With no time to act, Takashi steeled himself for the inevitable. The second before the wave hit him, he sucked in a lungful of air from his respirator and held his breath. However, nothing could have prepared him for the solid mass of water that engulfed him, knocking him off his feet and tumbling him over and over. His only thought was to swim upwards, out of the maelstrom and ride with the wave; he knew it would be pointless to swim against the tide. He was so disoriented, and the visibility was so limited, that he couldn’t work out which direction he was facing. As he was being carried along, at an incredible rate of knots, he could see shadows, but couldn’t make out what objects they were.
For an instant, he thought he could see daylight and kicked as hard as he could towards the light, his protective suit giving him added buoyancy. He broke the surface, narrowly missing an upturned car which floated past just inches from his face, before being dragged back down by the undercurrent. He kicked out for the surface again, this time managing to grab hold of a thin branch which, fortunately, was still attached to a floating tree. He hauled himself up onto the trunk, exhausted. All he could do now was hope and pray.
CHAPTER 2
Over six thousand miles away, wearing an almost identical protective suit, Professor Erik Morantz finished inspecting the thermal shields in Atlas, one of four particle detectors equispaced around CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
This was the first time the collider had been fired up in over a year and everybody was, justifiably, on edge. During that occasion, a catastrophe was narrowly averted by the quick-thinking actions of one of the maintenance crew, who noticed a build-up of condensation around a pipe leading to one of the helium coolant tanks which supplied the heat shields. He quickly deduced that the only way this could happen would be if the supercooled helium was escaping. He raised the alarm and the collider was immediately shut down. If the leak had gone undetected, the gigantic magnetic coils at the heart of the collider would have overheated, endangering the lives of the two thousand people working there.
‘The heat shields are working fine,’ Professor Morantz spoke into the microphone in his helmet. ‘Increase the power to seventy per cent capacity.’
Normally, Professor Erik Morantz would be directing operations from his office, in the control centre, but this time he was taking a personal interest. The publicity surrounding the numerous breakdowns of the collider was jeopardising his position as Director General and he couldn’t afford to have another failure on his hands so soon after the last one.
‘They’re holding. Increase power to maximum.’ He could tell by the computerised console on the side of Atlas that the thermal shields were functioning correctly. ‘Okay, release the proton beams.’
The two beams were positioned in opposite directions around the 27-kilometre circular tunnel, which made up the particle accelerator. The theory was that the protons would increase speed as they passed through a series of superconducting radio frequency (RF) cavities, located around the tunnel. Just like pushing a child’s swing, these RF cavities would give the particles a push each time they passed, steadily increasing the energy of the particles, until they reached the speed of light. The aftermath of the particles collision would be recorded by Atlas, or one of the other three detectors.
‘How long do you want us to run the experiment for, Professor?’ The voice of Deiter Weiss, Professor Morantz’s second-in-command, came through his headset.
‘Give it another fifteen minutes and then reduce power to fifty per cent,’ Morantz responded. ‘I’m on my way back to the control room now.’
He climbed into the white golf buggy, which was the preferred mode of transport in the tunnels, the alternatives being bicycles or walk. It would take him fifteen minutes to cover the three-mile journey back to the control room, through the service tunnels that ran parallel to the collider; enough time to contemplate his position at CERN.
He was one of the original founding members and had joined the project to identify the God particle when it was first conceived in 1984, at a symposium in Lausanne, Switzerland. It took a further ten years of lobbying to convince CERN that the Large Hadron Collider was a viable project; however, with the support of twenty countries, they finally gave their approval for the construction.
For the next fourteen years, Professor Morantz worked alongside architects, civil engineers, scientists, accountants and pen-pushers, to build the world’s largest machine. Officially, he was employed by the Department of Quantum Physics at CERN, but he reported directly to the governing council. When it was time to choose a Director General to oversee all experiments associated with the LHC, there really was only one candidate. Morantz had lived and breathed what he referred to as ‘The Creator’ for practically a third of his life, shunning any and all social or family commitments, in the pursuit of knowledge. The knowledge consisted of one thing: the definitive proof that the God particle — or, to give it its scientific name, the Higgs boson — existed.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t had his fair share of female admirers when he was younger. Now in his early sixties, his portly stature had only developed over the last few years; prior to that, he’d had a lean and compact frame, which he was lucky enough not to have had to work at maintaining. The numerous times he had laboured through the night, on projects that had so engrossed him, that he’d lost all track of time, were now showing as deep furrows across his forehead. The copious hours of studying in dimly-lit rooms had etched lines around his eyes. His once full head of wavy black hair was now wispy, unkempt and silver-grey. But the one feature that hadn’t changed over time, and was responsible for attracting so much female attention as a young man, was his piercing blue eyes. They were as bright and sparkly as they had ever been.
He arrived at the control room entrance, still debating as to whether he should step down from the project and let someone else take the helm. He wasn’t getting any younger, and the amount of pressure he was under from the council, because of the negative publicity surrounding the previous breakdowns, was making him reconsider whether the role of Director General was right for him.
He was a scientist, not a politician, which invariably accounted for the abrasive relationship he had with the press. Whenever they asked him a direct question regarding the collider’s lack of performance, he would tell them, honestly, that he didn’t know why these failures were occurring, but he would look into it and report back to them when he had conclusive evidence. Unfortunately, this never happened; the breakdowns seemed unrelated and random, isolated incidences of leaks, power surges and malfunctions.
If he were more politically-minded, like Deiter, he would have been able to put a more positive spin on the situation at the press conferences. ‘Yes, everything’s under control. These are minor setbacks, and we are making giant strides forward into new scientific frontiers.’ But that just wasn’t in his nature.
Deiter, on the other hand, was a totally different scientific animal. He was about ten years younger than Morantz. He hadn’t really taken the time to get to know the man. In fact, he didn’t actually care much for Deiter. He had been appointed at the same time as Morantz, by the council, and was everything that his boss wasn’t. He was articulate and charismatic, self-assured to the point of arrogant, and meticulously groomed, from his tightly-cropped salt and pepper hair to his manicured fingernails. He wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He spoke English with a clipped German accent. He was very much the archetypal corporate scientist, the one seen espousing the virtues of a newly-formulated ingredient in a shampoo commercial.