Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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 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 old-fashioned 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 old-fashioned 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; sh
e’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.”