The God Particle by Richard Cox Page A

emptier than it was just moments ago.
    “Yes, sometimes they do.”
    He smiles as he rises to shake Mannheim’s hand, viscerally aware of the receding field, of sanity drifting in to fill the void.
    Steve leaves Mannheim’s office and heads to his own. Any moment now, he knows, the field could return with reinforcements. Come streaming down out of the HVAC system. Follow him from its hiding place in Mannheim’s office. Or slide, snakelike, out of Serena’s cubicle, wrap its body around his leg and jerk him back, toward her, toward the night in Zurich when everything went wrong. He ducks into his office, where he plugs in his laptop and decides the daily routine is maybe welcome after all.
    6
    Minutes later, a knock on his door.
    A figure moving toward him, tiptoeing into his office, the way a mime might imitate the move onstage. Why the hell is she doing that?
    “Hi, Serena,” he says.
    “I didn’t want to bother you,” she whispers.
    “Glad to see one of us made it back from Zurich safely.”
    Serena shifts her weight from leg to leg. Scratches the back of one calf with the other foot.
    “I was
really
shocked to hear what happened. I should never have left you alone, Steve. I am
so
very sorry.”
    “Hey,” he says, “don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.
I’m
the one that shouldn’t have let you leave. I wasn’t much of a gentleman.”
    “I wouldn’t go
that
far, Steve. But anyway, I’m sorry for . . . for what I said to you about Janine. I had no right. I hope we can still be friends.”
    “Of course we can.” Steve turns away from his computer and looks directly at her. “Look, it takes a lot of guts to do what you did in Zurich. To put yourself on the line, tell someone the truth even though they might not feel the same way. I admire you for doing that, even though in our case it maybe wasn’t the best timing.”
    She just stares at him. And if he senses a hint of noise in the room, noise that could be coming from nowhere but his own head, Steve isn’t obligated to acknowledge it.
    “You can’t act the way your heart feels all the time,” he adds. “But when it seems right, go for it. What you said that night was right: You’ve only got one life to live, so live it.”
    “Obviously you didn’t get back here when you expected,” she says to him. “How did the proposal with Janine go?”
    “I had to postpone it,” he tells her and points to his head.
    “Oh, of course. Well, I really appreciate what you’ve said. You were right—I was mortified that night and pretty much have been since. But now I feel better. You’re being really cool about this.”
    Serena steps forward and leans down, gives him a quick kiss on the cheek.
    “Thank you,” she says. “I don’t know how to repay you.”
    “No need at all. But Serena, can you let everyone know today’s staff meeting is postponed?”
    “It is? Why?”
    “I need to prepare for my interview tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow?”
    “Yep. Jim just told me this morning.”
    The noise again, a surge of it, distorting a couple of words spoken from outside his office: Simon Slater.
    He thinks.
    “Well, good luck then,” Serena says. “I’ll bet you’ll knock ’em dead!”
    7
    Somehow it seems to rear its ugly head every day, the truth of human duality, the battle between logic and instinct. Mankind struggles to further understand the world but can’t escape his need to propagate the species, or to dominate the herd. Here is Larry Adams, a gifted physicist with a deep understanding of the event selection process in large particle detectors, a genius with the software algorithms used to decide which collisions are worth recording for analysis and which are discarded, and he seems more worried about Mike’s conversation with a television news anchor than their struggling search for Higgs. Here is Landon Donovan, the arrogant billionaire who arranged the funding for this one-of-a-kind private research facility, and his meddling management