Charmed Particles (20 page)

The next morning, Sarala set about digging up the sod along the front walkway and turning over the soil. It was difficult work, but it felt good. She dug down into the ground, clearing away the grass and revealing the rich, dark soil, scooping out small holes into which she could place the fragile, just-sprouting plants.

Into the dark, cool dirt she pressed her fingers, making space for each of the tiny constellations of roots. As she loosened the sprouting plants from the flats and settled them into their places in the ground, she covered their delicate roots with earth and marveled that she and the sun and the water had been all that was needed to coax them into life. She thought of the tunnels that might be built under these homes, imagined the particles circling somewhere down below. She thought of the small army of flowering plants that would bloom here as her own response to the signs that had begun to crop up along their street, emboldened by the arrival of the first. She wondered if Abhijat would notice the changes to the front yard. She realized, half smiling, half sad, how unlikely it was.

Each night at dinner he was there in body, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Even Meena seemed to notice, no longer working on her schoolwork there in the kitchen after dinner, peppering her father with questions, but instead withdrawing to her room to work on her schoolwork alone. The house had grown so silent it had begun to press in on Sarala, and some nights she turned on the television just for the sound of another voice.

“Why don't you talk with Abhijat about this, about how distant he seems?” Carol had suggested.

Once, this might have seemed possible, but not lately, Sarala thought. “Some conversations aren't worth having,” she said. Carol looked at her sadly.

Sarala remembered how, in the early days of their marriage, she had kept a mental list of the ways she and Abhijat had begun to love one another. It had been a long time since she'd added to that list, she realized, feeling like she had failed at this.

New articles appeared in the
Herald-Gleaner
on the issues of ground-water contamination and on the potential for radioactivity to be released into the atmosphere. Letters to the editor urged officials to consider what they had begun calling the No-Action Alternative, which advocated not constructing the super collider. These, Lily carefully clipped from the newspaper and included in her letters to her father, annotating them with her own observations, most of which were expressions of exasperated frustration at how boneheaded, obstinate, and unwilling to listen to reason, to science, the citizens of Nicolet seemed to be on the matter.

Sarala was proud that the flowers along the front walk had come in nicely, petals unfolding with the warm days. She imagined the roots stretching deep into the dark black soil. In the mornings, when the ground was still wet from the dew, Sarala liked to kneel at the edges of the lawn, pulling budding weeds and stubborn blades of grass from among the flowers, her fingers working deep into the soil, loosening them from the earth.

Stepping back to admire her work, she thought of how carefully, in the early years of their marriage, she'd attended to the project of adapting and adjusting to their new home—and of how little attention Abhijat seemed to have devoted to this.

The scientists and other staff at the Lab had begun to worry that if the super collider wasn't built there, it would be built somewhere else, meaning that the Lab's technology would be surpassed, all but guaranteeing its demise.

Abhijat explained this to Lily, Meena, and Sarala one night over dinner, noting with a deep sense of sadness that the best physicists, who had for years been drawn to the Lab by virtue of its position at the forefront of high-energy particle physics, would, if the Lab were to lose its bid for the collider, almost certainly begin to make their way to other facilities. He could envision a time—he said this haltingly, as though not wanting to admit it, as though by saying it aloud he might invest this possibility with a sort of dangerous power—when the Lab might be shut down entirely.

This went on through the summer, through the long, cold winter, and through the spring, by which point the very fact that now, a year after news of it had leaked, the project was still only “under consideration” itself became part of the frustration.

In most cases, the citizens of Nicolet were assured, the planned tunnels could be built under existing structures, the land returned, after construction, to its original use. But in a handful of cases, where they might need to construct an access shaft or a maintenance facility, the land would have to be bought and the owners relocated, and soon, the letters to the editor that Sarala read each morning began to focus on the frustration of being left in this limbo.

We don't know from one day to the next if we'll lose our home. My wife and I saved for years to buy this house and now we're being told we may have to start all over again. Until a decision is made, our lives are on hold. We don't dare make any plans because we don't know what the future will have for us here.

And though the prospect of relocation, of being forced to sell their land and homes was troubling to those who faced it, equally troubled were those who were assured that they could remain where they were, the tunnel snaking its way in a long loop below their neighborhoods.

My husband and I used our hard-earned savings to build our house. It has been a home for our family and an investment in our future. But now we are left wondering, if we want to sell our home sometime in the future, will we have to disclose that this atom smasher runs underneath it? And if so, well, then frankly, I can't imagine who in their right mind would buy such a home. Leaving us holding the bag. This project is nothing more than welfare for the overeducated.

Sarala thought back to their own period of house hunting when she had arrived in Nicolet. Would she have felt comfortable buying such a home, she wondered.

In his own letter to the editor, Dr. Palmer, the Lab director, noted that his own home, one of the old white clapboard farmhouses that had been removed from their original homesteads and trucked to the village on the grounds of the Lab, sat right on top of the current accelerator's neutrino beam. “Do you think I would live here if there were something to be afraid of?” he asked.

But from the citizens of Nicolet, there was no response.

Once Rose announced her candidacy for the mayor's office, she'd been pressed to take a stand on the collider almost immediately. This will be the issue that wins or loses the election, her campaign advisors cautioned her. Whatever position Mayor Callahan, the incumbent, takes, they warned, you'll have to take the other. And it would be best to get out ahead of him on this, they pointed out. It would put you in a position of power.

Rose understood this, and agreed. She had set about trying to educate herself on the issue and its potential impact on Nicolet. But as she delved into the many volumes of the Environmental Impact Statement, she realized that it was not an issue around which one could easily wrap one's mind.

Watching the electorate carefully, Rose had noted that, on the matter of property values, even those who believed there wasn't any real danger in the collider had to admit to knowing enough of human nature, enough of their fellow citizens, to understand that it wouldn't matter in the end—that this fear, however unfounded, would, in fact, damage their property values. “If two homes of equal value were for sale,” the argument went, “and one was located on top of this experiment, I think it's easy to recognize that most prospective home buyers would choose the one not located on top of such a facility.”

As she made her way through the materials, weighing each side carefully, her advisors pressed her to come to a decision. They prepared press releases for both possible decisions so they'd be ready to move as soon as she made her choice. But in the end, Mayor Callahan beat her to it.

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: M
AYOR
C
OMES
O
UT
I
N
F
AVOR OF
THE
S
UPER
C
OLLIDER
.

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.