The seat on his other side was empty.
“Before you start on Wyman,” Hazelius said to Corcoran, “I’d like to finish introducing him to those who didn’t meet him earlier.”
“Go ahead.”
“This is Julie Thibodeaux, our quantum electrodynamicist.”
A woman opposite Ford gave him a curt hello before returning to a querulous monologue aimed at the white-haired, leprechaun-like man next to her. Thibodeaux resembled the stereotype of the female scientist: dowdy, overweight, dressed in a dingy lab coat, her short hair stringy from lack of washing. A set of pens in a plastic pocket protector completed the caricature. Her file said she suffered from something called “borderline personality disorder.” Ford was curious to see just how that manifested itself.
“The gentleman talking to Julie is Harlan St. Vincent, our electrical engineer. When Isabella is running at full power, Harlan manages the nine hundred megawatts of electricity pouring in here like Niagara Falls.”
St. Vincent stood and extended his hand across the table. “Pleased to meet you, Wyman.” When he sat back down, Thibodeaux went on with her disquisition, which seemed to involve something called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
“Michael Cecchini, our Standard Model particle physicist, is the gentleman at the far end.”
A short, dark man rose, extended his hand. Ford took it, struck by his curiously flat, opaque gray eyes. The man looked dead inside—and the handshake was the same: clammy and lifeless. And yet, as if in defiance of the nihilism at the center of his existence, Cecchini had taken fastidious care with his dress; his shirt was a white so brilliant it hurt the eyes, there was a knife-edge crease in his slacks, and his hair was parted with military precision and groomed to perfection. Even his hands were immaculate, as soft and clean as patted dough, the nails emery- boarded and polished to a high gloss. Ford caught a faint scent of an expensive aftershave. But nothing could completely cover up the whiff of existential despair clinging to him.
Hazelius finished the introductions and disappeared into the kitchen, and the noise level grew.
Ford still hadn’t met Kate. He wondered if that was a coincidence.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever met an anthropologist before,” Melissa Corcoran spoke to him.
He turned. “And I’ve never met a cosmologist.”
“You’d be amazed at how many people think I do hair and nails.” Her smile seemed an invitation. “What exactly will you be doing here?”
“Getting to know the locals. Explaining to them what’s going on.”
“Ah, but do
“Maybe you’ll help me out.”
Smiling, she reached across the table and grasped a bottle. “Wine?”
“Thank you.”
She examined the label. “Villa di Capezzana, Carmignano, 2000. I have no idea what it is, but it’s good. George Innes is our wine connoisseur. George? Tell us about the wine.”
Innes broke off a conversation at the other end of the table, a smile of pleasure lighting his face. He tucked his glasses up. “I was lucky to snag that case—I wanted to serve something special tonight. Capezzana is one of my favorites, from an old estate in the hills west of Florence. It was the first DOC to permit cabernet sauvignon in the blend. It exhibits good color, red and black currant aromas mingling with cherries, and good depth of fruit.”
Corcoran turned back to Ford with a smirk. “George is a frightful wine snob,” she said, pouring a generous portion into his glass, then refilling her own. She raised it. “Welcome to Red Mesa. A horrible place.”
“Why is that?”
“I brought my cat—I couldn’t bear to be parted from her. Two days after we arrived, I heard a howl and saw a coyote running off with her.”
“How terrible.”
“You see them all over, the mangy, slinking brutes. Then there are the tarantulas, scorpions, bears, bobcats, porcupines, skunks, rattlesnakes, and black widow spiders.” Reciting the words seemed to please her. “I hate this place,” she said with relish.
Ford smiled with what he hoped looked like embarrassment and asked the dumbest question he could think of. No point in people thinking he was smart. “So, what’s Isabella supposed to do? I’m just an anthropologist.”
“In theory, it’s quite simple. Isabella smashes subatomic particles together at almost the speed of light, to re-create the energy conditions of the Big Bang. It’s like a demolition derby. Two separate beams of particles accelerate in opposite directions in a huge circular pipe, forty-seven miles in circumference. The particles go faster and faster, round and round inside the ring, until they’re moving at 99.99 percent the speed of light in opposite directions. The fun begins when we bring them together in a head-on collision. In that way we re-create the violence of the Big Bang itself.”
“What kinds of particles do you smash together?”
“Matter and antimatter—protons and antiprotons. When they come together—pow! E equals mc squared. The sudden blast of energy creates a spray of all kinds of different particles. That spray gets caught in the detectors and we can figure out what each particle is and how it was created.”
“Where do you get antimatter?”
“We mail-order it from Washington.”
Ford smiled. “And I thought they only had black holes.”
“Seriously, we create our own antimatter on-site by blasting a gold plate with alpha particles. We collect the antiprotons in a secondary ring, then feed them into the main ring as needed.”
“So where does the cosmology part come in?” Ford asked.
“I’m here to study dark things!” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Dark matter and dark energy.” Another sip of wine.
“Sounds scary.”
She laughed. He watched her green eyes traveling across him, appraisingly, frankly, and wondered how old she might be. Thirty-three? Four?
“About thirty years ago, astronomers began to realize that most of the matter in the universe wasn’t the usual stuff you could see and touch. They called it dark matter. It seems that dark matter is all around us, invisible, passing through us undetected, like a shadow universe. Galaxies sit in the middle of huge pools of dark matter. We don’t know what it is, why it exists, or where it came from. Since dark matter must have been created along with regular matter during the Big Bang, I hope to use Isabella to make some of it.”
“And dark energy?”
“Lovely, creepy stuff. Back in 1999, cosmologists found that some unknown energy field was causing the universe to expand, faster and faster, blowing it up like a giant balloon. They christened it dark energy. Nobody has the
Across the table Volkonsky snorted, his voice shrill. “Malevolent? Universe is indifferent. It not give a shit about us.”
“The fact is,” said Corcoran, “dark energy will eventually wreck the universe—in the Big Rip.”
“The Big Rip?” Until now, Ford had been feigning ignorance, but the Big Rip was new to him.
“It’s the latest theory of the fate of the universe. Pretty soon the expansion of the universe will become so fast that galaxies will be ripped apart, then the stars, the planets, you and me—down to the very atoms themselves. Everything gone, poof! Existence will come to an end. I wrote the article about it on Wikipedia. Check it out.”
She took another sip, and Ford noticed she wasn’t the only one enjoying the wine. The conversations around them had swelled in volume, and half a dozen bottles already stood empty.
“Did you say ‘pretty soon’?”
“No more than twenty, twenty-five billion years from now.”
“
Corcoran said, “We cosmologists take the long view.”
“And we computer scientists take short view. Like millisecond short.”
“Milliseconds?” said Thibodeaux scornfully. “My work in quantum electrodynamics deals in femtoseconds.”
