He had counted the hours, the minutes until he would return home for dinner and share the news with Sarala and Meena. In his office, he could hardly focus, playing his announcement out ahead of time.
“But with such a large circumference, where will they build it?” Sarala, seated beside him at the dinner table, had asked, after he shared the news. Watching him talk, she had thought of how she hadn’t seen him this animated in years.
“Part of it on the Lab’s campus — the accelerator, the particle detector, the experiment halls — and part of it stretching out,” he answered.
“Stretching out — to where?” Sarala asked, catching Meena’s eye, who, Sarala could tell, was wondering the same thing.
“Through Nicolet,” he answered. “Or rather, under it.”
“Yes, but under where, exactly?” Sarala asked.
Abhijat would later come to think of this moment — Sarala’s question, the concern in her voice — as the first moment he glimpsed the way this might sound to the rest of the community. “Well.” He found himself proceeding cautiously. “That is still under consideration.” But it’s unimportant, he’d wanted to tell her, hoping to redirect her attention instead to where his own lay: to the possibilities this opened for his work, his reputation.
In the cafeteria that afternoon, following the announcement, he and his fellow colleagues had been so focused on the changes this would mean for the field, so excited by what this would mean for each of their careers, that it hadn’t occurred to them how such a proposal would be perceived in the community.
“I’m not sure this is going to go over well in town,” Sarala said gently, hating to put out the light of excitement in Abhijat’s eyes, but certain that ahead lay troubled times.
Sarala had been right. By the following morning, news of the proposed collider appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and the Nicolet Herald-Gleaner, along with a proposed path for the collider ring superimposed over a map of Nicolet, showing the collider’s tunnels running under the town’s subdivisions, schools, and what the newspaper identified as “prime farmland.” ATOM SMASHER, the headline read in all caps.
Reporters have learned that the National Accelerator Research Lab is in discussions with the Department of Energy to build a large collider ring, called the “Superconducting Super Collider,” in an underground tunnel that will encircle the town of Nicolet, running under homes, schools, and farmland.
Sarala presented the paper to Abhijat as he took his seat at the table for breakfast.
“Abhijat, this map,” she said softly, after he had taken a moment to skim the front page. “It would go right under our neighborhood, under Meena’s school, under Heritage Village.”
“But this is only a proposed path,” he assured her. “It’s far from certain.”
“But,” Sarala continued, “I don’t understand why the Lab can’t build this on the property they already have.”
“It’s much, much bigger than the accelerator we have now,” Abhijat explained. “Much bigger than the property we have. The current advances in tunneling, though, mean the Lab wouldn’t have to acquire the land.” These points had been noted by the Lab director the day before in his announcement. Here, Abhijat’s voice took on a hopeful tone. “No one would have to give up their farms or homes as when the Lab campus was built. Now we can just tunnel under these things, and people can retain their homes.”
Sarala looked at him dubiously.
“Oh, but you must understand,” he continued. “This is not a machine to be feared. It is something we should be in awe of, honored to have built here. Think of the answers it will reveal to us. Think of what it might mean for our family.”
Sarala was thinking of that. “But under our town? Under our homes?” she asked.
“Yes, but there is no danger. What possible danger could there be?”
But Sarala did not have an answer for this.
By the time Abhijat arrived at the Lab that morning, the staff had been summoned back to Anderson Hall where, just the day before, they had received what had seemed to them to be happy news. Again, the Lab director at the podium. Again the restless chattering among the staff in the audience. Again the director’s hand held up to quell this, and then his voice.
“Many of you have likely seen the covers of today’s papers. This is not how we planned the information to be disseminated to the public, but here it is and we must make the best of it.”
The day the cover story about the collider appeared in the paper, Rose, at the tiny desk in the corner of the kitchen from which she ran her political career, had begun to imagine greater things. With an issue like this, sure to galvanize the voters, she thought, she might — if she played her cards just right — have a chance next year at the mayor’s office.
CHAPTER 12. Conditions at the Creation of the Universe
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. He is the God of order and not of confusion.
IN THE WEEKS SINCE THE ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT THE NEW accelerator, Sarala noted that the front page of the Herald-Gleaner featured a steady march of articles on the history of the Lab, its safety record, and its scientific accomplishments. There were articles on land acquisition and the power of eminent domain, on the various methods that might be employed for tunneling beneath the homes and farmland of Nicolet. On the necessity for the Lab to secure the support of elected officials at the local, state, and national level if the project were to move forward. On subatomic particles like quarks and gluons. On the paradox of needing so large an instrument to study something so small. Abhijat had been surprised, then alarmed, at the amount of coverage the collider plan was getting in the news, not all of it good.
The decision about whether or not the super collider would be constructed was to be made, the citizens of Nicolet learned, not by them, but by the Department of Energy, which would conduct and then circulate environmental impact studies, feasibility studies, and would endeavor to gauge the response of the community to the idea by hosting a public hearing on the matter.
Representatives from the Lab and the Department of Energy were quoted, insisting that the path that had been outlined on the front page — in which the tunnel traveled west from the Lab’s campus, running under homes in Eagle’s Crest, under Heritage Village, and out into the surrounding farmland before arcing back around and making its way back to the Lab, passing under still more farmland, more homes, the elementary school, the junior high, and the high school — was only one of several possibilities still under consideration.
These same officials cited the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN on the French-Swiss border, which had been constructed under French farmland, as a model, and as proof that there was no reason to fear living on top of such a facility.
Not long after the articles began to appear, Sarala noticed that the Editorials and Letters to the Editor sections of the Herald-Gleaner had begun, slowly, to be taken over entirely by the issue of the collider. Gone were scraps over increases in property taxes, rogue candidates for school board, and complaints over the noise produced by the cannons set off each summer during Heritage Village’s annual Revolutionary War Days event.