Flashforward

1

Day One: Tuesday, April 21, 2009

A SLICE THROUGH SPACE TIME…

The control building for CERN's Large Hadron Collider was new: it had been authorized in A.D. 2004 and completed in 2006. The building enclosed a central courtyard, inevitably named "the nucleus." Every office had a window either facing in toward the nucleus or out toward the rest of CERN's sprawling campus. The quadrangle surrounding the nucleus was two stories tall, but the main elevators had four stops: the two above-ground levels; the basement, which housed boiler rooms and storage; and the minus-one-hundred-meter level, which exited onto a staging area for the monorail used to travel along the twenty-seven-kilometer circumference of the collider tunnel. The tunnel itself ran under farmers' fields, the outskirts of the Geneva airport, and the foothills of the Jura mountains.

The south wall of the control building's main corridor was divided into nineteen long sections, each of which had been decorated with a mosaic made by an artist from one of CERN's member countries. The one from Greece depicted Democritus and the origin of atomic theory; the one from Germany portrayed the life of Einstein; the one from Denmark, that of Niels Bohr. Not all of the mosaics had physics as their themes, though: the French one depicted the skyline of Paris, and the Italian one showed a vineyard with thousands of polished amethysts representing individual grapes.

The actual control room for the Large Hadron Collider was a perfect square, with wide, sliding doors positioned precisely in the centers of two of its sides. The room was two stories tall, and the upper half was walled with glass, so that tour groups could look down on the proceedings; CERN offered three-hour public tours Mondays and Saturdays at 09h00 and 14h00. Hanging flat against the walls below the windows were the nineteen member-state flags, five per wall; the twentieth spot was taken up by the blue-and-gold flag of the European Union.

The control room contained dozens of consoles. One was devoted to operating the particle injectors; it controlled the beginnings of experiments. Adjacent to it was another with an angled face and ten inlaid monitors that would display the results reported by the ALICE and CMS detectors, the huge underground systems that would record and attempt to identify the particles produced by LHC experiments. Monitors on a third console showed portions of the gently curving underground collider tunnel, with the I-beam monorail track hanging from the ceiling.

Lloyd Simcoe, a Canadian-born researcher, sat at the injector console. He was forty-five, tall, and clean-shaven. His eyes were blue and his crewcut hair so dark brown that one could get away with calling it black — except at the temples, where about half of it had turned gray.

Particle physicists weren't known for their sartorial splendor, and Lloyd had until recently been no exception. But he'd agreed a few months ago to donate his entire wardrobe to the Geneva chapter of the Salvation Army, and let his fiancee pick out all-new things for him. Truth be told, the clothes were a little flashy for his taste, but he had to admit that he'd never looked so sharp. Today, he was wearing a beige dress shirt; a coral-colored jacket; brown pants with exterior pouches instead of interior pockets; and — in a nod to fashion tradition — black Italian leather shoes. Lloyd had also adopted a couple of universal status symbols that also happened to be bits of local color: a Mont Blanc fountain pen, which he kept clipped to his jacket's inside pocket, and a gold Swiss analog watch.

Seated on his right, in front of the detector console, was the master of the makeover herself, his fiancee, engineer Michiko Komura. Ten years Lloyd's junior at thirty-five, Michiko had a small, upturned nose and lustrous black hair that she had styled in the currently popular page-boy cut.

Standing behind her was Theo Procopides, Lloyd's research partner. At twenty-seven, Theo was eighteen years younger than Lloyd; more than one wag had compared the conservative middle-aged Lloyd and his fiery Greek colleague to the team of Crick and Watson. Theo had curly, thick, dark hair, gray eyes, and a prominent, jutting jaw. He almost always wore red denim jeans — Lloyd didn't like them, but no one under thirty wore blue jeans anymore — and one of an endless string of T-shirts depicting cartoon characters from all over the world; today he had on the venerable Tweety Bird. A dozen other scientists and engineers were positioned at the remaining consoles.

Moving up the cube…

Except for the gentle hum of air conditioning and the soft whir of equipment fans, the control room was absolutely silent. Everyone was nervous and tense, after a long day of preparing for this experiment. Lloyd looked around the room then took a deep breath. His pulse was racing, and he could feel butterflies gyrating in his stomach.The clock on the wall was analog; the one on his console, digital. They were both rapidly approaching 17h00 — what Lloyd, even after two years in Europe, still thought of as 5:00 P.M.

Lloyd was director of the collaborative group of almost a thousand physicists using the ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment") detector. He and Theo had spent two years designing today's particle collision — two years, to do work that could have taken two lifetimes. They were attempting to recreate energy levels that hadn't existed since a nanosecond after the Big Bang, when the universe's temperature was 10,000,000,000,000,000 degrees. In the process, they hoped to detect the holy grail of high-energy physics, the long-sought-after Higgs boson, the particle whose interactions endowed other particles with mass. If their experiment worked, the Higgs, and the Nobel that would likely be awarded to its discoverers, should be theirs.

The whole experiment was automated and precisely timed. There was no great knife switch to pull down, no trigger hidden under a spring-loaded cover to push. Yes, Lloyd had designed and Theo had coded the core modules of the program for this experiment, but everything was now under the control of a computer.

When the digital clock reached 16:59:55 Lloyd started counting down out loud with it. "Five."

He looked at Michiko.

"Four."

She smiled back encouragingly. God, how he loved her—

"Three."

He shifted his gaze to young Theo, the wunderkind — the kind of youthful star Lloyd had hoped to have been himself but never was.

"Two."

Theo, ever cocky, gave him a thumbs-up sign.

"One."

Please, God… thought Lloyd. Please.

"Zero."

And then—

And then, suddenly, everything was different.

There was an immediate change in the lighting — the dim illumination of the control room was replaced with sunlight coming through a window. But there was no adjustment, no discomfort — and no sense that Lloyd's pupils were contracting. It was as if he were already used to the brighter light.

And yet Lloyd couldn't control his eyes. He wanted to look around, to see what was going on, but his eyes moved as if under their own volition.

He was in bed — naked, apparently. He could feel the cotton sheets sliding now over his skin as he propped himself up on one elbow. As his head moved, he caught a brief glimpse of dormer windows, looking out apparently from the second floor of a country house. There were trees visible, and—

No, that couldn't be. These leaves had turned, frozen fire. But today was April 21 — spring, not autumn.

Lloyd's view continued to shift and suddenly, with what should have been a start, he realized he wasn't alone in bed. There was someone else with him.

He recoiled.

No — no, that wasn't right. He didn't physically react at all; it was as if his body were divorced from his mind. But he felt like recoiling.

The other person was a woman, but—

What the hell was going on?

She was old, wrinkled, her skin translucent, her hair a white gossamer. The collagen that had once filled her cheeks had settled as wattles at the sides of her mouth, a mouth now smiling, the laugh lines all but lost amongst the permanent creases.

Lloyd tried to roll away from the hag, but his body refused to cooperate.

What in God's name was happening?

It was spring, not autumn.

Unless—

Unless, of course, he was now in the southern hemisphere. Transported, somehow, from Switzerland to Australia…

But no. The trees he'd glimpsed through the window were maples and poplars; it had to be North America or Europe.

His hand reached out. The woman was wearing a navy-blue shirt. It wasn't a pajama top, though; it had buttoned-down epaulets and several pockets — adventure clothing made of cotton duck, the kind L. L. Bean or Tilley sells, the kind a practical woman might wear to do her gardening. Lloyd felt his fingers brushing the fabric now, feeling its softness, its pliancy. And then—

And then his fingers found the button, hard, plastic, warmed by her body, translucent like her skin. Without hesitation, the fingers grasped the button, pushed it out, slipped it sideways through the raised stitching around the buttonhole. Before the top fell open, Lloyd's gaze, still acting on its own initiative, lifted again to the old woman's face, locking onto her pale blue eyes, the irises haloed by broken rings of white.

He felt his own cheeks drawing tight as he smiled. His hand slipped inside the woman's top, found her breast. Again he wanted to recoil, snapping his hand back. The breast was soft and shriveled, the skin hanging loosely on it — fruit gone bad. The fingers drew together, following the contours of the breast, finding the nipple.

Lloyd felt a pressure down below. For a horrible moment, he thought he was getting an erection, but that wasn't it. Instead, suddenly, there was a sense of fullness in his bladder; he had to urinate. He withdrew his hand and saw the old woman's eyebrows go up inquisitively. Lloyd could feel his shoulders rise and fall, a little shrug. She smiled at him — a warm smile, an understanding smile, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if he often had to excuse himself at the outset. Her teeth were slightly yellow — the simple yellow of age — but otherwise in excellent shape.

At last his body did what he'd been willing all along: it rolled away from the woman. Lloyd felt a pain in his knee as he did so, a sharp jab. It hurt, but he outwardly ignored it. He swung his legs off the bed, feet slapping softly against the cool hardwood floor. As he rose, he saw more of the world outside the window. It was either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, the shadow cast by one tree falling sharply across the next. A bird had been resting in one of the boughs; it was startled by the sudden movement in the bedroom and took wing. A robin — the large North American thrush, not the small Old World robin; this was definitely the United States or Canada. In fact, it looked a lot like New England — Lloyd loved the fall colors in New England.

Lloyd found himself moving slowly, almost shuffling across the floorboards. He realized now that this room wasn't in a house, but rather a cottage; the furnishings were the usual vacation-home hodgepodge. That night table — low-slung, made of particle board with a wallpaper-thin veneer of fake woodgrain on top: he recognized it, at least. A piece of furniture he'd bought as a student, and had eventually put in the guest room at the house in Illinois. But what was it doing here, in this unfamiliar place?

He continued along. His right knee bothered him with each step; he wondered what was wrong with it. A mirror was hanging on the wall; its frame was knotty pine, covered over with clear varnish. It clashed with the darker "wood" of the night table, of course, but—

Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

Of their own accord, his eyes looked into the mirror as he passed, and he saw himself—

For a half-second he thought it was his father. But it was him. What hair was left on his head was entirely gray; that on his chest was white. His skin was loose and lined, his gait stooped.

Could it be radiation? Could the experiment have exposed him? Could—

No. No, that wasn't it. He knew it in his bones — in his arthritic bones. That wasn't it.

He was old.

It was as if he'd aged twenty years or more, as if—

Two decades of life gone, excised from his memory.

He wanted to scream, to shout, to protest the unfairness, protest the loss, demand an accounting from the universe—

But he could do none of that; he had no control. His body continued its slow, painful shuffle to the bathroom.

As he turned to enter the room, he glanced back at the old woman on the bed, lying now on her side, her head propped up by an arm, her smile mischievous, seductive. His vision was still sharp — he could see the flash of gold on the third finger of her left hand. It was bad enough that he was sleeping with an old woman, but a married old woman—

The plain wooden door was ajar, but he reached a hand up to push it open the rest of the way, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a matching wedding ring on his own left hand.

And then it hit him. This hag, this stranger, this woman he'd never seen before, this woman who looked nothing like his beloved Michiko, was his wife.

Lloyd wanted to look back at her, to try to imagine her as she would have been decades younger, to reconstruct the beauty she might have once had, but—

But he continued on into the bathroom, half turning to face the toilet, leaning over to lift the lid, and—

— and, suddenly, incredibly, thankfully, amazingly, Lloyd Simcoe was back at CERN, back in the LHC control room. For some reason, he was slumped in his vinyl-padded chair. He straightened himself up and used his hands to pull his shirt back into position.

What an incredible hallucination it had been! There would be hell to pay, of course: they were supposed to be fully shielded here, a hundred meters of earth between them and the collider ring. But he'd heard how high-energy discharges could cause hallucinations; surely that had been what had happened.

Lloyd took a moment to reorient himself. There had been no transition between here and there: no flash of light, no sense of wooziness, no popping of his ears. One instant, he'd been at CERN, then, in the next, he'd been somewhere else, for — what? — two minutes, perhaps. And now, just as seamlessly, he was back in the control room.

Of course he'd never left. Of course it had been an illusion.

He glanced around, trying to read the faces of the others. Michiko looked shocked. Had she been watching Lloyd while he was hallucinating? What had he done? Flailed around like an epileptic? Reached out into the air, as if stroking an unseen breast? Or just slumped back in his chair, falling unconscious? If so, he couldn't have been out for long — nowhere ear the two minutes he'd perceived — or surely Michiko and others would be looming over him right now, checking his pulse and loosening his collar. He glanced at the analog wall clock: it was indeed two minutes after five P.M.

He then looked over at Theo Procopides. The young Greek's expression was more subdued than Michiko's, but he was being just as wary as Lloyd, looking in turn at each of the other people in the room, shifting his gaze as soon as one of them looked back at him.

Lloyd opened his mouth to speak although he wasn't sure what he wanted to say. But he closed it when he heard a moaning sound coming through the nearest open door. Michiko evidently heard it too; they both rose simultaneously. She was closer to the door, though, and by the time Lloyd reached it, she was already out in the corridor. "My God!" she was saying. "Are you okay?"

One of the technicians — Sven, it was — was struggling to get to his feet. He was holding his right hand to his nose, which was bleeding profusely. Lloyd hurried back into the control room, unclipped the first-aid kit from its wall mount, and ran to the corridor. The kit was in a white plastic box; Lloyd popped it open and began unrolling a length of gauze.

Sven began to speak in Norwegian, but stopped himself after a moment and started over in French. "I — I must have fainted."

The corridor was covered with hard tiles; Lloyd could see a carnation smear of blood where Sven's face had hit the floor. He handed the gauze to Sven, who nodded his thanks then wadded it up and pressed it against his nose. "Craziest thing," he said. "Like I fell asleep on my feet." He made a little laughing sound. "I had a dream, even."

Lloyd felt his eyebrows climbing. "A dream?" he said, also in French.

"Vivid as anything," said Sven. "I was in Geneva — over by Le Rozzel." Lloyd knew it well: a Breton-style creperie on Grand Rue. "But it was like some science-fiction thing. There were cars hovering by without touching the ground, and — "

"Yes, yes!" It was a woman's voice, but not in response to Sven. It was coming from back inside the control room. "The same thing happened to me!"

Lloyd re-entered the dimly lit room. "What happened, Antonia?"

A heavyset Italian woman had been talking to two of the other people present, but now turned to face Lloyd. "It was like I was suddenly somewhere else. Parry said the same thing happened to him."

Michiko and Sven were now standing in the doorway, right behind Lloyd. "Me, too," said Michiko, sounding relieved that she wasn't alone in this.

Theo, standing next to Antonia now, was frowning. Lloyd looked at him. "Theo? What about you?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

Theo shook his head.

"We all must have passed out," said Lloyd.

"I sure did," said Sven. He pulled the gauze away from his face, then touched it against his nose again to see if the bleeding had stopped. It hadn't.

"How long were we out?" asked Michiko.

"And — Christ! — what about the experiment?" asked Lloyd. He sprinted over to the ALICE monitoring station and tapped a couple of keys.

"Nothing," he said. "Damn."

Michiko blew out air in disappointment.

"It should have worked," said Lloyd, slapping an open palm against the console. "We should have got the Higgs."

"Well, something happened," said Michiko. "Theo, didn't you see anything while the rest of us were having — having visions?"

Theo shook his head. "Not a thing. I guess — I guess I did black out. Except there was no blackness. I was watching Lloyd as he counted down: five, four, three, two, one, zero. Then it was like a jump cut, you know, in film. Suddenly Lloyd was slumped over in his seat."

"You saw me slump over?"

"No, no. It's like I said: one instant you were sitting up, and the next you were slumped over, with no movement in between. I guess — I guess I did black out. No sooner had it registered on me that you were slumped over than you were sitting back up, and — "

Suddenly, a warbling siren split the air — an emergency vehicle of some sort. Lloyd hurried out of the control room, everyone following. The room on the opposite side of the corridor had a window in it. Michiko, who had got there first, was already hoisting the venetian blind; late-afternoon sun streamed in. The vehicle was a CERN fire truck, one of three kept on site. It was racing across the campus, heading toward the main administration building.

Sven's nose had apparently at last stopped bleeding; he was now holding the bloody mass of gauze at his side. "I wonder if somebody else had a fall?" he said.

Lloyd looked at him.

"They use the fire trucks for first aid as well as fires," said Sven.

Michiko realized the magnitude of what Sven was suggesting. "We should check all the rooms here; make sure everyone is all right."

Lloyd nodded and moved back to the corridor. "Antonia, you check everyone in the control room. Michiko, you take Jake and Sven and go down that way. Theo and I will look up this way." He felt a brief pang of guilt at dismissing Michiko, but he needed a moment to sort out what he'd seen, what he'd experienced.

The first room Lloyd and Theo entered contained a downed woman; Lloyd couldn't remember her name, but she worked in public relations. The flatscreen computer monitor in front of her showed the familiar Linux 2009 three-dimensional desktop. She was still unconscious; it was clear from the massive bruise on her forehead that she'd pitched forward, hitting her head on the metal rim of her desk, knocking herself out. Lloyd did what he'd seen done in countless movies: he took her left hand in his right, holding it so that the back of her hand was face up, and he patted it gently with his other hand while urging her to wake up.

Which, at last, she did. "Dr. Simcoe?" she said, looking at Lloyd. "What happened?"

"I don't know."

"I had this — this dream," she said. "I was in an art gallery somewhere, looking at a painting."

"Are you okay now?"

"I — I don't know. My head hurts."

"You might have a concussion. You should get to the infirmary."

"What are all those sirens?"

"Fire trucks." A pause. "Look, I've got to go now. Other people might be hurt, as well."

She nodded. "I'll be all right."

Theo had already continued on down the corridor. Lloyd left the room and headed down, as well. He passed Theo, who was tending to someone else who had fallen. The corridor made a right-hand turn; Lloyd headed along the new section. He came to an office door, which slid open silently as he approached it, but the people on the other side all seemed to be fine, although they were talking animatedly about the different visions they'd had. There were three individuals present: two women and a man. One of the women caught sight of Lloyd.

"Lloyd, what happened?" she asked in French.

"I don't know yet," he replied, also in French. "Is everyone okay?"

"We're fine."

"I couldn't help overhearing," said Lloyd. "The three of you had visions, too?"

Nods all around.

"They were vividly realistic?"

The woman who hadn't yet spoken to Lloyd pointed at the man. "Not Raoul's. He had some sort of psychedelic experience." She said it as if this was only to be expected given Raoul's lifestyle.

"I wouldn't exactly say 'psychedelic,' " said Raoul, sounding as though he needed to defend himself. His blond hair was long and clean, and tied together in a glorious ponytail. "But it sure wasn't realistic. There was this guy with three heads, see — "

Lloyd nodded, filing this bit of information away. "If you guys are all fine, then join us — some people took nasty falls when whatever it was happened. We need to search for anyone who might be hurt."

"Why not go on the intercom, and get everyone who can to assemble in the lobby?" said Raoul. "Then we can do a head count and see who's missing."

Lloyd realized this made perfect sense. "You continue to look; some people might need immediate attention. I'll go up to the front office." He headed out of the room, and the others rose and entered the corridor as well. Lloyd took the shortest path to the office, sprinting past the various mosaics. When he arrived, some of the administrative staff were tending to one of their own who'd apparently broken his arm when he fell. Another person had been scalded when she pitched forward onto her own steaming cup of coffee.

"Dr. Simcoe, what happened?" asked a man.

Lloyd was getting sick of the question. "I don't know. Can you operate the PA?"

The man looked at him; evidently Lloyd was using a North Americanism the fellow didn't know.

"The PA," said Lloyd. "The public-address system."

The man's blank look continued.

"The intercom!"

"Oh, sure," he said, his English harshened by a German accent. "Over here." He led Lloyd to a console and flipped some buttons. Lloyd picked up the thin plastic wand that had the solid-state microphone at its tip.

"This is Lloyd Simcoe." He could hear his own voice coming back at him from the speaker out in the corridor, but filters in the system eliminated any feedback. "Clearly, something has happened. Several people are injured. If you yourself are ambulatory — " He stopped himself; English was a second language for most of the workers here. "If you yourself can walk, and if people you're with can walk as well, or at least can be left, please come at once to the main lobby. Someone could have fallen in a hidden place; we need to find out if anyone is missing." He handed the microphone back to the man. "Can you repeat the gist of that in German and French?"

"Jawohl," said the man, already switching mental gears. He began to speak into the mike. Lloyd moved away from the PA controls. He then ushered the able-bodied people out of the office into the lobby, which was decorated with a long brass plaque rescued from one of the older buildings that had been demolished to make room for the LHC control center. The plaque spelled out CERN's original acronym: Conseil Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire. These days, the acronym didn't actually stand for anything, but its historical roots were honored here.

The faces in the lobby were mostly white, with a few — Lloyd stopped himself before he mentally referred to them as melanic-Americans, the term currently preferred by blacks in the United States. Although Peter Carter, there, was from Stanford, most of the other blacks were actually directly from Africa. There were also several Asians, including, of course, Michiko, who had come to the lobby in response to the PA announcement. Lloyd moved over to her and gave her a hug. Thank God she, at least, hadn't been hurt. "Anybody seriously injured?" he asked.

"A few bruises and another bloody nose," said Michiko, "but nothing major. You?"

Lloyd scanned for the woman who had banged her head. She hadn't shown up yet. "One possible concussion, a broken arm, and a bad burn." He paused. "We should really call for some ambulances — get the injured to a hospital."

"I'll take care of that," said Michiko. She disappeared into the office.

The assembled group was getting larger; it now numbered about two hundred people. "Everyone!" shouted Lloyd. "Your attention, please! Votre attention, s'il vous plait!" He waited until all eyes were on him. "Look around and see if you can account for your coworkers or office mates or lab staff. If anyone you've seen today is missing, let me know. And if anyone here in the lobby requires immediate medical attention, let me know that, too. We've called for some ambulances."

As he said that, Michiko re-emerged. Her skin was even paler than normal, and her voice was quavering as she spoke. "There won't be any ambulances," she said. "Not anytime soon, anyway. The emergency operator told me they're all tied up in Geneva. Apparently every driver on the roads blacked out; they can't even begin to tally up how many people are dead."

2

CERN was founded fifty-five years previously, in 1954. Its staff consisted of three thousand people of which about a third were physicists or engineers, a third were technicians, and the remaining third were split evenly between administrators and craftspeople.

The Large Hadron Collider was built at a cost of five billion American dollars inside the same circular underground tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border that still housed CERN's older, no-longer-used Large Electron-Positron collider; LEP had been in service from 1989 to 2000. The LHC used 10-Tesla dual-field superconducting electromagnets to propel particles around the giant ring. CERN had the largest and most powerful cryogenic system in the world, using liquid helium to chill the magnets to just 1.8 Celsius degrees above absolute zero.

The Large Hadron Collider was actually two accelerators in one: one accelerated particles clockwise; the other, counterclockwise. A particle beam going in one direction could be made to collide with another beam going in the opposite direction, and then—

And then E=mc², big time.

Einstein's equation said simply that matter and energy are interchangeable. If you collide particles at high enough velocities, the kinetic energy of the collision may be converted into exotic particles.

The LHC had been activated in 2006, and during its first few years of work it did proton-proton collisions, producing energies of up to fourteen trillion electron-volts.

But now it was time to move on to Phase Two, and Lloyd Simcoe and Theo Procopides had led the team designing the first experiment. In Phase Two, instead of colliding protons together, lead nuclei — each two hundred and seventeen times more massive than a proton — would be rammed into each other. The resulting collisions would produce eleven hundred and fifty trillion electron volts, comparable to the energy level in the universe only a billionth of a second after the big bang. At that energy level, Lloyd and Theo should have produced the Higgs boson, a particle that physicists had been pursuing for half a century.

Instead, they produced death and destruction on a staggering scale.

Gaston Beranger, Director-General of CERN, was a compact, hairy man with a sharp, high-bridged nose. He had been sitting in his office when the phenomenon occurred. It was the largest office on the CERN campus, with a long real-wood conference table directly in front of his desk, and a large, mirror-backed, well-stocked bar. Beranger didn't drink himself — not anymore; there was nothing harder than being an alcoholic in France, where wine flowed with every meal; Gaston had lived in Paris until his appointment at CERN. But when ambassadors came to see what their millions were being spent on, he needed to be able to pour them a glass without ever once showing how desperately he would have liked to have joined them.

Of course, Lloyd Simcoe and his sidekick Theo Procopides were trying their big experiment in the LHC this afternoon; he could have cleared his schedule to have gone and watched that — but there was always something major going, and if he went to watch every run of the accelerators he'd never get any work done. Besides, he needed to prepare for his meeting tomorrow morning with the team from Gec Alsthom, and—

"You pick that up!"

Gaston Beranger had no doubt where he was: it was his house, on Geneva's Right Bank. The Ikea Billy bookcases were the same, as were the couch and the easy chair. But the Sony TV, and its stand, were gone. Instead, what must have been a flat-panel monitor was mounted on the wall above where the TV used to be. It was showing an international lacrosse game. One team was clearly Spain's, but he didn't recognize the other team, clad in green-and-purple jerseys.

A young man had come into the room. Gaston didn't recognize him, either. He had been wearing what appeared to be a black leather jacket, and had thrown it over the end of the couch, where it had slipped down to the carpeted floor. A small robot, not much bigger than a shoebox, rolled out from under an end table and started toward the fallen coat. Gaston pointed a finger at the robot and barked, "Arrêt!" The machine froze, then, after a moment, retreated back under the table.The young man turned around. He looked to be maybe nineteen or twenty. On his right cheek there was what seemed to be an animated tattoo of a lightning bolt; it zigzagged its way across the young man's face in five discrete jumps, then repeated the cycle over and over again.

As he turned the left side of his face became visible — and it was horrifying, all the muscles and blood vessels clearly visible, as if, somehow, he'd treated his skin with a chemical that had turned it transparent. The young man's right hand was covered over with an exoskeletal glove, extending his fingers into long, mechanical digits terminating in glistening surgically sharp silver points.

"I said pick that up!" snapped Gaston in French — or, at least it was his voice; he had no sense of willing the words out. "As long as I'm paying for your clothes, you'll take good care of them."

The young man glared at Gaston. He was positive he didn't know him, but he did bear a resemblance to… whom? It was hard to tell with that ghastly half-transparent face, but the high forehead, the thin lips, those cool gray eyes, that aquiline nose…

The pointed tips of the finger extensions retracted with a whir, and the boy picked up the jacket between mechanical thumb and forefinger, holding it now as if it were something distasteful. Gaston's gaze tracked with him as he moved across the living room. As it did so, Gaston couldn't help noticing that a lot of other details were wrong, too: the familiar pattern of books on the shelves had changed completely, as if someone had reorganized everything at some point. And, indeed, there seemed to be far fewer volumes than there should have been, as though a purge had been done of the family library. Another robot, this one spiderlike and about the size of a splayed human hand, was working its way along the shelves, apparently dusting.

On one wall, where they used to have a framed print of Monet's Le Moulin de la Galette, there was now an alcove, displaying what looked like a Henry Moore sculpture — but, no, no, there could be no alcove there; that wall was shared with the house next door. It must have really been a flat piece, a hologram or something similar, hanging on the wall and giving the illusion of depth; if so, the illusion was absolutely perfect.

The closet doors had changed, too; they slid open of their own volition as the boy approached. He reached in, pulled out a hanger, and put the jacket on it. He then replaced the hanger inside the closet… and the jacket slipped from it to the closet floor.

Gaston's voice lashing out again: "Damn it, Marc, can't you be more careful?"

Marc…

Marc!

Mon Dieu!

That's why he looked familiar.

A family resemblance.

Marc. The name Marie-Claire and he had chosen for the child she was carrying.

Marc Beranger.

Gaston hadn't even yet held the baby in his arms, hadn't burped it over his shoulder, hadn't changed its diaper, and yet here he was, grown up, a man — a frightening, hostile man.

Marc looked at the fallen jacket, his cheek still flashing, but then he walked away from the closet, letting the door hiss shut behind him.

"Damn you, Marc," said Gaston's voice. "I'm getting sick of your attitude. You're never going to get a job if you keep behaving like this."

"Screw you," said the boy, his voice deep, his tone a sneer.

Those were baby's first words — not "mama," not "papa," but "Screw you."

And, as if there could be any doubt remaining, Marie-Claire entered Gaston's field of view just then, emerging through another sliding door from the den. "Don't speak to your father that way," she said.

Gaston was taken aback; it was Marie-Claire, without question, but she looked more like her own mother than herself. Her hair was white, her face was lined, and she'd put on a good fifteen kilos.

"Screw you, too," said Marc.

Gaston rather suspected that his voice would protest, "Don't talk to your mother like that." It did not disappoint him.

Before Marc turned back around, Gaston caught sight of a shaved area at the back of the kid's head, and a metal socket surgically implanted there.

It had to be a hallucination. It had to. But what a terrible hallucination to have! Marie-Claire was due any day now. They'd tried for years to get pregnant — Gaston ran a facility that could precisely unite an electron and a positron, but somehow he and Marie-Claire had been unable to get an egg and a sperm, each millions of times larger than those subatomic particles, to come together. But finally it had happened; finally God had smiled upon them, finally she was pregnant.

And now, at last, nine months later, they were soon to give birth. All those Lamaze classes, all that planning, all that fixing up of the nursery… it was soon going to come to fruition.

And now this dream; that's all it must be. Just a bad dream. Cold feet; he'd had the worst nightmare of his life just before he got married. Why should this be any different?

But it was different. This was much more realistic than any dream he'd ever had. He thought about the plug on the back of his son's head; thought about images being pumped directly into a brain — the drug of the future?

"Get off my back," said Marc. "I've had a hard day."

"Oh, really?" said Gaston's voice, dripping with sarcasm. "You've had a hard day, eh? A hard day terrorizing tourists in Old Town, was it? I should have let you rot in jail, you ungrateful punk — "

Gaston was shocked to find himself sounding so much like his own father — the things his father had said to him when he was Marc's age, the things he'd promised himself he'd never say to his own children.

"Now, Gaston… " said Marie-Claire.

"Well, if he doesn't appreciate what he's got here… "

"I don't need this shit," sneered Marc.

"Enough!" snapped Marie-Claire. "Enough."

"I hate you," said Marc. "I hate you both."

Gaston's mouth opened to reply, and then—

— and then, suddenly, he was back in his office at CERN.

After reporting the news of all the deaths, Michiko Komura had immediately gone back into the front office of the LHC control center. She kept trying to phone the school in Geneva that her eight-year-old daughter Tamiko attended; Michiko was divorced from her first husband, a Tokyo executive. But all she got was busy signal after busy signal, and the Swiss phone company, for some reason, wasn't offering to automatically notify her when the line became free.

Lloyd was standing behind her as she kept trying, but finally she looked up at him, her eyes desperate. "I can't get through," she said. "I've got to go there."

"I'll come with you," said Lloyd at once. They ran out of the building, into the warm April air, the ruddy sun already kissing the horizon, the mountains looming in the distance.

Michiko's car — a Toyota — was parked here, too, but they took Lloyd's leased Fiat, with Lloyd driving. They made their way out of the CERN campus, passing by the towering cylindrical liquid helium tanks, and got onto Route de Meyrin, which took them through Meyrin, the town just east of CERN. Although they saw some cars at the sides of the road, things looked no worse than they did after one of the rare winter storms, except, of course, that there was no snow on the ground.

They passed quickly through the town. A short distance outside it was Geneva's Cointrin Airport. Pillars of black smoke rose to the sky; a large Swissair jet had crashed on the one runway. "My God," said Michiko. She brought a knuckle to her mouth. "My God."

They continued on into Geneva proper, situated at the westernmost tip of Lac Leman. Geneva was a wealthy metropolis of 200,000, known for ultra-posh restaurants and wildly expensive shops.

Signs that would normally be lit up were out, and lots of cars — many of them Mercedes and other expensive makes — had veered off the roads and plowed into buildings. The plate-glass windows on several storefronts had shattered, but there didn't seem to be any looting going on. Even the tourists were apparently too stunned by what had happened to take advantage of the situation.

They did spot one ambulance, tending an old man at the side of the road; they also heard the sirens of fire trucks or other emergency vehicles. And at one point, they saw a helicopter embedded in the glass side of a small office tower.

They drove across the Pont de l'Ile, passing over the river Rhone, gulls wheeling overhead, leaving the Right Bank with its patrician hotels, and entering the historic Left Bank. The route around Vieille Ville — Old Town — was blocked by a four-car traffic accident, so they had to try negotiating their way through its narrow, crooked, one-way streets. They drove down Rue de la Cite, which turned into Grand Rue. But it, too, was blocked, too, by a Transports Publics Genevois bus that had spun out of control and was now swung across both lanes. They tried an alternate route, Michiko fretting more and more with each passing minute, but it was also obstructed by damaged vehicles.

"How far is the school?" asked Lloyd.

"Less than a kilometer," said Michiko.

"Let's do it on foot." He drove back to Grand Rue, then pulled the car over at the side of road. It wasn't a legal parking spot, but Lloyd hardly thought anybody would be worrying about that at a time like this. They got out of the Fiat and began running up the steep, cobbled streets. Michiko stopped after a few paces to remove her high heels so she could run faster. They continued on up the streets, but had to stop again for her to replace her shoes as they came to a sidewalk covered with glass shards.

They hurried up Rue Jean-Calvin, passing the Musee Barbier-Mueller, switched to Rue du Puits St. Pierre, and hustled by the seven-hundred-year-old Maison Tavel, Geneva's oldest private home. They had slowed only slightly by the time they passed the austere Temple de l'Auditoire, where John Calvin and John Knox had once held forth.

Hearts pounding, breath ragged, they pushed onward. On their right were the Cathedrale St-Pierre and Christie's auction house. Michiko and Lloyd hurried through the sprawling square of Place du Bourg-de-Four, with its halo of open-air cafes and patisseries surrounding the central fountain. Many tourists and Genevois were still prone on the paving stones; others were sitting up on the ground, either tending to their own scrapes and bruises or being aided by other pedestrians.

Finally, they made it to the school grounds on Rue de Chaudronniers. The Ducommun School was a long-established facility catering to the children of foreigners working in or near Geneva. The core buildings were over two hundred years old, but several additional structures had been added in the last few decades. Although classes ended at 4:00 P.M., after-school activities were provided until 6:00 P.M., so that professional parents could leave kids there all day, and, although it was now getting on to 7:00 P.M., scores of kids were still here.

Michiko was hardly the only parent to have rushed here. The grounds were crisscrossed by the long shadows of diplomats, rich business people, and others whose kids attended Ducommun; dozens of them were hugging children and crying with relief.

The buildings all looked intact. Michiko and Lloyd were both huffing and puffing as they continued running across the immaculate lawn. By long tradition, the school flew the flags of the home countries of every student out front; Tamiko was the only Japanese currently enrolled, but the rising sun was indeed snapping in the spring breeze.

They made it into the lobby, which had beautiful marble floors and dark-wood paneling on the walls. The office was off to the right, and Michiko led the way to it. The door slid open, revealing a long wooden counter separating the secretaries from the public. Michiko made it over to the counter, and, between shuddering breaths, she began, "Hello, I'm — "

"Oh, Madame Komura," said a woman emerging from an office. "I've been trying to call you, but haven't been able to get through." She paused awkwardly. "Please, come in."

Michiko and Lloyd made their way behind the counter and into the office. A PC sat on the desk, with a datapad docked to it.

"Where's Tamiko?" said Michiko.

"Please," said the woman. "Have a seat." She looked at Lloyd. "I'm Madame Severin; I'm the headmistress here."

"Lloyd Simcoe," said Lloyd. "I'm Michiko's fiance."

"Where's Tamiko?" said Michiko again.

"Madame Komura, I'm so sorry. I'm — " She stopped, swallowed, started again. "Tamiko was outside. A car came plowing through the parking lot, and… I'm so very sorry."

"How is she?" asked Michiko.

"Tamiko is dead, Madame Komura. We all — I don't know what happened; we all blacked out or something. When we came to, we found her."

Tears were welling out of Michiko's eyes. Lloyd felt a horrible constriction in his chest. Michiko found a chair, collapsed into it, and put her face in her hands. Lloyd knelt down next to her and put an arm around her.

"I'm so sorry," said Severin.

Lloyd nodded. "It wasn't your fault."

Michiko sobbed a while longer, then looked up, her eyes red. "I want to see her."She's still in the parking lot. I'm sorry — we did call for the police, but they haven't come yet."

"Show me," said Michiko, her voice cracking.

Severin nodded, and led them out behind the building. Some other youngsters were standing, looking at the body, terrified of it and yet drawn to it, something beyond their ken. The staff were too busy dealing with kids who had been injured to be able to corral all the pupils back into the school.

Tamiko was lying there — just lying there. There was no blood, and her body seemed intact. The car that had presumably hit her had backed off several meters and was parked at an angle. Its bumper was dented.

Michiko got within five meters, and then collapsed completely, crying loudly. Lloyd drew her into his arms, and held her. Severin hovered nearby for a bit, but was soon called away to deal with another parent, and another crisis.

At last, because she wanted it, Lloyd led Michiko over to the body. He bent over, his vision blurring, his heart breaking, and gently smoothed Tamiko's hair away from her face.

Lloyd had no words; what could he possibly say that might bring comfort at a time like this? They stood there, Lloyd holding Michiko for perhaps half an hour, her body convulsing with tears the whole time.

3

Theo Procopides staggered down the mosaic-lined corridor to his tiny office, its walls covered with cartoon posters: Asterix le Gauloix here, Ren and Stimpy there, Bugs Bunny and Fred Flintstone and Gaga from Waga above the desk.

Theo felt woozy, shell-shocked. Although he hadn't had a vision, it seemed everyone else had. Still, even just having blacked out would have been enough to unnerve him. Added to that were the injuries to his friends and coworkers, and the news of the deaths in Geneva and the surrounding towns. He was utterly devastated.

Theo was aware that people thought of him as cocky, arrogant — but he wasn't. Not really, not down deep. He just knew he was good at what he did, and he knew that while others were talking about their dreams, he was working hard day in and day out to make his a reality. But this — this left him confused and disoriented.

Reports were still coming in. One hundred and eleven people had died when a Swissair 797 crashed at Geneva Airport. Under normal circumstances, some might have survived the actual crash — but no one moved to evacuate before the plane caught fire.

Theo collapsed in his black leather swivel chair. He could see smoke rising in the distance; his window faced the airport — you needed a lot more seniority to get one that faced the Jura mountains.

He and Lloyd had intended no harm. Hell, Theo couldn't even begin to fathom what had caused everyone to black out. A giant electromagnetic pulse? But surely that would have done more damage to computers than to people, and all of CERN's delicate instruments seemed to be running normally.

Theo had swiveled the chair around as he'd sat down in it; his back was now to the open door. He wasn't aware that someone else had arrived until he heard a masculine throat-clearing. He rotated the chair and looked at Jacob Horowitz, a young grad student who worked with Theo and Lloyd. He had a shock of red hair and swarms of freckles.

"It's not your fault," Jake said, emphatically.

"Of course it is," said Theo, as if it were plainly obvious. "We clearly didn't take some important factor into consideration, and — "

"No," said Jake, strongly. "No, really. It's not your fault. It had nothing to do with CERN."

"What?" Theo said it as if he hadn't understood Jake's words.

''Come down to the staff lounge."

"I don't want to face anyone just now, and — "

"No, come on. They've got CNN on down there, and — "

"It's made CNN already?"

"You'll see. Come."

Theo rose slowly from his chair and started walking. Jake motioned for him to move more quickly, and at last Theo began to jog alongside Jake. When they arrived, there were maybe twenty people in the lounge.

" — Helen Michaels reporting from New York City. Back to you, Bernie."

Bernard Shaw's stern, lined face filled the high-definition TV screen. "Thanks, Helen. As you can see," he said to the camera, "the phenomenon seems to be worldwide — which suggests that the initial analyses that it must have been some sort of foreign weapon are unlikely to be correct, although of course the possibility that it was a terrorist act remains. No credible party, as yet, has stepped forward to claim responsibility, and — ah, we now have that Australian report we promised you a moment ago."

The view changed to show Sydney with the white sails of the Opera House in the background, lit up against a dark sky. A male reporter was standing in the center of the shot. "Bernie, it's just after four A.M. here in Sydney. There's no one image I can show you to convey what's happened down here. Reports are only slowly coming in as people realize that what they experienced was not an isolated phenomenon. The tragedies are many: we have word from a downtown hospital of a woman who died during emergency surgery when everyone in the operating theater simply stopped working for several minutes. But we also had a story of an all-night convenience-store robbery thwarted when all parties — including the robber — collapsed simultaneously at 2:00 A.M. local time. The robber was knocked unconscious, apparently, as he struck the floor, and a patron who woke up before he did was able to get his gun. We still have no good idea what the death count is here in Sydney, let alone the rest of Australia."

"Paul, what about the hallucinations? Are those being reported down under, as well?"

A pause while Shaw's question bounced off satellites from Atlanta to Australia. "Bernie, people are buzzing about that, yes. We don't know what percentage of the population experienced hallucinations, but it seems to be a lot. I myself had quite a vivid one."

"Thanks, Paul." The graphic behind Shaw changed to the American Presidential seal. "President Boulton will address the nation in fifteen minutes, we're told. Of course, CNN will bring you live coverage of his remarks. Meanwhile, we have a report now from Islamabad, Pakistan. Yusef, are you there—?"

"See," said Jake, sotto voce. "It had nothing to do with CERN."

Theo felt simultaneously shocked and relieved. Something had affected the entire planet; surely their experiment couldn't have done that.

And yet—

And yet, if it hadn't been related to the LHC experiment, then what could have caused it? Was Shaw right — was it some sort of terrorist weapon? It had only been a little over two hours since the phenomenon. The CNN team was showing amazing professionalism; Theo was still struggling to get his own equilibrium back.

Shut off the consciousness of the entire human race for two minutes, and what would the death toll be?

How many cars had collided?

How many planes had crashed? How many hang-gliders? How many parachutists had blacked out, failing to pull their ripcords?

How many operations had gone bad? How many births had gone bad?

How many people had fallen from ladders, fallen down stairs?

Of course, most airplanes would fly just fine for a minute or two without pilot intervention, as long as they actually weren't taking off or landing. On uncrowded roads, cars might even manage just to roll safely to a stop.

But still… still…

"The surprising thing," said Bernard Shaw, on the TV, "is that as near as we can tell, the consciousness of the human race shut off at precisely noon Eastern Time. At first it seemed that the various times were not all exactly the same, but we've been checking the clocks of those who've reported in against our own clocks here at CNN Center in Atlanta, which, of course, are set against the time signal from the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. Adjusting for slightly incorrect settings that other people had, we find that the phenomenon occurred to 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 Beranger, 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. Beranger."

"What the hell have you done?" demanded Beranger 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 Beranger 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 Beranger.

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 Beranger well, but all science administrators worldwide were doubtless cut from the same cloth. And hearing Beranger 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 Beranger. "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." Beranger 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 seventeen-thirty, 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 Beranger. "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 Beranger. "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 Beranger. "Remember, update me every hour, on the hour."

Theo nodded, and Beranger 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.

4

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 you'd never been before, or at least of something you'd never seen before?"

The woman nodded. "I guess that's right."

Michiko was four places away around the circle. Lloyd couldn't tell if she was absorbing any of this or not.

"What about you, Franco?" asked Lloyd.

Franco della Robbia shrugged. "It was Rome, at night. But — I don't know — it must have been some video game, really. Some VR thing."

Lloyd leaned forward. "Why do you say that?"

"Well, it was Rome, all right. Right by the Coliseum. And I was driving a car — except I wasn't driving, not exactly. The car seemed to be working of its own volition. And I couldn't tell for sure about the one I was in, but a lot of the cars were hovering maybe twenty centimeters off the ground." He shrugged. "Like I said, a simulation of some sort."

Sven and Antonia, who had both spoken of flying cars earlier in the day, were nodding vigorously. "I saw the same thing," said Sven. "Well, not Rome — but I did see floating cars."

"Me, too," said Antonia.

"Fascinating," said Lloyd. He turned to his young grad student, Jacob Horowitz. "Jake, what did you see?"

Jake's voice was thin, reedy. He ran freckled fingers nervously through his red hair. "The room was pretty nondescript. A lab somewhere. Yellow walls. There was a periodic table on one of the walls, though, and it was labeled in English. And Carly Tompkins was there."

"Who?" said Lloyd.

"Carly Tompkins. At least, I think it was her. She looked a lot older than the last time I'd seen her."

"Who is Carly Tompkins?"

The answer came not from Jake but from Theo Procopides, sitting farther around the circle. "You should know her, Lloyd — she's a fellow Canuck. Carly's a meson researcher; last I heard, she was with TRIUMF."

Jake nodded. "That's right. I've only met her a couple of times, but I'm pretty sure it was her."

Antonia, whose turn would have been next, raised her eyebrows. "If Jake's vision was of Carly, I wonder whether Carly's vision was of Jake?"

Everyone looked at the Italian woman, intrigued. Lloyd shrugged a little. "There's one way to find out. We could phone her." He looked at Jake. "Do you have her number?"

Jake shook his head. "Like I said, I hardly know her. We went to some of the same seminars at the last APS meeting, and I sat in on her paper on chromodynamics."

"If she's in APS," said Antonia, "she'll be in the directory." She waddled across the room and rummaged on a shelf until she found a slim volume with a plain cardboard cover. She riffled through it. "Here she is," said Antonia. "Home and work numbers."

"I — ah, I don't want to call her," said Jake.

Lloyd was surprised by his reluctance, but didn't pursue the matter. "That's all right. You shouldn't speak to her anyway. I want to see if she spontaneously comes up with your name."

"You may not be able to get through," said Sven. "The phones have been jammed with people trying to check on family and friends — not to mention all the lines knocked down by motorists."

"It's worth a try," said Theo. He got up, walked across the room, and took the directory from Antonia. But then he looked at the phone, and looked back at the numbers in the directory. "How do you dial Canada from here?"

"It's the same as dialing the U.S.," said Lloyd. "The country code's the same: zero-one."

Theo's finger danced on the keypad, entering a long string of digits. Then, for the benefit of his audience, he held up fingers to indicate how many rings had occurred. One. Two. Three. Four—

"Oh, hello. Carly Tompkins, please. Hi, Dr. Tompkins. I'm calling from Geneva, from CERN. Look, there's a bunch of us here. Is it okay if I put you on the speakerphone?"

A sle epy voice: " — if you like. What's going on?"

"We want to know what your hallucination was when you blacked out."

"What? Is this some kind of prank?"

Theo looked at Lloyd. "She doesn't know."

Lloyd cleared his voice, then spoke up. "Dr. Tompkins, this is Lloyd Simcoe. I'm also a Canadian, although I was with the D-Zero Group at Fermilab until 2007, and for the last two years I've been here at CERN." He paused, not sure what to say next. Then: "What time is it there?"

"Just before noon." The sound of a stifled yawn. "Today is my day off; I was sleeping in. What's this all about?"

"So you haven't been up yet today?"

"No."

"Do you have a TV in the room you're in?" asked Lloyd.

"Yes."

"Turn it on. Look at the news."

She sounded irritated. "I can hardly get the Swiss news here in British Columbia."

"It doesn't have to be the Swiss news. Put on any news channel."

The whole room heard Tompkins sighing into the mouthpiece of her phone. "All right. Just a second."

They could hear what was presumably CBC Newsworld muffled in the background. After what seemed an eternity, Tompkins returned to the handset.

"Oh, my God," she said into the phone. "Oh, my God."

"But you slept through it all?" said Theo.

"I did, I'm afraid," said the voice from half a world away. She paused for a second. "Why did you call me?"

"Has the news program you've been watching mentioned the visions yet?"

"Joel Gotlib is going on about that now," she said, presumably referring to a Canadian newscaster. "It sounds crazy. Anyway, nothing like that happened to me."

"All right," said Lloyd. "We're sorry to have disturbed your sleep, Dr. Tompkins. We'll be — "

"Wait," said Theo.

Lloyd looked at the younger man.

"Dr. Tompkins, my name is Theo Procopides. We've met, I think, once or twice at conferences."

"If you say so," said Tompkins's voice.

"Dr. Tompkins," continued Theo. "I'm like you — I didn't see anything either. No vision, no dream, no nothing."

"Dream?" said Tompkins's voice. "Well, now that you mention it, I guess I did have a dream. Funny thing was it was in color — I never dream in color. But I remember the guy in it had red hair."

Theo looked disappointed — he'd clearly been pleased to find he wasn't alone. But everyone else's eyebrows flew up, and they turned to look at Jake.

"Not only that," said Carly, "he had red underwear, too."

Young Jake now turned the aforementioned color. "Red underwear?" repeated Lloyd.

"That's right."

"Did you know this man?" asked Lloyd.

"No, I don't think so."

"He didn't look like anyone you'd ever met before?"

"I don't think so."

Lloyd leaned closer to the speakerphone. "What about — what about the father of someone you'd met before? Did he look like somebody's father?"

"What are you getting at?" asked Tompkins.

Lloyd sighed then looked around the room, seeing if anyone was going to object to him going on. No one did. "Does the name Jacob Horowitz mean anything to you?"

"I don't — oh, wait. Oh, right. Sure, sure. That's who he reminded me of. Yeah, it was Jacob Horowitz, but, geez, he should take better care of himself. He looked like he'd aged decades since I last saw him."

Antonia made a small gasp. Lloyd felt his heart pounding. "Look," said Carly. "I want to make sure my family members are okay. My parents are in Winnipeg — I've got to get going."

"Can we call you back in a bit?" asked Lloyd. "You see, we've got Jacob Horowitz here, and his vision seems to match yours — sort of, anyway. He said he was in a lab, but… "

"Yes, that's right. It was a lab."

Incredulity crept into Lloyd's voice. "And he was in his underwear?"

"Well, not by the end of the vision… Look, I've got to go."

"Thanks," said Lloyd. "Bye."

"Bye."

Swiss dial tone issued from the speaker. Theo reached over and shut it off.

Jacob Horowitz still looked decidedly embarrassed. Lloyd thought about telling him that probably half of all the physicists he knew had done it at one time or another in a lab, but the young man looked like he'd have a nervous breakdown if anyone said anything to him just now. Lloyd started to shift his gaze around the circle again. "All right," he said. "All right. I'm going to say it, because I know you're all thinking it. Whatever happened here caused some sort of time effect. The visions weren't hallucinations; they were actual insights into the future. The fact that Jacob Horowitz and Carly Tompkins both apparently saw the same thing strongly suggests that."

"But Raoul's vision was psychedelic, didn't someone say that?" said Theo.

"Yeah," said Raoul. "Like a dream, or something."

"Like a dream," repeated Michiko. Her eyes were still red, but she was reacting to the outside world.

That was all she said, though, but, after a moment Antonia caught her meaning and elaborated. "Michiko's right," said the Italian physicist. "No mystery there — at whatever point in the future the visions are of, Raoul will be asleep, and having an actual dream."

"But this is crazy," said Theo. "Look, I didn't have any vision."

"What did you experience?" asked Sven, who hadn't heard Theo describe it before.

"It was — I don't know, like a discontinuity, I guess. Suddenly, it was two minutes later; I had no sensation of passing time, and nothing at all like a vision." Theo folded his arms defiantly across his broad chest. "How do you explain that?"

There was quiet around the room. The pained expressions on a lot of faces made clear to Lloyd that they'd gotten it, too, but no one wanted to voice it aloud. Finally, Lloyd shrugged a little. "Simple," he said, looking at his brilliant, arrogant, twenty-seven-year old associate, "in twenty years — or whatever time the visions are of… " He paused, then spread his hands. "I'm sorry, Theo, but in twenty years, you're dead."

5

The vision Lloyd most wanted to hear about was Michiko's. But she was still — as she doubtless would be for a very long time — completely out of it. When it came to her turn in the circle, Lloyd skipped over her. He wished he could just take her home, but it was doubtless best for her to not be alone right now, and there was no way that Lloyd, or anyone else, could get away to be with her.

None of the other visions relayed by the little sampling of people in the conference room overlapped — there was no indication that they were of the same time or the same reality, although it did seem that almost everyone was enjoying a day off or a holiday. But there was the question of Jake Horowitz and Carly Tompkins — separated by almost half the planet and yet apparently seeing each other. Of course, it could be coincidence. Still, if the visions did match, not just in their broad strokes, but in precise details, that would be significant.

Lloyd and Michiko had retired to Lloyd's office. Michiko was curled up tightly in one of the chairs, and she had Lloyd's windbreaker pulled over her like a blanket. Lloyd picked up the handset on his desk phone and dialed. "Bonjour," he said. "La police de Geneve? Je m'appelle Lloyd Simcoe; je suis avec CERN."

"Oui, Monsieur Simcoe," said a male voice. He switched to English; Swiss often did that in response to Lloyd's accent. "What can we do for you?"

"I know you're terribly busy — "

"An understatement, monsieur. We are, as you say, bogged."

Swamped, thought Lloyd. "But I'm hoping one of your witness examiners is free. We have a theory about the visions, and we need the help of someone proficient at taking testimony."

"I'll put you through to the right department," said the voice.

While he was on hold, Theo poked his head through the office door. "The BBC World Service is reporting that many people had matching visions," he said. "For instance, many married couples, even if they weren't in the same room at the time of the phenomenon, reported similar experiences."

Lloyd nodded at this bit of information. "Still, there's always a possibility, I guess, for whatever reason, of collusion, or, Carly and Jake notwithstanding, that synchronization of visions was a localized phenomenon. But… "

He left it unsaid — after all, it was Theo the visionless he was speaking to. But if Carly Tompkins and Jacob Horowitz — she in Vancouver, he near Geneva — really did see the exact same thing, then there would be little doubt that all the visions were of the same one future, mosaic pieces of tomorrow… a tomorrow that did not include Theo Procopides.

"Tell me about the room you were in," said the witness examiner, a middle aged Swiss woman. She had a datapad in front of her, and was wearing a loose polo shirt; last in fashion in the late 1980s, they were cycling back into popularity.

Jacob Horowitz closed his eyes, shutting out distractions, trying to recall every detail. "It's a lab of some sort. Yellow walls. Fluorescent lights. Formica counter tops. A periodic table on the wall."

"And is there anybody else in this lab?"

Jake nodded. God, why did the examiner have to be female? "Yes. There's a woman — a white woman, with dark hair. She looks to be about forty-five or so."

"And what is she wearing, this woman?"

Jake swallowed. "Nothing… "

The Swiss witness examiner had left, and Lloyd and Michiko were now comparing reports of Jacob's and Carly's visions; Carly had agreed to be similarly examined by the Vancouver police, and the report of that interview had been emailed to CERN.

In the intervening hours, Michiko had rallied a bit. She was clearly trying to focus, to go on, to help with the larger crisis, but every few minutes she would fade away and her eyes would go moist. Still, she managed to read through the two transcripts without getting the paper overly wet.

"There's no doubt," she said. "They match in every particular. They were in the same room."

Lloyd tried a small smile. "Kids," he said. He had only known Michiko for two years; they'd never made love in a lab — but in his grad-student days, Lloyd and his then girlfriend, Pamela Ridgley, had certainly heated up a few countertops at Harvard. But then he shook his head in wonder. "A glimpse of the future. Fascinating." He paused. "I imagine some people are going to get rich off this."

Michiko shrugged a bit. "Eventually, maybe. Those who happened to be looking at stock reports in the future might become wealthy — decades from now. That's a long time to wait for it to all pay off."

Lloyd was quiet for a moment, then: "You haven't told me what you saw yet — what your vision was."

Michiko looked away. "No," she said, "I haven't."

Lloyd touched her cheek gently, but said nothing.

"At the time — at the time I was having the vision, it seemed wonderful," she began. "I mean, I was disoriented and confused about what was going on. But the vision itself was joyous." She managed a wan smile. "Except now after what's happened… "

Again, Lloyd didn't push. He sat, outwardly patient.

"It was late at night," Michiko said at last. "I was in Japan; I'm sure it was a Japanese house. I was in a little girl's bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed. And this girl, maybe seven or eight, was sitting up in bed, and she was talking with me. She was a beautiful girl, but she wasn't — she wasn't — "

If the visions were of a time decades in the future, of course she wasn't Tamiko. Lloyd nodded gently, absolving her of having to finish the thought. Michiko sniffled. "But — but she was my daughter; she must have been. A daughter I haven't had yet. She was holding my hand, and she called me okaasan; that's Japanese for 'mommy.' It was like I was putting her to bed, wishing her good night."

"Your daughter… " said Lloyd.

"Well, our daughter, I'm sure," said Michiko. "Yours and mine."

"What were you doing in Japan?" asked Lloyd.

"I don't know; visiting family, I guess. My uncle Masayuki lives in Kyoto. Except for the fact that we had a daughter, I didn't really get any sense that it was in the future."

"This child, did she — "

Lloyd cut himself off. What he'd wanted to ask was boorish, crude. "Did she have slanted eyes?" Or maybe he would have caught himself in time and phrased it more elegantly: "Did she have epicanthic folds?" But Michiko wouldn't have understood. She'd have thought some prejudice underlay Lloyd's question, some silly misgivings about miscegenation. But that wasn't it. Lloyd didn't care if their eventual children were occidental or oriental in appearance. They could as easily be one as the other, or, of course, a mixture of the two, and he'd love them just the same, assuming—

Assuming, of course, that they were his children.

The visions seemed to be of a time perhaps two decades in the future. And in his vision, which he hadn't yet shared with Michiko, he was somewhere, maybe New England, with another woman. A white woman. And Michiko was in Kyoto, Japan, with a daughter who might be Asian or might be Caucasian or might be something in between, all depending on who her father was.

This child, did she—

"Did she what?" asked Michiko.

"Nothing," said Lloyd, looking away.

"What about your vision?" asked Michiko. "What did you see?"

Lloyd took a deep breath. He'd have to tell her sometime, he supposed, and—

"Lloyd, Michiko — you guys should come on down to the lounge." It was Theo's voice; he had just stuck his head in the door again. "We just recorded something off CNN that you'll want to see."

Lloyd, Michiko, and Theo entered the lounge. Four other people were already there. White-haired Lou Waters was jerking up and down on screen; the lounge VCR was an old unit — some staff member's hand-me-down — and didn't have a great pause function.

"Ah, good," said Raoul, as they entered. "Look at this." He touched the pause key on the remote, and Waters sprang into action.

" — David Houseman has more on this story. David?"

The picture changed to show CNN's David Houseman, standing in front of a wall of antique clocks — even with a breaking story, CNN still strove for interesting visuals.

"Thanks, Lou," said Houseman. "Most people's visions of course had no time reference in them, but enough people were in rooms with clocks or calendars on the wall, or reading electronic newspapers — there didn't seem to be any paper ones left — that we've been able to conjecture a date. It seems that the visions were of a time twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours ahead of the moment at which the visions occurred: the visions portray the period from 2:21 to 2:23 P.M. Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030. That assumes the occasional aberrations are explicable: some people seemed to be reading newspapers dated October 22, 2030, or even earlier — presumably they were reading old editions. And the time references, of course, depend a great deal on what time zone the person happens to be in. We're assuming that the majority of people will still live in the same time zone two decades from now that they happen to live in today, and those that report times off by a whole number of hours from what we'd expect were in some other time zone — "

Raoul hit the pause key again.

"There it is," said Raoul. "A concrete number. Whatever we did here somehow caused the consciousness of the human race to jump ahead twenty-one years for a period of two minutes."

Theo returned to his office, the darkness of night visible through his window. All this talk of visions was disturbing — especially since he himself hadn't had one. Could Lloyd be right? Could Theo be dead a mere twenty-one years from now? He was only twenty-seven, for God's sake; in two decades, he'd still be well shy of fifty. He didn't smoke — not much of a statement for any of the North Americans to make, but still an achie vement among Greeks. He worked out regularly. Why on earth should he be dead so soon? There had to be another explanation for him having no vision.His phone bleeped. Theo picked up the handset. "Hello?"

"Hello," said a female voice, in English. "Is this, ah, Theodosios Procopides?" She stumbled over the name.

"Yes."

"My name is Kathleen DeVries," said the woman. "I've been mulling over whether to phone you. I'm calling from Johannesburg."

"Johannesburg? You mean in South Africa?"

"For the time being, anyway," she said. "If the visions are to be believed, it's going to be officially renamed Azania sometime in the next twenty-one years."

Theo waited silently for her to go on. After a moment, she did. "And it's the visions that I'm calling about. You see, mine involved you."

Theo felt his heart racing. What wonderful news! Maybe he hadn't had a vision of his own for whatever reason, but this woman had seen him twenty-one years hence. Of course he had to be alive then; of course, Lloyd was wrong when he said Theo would be dead.

"Yes?" Theo said breathlessly.

"Umm, I'm sorry to have bothered you," said DeVries. "Can I — may I ask what your own vision showed?"

Theo let out air. "I didn't have one," he said.

"Oh. Oh, I am sorry to hear that. But — well, then, I guess it wasn't a mistake."

"What wasn't a mistake?"

"My own vision. I was here, in my home, in Johannesburg, reading the newspaper over dinner — except it wasn't on newsprint. It was on this thing that looked like a flat plastic sheet; some sort of computerized reader screen, I think. Anyway, the article I was reading happened to be — well, I'm sorry there's no other way to say it. It was about your death."

Theo had once read a Lord Dunsany story about a man who fervently wished to see tomorrow's newspaper today, and when he finally got his wish, was stunned to discover it contained his own obituary. The shock of seeing that was enough to kill him, news which would of course be reported in the next day's edition. That was it; that was all — a zinger, a punch line. But this… this wasn't tomorrow's paper; it was a paper two decades hence.

"My death," repeated Theo, as though those two words had somehow been missed in his English classes.

"Yes, that's right."

Theo rallied a bit. "Look, how do I know this isn't some scam or prank?"

"I'm sorry; I knew I shouldn't have called. I'll be — "

"No, no, no. Don't hang up. In fact, please let me get your name and number. The damned call display is just showing 'Out of Area.' You should let me phone you back; this call must be costing you a fortune."

"My name, as I said, is Kathleen DeVries. I'm a nurse at a senior citizens' home here." She told him her phone number. "But, really, I'm glad to pay for the call. Honestly, I don't want anything from you, and I'm not trying to trick you. But, well — look, I see people die all the time. We lose about one a week here at the home, but they're mostly in their eighties or nineties or even their hundreds. But you — you're going to be just forty-eight when you die, and that's way too young. I thought by calling you up, by letting you know, maybe you could somehow prevent your own death."

Theo was quiet for several seconds, then, "So, does the — the obituary say what I died of?" For one bizarre moment, Theo was kind of pleased that his passing had been worthy of note in international newspapers. He almost asked if the first two words in the article happened to be "Nobel laureate." "I know I should cut down on my cholesterol; was it a heart attack?"

There was silence for several seconds. "Umm, Dr. Procopides, I'm sorry, I guess I should have been more clear. It's not an obituary I was reading; it's a news story." He could hear her swallow. "A news story about your murder."

Theo fell silent. He could have repeated the word back to her incredulously. But there was no point.

He was twenty-seven; he was in good health. As he'd been thinking a few moments ago, of course he wouldn't be dead of natural causes in a mere twenty-one years. But — murder?

"Dr. Procopides? Are you still there?"

"Yes." For the time being.

"I'm — I'm sorry, Dr. Procopides. I know this must come as quite a shock."

Theo was quiet for a few moments longer, then: "The article you were reading — does it say who kills me?"

"I'm afraid not. It's an unsolved crime, apparently."

"Well, what does the article say?"

"I've written down as much of it as I remember; I can email you it, but, well, here, let me read it to you. Remember, this is a reconstruction; I think it's pretty accurate, but I can't guarantee every word." She paused, cleared her throat, then went on. "The headline was, 'Physicist Shot Dead.' "

Shot, thought Theo. God.

DeVries went on. "The dateline was Geneva. It said, 'Theodosios Procopides, a Greek physicist working at CERN, the European center for particle physics, was found shot to death today. Procopides, who received his Ph.D. from Oxford, was director of the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider at — "

"Say that again," said Theo.

"The Tachyon-Tardyon Collider," said DeVries. She was mispronouncing "tachyon," saying it with a CH blend instead of a K sound. "I'd never heard those words before."

"There's no such collider," said Theo. "At least, not yet. Please, go on."

"… director of the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider at CERN. Dr. Procopides had been with CERN for twenty-three years. No motive has been suggested for the killing, but robbery has been ruled out, as Dr. Procopides's wallet was found on him. The physicist was apparently shot sometime between noon and 1:00 P.M. local time yesterday. The investigation is continuing. Dr. Procopides is survived by his… "

"Yes? Yes?"

"I'm sorry, that's all it said."

"You mean your vision ended before you finished reading the article?"

There was a small silence. "Well, not exactly. The rest of the article was off-screen, and instead of touching the pagedown button — I could clearly see such a button on the side of the reading device — I went on to select another article." She paused. "I'm sorry, Dr. Procopides. I — the 2009 me — was interested in what the rest of the story said, but the 2030 version didn't seem to care. I did try to will her — to will me — to touch the page-down control, but it didn't work."

"So you don't know who killed me, or why?"

"I am sorry."

"And the paper you were reading — you're sure that it was the then-current one? You know, the October 23, 2030, one."

"Actually, no. There was a — what would you call it? A status line? There was a status line at the top of the reader that said the date and the name of the paper quite prominently: The Johannesburg Star, Tuesday, October 22, 2030. So I guess it was yesterday's paper, so to speak." She paused. "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news."

Theo was quiet for a time, trying to digest all this. It was hard enough dealing with the fact that he might be dead in a mere twenty years, but the idea that someone might kill him was almost too much to bear.

"Ms. DeVries, thank you," he said. "If you recall any other details — anything at all — please, please let me know. And please do fax me the transcript you mentioned." He gave her his fax number.

"I will," she said. "I — I'm sorry; you sound like a nice young man. I hope you can figure out who did it — who's going to do it — and find a way to prevent it."

6

It was now almost midnight. Lloyd and Michiko were walking down the corridor toward his office when they heard Jake Horowitz's voice calling out from an open door. "Hey, Lloyd, have a look at this.

They entered the room. Young Jake was standing next to a TV set. Its screen was filled with snow.

"Snow," said Lloyd, helpfully, as he crossed over to stand beside Jake.

"Indeed."

"What channel are you trying to get?"

"No channel. I'm playing back a tape."

"Of what?"

"This happens to be the security camera at the main gatehouse to the CERN campus." He hit the eject button; the VHS tape popped out. He replaced it with another cassette. "And this is the security camera at the Microcosm." He hit play; the screen again filled with snow.

"Are you sure this is the right kind of VCR?" Switzerland used the PAL recording format, and, although multistandard machines were common, there were a few NTSC-only VCRs at CERN.

Jake nodded. "I'm sure. Took me a while to find one that would show what was actually on the tape, too — most VCRs just go to solid blue if there's no picture signal."

"Well, if it's the right kind of VCR, then there must be something wrong with the tapes." Lloyd frowned. "Maybe there was an electromagnetic pulse associated with the — the whatever it was; it could have wiped the tapes."

"That was my first thought, too," said Jake. "But watch this." He hit the remote's reverse button. The snow speeded up its dancing on screen, and the letters REV — the abbreviation was the same in many European languages — appeared in the upper right corner. After about half a minute, a picture suddenly appeared, showing the Microcosm Exhibit, CERN's gallery devoted to explaining particle physics to tourists. Jake rewound the tape some more then took his finger off the button.

"See?" he said. "That's earlier on the tape — look at the time stamp." In the center of the screen near the bottom, a digital readout was superimposed on the image, with the time incrementing: "16h58m22s," "16h58m23s," "16h58m24s"…"About a minute and a half before the phenomenon began," said Jake. "If there'd been something like an EMP, it would have wiped what was already on the tape, too."

"So what are you saying?" asked Lloyd. "The tape goes all snowy right at the beginning of the phenomenon?" He liked Jake's word for what had happened.

"Yes — and it picks up again exactly one minute and forty-three seconds later. It's the same on all the tapes I've checked: one minute and forty-three seconds of static."

"Lloyd, Jake — come quick!" It was Michiko's voice; the two men turned around to see her beckoning to them from the doorway. They ran after her into the room next door — the lounge, which had its own TV set, still showing CNN.

" — and of course there were hundreds of thousands of videos made during the period when people's minds were elsewhere," said anchor Petra Davies. "Security-camera footage, home-video cameras left running, tapes from TV studios — including our own archival tapes made right here at CNN, which the FCC requires us to produce — and more. We'd assumed they would clearly show everyone in them blacking out, and bodies collapsing to the ground — "

Lloyd and Jake exchanged a glance. "But," continued Davies, "none of them show anything. Or, more precisely, they show nothing but snow — black and white flecks, roiling on the screen. As far as we can tell, every video made anywhere in the world during the Flashforward shows snow for precisely one minute and forty-three seconds. Likewise, our other recording devices, such as those hooked up to the weather instruments we use in making forecasts, recorded no data during the period in which everyone blacked out. If anyone watching this does have a tape or recording made during that time that shows a picture, we'd like to hear about it. You can phone us toll-free at… "

"Incredible," said Lloyd. "It does make you wonder just exactly what was going on during all that time."

Jake nodded. "That it does."

" 'Flashforward,' eh?" said Lloyd, savoring the term the newscaster had used. "That's not a bad name for it."

Jake nodded. "It certainly beats 'the CERN disaster,' or anything like that."

Lloyd frowned. "That it does."

Theo leaned back in his office chair, hands behind his head, staring at the constellations of holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles, thinking about what that DeVries woman had said.

It wasn't like knowing you were going to die in an accident. If you were forewarned that you'd be hit by a car on such-and-such a street at such-and-such a time, well, then you simply had to avoid being at that place at that moment, and — voila! — crisis averted. But if someone was hell-bent on murdering you, it would happen sooner or later. Just not being here — or wherever the murder was going to take place; the story from the Johannesburg Star didn't actually mention the precise location — on October 21, 2030, wouldn't necessarily be enough to save Theo.

Dr. Procopides is survived by his…

Survived by his what? His parents? Poppa would be eighty-two then, and Momma would be seventy-nine. Theo's father had suffered a heart attack a few years ago, but had been scrupulous ever since about his cholesterol, giving up his saganaki and the feta-cheese salads that he so loved. Sure, they could still be alive then.

How would Poppa take it? A father isn't supposed to outlive his son. Would Poppa think he'd already lived a good, long time? Would he give up on life, passing on within a few more months, leaving Momma to go on all alone? Theo certainly hoped his parents would be alive in twenty-one years, but…

Dr. Procopides is survived by his…

… by his wife and children?

That's what they usually say in obituaries. By his wife — his wife Anthoula, perhaps, a nice Greek girl. That would make Poppa happy.

Except…

Except Theo didn't know any nice Greek girls — or any nice girls of any nationality. At least — a thought came up, but he fought it down — at least, not any who were free.

He had devoted himself to his work. First to getting grades good enough to go to Oxford. Next to getting his doctorate. Then to getting assigned here. Oh, there'd been women, of course — American schoolgirls back in Athens, one-night stands with other students, and even once, when in Denmark, a hooker. But he'd always thought there would be time later for love, a wife, children.

But when would that time come?

He had indeed wondered if the article would start "Nobel laureate." It didn't, but he had wondered — and, if he were honest with himself, it was a serious bit of wondering. A Nobel meant immortality; it meant being remembered forever.

The LHC experiment that he and Lloyd had spent years crafting should have produced the Higgs; if they had produced that, the Nobel surely would have followed. But they hadn't made the breakthrough.

The breakthrough — as if he'd have been content with only one.

Dead in twenty-one years. Who would remember him?

It was all so crazy. So unbelievable.

He was Theodosios Procopides, for God's sake. He was immortal.

Of course he was. Of course he was. What twenty-seven-year-old was not?

A wife. Children. Surely the obituary had mentioned those. Surely if Ms. DeVries had only paged down, she would have seen their names, and maybe their ages.

But wait — wait!

How many pages in a typical big-city newspaper? Two hundred, say. How many readers? Typical circulation of a big daily might be half-a-million copies. Of course, DeVries had said she was reading yesterday's newspaper. Still, she couldn't have been the only one looking at that article during the two-minute glimpse of the future.

And besides, Theo would apparently be killed here in Switzerland — the article had listed a Geneva dateline — and yet the story had made a South African newspaper. Which meant it must have made other newspapers and newsgroups all over the world, possibly with different accounts of the events. Certainly the Tribune de Geneve would have a more-detailed article. There had to be hundreds — maybe thousands — of people who had read reports of his death.

He could advertise for them, on the Internet and in major newspapers. Find out more — and find out, for sure, whether there was any truth to what this DeVries woman had said.

"Look at this," said Jake Horowitz. He plunked his datapad down on Lloyd's desk; it was showing a web page.

"What is it?"

"Stuff from the United States Geological Survey. Seismograph readings."

"Yeah?"

"Look at the readings for earlier today," said Jake.

"Oh, my."

"Exactly. For almost two minutes, starting at seventeen hundred hours our time, the recorders detected nothing at all. Either they registered zero disturbances — which is impossible, the Earth is always trembling slightly, even if just from tidal interactions with the moon — or they registered no data at all. It's just like the video cameras: no record of what was actually happening during those two minutes. And I've checked with various national weather services. Their weather instruments — wind speed, temperature, air pressure, and so on — recorded nothing during the Flashforward. And NASA and the ESA report dead periods in their satellite telemetry during that two-minute period, too."

"How could that be?" asked Lloyd.

"I don't know," said Jake, running a hand through his red hair. "But somehow every camera, every sensor, every recording instrument anywhere in the world simply stopped registering while the Flashforward was occurring."

Theo sat at his desk in his office, a plastic Donald Duck peering down at him from atop the monitor, thinking of how to phrase what he wanted to say. He decided to be simple and direct. After all, he'd need to place the information in the form of a classified ad in hundreds of newspapers worldwide; it would cost a fortune if he wasn't concise. He had three keyboards — a French AZERTY, an English QWERTY, and a Greek one. He was using the English one:

Theodosios Procopides, a native of Athens, working at CERN, will be murdered Monday, October 21, 2030. If your vision related to this crime, please contact procopides@cern.ch.

He thought about leaving it at that, but then added a final line: "I am hoping to prevent my own death."

Theo could translate it into Greek and French himself; in theory, his computer could translate it into other languages for him, but if there was one thing that his time at CERN had taught him it was that computer translations were often inaccurate — he still remembered the horrible Christmas-banquet incident. No, he would enlist the aid of various people at CERN to help him — and also to advise him which newspapers were significant in which countries.

But one thing he could do immediately: post his note to various newsgroups. He did that before going home to bed.

Finally, at one in the morning, Lloyd and Michiko left CERN. Again, they abandoned her Toyota in the parking lot — it was hardly unusual for people at CERN to pull all-nighters.

Michiko worked for Sumitomo Electric; she was an engineer specializing in superconducting-accelerator technology, on long-term assignment to CERN, which had bought several components for the LHC from Sumitomo. Her employer had provided her, and Tamiko, with a wonderful apartment on Geneva's Right Bank. Lloyd was less well paid, and didn't have a housing allowance; his apartment was in the town of St. Genis. He liked living in France while working mostly in Switzerland; CERN had its own special border crossing that allowed its staff to pass between the

two countries without worrying about showing passports.

Lloyd rented the apartment furnished; although he'd been at CERN two years, he didn't think of it as being his home, and the idea of buying furniture, which would be a bear to import back to North America, didn't make sense to him. The provided furnishings were a bit old-fashioned and ornate for his tastes, but at least everything coordinated well: the dark wood, the burnt-orange carpet, the dark-red walls. It had a cozy, warm feel, at the expense of making the place look smaller than it really was. But he had no emotional attachment to this apartment — he'd never been married or lived with anyone of the opposite sex, and, in the twenty-five years since he'd moved out on his own, he'd had eleven different addresses. Still, tonight there was no question that they should go to his place, not hers. There would be too much of Tamiko at the flat in Geneva, too much to face so soon.

Lloyd's apartment was in a forty-year-old building, heated by electric radiators. They sat on the couch. He had an arm around her shoulder, and he was trying to comfort her. "I'm sorry," said Lloyd.

Michiko's face was still puffy. She had periods of calm, but the tears would suddenly start again and they seemed to go on forever. She nodded slightly.

"There was no way to foresee this," said Lloyd. "No way to prevent it."

But Michiko shook her head. "What kind of mother am I?" she said. "I took my daughter half a world away from her grandparents, from her home."

Lloyd said nothing. What could he say? That it had seemed like a wonderful thing to do? Getting to study in Europe, even if only at age eight, would have been a terrific experience for any child. Surely bringing Tamiko to Switzerland had been the right idea.

"I should try to call Hiroshi," said Michiko. Hiroshi was her ex-husband. "Make sure he got the e-mail."

Lloyd thought about observing that Hiroshi probably wouldn't evince any more interest in his daughter now that she was dead than he had when she was alive. Even though he'd never met him, Lloyd hated Hiroshi, on many different levels. He hated that Hiroshi had made his Michiko sad — not just once or twice, but for years on end. It pained Lloyd to think of her trudging through life without a smile on her face, with no joy in her heart. He also, if he were brutally honest with himself, hated Hiroshi because he had had her first. But Lloyd didn't say anything. He simply stroked Michiko's lustrous black hair.

"He didn't want me to bring her here," said Michiko, sniffling. "He wanted her to stay in Tokyo, go to a Japanese school." She wiped her eyes. " 'A proper school,' he said." A pause. "If only I'd listened to him."

"The phenomenon was worldwide," said Lloyd gently. "She would have been no safer in Tokyo than in Geneva. You can't blame yourself."

"I don't," said Michiko. "I — "

But she stopped herself. Lloyd couldn't help wondering if she was going to say, "I blame you."Michiko hadn't come to CERN to be with Lloyd, but there was no doubt in either of their minds that he was the reason she'd decided to stay. She'd asked Sumitomo to keep her on here, after the equipment she was responsible for was installed. For the first two months, Tamiko had been back in Japan, but Michiko, once she'd decided to extend her stay, had arranged to have her daughter brought to Europe.

Lloyd had loved Tamiko, too. He knew the lot of stepfather was always a difficult one, but the two of them had hit it off. Not all youngsters are pleased when a divorced parent finds a new partner; Lloyd's own sister had broken up with her boyfriend because her two young sons didn't care for the new man in her life. But Tamiko had once told Lloyd that she liked him because he made her mother smile.

Lloyd looked at his fiancee. She was so sad, he wondered if he'd ever see her smile again. He felt like crying himself, but there was something stupid and masculine that wouldn't let him do that while she was also crying. He held it in.

Lloyd wondered what impact this was going to have on their upcoming marriage. He had brought no other agenda to his proposal than simply that he loved Michiko, totally and completely. And he did not doubt Michiko's love for him, but, nonetheless, to some degree, there had to have been a secondary reason for Michiko to want to marry him. No matter how modern and liberated a woman she was, and, by Japanese standards at least, Michiko was very modern, she still had, in some measure, to have been looking for a father for her child, someone who would have helped her to bring up Tamiko, who would have provided a male presence in her life.

Had Michiko really been in the market for a husband? Oh, yes, she and Lloyd were terrific together — but many couples were terrific together without marriage or any long-term commitment. Would she still wish to marry him now?

And, of course, there was that other woman, the one in his vision, the proof, vivid and full-blown…

The proof that, just as his own parents' marriage had ended in divorce, so, too, would the one he was supposed to enter with Michiko.

7

Day Two: Wednesday, April 22,2009

The death count keeps rising after yesterday's Flashforward phenomenon. In Caracas, Venezuela, Guillermo Garmendia, 36, apparently disconsolate over the death of his wife, Maria, 34, shot and killed his two sons, Ramon, 7, and Salvador, 5, then turned the gun on himself.

The government of Queensland, Australia, has declared a formal state of emergency, following the Flashforward.

Bondplus Corporation of San Rafael, California, is in a great state of turmoil. The chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and entire board of directors perished when their corporate jet crashed on take-off during the Flashforward. Bondplus was in the middle of defending itself from a hostile takeover bid from arch-rival Jasmine Adhesives.

A one-billion-dollar (Canadian) class-action suit has been launched against the Toronto Transit Commission, on behalf of transit riders injured or killed during the Flashforward. The suit claims that the Commission was negligent in not providing padded flooring at the bottom of staircases and escalators to protect people in the event of a fall.

A massive sell-off of Japanese yen has precipitated yet another crisis in the Japanese economy, following indications from the Flashforward that the yen will be worth only half its current value against the U.S. dollar in 2030.

The race was on.

Theo had his head bent down, poring over the computer logs strewn across his desk. There had to be an answer — a rational explanation for what had happened. Throughout the CERN campus, physicists were investigating, exploring, and debating possible explanations.

The door to Theo's office opened and Michiko Komura came in, some pieces of paper held in her hand. "I hear you're looking for information about your own murder," she said.

Theo felt his heart rate increasing. "Do you know something?"

"Me?" Michiko frowned. "No. No, sorry."

"Oh." A beat. "Then why bring it up?"

"Well, I was thinking, that's all. You can't be the only one desperate to know more about his or her future."

"I guess."

"And, well, it seems to me there should be a central method for coordinating that. I mean, I saw your newsgroup posting this morning — and it was hardly the only one like that."

"Oh?"

"Their are tons of people looking for information about their futures. Not everyone is looking for facts about their own deaths, of course, but — well, here, let me read some of them to you."

She sat down and began to read from the pieces of paper. " 'Anyone with information about the future whereabouts of Marcus Whyte, please contact… ' 'University student seeking career advice: if your vision indicated anything about which jobs are in demand in 2030, please let me know.' 'Information sought about the future of the International Committee of the Red Cross… ' "

"Fascinating," said Theo. He knew what Michiko was doing: burying herself in something — anything — rather than thinking about the loss of Tamiko.

"Isn't it, though?" she said. "And there are also a bunch of display ads on the Web already — come-ons from big corporations, looking for information that might help them. I didn't know you could get a banner ad placed so quickly, but I guess almost anything's possible if you're willing to pay for it." She paused and looked away; doubtless a thought of Tamiko had come to the front of her mind — some things, unfortunately, were impossible at any price. After a moment, she went on. "In fact, you know, you probably shouldn't go public with the info about your upcoming murder. I was saying to Lloyd this morning that life-insurance companies are probably already gathering details about anyone who is dead in the next twenty years so that they can turn down policy applications."

Theo felt his stomach fluttering. He hadn't thought of that. "So you think someone should coordinate all this?" he said.

"Well, not the corporate stuff — I wouldn't let my bosses at Sumitomo hear me say this, but I don't care about which companies get rich. But the personal stuff — people trying to figure out what their own futures hold, trying to make sense of their visions. I think we should help them."

"You and me?"

"Well, not just us. All of CERN."

"Beranger will never go for that," said Theo, shaking his head. "He doesn't want us to admit any involvement."

"We don't have to. We can just volunteer to coordinate a database. We've certainly got the computing and, after all, CERN's got a history of altruistic computing. The World Wide Web was created here, after all."

"So what do you propose?" asked Theo.

Michiko lifted her shoulders a bit. "A central repository. A Web site with a form: describe your vision in, I don't know, maybe two hundred words. We could index all the descriptions so that people could search them via keywords and Boolean operators. You know, all visions that mention Aberdeen but not sporting events. Stuff like that. Of course, the indexing program would automatically cross reference hockey, baseboru, and so on, to general terms like 'sporting events.' Not only would it help you, it would help a lot of other people."

Theo found himself nodding. "That makes sense. But why limit the length of the entries? I mean, storage space is cheap. I'd encourage people to be as detailed in their accounts as possible. After all, what's seemingly irrelevant to the person having the vision might be vitally important to somebody else."

"Good point," said Michiko. "As long as Beranger's moratorium on using the LHC is in effect, I've really got nothing much to do, so I'm willing to work on this. But I'll need some help. Lloyd is useless when it comes to programming; I thought maybe you could give me a hand." Lloyd and Theo's partnership had begun because Lloyd needed someone with much more programming expertise than he had to encode his physics ideas into experiments that could be run using ALICE.

Theo was already thinking of an angle. They could announce it with a press release — that woman in public relations who had knocked herself out during her vision could send it out to wherever such things went. But in the press release, they could use Theo's own case as an example — it would be the perfect way of making sure his problem got worldwide attention. "Sure," said Theo. "Sure thing."

After Michiko left, Theo turned back to his computer and checked his e-mail. There were the usual things, including spam from some company in Mauritania. The Mauritanian government had pulled off a remarkable coup: by being one of the few nations not to ban spamming by domestic companies, they'd brought thousands of businesses to their shores.

Theo clicked through the other messages. A note from a friend in Sorrento. A request for a copy of a paper Theo had coauthored; for some researcher at MIT, at least, it was back to business as usual. And—

Yes! More information about his murder.

It was from a woman in Montreal. She was French, but had been born in France, not Canada, and so followed news from her homeland. CERN, of course, straddled the Switzerland/France border, and although Geneva was the closest city, a murder at the facility was as much a French story as a Swiss one.

Her vision had been of reading the write-up in Le Monde about Theo's murder. The facts all matched what Kathleen DeVries had related — the first confirmation Theo had actually had that the South African woman wasn't perpetrating a hoax. But the words of the news report, as she relayed them, were quite different. It wasn't just a translation of the one DeVries had seen; rather, it was a completely different article. And it contained one salient fact that had been absent from the Johannesburg account. According to this French woman, the name of the detective who would be investigating Theo's murder was Helmut Drescher of the Geneva police.

The woman concluded her e-mail with, "Bonne chance!"

Bonne chance. Good luck. Yes, he'd certainly need a lot of that.

Theo knew the emergency number for the Geneva police off by heart: 1-1-7; indeed, it was printed on a sticker attached to all of CERN's phones. But he had no idea what the general-inquiry number was. He used the telephone keyboard on his phone, found the number, and dialed it.

"Allo," said Theo. "Detective Helmut Drescher, s'il vous plait."

"We don't have a detective by that name," said the male cop at the other end of the phone.

"He might have some other position. Something more junior."

"There's no one here by that name at all," said the voice.

Theo considered. "Do you have a directory of other police departments in Switzerland? Is there any way to check?"

"I don't have anything like that here; we'd have to dig around a bit."

"Could you do that?"

"What's this all about?"

Theo decided that honesty — or, at least, semi-honesty — was the best policy. "He's investigating a murder, and I've got some information."

"All right; I'll look into it. How can I reach you?"

Theo left his name and number, thanked the officer, then hung up. He decided to try a more direct approach, tapping out Drescher's name on the telephone keyboard.

Pay dirt. There was only one Helmut Drescher in Geneva; he lived on Rue Jean-Dassier.

Theo dialed the number.

8

Striking hospital workers in Poland voted unanimously to return to work today. "Our cause is just, and we will take labor action again — but for now, our duty to humanity must come first," said Union leader Stefan Wyszynski.

Cineplex/Odeon, a large movie-theater chain, has announced free tickets for all patrons who were attending movies during the Flashforward. Although apparently the movies played on during the event, the audience lost consciousness, missing about two minutes of the action. Other theater chains are expected to follow suit.

After a record number of applications were filed in the last 24 hours, the United States Patent Office has closed until further notice, pending a decision from Congress on the patenting of inventions gleaned from the visions.

The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has issued a press release, pointing out that although we don't yet have an explanation for the Flashforward, there is no reason to invoke supernatural causes.

European Mutual, the largest insurance company in the European Union, has declared bankruptcy.

It was time, sooner than they'd thought. The shock of yesterday had pushed Marie-Claire Beranger into labor. Gaston took his wife to the hospital in Thoiry; the Berangers lived in Geneva, but it was important emotionally to them both that their son be born on French soil.

As CERN's Director-General, Gaston was well rewarded, and Marie-Claire, a lawyer, made a good income, too. Still, it was reassuring to know that regardless of their means, Marie-Claire would have gotten all the medical care she needed while she was expecting. Gaston had heard that in the United States many women see a doctor for the first time during their pregnancy on the day they give birth. It was no wonder that the U.S. had an infant-mortality rate many times higher than did Switzerland or France. No, they were going to give their son the best of everything. He knew it was a boy, and not just because of the vision. Marie-Claire was forty-two, and their doctor had recommended a series of sonograms during the pregnancy; they had quite clearly seen the little feller's little feller.

Of course there had been no way to conceal his vision from Marie-Claire; Gaston wasn't one for keeping secrets from his wife, anyway, but in this case, it was impossible. She'd had a corresponding vision — the same fight with Marc, but from her point of view. Gaston was glad that Lloyd Simcoe had managed to prove that the visions were synchronized by talking to his grad student and that woman in Canada; Marie-Claire and Gaston had vowed to keep their vision private.

Still, there had been issues, even though they'd both been part of the same scene. Marie-Claire had asked Gaston to describe what she looked like twenty years hence. Gaston had glossed over some details, her weight gain among them; she'd complained for months about how huge she was because of the pregnancy, and how she was determined to get her figure back quickly.

For his part, Gaston had been surprised to learn from her that he would have a beard in 2030; he'd never grown one in his youth, and now that his whiskers were already coming in gray, he'd assumed he'd never have one in the future, either. She told him he would keep his hair, though — but whether that was the truth, just a kindness on her part, or an indication that by the end of the third decade of this century that there would be easy and common cures for baldness, he didn't know.

The hospital was jammed with patients, many on gurneys out in corridors; they'd apparently been there since yesterday's event. Still, most of the injuries had either been instantly fatal, requiring no hospital visit, or broken bones and burns; comparatively few patients had actually been admitted. And, thankfully, the obstetrics ward was only slightly busier than usual. Marie-Claire was conveyed there in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse; Gaston walked alongside, holding his wife's hand.

Gaston was a physicist, of course — or, at least, had been one once; his various administrative portfolios had kept him from personally doing any real science for more than a dozen years. He had no idea what had caused the visions. Oh, certainly, they were likely related to the LHC experiment; the timing coincidence was too much to ignore. But whatever caused them, and however unpleasant his own one was, Gaston didn't regret his vision. It had been a warning, a wake-up call, a portent. And he would heed it — he wouldn't let things turn that way. He'd be a good father; he'd make lots of time for his son.

He squeezed his wife's hand.

And they headed into the delivery room.

The house was large and attractive — and, with its proximity to the lake, doubtless expensive. Its exterior lines suggested a chalet, but that was obviously an affectation: housing in cosmopolitan Geneva was as far-removed from Swiss chalets as that in Manhattan was from farmhouses. Theo rang the doorbell and waited, hands in his pockets, until it was opened.

"You must be the gentleman from CERN," said the woman. Although Geneva was located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, the woman's accent was German. As headquarters of numerous international organizations, Geneva attracted people from all over the world.

"That's right," said Theo, then, guessing at the appropriate honorific, "Frau Drescher." She was perhaps forty-five, slim, very pretty, with hair that Theo guessed was naturally blonde. "My name is Theo Procopides. Thank you for letting me come."

Frau Drescher lifted her narrow shoulders once. "I wouldn't normally, of course — a stranger who calls on the phone. But it's been such a strange couple of days."

"It has indeed," said Theo. "Is Herr Drescher home?"

"Not yet. Sometimes his business keeps him late."

Theo smiled indulgently. "I can imagine. Police work must be very demanding."

The woman frowned. "Police work? What exactly is it you think my husband does?"

"He's a police officer, no?"

"Helmut? He sells shoes; he has a shop on rue du Rhone."

People could change careers in twenty years, of course — but from salesperson to detective? Not quite a Horatio Alger story, but still pretty darned improbable. And, besides, the glitzy stores on rue du Rhone were pricey as hell; Theo himself could afford to do nothing but window-shop there. A person might have to take a substantial cut in pay to become a cop after working in that part of town.

"I'm sorry. I'd just assumed — your husband is the only Helmut Drescher in the Geneva directory. Do you know anyone else who has the same name?"

"Not unless you mean my son."

"Your son?"

"We call him Moot, but he's really Helmut, Jr."

Of course — the old man worked in a shoe store, and the son was a cop. And naturally a cop would have an unlisted phone number.

"Ah, my mistake. It must be him. Can you tell me how to get in touch with your son?"

"He's up in his room."

"You mean he still lives here?"

"Of course. He's only seven years old."

Theo mentally kicked himself; he was still struggling with the reality of the glimpses of the future — and perhaps the fact that he had not had one himself excused him from not really realizing the timeframe involved but, still, he felt like an idiot.

If young Moot was seven now, he'd be twenty-eight at the time of Theo's death — a year older than Theo himself was now. And no point asking if he wants to be a police officer when he grows up — every seven-year-old boy does.

"I hate to impose," said Theo, "but if you don't mind, I would like to see him."

"I don't know. Perhaps I should wait until my husband gets home."

"If you like," said Theo.

She looked as though she'd expected him to push; his willingness to wait seemed to dispel her fears. "All right," she said, "come inside. But I have to warn you: Moot's been very reserved since that — that thing that happened yesterday, whatever it was. And he didn't sleep at all well last night, so he's a bit fussy."

Theo nodded. "I understand."

She led him inside. It was a bright, airy home, with a stunning view of Lac Leman; Helmut Senior apparently sold a lot of shoes.

The staircase consisted of horizontal wooden steps with no vertical pieces. Frau Drescher stood at the base of it and called out, "Moot! Moot! There's someone here to see you!" She then turned to look at Theo. "Won't you have a seat?"

She was gesturing at a low-slung wooden chair with white cushions; a nearby couch matched it. He sat down. The woman moved to the foot of the stairs again, behind Theo now, and called out. "Moot! Come here! There's someone to see you." She moved back to where Theo could see her and lifted her shoulders apologetically in what's-a-mother-to-do shrug.

Finally, there was the sound of light feet on the wooden steps. The boy descended quickly; he might have been reluctant to heed his mother's call but, like most kids, he apparently habitually rushed down staircases.

"Ah, Moot," said his mother, "this is Herr Proco — "

Theo had turned to look over his shoulder at the boy. The moment Moot saw Theo, he screamed and immediately ran up the stairs so fast that the open-construction staircase visibly shook.

"What's wrong?" called his mother to his departing back.

When he reached the upper floor, the boy slammed a door shut behind him.

"I'm so sorry," said Frau Drescher, turning to Theo. "I don't know what's gotten into him."

Theo closed his eyes. "I do, I think," he said. "I didn't tell you everything, Frau Drescher. I — twenty-one years from now, I'm dead. And your son, Helmut Drescher, is a detective with the Geneva Police. He's investigating my murder."

Frau Drescher went as white as the snow cap on Mont Blanc. "Mein Gott," she said. "Mein Gott."

"You have to let me talk to Moot," Theo said. "He recognized me — which means his vision must have had something to do with me."

"He's just a little boy."

"I know that — but he's got information about my murder. I need to know whatever he knows."

"A child can't understand any of this."

"Please, Frau Drescher. Please — it's my life we're talking about."

"He wouldn't say anything about his — his vision," said the woman. "It had obviously frightened him, but he wouldn't talk about it."

"Please, I must know what he saw."

She thought about it for a few moments, then, as if it were against her better judgment, said: "Come with me."

She started up the staircase. Theo followed a few steps behind. There were four rooms on the upper floor: a washroom, its door open; two bedrooms, also with opened doors; and a fourth room, with a poster for the original Rocky movie taped to the outside of its closed door. Frau Drescher motioned for Theo to move back down the corridor a bit. He did so, and she rapped her knuckles on the door.

"Moot! Moot, it's momma. Can I come in?"

There was no reply.

She reached down to the brass-colored handle and turned it slowly, then tentatively opened the door part way. "Moot?"

A muffled voice, as if the boy was lying face down on a pillow. "Is that man still here?"

"He won't come in. I promise." A pause. "You know him from somewhere?"

"I saw that face. That chin."

"Where?"

"In a room. He was lying on a bed." A pause. "Except it wasn't a bed, it was made of metal. And it had a thing in it, like that plate you serve roasts on."

"A trough?" said Frau Drescher.

"His eyes were closed, but it was him, and… "

"And what?"

Silence.

"It's okay to say, Moot. It's okay to tell me."

"He didn't have any shirt or pants on. And there was this guy in a white smock, like we wear in art class. But he had a knife, and he was… "

Theo, standing in the corridor, held his breath.

"He had a knife, like, and he was… he was… "

Carving me open, Theo thought. An autopsy, the detective watching as the medical examiner performed it.

"It was so gross," said the boy.

Theo stepped quietly forward, standing now in the doorway behind Frau Drescher. The youngster was indeed lying on his stomach.

"Moot… " Theo said very softly. "Moot, I'm sorry you saw that, but — but I have to know. I have to know what the man was saying to you."

"I don't want to talk about it," said the boy.

"I know… I know. But it's very important to me. Please, Moot. Please. That man in the white smock, he was a doctor. Please tell me what he was saying."

"Do I have to?" said the boy to his mom.

Theo could see emotions warring across her face. On the one hand, she wanted to protect her son from an unpleasant situation; on the other, something bigger than that was clearly at stake. At last she said, "No, you don't have to — but it would be helpful." She moved across the room, sat on the edge of the bed, and stroked the boy's crewcut blond head. "You see, Herr Procopides here, he's in a lot of trouble. Somebody is going to try to kill him. But maybe you can help prevent that. You'd like to do that, wouldn't you, Moot?"

It was the boy's turn to wrestle with his thoughts. "I guess," he said at last. He lifted his head a bit, looked back at Theo, then immediately looked away.

"Moot?" said his mother, gently prodding.

"He dyes his hair," said the boy, as if it were a heinous thing to do. "It's really gray."

Theo nodded. Young Helmut didn't understand. How could he? Seven years old, suddenly transported from wherever he'd been — the playground, perhaps, or a classroom, or even the safety of this, his own bedroom. Transported from there to a morgue, watching a body being sliced open, watching thick, dark blood ooze down the channel in the pallet.

"Please," said Theo. "I — ah, I promise not to dye my hair anymore."

The boy was quiet for a while longer, then he spoke, tentatively, haltingly.

"They used a lot of fancy words. I didn't understand most of it."

"Were they speaking French?"

"No, German. The other guy, he didn't have an accent, just like I don't."

Theo smiled a bit; Moot's accent was actually pretty thick, he thought. Still, two-thirds of Switzerland's population usually spoke German, while only eighteen percent regularly spoke French. Granted, Geneva was in the French-speaking part of the country, but it wouldn't be at all unusual for two native-German speakers to use that language if no one else was around.

"Did they say anything about an entrance wound?" asked Theo.

"A what?"

"An entrance wound." At the moment, Moot and Theo were speaking French; Theo hoped he had the right phrasing for that language. "You know, where the bullet went in."

"Bullets," said the boy.

"Pardon?"

"Bullets. There were three of them." He looked at his mother. "That's what the man in the smock said."

Three bullets, thought Theo. Somebody wanted me very dead.

"And the entrance wounds?" said Theo. "Did they say where the bullets went in?"

"In the chest."

So I would have seen the killer, thought Theo. "Is there anything else you can tell me?"

"I said something," said the boy.

"What?"

"I mean, it seemed like I was saying it. But it wasn't my voice. It was all deep, you know?"

Grown up. Of course it was deep. "What did you say?"

"That you'd been shot at close range."

"How did you know that?"

"I don't know it — I don't know why I said it. The words just sort of came out."

"Did the medical examiner — the man in the smock — did he say anything when you said that?"

The boy was now sitting up in bed, facing them. "No, he just nodded, sort of. Like he agreed with me."

"Well, then, did he say something that prompted you to observe it had been at close range?"

"I don't understand," said the boy. "Momma, do I have to do this?"

"Please," said Frau Drescher. "We'll have ice cream for dessert. Please just help the nice man for a few more minutes."

The boy frowned, as if weighing how much appeal the ice cream might have. Then: "He said you were killed in a boxing match."

Theo was startled. He might be arrogant, he might be pushy, but never in his adult life had he hit another human being. Indeed, he rather considered himself a pacifist, and had turned down several lucrative offers from defense companies after graduation. He'd never been to a boxing match in his life; he thought of it not as a sport but rather as an animalistic display.

"Are you sure he said that?" said Theo. He looked at the Rocky poster on the door again, then at the wall above Moot's bed, which sported a poster of heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield. Maybe the kid was conflating his dreams with his vision?

"Uh-huh," said Moot.

"But why would I be shot in a boxing match?"

The boy shrugged.

"Do you remember anything else?"

"He said something was really small."

"Something was small?'

"Yeah. Just nine millimeters."

Theo looked at the mother. "That's a gun size. I think it refers to the diameter of the bore."

"I hate guns," said Frau Drescher.

"Me, too," said Theo. He looked at the boy again. "What else did they say?"

" 'Glock.' The man kept saying 'Glock.' "

"That's a kind of gun. Did they say anything else?"

"Stuff about dallisics… "

"Dal—? You mean ballistics?"

"I guess. They were going to send the bullets to dallisics. Is that a city?"

Theo shook his head. "Did they say anything else about the bullets?"

"They were American. The man said it said 'Remington' on the shell casings, and I said, like I knew what I was talking about, 'American,' and he nodded."

"Did they say anything else? Anything while they were looking in my chest?"

The boy's face was pale. "There was so much blood. So much guts. I… "

Frau Drescher drew her son closer to her. "I'm sorry, Herr Procopides, but I think that's enough."

"But — "

"No. You'll have to go now."

Theo exhaled. He reached into his pocket, pulled out one of his cards, and crossed over to the boy's bed. "Moot, this is how you can reach me. Please keep this card. Any time — I mean any time, even years from now — if something occurs to you that you think I should know, I beg you to give me a call. It's very important to me."

The boy looked at the little rectangle; he'd probably never been handed a business card before in his life.

"Take it. Take the card. It's yours to keep."

Moot took it tentatively from Theo's hand.

Theo gave another card to the mother, thanked both Dreschers, and left.

9

Darren Sunday, star of the NBC television series Dale Rice, died today of injuries sustained in a fall during the phenomenon. Production on the series, which had been shooting around Sunday's absence, has halted.

The New York State Thruway Commission reports that the seventy-two-car pileup near Exit 44 (Canandaigua) has still not been cleared; the westbound Thruway is still blocked at that point. Drivers are advised to choose alternate routes.

A group of ten thousand Muslims in London, England, whose private prayers were interrupted by the Flashforward, came together today in Piccadilly Circus to face Mecca and pray en masse.

Pope Benedict XVI has announced a grueling schedule of international visits. He invites Catholics and non-Catholics to attend his masses, designed to give comfort to those who lost loved ones during the Flashforward. When questioned about whether the Flashforward constituted a miracle, the pontiff reserved judgment.

The United Nations Children's Fund has stepped in to help overburdened national adoption agencies in finding homes for children orphaned during the Flashforward.

Although CERN was jumping — every researcher had a pet theory about what had happened — Lloyd and Michiko went home early; nobody could blame them after what had happened to Michiko's daughter. "Home," again without discussion — none was necessary — was Lloyd's apartment in St. Genis.

Michiko was still crying every few hours, and Lloyd had finally found time at work to close his office door, put his head down on his desk, and cry his heart out, too. Sometimes, crying helped make the pain go away; it didn't in this case.

They had an early dinner; Lloyd cooked up chops, which he'd had in the fridge. Michiko, clearly wanting to do something — anything — to keep her mind busy, worked on straightening up Lloyd's apartment.

And, as they finished their dinner, and Michiko drank her tea and Lloyd his coffee, the question Lloyd had been dreading was finally asked again.

"What did you see?" asked Michiko.

Lloyd opened his mouth to reply, but then closed it.

"Oh, come on," said Michiko, evidently reading his face. "It couldn't have been that bad."

"It was," said Lloyd.

"What did you see?" she asked again.

"I — " He closed his eyes. "I was with another woman."

Michiko blinked several times. Finally, her voice frosty, she said, "You were cheating on me?"

"No — no."

"Then what?"

"I was — God, honey, I am so sorry — I was married to another woman."

"How do you know you were married?"

"We were both in bed together; we were wearing matching wedding bands. And we were in a cottage in New England."

"Maybe it was her place."

"No. I recognized some of the furniture."

"You were married to someone else," said Michiko, as if trying to digest the concept. She had such a shock recently that perhaps anything else would have been too much to absorb.

Lloyd nodded. "We — you and I — we must have been divorced. Or… "

"Or?"

He shrugged. "Or maybe we never went through with the marriage in the first place."

"Don't you still love me?" asked Michiko.

"Of course I do. Of course I do. But — look, I didn't want to have that vision. I didn't enjoy it at all. Remember when we were talking about our vows? Remember when we discussed whether to leave 'till death do us part' in there? You said it was old fashioned; you said nobody says that anymore. And, well, you have been married once before. But I said we should leave it in. That's what I wanted. I wanted a marriage that would last forever. Not like my parents — and not like your first marriage."

"You were in New England," said Michiko, still trying to deal with it. "And I — I was in Kyoto."

"With a little girl," said Lloyd. He paused, unsure whether he should give voice to the nagging question. But then he did, not quite meeting her eyes as he spoke. "What did the girl look like?"

"She had long black hair," said Michiko.

"And… "

Michiko looked away. "And Asian features. She looked Japanese." She paused. "But that doesn't mean anything; lots of kids of mixed couples look more like one parent than the other."

Lloyd felt his heart move in his chest. "I thought we were meant for each other," he said softly. "I thought… " He trailed off, unable to say, "I thought you were my soulmate." His eyes were stinging; so, apparently, were hers. She rubbed them with the backs of her hands.

"I love you, Lloyd," she said.

"I love you too, but… "

"Yes," she said. "But… "

He reached across and touched her hand, which was now sitting on the tabletop. She gripped his fingers. They sat silently together for a very long time.

Theo sat for a while in his car on the street outside the Dreschers' home, his mind racing. He'd been shot by a Glock 9mm; he was pretty sure from cop shows he'd watched that the Glock was a semiautomatic pistol, popular with police forces worldwide. But the ammunition had been American; maybe it had been an American who had pulled the trigger. Of course, Theo had probably not yet met whoever it was who would one day want him dead. Surely there would be almost no overlap between his current circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues and those who would comprise those groups two decades hence.

Still, Theo already knew a lot of Americans.

But none well. None, except Lloyd Simcoe.

Of course, Lloyd wasn't really an American. He was born in Canada. And Canadians didn't like guns, either — they had no Second Amendment, or whatever damned thing it was that made Americans think they could go around armed.

But Lloyd had lived in the U.S. for seventeen years before coming to CERN, first at Harvard, then as an experimenter with the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. And, by Lloyd's own admission, he'd be living in the U.S. again by the time of the visions. He could have gotten a gun easily enough.

But no — Lloyd had an alibi. He was in New England when Theo was — what was it the Americans say? When Theo was wasted.

Except…

Except that Theo was/would be killed October 21 — and Lloyd's vision, like everyone else's, was of October 23.

Lloyd had told Theo his vision — he'd said he hadn't told Michiko yet, but Theo had insisted, and Lloyd had relented, although he did swear the young Greek to secrecy. Lloyd had said his vision had him making love to an old woman, presumably his then-wife.

Old people surely didn't make love that often, thought Theo. Indeed, they probably only did it on special occasions. Like when one of them had returned from a long absence. It's only a six-hour flight from New England to Switzerland… and that's today. Twenty years hence, it might be much less.

No, Lloyd could easily have been at CERN on Monday and back home in New Hampshire, or wherever the hell it was, on Wednesday. Not that Theo could think of any reason that Lloyd would want to kill him.

Except that, of course, by 2030, Theo, not Lloyd, was apparently director of what sounded like an incredibly advanced particle accelerator at CERN: the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider. Academic and professional jealousy had led to more than one murder over the years.

And, of course, there was the fact that Lloyd and Michiko were no longer together. If he were honest with himself, Theo fancied Michiko, too. What man wouldn't? She was gorgeous and brilliant and warm and funny. And, well, she was closer to his age than to Lloyd's. Could he have had a role in their breakup?

Just as he had pushed Lloyd to share his vision, so, too, had he pushed Michiko to share hers: Theo was hungry for insight, vicariously trying to experience what everyone else had been lucky enough to see. In Michiko's vision, she was in Kyoto, perhaps, as she had said, taking her daughter to visit Michiko's uncle. Could Lloyd have waited until she was temporarily away from Geneva to come over to settle an old score with Theo?

Theo hated himself for even considering such possibilities. Lloyd had been his mentor, his partner. They'd always talked about sharing a Nobel Prize. But—

But there was no mention of a Nobel in the two articles he'd found now about his own death. Of course, that didn't mean Lloyd wouldn't get one, but…

Theo's mother was diabetic; Theo had researched the history of diabetes when she'd been diagnosed. The names Banting and Best kept coming up — the two Canadian researchers who had discovered insulin. Indeed, they were another pair people sometimes likened Lloyd and Theo to: like Crick and Watson, Banting and Best were of different ages — Banting was clearly the senior researcher. But although Crick and Watson had been jointly awarded the Nobel, Banting had shared his not with his true research partner, young Best, but rather with J. R. R. Macleod, Banting's boss. Perhaps Lloyd would get a Nobel — not for the Higgs discovery, which had failed to materialize, but rather for an explanation of the time-displacement effect. And perhaps he would share it not with his young partner but rather with his boss — with Beranger, or someone else in the CERN hierarchy. What would that do to their friendship, their partnership? What jealousies and hatreds would fester between now and the year 2030?

Madness. Paranoia. And yet—

And yet, if he were killed on the CERN grounds — Moot Drescher's suggestion of a shoot-out in a sports arena still seemed a dubious proposition — then he would be killed by someone who had managed to gain access to the campus. CERN wasn't a maximum-security facility by any means, but neither did it allow just anyone to enter its gates.

No, someone who could get into CERN had likely killed him. Someone whom Theo would meet with face-to-face. And someone who wanted him not just dead, but who had clearly vented pent up anger, pumping shot after shot into Theo's body.

Lloyd and Michiko had moved to the couch in the living room; the dishes could wait for later.

Dammit, thought Lloyd, why did this have to happen? Everything had been going so well, and now—

And now, it looked like it all was going to fall apart. Lloyd wasn't a young man. He'd never intended to wait this long to get married, but…

But work had gotten in the way, and—

No. No, that wasn't it. Let's be honest. Let's face it.

He thought of himself as a good man, kind and gentle, but—

But, truth be told, he wasn't polished, he wasn't slick; it had been easy for Michiko to improve his wardrobe, because, of course, almost any change would have been for the better.

Oh, sure, women — and men, for that matter — said he was a good listener, but Lloyd knew that it wasn't so much that he was sage but rather that he simply didn't know what to say. And so he sat, taking it in, taking in the peaks and valleys of other people's lives, the highs and lows, the trials and travails of those whose existence had more variation, more excitement, more angst than his own.

Lloyd Simcoe wasn't a lady's man; he wasn't a raconteur; he didn't have a reputation as an after-dinner speaker. He was just a scientist, a specialist in quark-gluon plasma, a typical nerd who'd started out as a kid who couldn't throw a baseball, who spent his adolescence with his nose buried in books when others his age were out honing interpersonal skills in a thousand and one different situations.

And the years had slipped by — his twenties, his thirties, and now, here, most of his forties. Oh, he'd had success at his work, and he'd dated now and again, and there had been Pam, all those years ago, but nothing that looked as though it was going to be permanent, no relationship that seemed destined to stand the test of time.

Until this one, with Michiko.

It had felt so right. The way she laughed at his jokes; the way he laughed at hers. The way, even though they'd grown up in vastly different societies — him in conservative, rural Nova Scotia; her in cosmopolitan, overwhelming Tokyo — that they shared the same politics and morals and beliefs and opinions, as if — the term came again, unbidden — as if they were soul mates, always meant to be together. Yes, she'd been married and divorced, yes, she is — was — a parent, but, still, they had seemed absolutely in sync, so very right for each other.

But now—

Now, it seemed as though that, too, was an illusion. The world might still be struggling to decide what, if any, reality the visions reflected, but Lloyd had already accepted them as fact, true depictions of tomorrow, the one unalterable space-time continuum in which he had always known he dwelled.

And yet he had to explain to her what he was feeling — him, Lloyd Simcoe, the man whom words always failed, the good listener, the brick, the one others turned to when they had doubts. He had to explain to her what was going through his mind, why a vision of a dissolved marriage twenty-one years — twenty-one years! — down the road so paralyzed him right now, so poisoned for him what he'd thought they had.

He looked at Michiko, dropped his gaze, tried again to meet her eyes, then focused on a blank spot on the apartment's dark, wine-colored walls.

He'd never spoken of this to anyone — not even to his sister Dolly, at least not since they were kids. He took a deep breath, then began, his eyes still locked on the wall. "When I was eight years old, my parents called me and my sister down to the living room." He swallowed. "It was a Saturday afternoon. Tensions had been high for weeks in our house. That's an adult way of expressing it — 'tensions were high.' As a kid, all I knew was that mom and dad weren't talking. Oh, they spoke when they had to, but it was always with sharp voices. And it often ended in choked-off phrases. 'If that's the way—!' 'I'm not—!' 'Don't you—!' Like that. They tried to keep it civil when they knew we could hear them, but we heard a lot more than they thought."

He looked briefly at Michiko, then shifted his gaze to the wall again. "Anyway, they called us down to the living room. 'Lloyd, Dolly — come here!' It was my father. And, you know, when he yelled for us to come, it usually meant we were in trouble. We hadn't put away our toys; one of the neighbors had complained about something we'd done; whatever. Well, I came out of my room, and Dolly came out of hers, and we kind of looked at each other, you know, just a glance, just a shared moment of apprehension." He now looked at Michiko, just as he had at his sister all those years ago.

Lloyd continued. "We went down the stairs, and there they were: Mom and Dad. And they were both standing, and we stood, too. The whole time, we stood around, like we were waiting for the fucking bus. They were both quiet for a bit, like they didn't know what to say. And then, finally, my mother spoke up. She said, 'Your father is moving out.' Just like that. No preamble, no softening the blow: 'Your father is moving out.'

"And then he spoke. 'I'll get a place nearby. You'll be able to see me on weekends.'

"And my mother added, as if it needed to be said, 'Your father and I haven't been getting along.' "

Lloyd fell quiet.

Michiko made a sympathetic face. "Did you see him much, after he moved out?" she asked at last.

"He didn't move out."

"But your parents are divorced."

"Yes — six years later. But after the great announcement, he didn't move out. He didn't leave."

"So your parents made up?"

Lloyd shrugged a little. "No. No, the fighting continued. But they never mentioned him moving out again. We — Dolly and I — we kept waiting for the other shoe to fall, for him to move out. For months — really, all of the six years their marriage lasted after that — we thought he might leave at any moment. There was never a timeframe mentioned, after all — they never said when he was going to go. When they did finally split up, it was almost a relief. I love my dad, and my mom, too, but having that hanging over our heads for so long was just too much to bear." He paused. "And a marriage like that, one gone bad — I'm sorry, Michiko, but I don't think I could ever go through anything like that again."

10

Day Three: Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Los Angeles District Attorney's office has dropped all pending misdemeanor cases to free up staff to deal with the flood of new charges being laid related to looting in the aftermath of the Flashforward.

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, reports record numbers of requests for course calendars.

Amtrak in the U.S., Via Rail in Canada, and British Rail have reported huge increases in passenger volume. No trains operated by those companies crashed during the Flashforward.

The Church of the Holy Visions, begun yesterday in Stockholm, Sweden, now claims 12,000 adherents worldwide, making it the fastest-growing religion on the planet.

The American Bar Association reports a huge increase in requests for new wills to be drawn up, or existing wills to be revised.

The next day, Theo and Michiko were working on setting up their Web site for people to report their visions. They'd decided to call it the Mosaic Project, both in honor of the first popular (but now long abandoned) Web browser, and in acknowledgement of the now clearly established fact, thanks to the efforts of researchers and reporters worldwide, that each person's vision did indeed represent one small stone in a vast mosaic portrait of the year 2030.

Theo had a mug of coffee. He took a sip, then, "Can I ask you a question about your vision?"

Michiko looked out the window at the mountains. "Sure."

"That little girl you were with. Is she your daughter, do you think?" He'd almost said "your new daughter" but fortunately had censored the thought before it was free.

Michiko lifted her narrow shoulders slightly. "Apparently."

"And — and Lloyd's daughter, too?"

Michiko looked surprised by the question. "Of course," she said, but there was hesitation in her voice.

"Because Lloyd — "

Michiko stiffened. "He told you his vision, did he?"

Theo realized he'd put his foot in it. "No, not exactly. Just that he was in New England — "

"With a woman who wasn't me. Yes, I know."

"I'm sure it doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the visions aren't going to turn out to be true."

Michiko looked out at the mountains again; Theo found himself doing that a lot, too. There was something about them — something solid, permanent, unchanging. He found it calming to look at them, to know that there were things that endured not just for decades but for millennia.

"Look," she said, "I've been divorced once already. I'm not naive enough to think that all marriages will last forever. Maybe Lloyd and I will break up at some point. Who knows?"

Theo looked away, unable to meet her eyes, unsure how she'd react to the words he felt bubbling up within him. "He'd be a fool to let you go," he said.

His hand had been lying on the tabletop. Suddenly he felt Michiko's hand touching his, patting its back affectionately. "Why, thank you," she said. He did look at her and she was smiling. "That's the nicest thing anyone ever said to me."

She took back her hand… but not for a few more delicious seconds.

Lloyd Simcoe walked from the LHC control center to the main administration building. It normally took fifteen minutes to make the journey, but it ended up lasting half an hour because he was stopped three times by physicists going the other way who wanted to ask Lloyd questions about the LHC experiment that might have caused the time displacement, or to suggest theoretical models to explain the Flashforward. It was a beautiful spring day — cool, but with great mountains of cumulonimbus in the bright blue sky rivaling the peaks to the east of the campus.

At last he entered the admin building and made his way down to Beranger's office. Of course, he'd made an appointment (for which he was now fifteen minutes late); CERN was a huge operation, and there was no way in which you could just drop in on its Director-General.

Beranger's secretary told Lloyd to head right in, and Lloyd did just that. The office's third-floor window looked out over the CERN campus. Beranger rose from behind his desk and took a seat at the long conference table, much of which was covered with experimental logs related to the Flashforward. Lloyd sat down on the opposite side.

"Oui?" said Beranger. Yes? What is it?

"I want to go public," said Lloyd. "I want to tell the world about our role in what happened."

"Absolument pas," said Beranger. No way.

"Dammit, Gaston, we have to come clean at some point."

"You don't know that we're at fault, Lloyd. You can't prove it — and nobody else can, either. The phones have been ringing off the hook, of course: I imagine every scientist in the world is getting calls from the media asking for opinions about what happened. But nobody has connected it to us yet — and hopefully nobody will."

"Oh, come on! Theo says you came storming over to the LHC control center right after the Flashforward — you knew it was us from the very first moment."

"That's when I thought it was a localized phenomenon. But once I learned it was worldwide, I reconsidered. You think we were the only facility doing something interesting at that time? I've checked. KEK was running an experiment that had started just five minutes before the Flashforward; SLAC was doing a set of particle collisions, too. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up a burst at just before 17h00; there was also, just before 17h00, an earthquake in Italy measuring three-point-four on the Richter scale. A new fusion reactor came online in Indonesia at precisely 17h00 our time. And there was a series of rocket-motor tests going on at Boeing."

"Neither KEK nor SLAC can produce energy levels close to what we were doing with the LHC," said Lloyd. "And the rest are hardly unusual events. You're grasping at straws."

"No," said Beranger. "I'm conducting a proper investigation. You're not sure — not to a moral certainty — that it was us, and until you are, you're not saying a word."

Lloyd shook his head. "I know you spend your days pushing paper around, but I thought in your heart you were still a scientist."

"I am a scientist," said Beranger. "This is about science — good science, the way it's supposed to be done. You're ready to make an announcement before all the facts are in. I'm not." He paused, took a breath. "Look," he said, "people's faith in science has already been shaken enough over the years. Way too many science stories have turned out to be frauds or hype."

Lloyd looked at him.

"Percival Lowell — who just needed better lenses and a less-active imagination — claimed to see canals on Mars. But there were no canals there.

"We're still dealing with the aftermath of one idiot in Roswell who decided to declare that what he was looking at was the remains of an alien spaceship, instead of just a weather balloon.

"Do you remember the Tasaday? The stone-age tribe discovered in New Guinea in the 1970s that had no word for war? Anthropologists were falling all over themselves to study them. Only one problem — they were a hoax. But scientists were too quick to want to get on talk shows and didn't bother to look at the evidence."

"I'm not trying to get on a talk show," said Lloyd.

"Then we announced cold fusion to the world," said Gaston, ignoring him. "Remember that? The end of the energy crisis, the end of poverty! More power than humanity would ever need. Except it wasn't real — it was just Fleischmann and Pons jumping the gun.

"Then we started talking about life on Mars — the antarctic meteorite with supposed microfossils, proof that evolution had begun on another planet besides Earth. Except that it turned out the scientists had spoken too soon again, and the fossils weren't fossils at all, but just natural rock formations."

Gaston took a breath. "We've got to be careful here, Lloyd. You ever listened to anybody from the Institute for Creation Research? They spout absolute gibberish about the origin of life, but you can see people in the audience nodding their heads and agreeing with them — the creationists say the scientists don't know what they're talking about, and they're right, half the time we don't. We open our mouths too early, all in some desperate bid for primacy, for credit. But every time we're wrong — every time we say we've made a breakthrough in the fight for a cure for cancer or we've solved a fundamental mystery of the universe and then have to turn around a week or a year or a decade later and say, oops!, we were wrong, we didn't check our facts, we didn't know what we were talking about — every time that happens we give a boost to the astrologers and creationists and New Agers and all the other ripoff artists and charlatans and just plain nut cases. We are scientists, Lloyd — we're supposed to be the last bastion of rational thought, of verifiable, reproducible, irrefutable proof, and yet we're our own worst enemies. You want to go public — you want to say CERN did it, we displaced human consciousness through time, we can see the future, we can give you the gift of tomorrow. But I'm not convinced, Lloyd. You think I'm just an administrator who is trying to cover his ass, indeed, the collective ass of all of us, and of our insurers. But that's not it — or, to be honest, that's not entirely it. Dammit, Lloyd — I'm sorry, more sorry than you can possibly imagine, about what happened to Michiko's daughter. Marie-Claire gave birth yesterday; I shouldn't even be here — thank God her sister is staying with us — but there's so much to be done. I've got a son now, and even though I've only had him for a matter of hours, I could never stand losing him. What Michiko has faced — what you're facing — is beyond imagining to me. But I want a better world for my son. I want a world in which science is respected, in which scientists speak from hard data not wild speculations, in which when someone reports a science story the people in the audience will sit up and take notice because something new and fundamental about the way the universe works is being revealed — rather than having them roll their eyes and say, geez, I wonder what they're claiming this week. You don't know for a fact — for an honest-to-God fact — that CERN had anything to do with what happened… and until you — until I know that, no one is giving a press conference. Is that clear?"

Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, closed it, then opened it again. "And if I can prove that CERN had something to do with it?"

"You're not to reactivate the LHC — not at 1150-TeV levels. I'm reshuffling the experimental queue. Anyone who wants to use the LHC for proton-proton collisions may do so, once we finish all the diagnostics, but no one is firing up that accelerator for nuclear collisions until I say so."

"But — "

"No buts, Lloyd," said Beranger. "Now, look, I've got a ton of work to do. If there's nothing else…?"

Lloyd shook his head, and left the office, left the administration building, and headed back.

More people stopped Lloyd on his way back; it seemed there was a new theory being put forth every few minutes and old ones being shot down just as frequently. At last Lloyd returned to his office. Waiting on his desk was the initial report of the engineering team that had been scouring the entire twenty-seven kilometers of the LHC tunnel, looking for any abnormality in the equipment that might have accounted for the time displacement; so far, nothing unusual had cropped up. And the ALICE and CMS detectors had also received clean bills of health, passing every diagnostic test run on them to date.

There was also a copy of the front page of the Tribune de Geneve waiting; someone had placed it there and had circled a particular story:

Man Who Had Vision Dies

Future Not Fixed, Professor Says

MOBILE, ALABAMA (AP): James Punter, 47, was killed in an automobile accident today on the I-65. Punter had previously recounted a precognition vision to his brother Dennis Punter, 44.

"Jim had told me all about his vision," said Dennis. "He was at home — the same house he lived in today — in the future. He was shaving, and had the fright of his life when he saw himself in the mirror, all old and wrinkled."

Punter's death has wide-ranging implications, says Jasmine Rose, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York at Brockport.

"Ever since the visions occurred, we've been arguing about whether they portrayed the real future or only one possible future, or, indeed, whether they might simply be hallucinations," she said.

"Punter's death clearly indicates that the future is not fixed; he had a vision and yet is no longer around to see that vision come true."

Lloyd was still steamed from his encounter with Beranger, and he found himself crumpling up the newspaper page and throwing it across his office.

A philosophy professor!

Punter's death didn't prove a thing, of course. His account was entirely anecdotal. There was no supporting evidence for it — no newspaper or TV show glimpsed that could be compared with others' accounts of the same things, and no one else had apparently seen him in their visions. A forty-seven-year-old could easily be dead in twenty-one years. He could have made up the vision — and a very unimaginative one it was, too — rather than revealing that he hadn't had one. As Michiko had said, Theo had probably ruined his chances of ever getting life insurance by revealing his own lack of a vision; Punter might have decided it was better to pretend to have a vision than admit that he was going to be dead.

Lloyd sighed. Couldn't they have gotten a scientist to address this issue? Someone who understands what really constitutes evidence?

A philosophy professor. Give me a fucking break.

Michiko was doing most of the work related to setting up the Web site; Theo was running computer simulations of the LHC collision on a separate PC in the same room, making himself available as needed to help Michiko. Of course, CERN had all the latest authoring tools, but there still was much to be done by hand, including writing up descriptions of various lengths to submit to the hundreds of different search engines available worldwide. She figured they would have everything ready to go in another day.

A window popped up on Theo's monitor announcing that he had new mail. Normally, he would have ignored it until a more convenient time, but the subject line demanded immediate attention: "Betreff: Ihre Ermordung," German for "Re: Your Murder."

Theo told the computer to display the message. The whole thing was in German, but Theo had no trouble reading it. Michiko, looking over his shoulder, didn't read any German, though, and so he translated it for her.

"It's from a woman in Berlin," said Theo. "It says something like, 'I saw your posting forwarded to a newsgroup I read. You're looking for people who might know something about your murder. Well, a person who lives in the same apartment building I do knows something about it. We all' — it's congregated, gathered, something like that — 'we all gathered in the lobby after whatever it was happened, and shared our visions. A fellow — I don't know him that well, but he lives one floor above me — had a vision of watching a television newscast about the murder of a physicist at, I thought he said, Lucerne but when I read your posting I realized he'd actually said CERN, which, I confess, I'd never heard of. Anyway, I've forwarded a blind copy of your message to him, but I don't know if he'll get in touch with you or not. His name is Wolfgang Rusch, and you can reach him at… ' That's what it says."

"What are you going to do?" asked Michiko.

"What else? Contact this guy." He picked up the phone, dialed his billing code for personal long-distance calls, then tapped out the number that was still glowing on his screen.

11

A national day of mourning has been declared in the Philippines, to honor President Maurice Maung and all the other Filipinos who died during the Flashforward.

A group calling itself the April 21 Coalition is already lobbying Congress to approve a memorial on the Washington, D.C. mall in honor of the Americans killed during the Flashforward. They propose a giant mosaic, depicting a view of Times Square in New York City, as it will apparently be in 2030, based on accounts of thousand of people whose visions depicted that locale. There would be one tile in the mosaic for each individual who perished in the event, with each tile laser inscribed with an individual's name.

Castle Rock Entertainment has announced a delay in the release of its much-anticipated summer blockbuster Catastrophe "until a more appropriate time."

Separatist sentiment in Quebec is at an all-time low, according to a Maclean's opinion poll: "The apparently certain knowledge that Quebec will still be part of Canada twenty-one years hence has caused even many diehard separatists to throw in the towel," observed a Maclean's editorial.

As an emergency measure to free up doctors to deal with those physically injured during the Flashforward, the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved eleven formerly prescription antidepressants for over-the-counter sales for a one-year period.

That night, Lloyd and Michiko sat again on the couch in Lloyd's apartment, a five-centimeter-thick stack of printouts and reports Lloyd had brought home sitting on the coffee table. Michiko hadn't cried once since they got home, but Lloyd knew that she would doubtless cry herself to sleep again tonight, as she had the last two nights. He was trying to do the right thing: he didn't want to avoid the topic of Tamiko — that, he knew, was tantamount to denying that she had ever existed — but he would only pursue it if Michiko herself mentioned her.

And, of course, he wanted to avoid the topic of their wedding and their visions, and all the doubts that were swirling through his mind. And so they sat, and he held her when she needed holding, and they talked about other things.

"Gaston Beranger was going on about the role of science today," said Lloyd. "And, dammit all, he got me to thinking maybe he was right. We've been saying outrageous things, we scientists. We've been deliberately using loaded words, making the public think we're doing things that we aren't."

"I admit we haven't always done a good job of presenting scientific truths to the public," said Michiko. "But — but if CERN is responsible… if you — "

If you are responsible…

That's doubtless what she'd started to say before she'd caught herself. If you are responsible…

Yes, if he was responsible — if his experiment, his and Theo's, had somehow been responsible for all that death, all that destruction, for the death of Tamiko…

He'd sworn to himself that he'd never make Michiko sad, that he'd never do to her what Hiroshi had done. But if his experiment had been what had led, however inadvertently, however indirectly, to Tamiko's death, then he'd harmed Michiko far more than all Hiroshi's indifference and neglect ever had.

Wolfgang Rusch had seemed reluctant to talk on the phone, and Theo had finally declared outright that he was coming to Germany to see him. Berlin was only eight hundred and seventy kilometers from Geneva. He could drive it in a day, but he decided to first call a travel agent, on the off-chance that there might be a cheap seat available.

It turned out that there were a lot of seats available.

Yes, there had been a slight reduction in the world's fleet of airplanes — some had crashed, although most of the thirty-five hundred planes that had been aloft during the Flashforward had flown on merrily without pilot intervention. And, yes, there was an influx of people who had no choice but to travel in order to deal with family emergencies.

But, according to the travel agent, everyone else was staying home. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide were refusing to get on planes — and who could blame them? If the blackout effect happened again, more aircraft would smash into runways. Swissair was waiving all the usual travel restrictions — no advanced booking required, no minimum stay needed — and was giving quadruple frequent-flyer points, plus granting First Class seating on a first-come, first-served no-extra-cost basis; other airlines were offering similar deals. Theo booked a flight, and was in Germany less than ninety minutes later. He'd put the flight time to good use, running some more lead-nuclei collision simulations on his notebook computer.

When he arrived at Rusch's apartment, it was a little after 8:00 P.M. "Thank you for agreeing to see me," said Theo.

Rusch was in his mid-thirties, thin, with blond hair and eyes the color of graphite. He stood aside to let Theo into the small apartment, but didn't seem at all happy to have a visitor. "I have to tell you," he said in English, "I wish you hadn't come. This is a very difficult time for me."

"Oh?"

"I lost my wife during the — whatever you call it. The German press has been referring to it as Der Zwischenfall — 'the incident.' " He shook his head. "Seems a wholly inadequate name to me."

"I'm sorry."

"I'd been here at home when it happened. I don't teach on Tuesdays."

"Teach?"

"I'm an associate professor of chemistry. But my wife — she was killed on her way home from work."

"I am so sorry," said Theo, sincerely.

Rusch shrugged. "That doesn't bring her back."

Theo nodded, conceding the point. He was glad, though, that Beranger had so far vetoed Lloyd going public with CERN's involvement in the accident — he doubted Rusch would be talking to him at all if he knew of the relationship.

"How did you find me?"

"A tip — I've been getting a bunch of them. People seem intrigued by my… my quest. Someone emailed me saying you had told them that your vision involved watching a television news report about my death."

"Who?"

"One of your neighbors. I don't think it matters which one." Theo hadn't actually been sworn to secrecy, but it didn't seem prudent to name his source, either. "Please," he said, "I've come a long way, at considerable expense, to speak with you. There must be more that you can tell me than what you said on the phone."Rusch seemed to soften a bit. "I guess. Look, I'm sorry. You have no idea how much I loved my wife."

Theo cast his eyes about the room. There was a photo on a low bookcase: Rusch, looking about ten years younger than his current mid-thirties, and a beautiful dark-haired woman. "Is that her?" Theo asked.

Rusch looked as though his heart had skipped a beat — as though he thought Theo was pointing to his wife, in the flesh, miraculously made whole again. But then his eyes lighted on the picture. "Yes," he said.

"She's very pretty."

"Thank you," mumbled Rusch.

Theo waited a few moments, then simply went on. "I've spoken to a few people who were reading newspaper or online articles about my — my murder, but you are the first I've found who actually saw something on TV. Please, what can you tell me about it?"

Rusch finally indicated that Theo should sit down, which he did, near the picture of the late Frau Rusch. On the coffee table, there was bowl full of grapes — probably one of the new genetically engineered varieties that stayed succulent even without refrigeration.

"There isn't much to tell," said Rusch. "Although there was one strange thing, now that I think about it. The news report wasn't in German. Rather, it was in French. Not many French newscasts here in Germany."

"Were there call letters or a network logo?"

"Oh, probably — but I didn't pay any attention to them."

"The newscaster — did you recognize him?"

"Her. No. She was efficient, though. Very crisp. But it's no surprise I didn't recognize her; she was certainly under thirty, meaning she'd be less than ten years old today."

"Did they superimpose her name? If I can find her today, her vision, of course, would be of her giving that newscast, and maybe she remembered something that you didn't."

"I wasn't watching the newscast live; it was recorded. My vision started with me fast-forwarding; I wasn't using a remote, though. Rather, the player was responding to my voice. But it was skipping ahead. It wasn't videotape; the sped-up image was absolutely smooth, with no snow or jerkiness." He paused. "Anyway, as soon as a graphic came up behind her showing a picture of — well, it was of you, I guess, although you were older, of course — I stopped fast-forwarding, and began to watch. The words under the graphic said 'Un Savant tue' — 'death of a scientist.' I guess that title intrigued me, you know, being a scientist myself."

"And you watched the whole report?"

"Yes."

A thought crossed Theo's mind. If Rusch had watched the whole report, then it must have lasted less than two minutes. Of course, three minutes was an eternity on TV, but…

But his whole life, dismissed in under one minute and forty-three seconds…

"What did the reporter say?" asked Theo. "Anything you can remember will be a help."

"I honestly don't recall much. My future self may have been intrigued, but, well, I guess I was panicking. I mean — what the hell was going on? I'd been sitting at the kitchen table, over there, drinking some coffee and reading some student papers, then suddenly everything changed. The last thing I was interested in was paying attention to the details of some news story about somebody I didn't know."

"I understand that it must have been very disorienting," said Theo, but having not had a vision himself he suspected he really didn't understand. "Still, as I said, any details you could remember would be helpful."

"Well, the woman said you were a scientist — a physicist, I think. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"And she said you were — you will be — forty-eight years old."

Theo nodded.

"And she said you were shot."

"Did she say where?"

"Ah, in the chest, I think."

"No, no. Where I was shot — what place?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Was it at CERN?"

"She said you worked at CERN, but — but I don't recall her saying that was where you were killed. I'm sorry."

"Did she mention a sports arena? A boxing match?"

Rusch looked surprised by the question. "No."

"Do you remember anything else?"

"I'm sorry, no."

"What was the story that came on after the one about me?" He didn't know why he asked that — maybe to see where he had fitted into the pecking order.

"I'm sorry, I don't know. I didn't watch the rest of the newscast. When the piece on you was finished, a commercial came on — for a company that lets you create designer babies. That did fascinate me — the 2009 me — but my 2030 self seemed to have no interest in it. He just turned off the — well, it wasn't really a TV, of course; it was a hanging flatscreen thing. But he just turned it off — he said the word 'Off' to it, and it went dark, just like that; no fading out. And then he — me — we turned around and — I guess I was in a hotel room; there were two large beds in it. I went and lay down on one of the beds, fully clothed. And I spent the rest of the time just staring at the ceiling, until my vision ended and I was back at the kitchen table." He paused. "I had a nasty bump on my forehead, of course; I'd smashed it into the tabletop when the vision began. And I'd spilled hot coffee on my hand, too; I must have knocked over my mug when I pitched forward. I was lucky that I wasn't seriously burnt. It took me a while to collect my wits, and then I found out that everyone in the building had also had some sort of hallucination. And then I tried to call my wife, only to find out that… that… " He swallowed hard. "It took them a while to find her, or, at least, to contact me. She'd been walking up a steep flight of stairs, coming out of the subway. She'd almost made it to the top, according to others who saw her, and then she'd blacked out, and fallen backwards, down sixty or seventy steps. The fall broke her neck."

"My God," said Theo. "I'm sorry."

Rusch nodded this time, simply accepting the comment.

There was nothing else to be said between them, and, besides, Theo had to get back to the airport; he didn't want to run up the cost of a hotel room in Berlin.

"Many thanks for your time," said Theo. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his business-card case. "If you recall anything else that you think might be helpful, I'd really appreciate it if you'd give me a call or drop me an email." He handed Rusch a card.

The man took it, but didn't look at it. Theo left.

Lloyd went back to Gaston Beranger's office the next day. This time the journey took even longer: he was waylaid by a unified-field-theory group on their way over to the Computer Center. When he at last made it to Beranger's office, Lloyd began, "I'm sorry, Gaston, you can try to oust me if you want, but I'm going to go public."

"I thought I was clear — "

"We have to go public. Look, I just got through speaking to Theo. Did you know he went to Germany yesterday?"

"I can't keep track of the comings and goings of three thousand employees."

"He went to Germany — on a moment's notice, and he got a cheap fare. Why? Because people are afraid to fly. The whole world is still paralyzed, Gaston. Everyone is afraid that the time displacement is going to happen again. Check the newspapers or the TV, if you don't believe me; I just did myself. They're avoiding sports, driving when only absolutely necessary, and not flying. It's as if — it's as if they're waiting for the other shoe to drop." Lloyd thought again about the announcement that his father was leaving. "But it isn't going to happen, isn't it? So long as we don't replicate what we were doing here, there's no way in which the time-displacement will repeat. We can't leave the world hanging. We've done enough damage already. We can't let people be afraid to get on with their lives, to go back — as much as possible — to the way things were before."

Beranger seemed to be considering this.

"Come on, Gaston. Someone is going to leak it soon enough anyway."

Beranger exhaled. "I know that. You think I don't know that? I don't want to be obstructionist here. But we do need to think about the consequences — the legal ramifications."

"Surely it's better if we come forward of our own volition, rather than waiting for someone to blow the whistle on us."

Beranger looked at the ceiling for a time. "I know you don't like me," he said, without meeting Lloyd's eyes. Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, but Beranger raised a hand. "Don't bother denying it. We've never gotten along; we've never been friends. Part of that is natural, of course — you see it in every lab in the world. Scientists who think the administrators exist to stymie their work. Administrators who act as though the scientists are an inconvenience instead of the heart and soul of the place. But it goes beyond that, doesn't it? No matter what our jobs were, you wouldn't like me. I'd never stopped to think about stuff like that before. I always knew some people didn't like me and never would, but I never figured it might be my fault." He paused, then shrugged a little. "But maybe it is. I never told you what my vision showed… and I'm not about to tell you now. But it got me thinking. Maybe I have been fighting you too much. You think we should go public? Christ, I don't know if that's the right thing to do or not. I don't know that not going public is the right thing, either."

He paused. "We've come up with a parallel, by the way — something to toss the press if it does leak out, an analogy to demonstrate why we aren't culpable."

Lloyd raised his eyebrows.

"The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse," said Beranger.

Lloyd nodded. Early on November 7, 1940, the pavement on the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge in Washington state began to ripple. Soon the whole bridge was oscillating up and down, massively heaving, until, at last, it collapsed. Every high-school physics student in the world had seen film of this, and for decades they were given the best-guess explanation: that perhaps the wind had generated a natural resonance with the bridge, causing it to undulate in waves.

Surely the bridge-builders should have foreseen that, people had said at the time; after all, resonance was as old as tuning forks. But the resonance explanation was wrong; resonance requires great precision — if it didn't, every singer could shatter a wine glass — and random winds almost certainly couldn't produce it. No, it was shown in 1990 that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had collapsed due to the fundamental nonlinearity of suspension bridges, an outgrowth of chaos theory — a branch of science that hadn't even existed when the bridge was built. The engineers who had designed it hadn't been culpable; there was no way with the knowledge then available that they could have predicted or prevented the collapse.

"If it had just been visions," said Beranger, "you know, we wouldn't need to cover our asses; I suspect most people would thank you. But there were all those car accidents and people falling off ladders, and so on. Are you prepared to take the blame? Because it won't be me that takes the fall, and it won't be CERN. When it comes right down to it, no matter how much we talk about Tacoma Narrows and unforeseen consequences, people will still want a specific human scapegoat, and you know that's going to be you, Lloyd. It was your experiment."

The Director-General stopped talking. Lloyd considered all this for a time, then said, "I can handle it."

Beranger nodded once. "Bien. We'll call a press conference." He looked out his window. "I guess it is time we came clean."