The God Particle (25 page)

“I became interested when I grasped the scope and miracle of the universe for the first time. When I first realized how incredible it was that we were even here.”

“But isn’t that the same as—”

“Come outside with me,” Mike says. He takes her by the hand and leads her toward the back door. “Let me show you something.”

Mike turns off the backyard floodlight as they step onto the porch, a square of concrete before a rectangle of grass. She stands in front of him and he wraps his arms around her.

“You see all those stars?” he asks. “Look at how many of them you can see just with your naked eye. Every single one of them is a sun. Some bigger than our own, some smaller.”

She loves his voice. She could stand out here all night listening to him.

“But from here the sky seems kind of two-dimensional, doesn’t it? The stars look like they’re all the same distance away. Imagine our planet is at the center of a gigantic, hollow bowling ball, and imagine the stars are white dots painted on the black inside of its surface. That’s what they kind of look like from here.”

“Okay,” she says.

“But in reality they’re all different distances away. And most of them are so far away that you can’t see them. Our Milky Way galaxy is made up of at least a hundred billion stars, but we can only see maybe a thousand of them from here in my backyard. If this looks like a lot, imagine what it would look like if you could see, say, fifty million times more than this.”

“Fifty million stars?”

“Not fifty million more. Fifty million
times
more. Try to imagine
billions
of stars.”

“I guess the sky would be filled with them. How can there be so many?”

“It gets even better. You know how there are more galaxies than just our Milky Way? And that we can see them from here?”

“Sure.”

“To see one of those others,” Mike tells her, “you have to pick a spot where you can look all the way out of our own galaxy without encountering very many stars. Otherwise, the nearby stars will get in the way.”

“Right.”

“Okay, now remember that our own galaxy contains at least a hundred billion stars. Maybe more. That is an insurmountably big number. I’m thirty-two, which is about a billion seconds old. So—”

“What? How do you even know that?”

“Well, it’s just math. Sixty seconds times sixty minutes times twenty-four hours times—”

“Did you do that in your head just now?”

“Well, no. I did it on a calculator once.”

She smiles to herself. She’s never met anyone like him. “You’re such a nerd.”

“A nerd?” he asks, relaxing his hold on her.

“Don’t let go,” she says, pulling his arms tight around her. “I mean a good kind of nerd.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Just kisses the top of her head.

“Okay,” she prompts. “So you’re a billion seconds old. . . .”

“Right, and if I’d started counting the stars when I was born, one a second, I wouldn’t be anywhere near done counting just the stars in our galaxy. I would have had to start counting a thousand years before Christ, and I’d still need a few hundred more years.”

“Holy shit,” Kelly says.

“Now think of the moon.”

“The moon.”

“Right. The moon looks pretty big, but it covers a pretty small patch of the overall sky. Imagine dividing the moon into fifty pieces of identical size. Imagine how much sky one of those little pieces would cover.”

“Not much,” Kelly says.

“Okay, now come inside. I want to show you a picture that scientists took with the Hubble space telescope.”

Kelly takes his hand and lets him guide her back into the house.

“When the Hubble was built,” he says, “when it enabled us to see farther into the universe than anyone had ever seen before, someone got the idea to look far outside our galaxy and see what things looked like.”

In the study, Mike sits in front of his computer and starts moving the mouse, looking through folders.

“Remember how small the piece of sky was? Fifty of those pieces just to cover the moon? Astronomers pointed the Hubble telescope at a section of sky that big and came up with this picture.”

He opens the image, and it is wild with color. Spots of light on a black background. Large and small, orange and yellow and white and blue, spiral shapes, spherical shapes, shapes that have no name.

“What are those?” Kelly asks.

“Galaxies. There are around ten thousand galaxies in this image alone.”

“Thousands of galaxies?”

“Remember the tiny piece of the sky we’re looking at. We’ve looked at other sections of the sky with deep field images and they all look about the same. It seems reasonable that in every tiny patch of sky where you pointed the telescope, you would see thousands of galaxies. The entire sky is almost thirteen million times bigger than this little section.”

“And each one of these galaxies could have as many stars as our own galaxy? Hundreds of billions?”

“Well, some might have less. But some would surely have more.”

“Holy shit. That’s a lot of stars.”

“And we think the matter that eventually created all those stars and galaxies—and the idea of spacetime itself—emerged from the event of the Big Bang. To understand how the universe evolved, how everything came to be, we have to understand the constituent elements and forces that emerged in those very first instants. That is basically what my job is. Knowing what all these particles are and how they act can help us understand how the whole thing got here in the first place.”

“Oh,” Kelly says.

“Once I began to comprehend all this, I was hooked.”

Kelly reaches forward and wraps her arms around Mike’s midsection. Kisses his ear. His neck. Climbs into the chair with him.

“I think I’m hooked, too,” she says.

1

The receptionist beams as Steve strides into the office and announces his appointment.

“Of course, Mr. Keeley. Dr. Taylor is waiting. You can go right in.”

So he does. And there is the shrink, who stands to greet him, who conveys an unmistakable sensation of Juicy Fruit and Diet Coke. Of pink sheets and stuffed animals.

“Hello, Mr. Keeley,” Dr. Taylor says. “I have to say, you look much better than when I last saw you.”

“Good to see you,” he answers. “I feel better. I am better.”

She sits in her chair and invites Steve to make himself comfortable on the sofa. But he’d rather sit in the other chair and face her this time.

“That’s wonderful to hear. Did you see your physician? Or did you find something to disprove your conspiracy theory?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Steve says. “It’s sort of the opposite. I figured out that my hallucinations haven’t been hallucinations at all.”

She just looks at him, as if unsure how to proceed. “Mr. Keeley, it was very important last week when you acknowledged that the ‘field’ was a figment of your imagination. We both agreed the hallucinations were being caused by either the head injury, emotional trauma, or both. I’m afraid it’s a big step backward to change your opinion about this.”

“But that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. If it turns out that I’m right, that I’m
not
hallucinating, then perhaps the entire story is real. It would make a lot more sense than trying to fabricate reasons why the nurse would lie or why records of my hospital stay would be erased.”

“Steve—”

“Just listen,” he tells her. “Hear me out and then maybe you’ll at least try to be objective.”

She starts to say something but stops herself. “Okay. Please go on.”

Steve leans forward, lacing the fingers of his hands together. “Well, I was flipping channels yesterday—all I’ve been doing for days now is watching TV—because switching from one show to another is like self-hypnosis. It’s the only way I’ve been able to keep the field at bay since I left here last week. And I ended up on CNN, where I end up a lot. I get addicted to watching the news sometimes. And I see this story, it’s already in progress, I guess CNN picked it up from a local affiliate in Dallas. It’s this interview with a physicist. I wrote down his name so I wouldn’t forget it.”

He pulls out the ragged piece of yellow paper, what’s left of a Post-it note, pulls it out of his pants with trembling hands.

“Mike McNair. He works at that machine in Texas, the one built by the Internet tycoon? The super collider? And he goes through this entire history of physics and accelerators, how they started off small and kept getting bigger, because you need more and more power to study smaller and smaller things. The science of it was fascinating. Like when he talked about how the accelerator throws particles at other particles and then they ‘see’ what comes out. He said that when you look at something—say the Venus de Milo, for instance—you need light to see it, right? And light is photons, photons that are coming from the sun through windows, or from light bulbs in the Louvre, and those photons bounce off the Venus de Milo, and some of them are reflected back to your eyes, striking your retina in a certain configuration that is sent to your brain as electrochemical impulses, and that’s how you see the sculpture. And if they turn down the lights, or if the sun goes down, then the amount of photons decreases, or the angle of the reflection changes, and you see
more
shadows or shadows in different places, and the Venus de Milo appears to be a somewhat different sculpture. Its reality to you is different depending on how many photons there are and in what way they are reflected back to your eyes.

“He said the super collider is like that, how what goes in—different kinds of particles—has an effect on what comes out. Because they can’t actually ‘see’ what happens when the particles collide. But they have an idea of what should be going on, based on theory, based on previous experiments, and if they put a certain thing in and the product of those collisions matches what they expect, then they know they’re on the right track. And if it doesn’t, then they have to rethink the experiment or their predictions. It’s a very tedious process.”

“Of course,” Dr. Taylor says. “Science is like that. It—”

“Right. I know that now. And this particular accelerator, this superconducting super collider, one of the main reasons it was built was to look for this particle, this Higgs thing they call the—”

“God particle. I’ve heard of it. I didn’t realize they’d made an announcement.”

“The physicist, this McNair, he made it clear that the results were preliminary, that more tests were needed, but he said they may have proven the existence of this God particle. And—get this—they think these God particles compose a field, the Higgs field, and if what they believe is true, it
permeates
everything. It’s everywhere, in everything. And I couldn’t help but remember what you said last week, how what I described sounded like
Star Wars,
how this field seemed to bind the universe together.”

“Mr. Keeley—”

“I know it sounds crazy, but let me finish. Maybe you know all this, having gone to medical school and all, but I had no idea. I didn’t give a shit about science in school. He said that everything around us, everywhere, it’s all made up of tiny little particles. Not just atoms, everyone knows that, not just the subatomic elements like protons and electrons and that stuff, but even smaller things. Particles of matter like quarks. Messenger particles that communicate the forces that influence matter, like the strong force, which binds quarks together. Or electromagnetism, whose messenger particle is the photon, which isn’t just visible light but all kinds of stuff. I mean, did you know radio waves and light are the exact same thing? Just photons? The wavelength decides if we see it or not. He said that your eyes are basically instruments designed to receive photons within a certain wavelength range, and if they had a wider range, or if we had some other sensory organ that could detect a wider or different portion of the wavelength spectrum, we could ‘see’ radio waves. Or the ultraviolet radiation that turns our skin brown, or whatever. I mean, I had no freakin’ idea.”

“If you remember, I sort of mentioned this last week.”

“I know you did. I remembered
exactly
what you said, how detecting electromagnetic radiation would be a hell of a lot easier than influencing matter. Which is why I could hear Serena’s thoughts but not levitate off the bed. It makes perfect sense!”

“Mr. Keeley. Forgive me for being so direct, but it’s not healthy for you to think you can read minds. Or maybe pick up KROQ without a radio.”

“I expected you to say that.”

“No,” she says. “I’m not trying to be flippant. Or alarm you. But what you’re describing to me, that you truly believe you can perceive these fields, particles, so on and so forth, this is serious. A belief like that could seriously impair your ability to function normally in society. I’m afraid that, left untreated, you might . . . I’m afraid you might end up much worse off than you are now.”

“I’m not bipolar. I’m not going on lithium, and I’m certainly not going to a mental hospital.”

“I’m not suggesting—”

“Yes, you are. That’s exactly what you’re suggesting. And you know how I know?”

“I suppose because you can read my thoughts.”

“Except the term
reading
really doesn’t describe it right. It’s more like glimpses, flickering visual images, combined with something less tangible than that. Some of it is simply feeling. Knowing. Like the first time I came here, when I desperately wanted to believe I was hallucinating, and yet I knew your mind was wandering while you talked to me. You were thinking about the girl. The one you’ve been sleeping with.”

Dr. Taylor coughs. “Excuse me?”

“Does that make it more real for you? A personal example?”

“I . . . I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Dr. Taylor—”

“Please. Or I’ll call the police.”

“You call her your angel,” he says to her. “She has pink sheets. And the taste, like bubble gum or something? You were thinking of that earlier, when I came in.”

“Mr. Keeley!” the doctor says, nearly yelling now. He wonders if the receptionist will come in to see what the problem is. “I must ask you to leave at once!”

“Doesn’t it interest you at all that I can do this? That I can sense it? I want to know what the hell happened to me. Wouldn’t you, if you were me?”

“Mr. Keeley. Steve. I can . . . look, I can sympathize with what you’re saying, because—”

pink sheets how can he know about the pink sheets?

“—but I will not accept that you can sit there and intercept electromagnetic radiation from my brain. I really must—”

“All right,” he says, rising to his feet. “I’ll leave. You obviously can’t or don’t want to help me. If you promise you won’t call Dr. Dobbelfeld, I’ll leave right now.”

“But why don’t you want me to call him? Regardless of whether or not I believe you—which I do not, I do not believe this—you do. And if it
were
true, then perhaps it happened as a result of the surgery. Intentionally or not, doesn’t it make sense to contact the surgeon? He may be able to provide some insight.”

“Or come after me,” Keeley says. “Have you forgotten everything else? Svetlana? The nurse? The—”

“I haven’t forgotten. But this is . . . these are delusions of persecution. I mean, please . . .”

But Dr. Taylor trails off, and Steve can sense that she doesn’t really believe what she’s saying. He can tell how much it disturbs her to not consider or objectively evaluate direct evidence.

“I guess I’ll figure this out on my own,” he says. Strides to the door and then stops just before it. “But I’ll tell you something, Dr. Taylor. I don’t know if you are qualified to be consulting patients on their emotional problems when you can’t admit to your husband that you’re cheating on him with another woman. I really doubt you’d recommend anyone else to take that course of action.”

He leaves the office and shuts the door behind him.

2

On his way home now, directing his Infiniti through heavy traffic on the northbound 5, Steve supposes it doesn’t really matter whether or not Dr. Taylor calls Dobbelfeld, because if it’s true that he’s under surveillance, if there is in fact something bigger going on than just his recovery from head trauma, then certainly they’ll follow him wherever he goes. And if he does anything to reveal his suspicion, they’ll know it. Which isn’t good.

Because he’s going to Texas to visit McNair.

Somehow it’s important that he get close to the beam.

The challenge is to get there without being detected or followed. Unfortunately he has no idea how to do this. He can’t even say with certainty that he’s being followed, and even if he could, he wouldn’t recognize his pursuers.

The field, thankfully, has been much more manageable since he saw the television interview. Somehow, the knowledge that it might be real has given him control over its charge against his processing power. For now he’s pushed it into the background, like a computer program running behind the scenes, but Steve assumes that at some point it will rear its ugly head again whether he likes it or not.

And yet no longer can he regard the field as necessarily negative. Who wouldn’t want the ability to sense the thoughts and concerns and desires of your friends, your loved ones, of a beautiful woman in a bar? But if it occurs with unpredictable frequency, or if his awareness of the field triggers mental breakdowns—even occasionally—then such a skill will do as much harm as good. Like Dr. Taylor said, there might come a time when he would be unable to function as a normal, accepted member of society. Psychiatric hospitals are surely populated with innumerable patients who possess (real or imagined) paranormal powers.

Dr. Taylor, after all, could contact his parents, his company, Dr. Dobbelfeld, and recommend to them all that he be committed. Load him up with drugs and let him wander around slobbering. Which is as good a reason as any to get out of town, to go all the way to Texas and find McNair. But he’ll have to be quick about it, and careful, because until Dr. Taylor contacts Dobbelfeld, there’s at least a chance he could get out of the city undetected.

Ah, shit. This is absurd. How can he, a logical, goal-oriented man, who just weeks ago had life by the balls, how can he truly believe he is the victim of an international conspiracy? A conspiracy organized, presumably, by someone in the medical community, the purpose of which is to impart to him the ability to sense particles previously undetectable by human senses? To consider his situation in such frank terms is to render it preposterous. And yet he cannot refute the evidence that has led him to this conclusion, even Dr. Taylor’s unspoken admission that she has, in fact, been cheating on her husband. Look at the way she threw him out, the way she stammered and refused to listen to him. It’s only logical to draw reasonable conclusions from such proof.

And yet something more instinctive than logic is pushing him toward Texas.