The editor of the Herald-Gleaner would later come to remember the day of the super collider cover story as the last day the editorial pages featured content unrelated to the collider. From that day forward, letters about the collider began to arrive, at first in a slowish trickle, but that had been deceptive and unrepresentative of what was to come.
Throughout Nicolet, suspicion grew among the citizens as to just what the Lab was up to out there, whether they’d been planning this further takeover of the town’s land all along. In place of the usual sorts of letters to the editor were diatribes questioning whether all of the public activities at the Lab — the cultural events, the butterfly gardens, the hiking trails — had only been naked attempts at improving the Lab’s public image, luring in the wary public, who now eyed the Research Tower from their bedroom windows and imagined the superconductor snaking beneath their rec rooms, God-only-knows-what whizzing around below them as they slept. And then, once they collided, once they “succeeded,” what then? The end of the world? Dark matter? A black hole that would swallow Nicolet whole, leaving a gaping crater of nothingness in the prairie?
Since the announcement of the collider issue, Lily’s letters to Randolph had begun to focus almost exclusively on the subject, providing him with updates and articles clipped from the Herald-Gleaner. The local unions, she explained, argued that building the collider would bring thousands of construction jobs to the area, and were thus in favor of it. Local realtors worried that the location of the collider tunnel under homes would decrease property values in the area, so they had come out against it. Most teachers, Lily wrote, supported the project, as did many of the citizens who worked for computer or high-tech companies. These people, she explained in her letters, surely understood the research possibilities the collider would bring. But farmers, Lily noted, were split on the issue. There were those who were grateful for the Lab campus, for the way its land, returned to prairie grass, was the only land for miles that had not been swallowed up by suburban sprawl. But other farmers, remembering the land that had, years ago, been taken to build the Lab campus, were wary of the assurances that they’d still be able to own and farm the land under which the tunnels would be constructed. And on it went, the town divided.
To Lily, it seemed obvious that the collider was not only a good idea, but in fact an essential one. She found herself perplexed by the response of community members who did not support it, and had begun to feel as though she were living among foreigners whose strange customs she’d only ever half comprehended. Sitting in the wing chair in her father’s study, she wondered if that was how her father felt during his explorations. But, she realized, looking around the room at his photos and collections, he seemed to find these differences exciting rather than worrisome.
Randolph read Lily’s letters with a mixture of amusement at this strange, curious daughter he and Rose had produced and concern that she seemed so entirely uninterested in the things one might expect from a girl of her age.
He wrote to Rose: How do you suppose we might interest Lily in some of the more conventional preoccupations of young women her age?
But Rose, having never been particularly conventional herself, had been able to offer no fruitful suggestions. She remembered her own parents’ letters about the construction of the Lab years ago, the newspaper clippings her mother had sent in the letters she’d posted to wherever Rose and Randolph were due to arrive next. For Rose, out in the world, in the midst of her adventures with Randolph, the whole thing had seemed like a story that was happening to someone else.
CHAPTER 13. Expeditions through Unmapped Territory
As the quantum physicist Finkelstein said: “As well as a Yes and a No, the universe also contains a Perhaps.”
ALL WINTER LONG, COMING HOME FROM CAROL’S OR CATCHING A glimpse of her own home through Carol’s big bay window as they shared coffee in the morning, Sarala had begun to think that her house did, in fact, look stern and imposing. She felt embarrassed that it had taken her so long to notice how spare and utilitarian the yard was — driveway, grass, sidewalk, porch. By the end of the long grey winter, her eyes craved color, and she began to make plans for changes come spring: bright flowerbeds to line their front walkway, a flowering tree for their front yard. She sketched it out on a piece of paper, borrowing ideas from the glossy magazines she kept in a pile on the living room coffee table.
By early spring, copies of the feasibility studies the Lab had conducted began to circulate. These noted that it would be necessary to negotiate easements with property owners under whose homes and businesses the collider’s tunnels would run.
Then came the draft of the Environmental Impact Statement, which the Department of Energy had commissioned and which the citizens of Nicolet and the surrounding communities were invited to respond to. The statements arrived in eighteen-by-twelve-inch cardboard boxes, one to each home in Nicolet and the surrounding areas. Inside were reams of paper bound together, their blue covers reading Volume 1 of 21, Volume 2 of 21, and so on.
On the day the draft of the Environmental Impact Statement arrived at the Winchester home, Lily dragged the box through the foyer into Randolph’s study, slit it open with his ox-bone letter opener, and began reading, page 1, volume 1, red pen in hand for suggested corrections.
The collider ring will pass under farmland and residential communities.
Geologic suitability is outstanding. Perceived potential loss of home values is a key element of the strong landowner opposition.
Slowly, in the yards of some of the more vocal opponents, signs reading NO SSC, NOT UNDER MY HOUSE, and NOT UNDER MY SCHOOL began to bloom.
Sarala noticed these first, and wondered how long it would be before Abhijat, in the course of his commute through the neighborhood to the Lab, would notice them. It had not taken long.
Though the signs had sprouted up all around the neighborhood, Abhijat had managed to remain composed, if privately frustrated. But the first sign to go up on their own street was a different matter. It had felt, to Abhijat, very much like a personal attack.
The sign appeared one day in front of Ted and Sheila Miller’s house, just a few doors from the Mitals. Sarala noticed it first. She’d felt a sudden surge of embarrassment and shame. The Millers knew where Abhijat worked, but still the sign stood starkly in their yard, like a message to her and her family.
Abhijat noticed it that night on his way home. He slowed and pulled the car over to the side of the street. To Abhijat, the signs seemed tantamount to putting up a large placard in one’s yard announcing: “I am poorly educated and illogically fearful.” He couldn’t imagine who in their right minds would be willing to publicly advertise such a thing.
Surely his own neighbors knew where he worked, that his career and the careers of hundreds of his coworkers were at stake. Don’t you care, he’d wanted to shout, that you may cost people their occupations, their calling?
At the hardware store, Mr. Fricker, who’d taken a shine to this young mother who seemed, always, to come in without a husband, walked with Sarala through the store, helping her select the things she might need for the redesign of her yard: plastic trays in which to start the seeds, a small spade for when it was time to transplant the sprouting plants into the ground, potting soil, and slim envelopes of seeds. In the rotating seed display were flowers that reminded Sarala of her girlhood — orange, yellow, and pink marigolds — but she’d settled instead on an assortment of varieties in alternating arrangements of red, white, and blue.