Lily woke one morning to find her mother asleep at her father’s desk, highlighter in hand, the Environmental Impact Statement spread open before her, head resting in the crook of her arm. When Lily collected the paper and brought it to the kitchen table, the headline marching across the top of the Nicolet Herald-Gleaner caught her eye: MAYOR COMES OUT IN FAVOR OF THE SUPER COLLIDER.
Well, thought Rose, he’d beaten her to it. And he’d surprised her. She’d felt certain Mayor Callahan would come out against it.
“Yes, go ahead and send ours,” Rose told her advisors. She felt at once both apologetic and defeated as she put down the phone. She’d understood the importance of making the first move. She’d been leaning toward supporting the project, but that wouldn’t matter now. Her advisors felt certain that, given the direction public sentiment was heading, she’d ended up on the right side. She would chalk it up to a lesson learned — that sometimes an important decision must be made quickly rather than thoroughly.
Lily, being now a teenager, and attempting to make sense of the world by dividing it into neat and orderly categories — right and wrong, valid and invalid, useful and not useful — had been horrified when she’d learned about the public position Rose had taken on the issue of the collider.
“What were you thinking?” Lily asked the next morning, the paper spread open on the table, its headline announcing: LEADING CHALLENGER IN MAYORAL RACE COMES OUT AGAINST SUPER COLLIDER.
Rose, joining Lily at the breakfast table, explained that it was a political decision — that although she was sympathetic to the logic that the collider would allow scientists to answer many of the fundamental scientific questions about the origin of the universe, she had made a decision as a political figure to adopt a public opinion more in line with those of her constituents than reflective of her own understanding of the risks and rewards of the issue, something that was often required of politicians, she explained.
“But Mom, you know better than this,” Lily protested.
“What I know,” Rose said calmly, as though trying the line out on Lily, “is that our citizens need a leader who shares their concerns.”
“But you don’t really believe this is dangerous, do you?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said candidly. “But the voters need someone who understands their fear and will offer them some degree of protection.”
“So you’re pretending that you agree with something that’s factually incorrect?”
“Lily.” Here Rose took a deep, calming breath. “As you age, it is my firm belief that you will come to see that the world is not as black and white as you imagine it to be.”
“But Dr. Mital says—”
“Dr. Mital works at the Lab. It is in his interest for the collider to be built.”
“But he also lives here. You saw the map. It could go right under their house, as well as ours. Do you think he would support this if there were any danger?”
“Lily,” Rose continued patiently, “I think you would be surprised to learn some of the seemingly incomprehensible things people may do when their careers are at stake.”
Only after she’d said it, only after it escaped her mouth and she heard it out loud did Rose realize that Lily had won the argument. Sometimes she wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to raise a child who was not quite so bright, though when she shared this with Randolph in her next letter, he’d teased her: But Rose, you’d be so disappointed if you didn’t think she was smarter than the both of us.
Now, over breakfast, Lily and her mother no longer worked together on the crossword. Instead, Lily read the editorial page, her fingers worrying the amulet her father had sent her the month before from the markets of Marrakesh, while her mother fielded phone calls and worked on response letters to her constituents.
In her letters to Randolph, Rose had never permitted herself to bore him with the mundane details of their lives. Rather, she aimed in her letters to address more important, universal themes. However, once Lily had begun to so vocally criticize her mother’s position on the collider issue, Rose found herself unable to resist noting in her next letter that Randolph really should enjoy not having to put up with being the target of contempt from such an opinionated child. You are lucky to be the one she idolizes and not the one she takes for granted, she wrote, scribbling her signature at the bottom of the page and shoving the letter into an envelope.
Lily, meanwhile, continued her own campaign, sending her father clippings of articles and annotating the more outrageous editorials that appeared in the paper.
Randolph, reading their letters by candlelight in the sparse cell of the mountaintop monastery where he had stopped to collect his mail and replenish his supplies, had begun to think of the issue of the collider not as a conflict brewing among the citizens of Nicolet, but more specifically, as a conflict brewing in his home between the two women he loved most in the world, and, more importantly, as one that he was not at all sure how to solve.
Many of the Lab’s young physicists found it difficult to take seriously the concerns voiced by the protesters who gathered at the Lab entrance. Such fear seemed, to the young scientists, to be entirely baseless and thus impossible to comprehend. Many of them believed that the only real danger of a project like this wasn’t radiation, but rather simple, old-fashioned construction accidents.
Lunch in the Lab cafeteria often included a table at which one of the young physicists read the day’s letters to the editor aloud to his tablemates, all of them exasperated. Abhijat, however, did not feel so free to laugh at these letters. He had begun to worry that, ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the town’s fears were rational or not. Regardless of what the Lab did, it didn’t look like the protestors — or their concerns — were going away any time soon, and surely the Department of Energy would take that into account when making their decision.
“How goes your campaign amongst the savages?” one of their younger experimentalist colleagues, Dr. Cohen, asked as he joined Abhijat and Dr. Cardiff at their table in the cafeteria.
“It does us no credit,” Dr. Cardiff reminded him gently, “to engage in ad hominem attacks on those who see this issue in a different light than we do.”
“I don’t think it’s an ad hominem attack,” Dr. Cohen argued, “to point out the obvious — that their fear is based on nothing more than a lack of education.” Several of his contemporaries nodded in agreement.
Dr. Cardiff maintained his ever-patient expression. “I think it is more accurate to say that their fear is based on a difference in education,” for after speaking with many of the opponents, he knew it was far too simple to cast them as uneducated bumpkins. “It’s not that they are incapable of understanding the science. It’s simply that this is not what they’ve spent their lives doing, as we have. It does us no credit to think of them as stupid.”
Another colleague chimed in, “If you ask me, the people who are really dangerous are the ones who understand a small amount of physics — enough to think they understand what’s going on, but really, only enough to be paranoid.”
“Perhaps,” Dr. Cardiff allowed. “But then the responsibility to educate them on this issue rests with us.”
“Really, Gerald?” Dr. Cohen’s voice was quick to take on a thick veneer of sarcasm. “I’m supposed to put my work aside so I can teach these people the basic principles of particle physics, in hopes that they’ll grasp even a portion of the issue and allow us to build this here. No. It’s too much. That is not my job.”