived his pursuers. Now he can take Grand Avenue to the Pomona freeway and not get back on the 10 until he reaches Beaumont. From there he should be home free all the way to Texas, all the way to Olney.

All the way to the beam.

4

Darkness approaches from the east as he crosses the California–Arizona border at Blythe. Through the sunroof stars seem to shine down upon him, the moon blazing and white and magnified by the clarity of the desert. In L.A. the night sky is blurred by air and light pollution to an even, amber glow, and it seems to Steve that this observation is analogous to his newfound ability. The canopy of stars, like the field, is always there. Most city people just aren’t in a position to see them.

Steve wonders if anyone out here is in a position to see
him.

Headlights began to flicker in his rearview mirror as the sun descended behind him, belonging mostly to tractor trailers, but also to a number of passenger cars. Perhaps someone back there is following him, hanging back far enough to be inconspicuous, waiting to see where he’ll go. But that doesn’t seem very likely. Are they really going to follow him through the desert and halfway across the country? Wouldn’t they have installed a GPS transmitter on his car, or be watching him from a satellite, or something more sophisticated than simply tailing him?

Logically, there isn’t any way he lost those men in the Accord so quickly. A guy like him—a corporate suit whose previous goals in life included scaling the corporate ladder and finding marital bliss—did not outwit and outmaneuver a trained surveillance team. What seems more likely, in retrospect, is that the Accord was never following him at all. The surveillance—if it’s there at all—is something else, something more advanced.

In any case, he doesn’t sense it now. The field seems to have retreated into the periphery again, comfortably out of his way, but he wonders if he’s in control enough to call it up on demand. Perhaps he could use it to drive through the night without headlights. By distinguishing between the chemical makeup of the asphalt and the adjacent desert soil, perhaps he could navigate without light.

Steve closes his eyes. After a second or two the car begins to vibrate, his tires humming stridently, because the Infiniti is veering off the road. Unperturbed, he tries again to visualize the field and its conductors, tries to imagine the way it consumed him in the days leading up to and after his non-interview, but now his gift is nowhere to be found. Which is exactly the problem, exactly why he is worried, because an intermittent ability to sense constituent particles is no gift at all. And now, still sixty miles away from Phoenix, Steve wonders what might happen if he arrives in Olney and gets close to the beam and nothing happens.

What will he do then?

The highway stretches in front of him, an infinite black ribbon disappearing into the darkness.

5

Eighteen sleepy hours and three refueling stops later, beneath a brutal noontime sun, Steve approaches Olney from the southwest on Texas S.H. 79. His ass is numb, his right arm sore from resting his weight on the Infiniti’s center console, and he’s so tired he could pull over to the shoulder and fall immediately asleep. But of course he cannot sleep. He must find McNair.

He was able to make it as far as El Paso without a map, but he knew nothing about Olney except that it was somewhere in the general vicinity of Dallas. The particle accelerator is a huge thing, something like fifty miles around, so it’s not like he can just drive up to it. But surely there must be administrative offices, some kind of central command location, and he guesses the way to find it is simply head into town and ask someone.

The two-lane highway is wide and freshly paved, but the countryside on either side of it seems barely alive. Clusters of stunted mesquite trees stand above sparse pastures of brown grass, pastures guarded by charming oil pump jacks whose rusty, vaguely equine shapes have long been abandoned. Occasionally the landscape crystallizes into diminutive red cliffs or sinks into shallow stream valleys, but it’s mostly flat all the way to the city limit, which is marked by the standard green rectangular sign:

olney
pop. 15540

and a smaller sign mounted beneath that boasts:

home of the
one arm
dove hunt

and a third, obviously much newer:

and the north texas
superconducting
super collider!

He passes ancient corrugated steel buildings, rotting, wooden clapboard structures, the occasional squatty ranch home, and Steve wonders briefly why in the hell scientists would pick a place like this as the location of their most expensive and advanced experiment. But again it’s the size of the thing—where else to put a fifty-mile-around particle accelerator except the empty, endless Texas prairie?

Finally, as he approaches the town proper, civilization emerges in the form of fast food restaurants and convenience stores and an enormous Wal-Mart. Then a fork in the road, where a clean, new sign directs NTSSC visitors a few yards farther ahead, where 79 intersects with Texas 251. And here is another new road sign, one that makes his tired eyes widen:

ntssc administrative office 6
newcastle 11

Six miles. He’s only six miles away.

Steve approaches the turn and is surprised as he waits for two, three, now four cars to drive by before he can merge onto the intersecting highway. This road is newly resurfaced, and suburban housing developments have gone up on both sides of the highway. He follows the drivers ahead of him, gradually accelerating to the speed limit, and watches a few more cars file in behind him. In fact, as 251 rises and falls with the gently rolling prairie, he realizes there is a nearly unbroken line of automobiles occupying its southbound lane. An unbroken line that condenses until it’s bumper to bumper, and when he finally sees the NTSSC entrance ahead, maybe two hundred yards away, he is forced to bring his car to a complete stop. 251 southbound is at a standstill, at least twenty-five vehicles between his own and the entrance. News vans, passenger cars, SUVs, you name it. And the line is barely moving. He’ll be here forever.

Even worse is that not all vehicles are getting through. After a few minutes he can see that news vans and some SUVs are granted access, but very few passenger cars are being allowed inside the gate. He doesn’t need the field to tell him that only invited guests and members of the news media are being admitted, and it doesn’t take a particle physicist to realize that Steve himself is an uninvited guest. There isn’t any way they’re going to let him in.

Besides, the beam isn’t even on. It’s wrong, somehow, what he’s doing. Going directly to McNair is not the answer.

Probably he should get some rest anyway, a little voluntary sleep before he passes out and rear-ends the car in front of him.

Steve pulls out of the southbound lane, uses the Infiniti’s tight turn circle to pivot all the way back north, and drives back to town. All the way back to the acres of anonymous parking at the Wal-Mart, where he finds a remote spot in the grid of white stripes. Crawls snakelike into the backseat. Curls fetally. Drifts away.

6

He dreams of Svetlana. She joins him in the backseat, impossibly, because there is barely enough room on the seat for Steve himself, let alone a gorgeous woman curled up beside him. She nibbles on his neck, on his earlobe, which is also impossible since the back of his head is pressed against the leather seat. She whispers in his ear that he should drive a little farther. Find the reporter who helped bring the physicist’s message to him. Because, unlike McNair, she will listen.

But Steve doesn’t know anything about the woman, cannot remember her name, and certainly doesn’t know where to find her. At least not until Svetlana reminds him of the discussion with Dr. Taylor, when he explained how CNN picked up the interview from an affiliate in Dallas. And now he does remember, remembers her name is Kelly Smith, and with a little prodding even recalls the station’s call letters, WFAA. News 8.

At some point in the dream Svetlana convinces him to move on, that eventually a security guard is going to drive by and check on his car. Steve dreams that it’s already six o’clock in the evening, that he’s been sleeping for more than five hours, dreams that he finds the address and driving directions to WFAA on his Internet-capable GSM cell phone, he dreams that Svetlana rides shotgun with him as he finds his way out of Olney. They head east, first on Texas 114 and then on U.S. 380 toward Denton. Denton, she explains, is only forty miles from Dallas. And Dallas is where he’ll find Kelly Smith.