Lily looked down, too, a tear budding in the corner of her eye, which she brushed quickly away. Still, she stole another look at her mother, who, noting it, wondered whether Lily would raise the issue of the letters she’d discovered — the letters Rose had written but never sent.
She did not.
“I’m glad you’ll be here,” Lily said, taking her father’s hand and weaving her fingers between his.
CHAPTER 22. Awaiting Decision
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING THE HEARING, THE LAB SEEMED STRANGELY quiet, the scientists unable to concentrate. To Sarala it felt like the whole town had grown silent and closed in, as if bracing itself for a blow.
Abhijat found himself more often than not looking out his office window toward the city in the distance. How precarious it felt to have one’s professional fate in the hands of others.
At the grocery store, neighbors passed each other with curt greetings, having seen once and for all in the auditorium where everyone stood on the issue. They imagined the Department of Energy officials flying back to Washington, looking down over Nicolet from the windows of their airplane, its farmland and subdivisions growing smaller and smaller as they rose into the air and off to make their decision.
After the hearing, the letters began to arrive. In an office in Washington, a secretary who had been charged with collecting all correspondence on the matter of the super collider for the purposes of assembling a public record opened letter after letter from Nicolet. Some neatly typed on letterhead, others hand-lettered in nearly illegible scrawl — the shaky handwriting of elderly citizens, the large, looping handwriting of children.
Filed away with the others:
A letter from a woman who’d written I hate the SSC, across the bottom of the page near her signature.
Children’s drawings: SSC in all caps, a circle drawn round it, a line struck through in prohibition. And their letters, asking why the collider couldn’t be built on Mars instead of under people’s houses. There’s lots of space up there. Then no one in our town would be fighting.
In the rounded, decorative script of a teenage girclass="underline" I don’t really know much about this issue but our biology teacher asked us to write a letter in support of this. I hope this hasn’t wasted your time. I’m getting extra credit for writing this.
One in long, elegant cursive: It is my testimony at the hearing that has prompted my writing. I would like to apologize to the panel members for my attitude during the hearing. While this is an emotional issue for those of us facing relocation and the loss of our community as we know it, this does not excuse my anger toward the panel members. Shortly after the hearing, the Lord reminded me that as a Christian, I had failed to represent Him in a way worthy of His name. So I ask that you please extend this apology to the gentlemen taking testimony that day in the auditorium. Please also express to them that I continue to pray for all of you for wisdom in this decision-making process.
Anderson Hall rumbled with the low murmur of nervous conversation. Dr. Palmer made his way to the podium set up in the center of the stage, the auditorium seats filled with anxious Lab employees. Dr. Palmer was not a man who hid his emotions well; written across his face were the signs of fatigue and disappointment.
“Colleagues,” he began. “This process has been a long and emotional journey for many of us, and I am afraid I call you together today to share with you disappointing news. After careful consideration, the Department of Energy has decided against construction of the Superconducting Super Collider here at the National Accelerator Research Lab.”
There was a heavy silence in the large room. Dr. Palmer continued speaking, but Abhijat could no longer hear him, his mind racing.
Would it be built somewhere else, he wondered? Perhaps. But where? And more importantly, when? For surely it would mean more waiting, further delay, starting from scratch with studies and outreach and attempts to explain the magnitude of their work. His breath caught in his throat as all of this made itself clear to him.
Dr. Cardiff, beside him, turned at the sound.
Abhijat met his eyes, wiped a palm over a forehead now beaded with sweat.
“I know that many of us are profoundly heartbroken over this decision,” Dr. Palmer finished. “I wish that I had some words of comfort to offer you all. Perhaps it is enough to remind us all that very big projects don’t always have happy histories.”
From his office window, Abhijat looked out over the charred prairie grasses.
For months now, he had been counting on the arrival of the super collider, had so freighted it with meaning, with the possibility of the great prizes, of his theories being recognized and his work remembered. He’d come to think of it as the most important thing to happen in his life, in his career. Now, though, without it? It felt as though a giant obstacle had been placed in his path. And for the first time in his life, he felt unequal to the task of determining how to circumvent it.
There would be, over the course of the next year, he realized, a slow trickle of young, ambitious physicists from the Lab. There was still work to be done, but Abhijat and Dr. Cardiff knew, as did the younger physicists, that the Lab was no longer the place from which the most groundbreaking work would emerge.
One by one the staff filtered down to the cafeteria, taking places at the long tables that lined the atrium. The sun shone in through the windows, but inside, the mood was glum. Abhijat took a seat at a table with Dr. Cardiff and Dr. Cohen. The cafeteria ladies, who knew how badly the scientists had hoped for the collider, brought over plates of cookies, which the physicists picked at halfheartedly.
“This will be the end of the Lab,” Dr. Cohen said, breaking the heavy silence.
“Don’t be hyperbolic, Adam,” said one of their colleagues.
“There’s still much to be found in the lower energy levels we’ve got here now.”
“Oh, please,” Dr. Cohen answered. “That will be wrapped up in a matter of years. And then where will we be?”
“We’ll be off to another lab,” answered another colleague, as he took a seat.
That, they all knew, was likely true. Most would head to Europe or Japan. There were rumors of CERN trying for a super collider. Perhaps they would end up there.
Some would leave physics entirely, Dr. Cardiff thought, though he didn’t say this.
“Now I’m going to have to wait until I’m fifty to understand what breaks electroweak symmetry,” one of their young colleagues said, looking up from the napkin he’d torn into tiny pieces.
“If then,” Dr. Cohen added. “I think this may be the death knell for our field.”
“Entire fields of academic inquiry don’t just die out, Adam,” another colleague said.
“Of course they do.”
Alone now in his office, Abhijat looked again, as he had so many times before, out the window and over the great prairie.
He felt tired, he realized. Tired of the constant striving that had been the focus of his attentions for as long as he could remember, the most important part of his world. Tired of attending to a professional legacy, of contributing, critiquing, keeping up, being first. But he was afraid, too, of living without those things. Who would he be without them? Was there, as his mother had always insisted, happiness in contentment with what one had?
Instead of driving home, he decided, that evening, to walk, following the paths laid out through the Lab’s prairie grasses, toward town, toward his home.