The cake is melting.
Somebody ordered it from a bakery in Saint-Genis with a dipole magnet piped on top in blue icing, and by half past ten the magnet has slid off the edge and lies in a sugary puddle beside the tray. I film it anyway, a slow pan from the ruined icing up to the wall of screens, because that is the kind of shot Ruth likes and I am here to be liked.
The CERN Control Centre is hot enough to prove bread. Someone has wedged the outer doors open with a fire extinguisher, which I suspect breaks a rule printed somewhere in two languages, and a desk fan on the coffee counter swings its head from left to right as if it’s following a slow argument. Outside it is still twenty-nine degrees. Inside there are maybe eighty people: operators in shorts, physicists in free conference T-shirts, a dozen guests with visitor lanyards, and me. Fifty-six, six foot two, sweating through a linen shirt I bought specially and already regret, with a press badge that keeps flipping round on its cord so it shows the blank side.
“You’re filming the cake,” says Jonah Bekele, arriving at my elbow with two paper cups.
“I’m filming the cake.”
“Please don’t put the cake in the article.” He hands me a cup. Champagne, warm as tea. “The Director’s office paid for that cake.”
“Then it’s a public-interest cake.”
He laughs, one short bark, and checks over his shoulder to see if anyone heard. Jonah runs press visits for the lab. He is thirty-eight, wears a pressed white shirt in a heatwave, and this afternoon he met me off the number 18 tram holding a sign with my name spelled right.
Across the far wall, the big screen they call Page 1 shows the machine’s vital signs in yellow and white against black. Two beams, numbers climbing, a line of text I don’t understand that everyone else in the room keeps glancing at the way people in a hospital corridor glance at the doors. Tonight isn’t physics, Jonah told me at dinner. The physics finished two weeks ago. Tonight they’re pushing fatter bunches of protons round twenty-seven kilometres of tunnel, forty percent heavier than usual, to see what breaks before they switch the whole thing off for four years and rebuild it.
“So the last thing it does,” I said, “is a stress test.”
“That’s a depressing way to put it.”
“I’ve been told I have a gift.”
I drink the champagne. My glasses have gone somewhere again. I pat my shirt pocket, then my trouser pockets, then find them pushed up on my own head, which is where they were the last three times as well.
At the far console there’s a woman with a grey plait down her back, sixty or so, crying.
She isn’t making a thing of it. She types, reads, types again, and every so often wipes her face with the inside of her wrist and carries on. No one crowds her. A young operator beside her slides a box of tissues along the desk without looking up, and she takes one without looking up either, and that’s the whole conversation.
“Marguerite,” Jonah says quietly. “She was on shift for first beam in 2008. She retires in September.”
“Does she want to be filmed?”
“No.”
I film the back of her chair instead, the plait, the tissue box, the glow of her screen. It’s a good shot. I’ll probably cut it.
Later I go over anyway, lens cap on, camera down at my side.
“I’m not filming,” I say.
She finishes the line she’s typing before she looks up. Her eyes are swollen and there’s a fabric plaster on her thumb, gone grey along the edges.
“You will write that we are sad,” she says.
“Aren’t you?”
“I am tired.” She turns back to the screen. “It is not the same thing and it does not print.”
I don’t ask her anything else. I go back to the cake.
My phone buzzes in my trouser pocket. Ruth.
Charming not clever. 1,800 words. Monday. Don’t adopt a physicist.
I type back too late and put it away.
Near the coffee counter a young man with a beard is listening to a voice note on speaker, holding the phone flat on his palm as if the words might roll off. A child’s voice, high and delighted, saying something in Italian I don’t catch, and then a man laughing in the background of the recording.
It’s nothing. A father somewhere, a kid up past bedtime. But the flat, tinny sound of a voice through a phone speaker in a crowded room does what it always does, and for a moment I’m not in France. I’m in a stairwell in Gaziantep in 2016 with my phone against my ear, listening to a message I have listened to so many times since that I could recite the breaths in it.
Karim used to send voice notes instead of texts. He said typing was for people with nothing to say.
I know exactly where my phone is. Left trouser pocket. I know exactly what’s still saved on it. I don’t take it out.
“You all right?” Jonah says.
“Heat,” I tell him, and go and stand under the fan.
The feature is simple. Ruth’s pitch, not mine: The Last Night of the Big Machine. Fifteen hundred words of wonder and cake, some quotes about the frontiers of knowledge, a photograph of Page 1 saying goodbye. The Instrument has thirty-one thousand subscribers, most of them retired engineers and teachers who write in when we get a unit wrong. I have been there two years and nobody has ever shot at me.
But fifteen hundred words of wonder is thin, and I need a sidebar. Something small.
“What’s the dullest thing running tonight?” I ask Jonah around midnight. “The smallest experiment on the whole site. The one nobody’s come to celebrate.”
He looks genuinely pained. “Why would you want that?”
“Readers love an underdog. Also I’m tired of people telling me about the Higgs boson.”
He thinks about it, scrolling his phone, lips moving slightly. Then he snorts.
“VSM-7.”
“Which is?”
“Vacuum Stability Measurement. Run seven. It’s an auxiliary study, a sensor array and a calibration coil on one of the shafts out on the French side. It reads the collisions in parallel and checks whether the vacuum is stable.”
“Is it?”
“Apparently yes.”
“What happened to runs one to six?”
“I asked that. Nobody found it funny either.” He shows me his screen: a paragraph of press copy with the Aldane Foundation’s little blue logo at the bottom. “I wrote the public description for it last year. I fell asleep writing it. Actually asleep, at my desk.”
“Perfect. Can I see it?”
“It’s a hut in a field.”
“Better.”
He makes a call, steps outside to make it, comes back fanning himself with a folded schedule. “The technical lead will give you fifteen minutes after four. When the fill is steady and she’s bored. Her words.”
The hours between midnight and four at an event like this go soft at the edges. There are two short speeches, both good, both in two languages.
There is applause for a graph. It spreads about four rows and then thinks better of itself. A man in sandals explains quench protection to me with a paper napkin and a biro, and I understand about a third of it and nod at the rest the way I used to nod at colonels.
Nothing ends while I’m in the room. On Page 1 the two lines have sat flat all night and the figures under them hold, and the beams stay in until long after I’m due out in a field on the French side.
I get the camera up anyway and film the screen over the heads of people who have stopped looking at it. Steady numbers. A voice in French on a headset reading them off. Somewhere behind the wall a pump keeps going.
What I’ve got on the card is the back of a technician’s head and half of somebody’s shoulder across the lens. I’m five metres too far back and fifty-six years old and not willing to stand on a desk in front of the Director’s office. It doesn’t matter. Ruth wants a photograph of Page 1 saying goodbye, and Page 1 won’t say it until the beams come out, hours after I’m in a hut in a field.
In a corridor off the main hall there’s a vending machine and a sofa. I feed the machine a euro coin for a bottle of water. It swallows the euro and does nothing. I try a two-franc piece, on the grounds that the site straddles a border and the machine may have opinions. It takes that too, thinks about it, and gives me nothing, not even the grinding noise of trying.
I sit on the sofa with my bad knee straight out in front of me and my camera in my lap, and I fall asleep.
When Jonah shakes my shoulder it is twenty to four and the sweat on my back has gone cold.
“Car’s outside,” he says. “If you still want your hut.”
The car is a white Renault with a CERN sticker on the door and a dashboard buried in parking permits. Jonah drives with both hands on the wheel, like a learner, though he tells me he’s had his licence since he was eighteen. We leave the lights of Prévessin behind in about a minute and a half, and then there is only the road and the dark fields on either side, wheat or barley, I can’t tell which at night, and the smell through the open window of hot tarmac and cut hay.
Off to the west, over the black line of the Jura, lightning flickers without any thunder. Heat lightning. Karim had a word for it that I’ve forgotten.
“My mother sends me articles,” Jonah says, apropos of nothing, eyes on the road. “About the end of the world. Every time we switch anything on, she sends me a link. Black holes. Strangelets. One time it was a man in Arizona who said we’d opened a door to hell.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That hell is not in the Pays de Gex.” He glances at me. “She says I would say that. I work here.”
“She’s not wrong, as a principle.”
“No. That’s the annoying part.”
The shaft head appears as a patch of sodium light in the middle of a field: a chain-link fence, a big corrugated shed over the shaft, a pair of cooling units going flat out. Off to one side, two portable cabins have been bolted together into a single long box with a satellite dish on the roof and an air-conditioning unit dripping onto the gravel. Someone has taped a laminated sign to the door:
VSM-7 · PLEASE KNOCK · SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT
Under it, in biro, a small smiling face.
There’s a woman at the gate.
She’s in her forties, fair hair cut short, a navy polo shirt, a lanyard that says AUDIT on a white card. She holds a tablet and she steps into the headlights as we pull up, not hurrying, one hand raised.
Jonah winds down his window. “Press visit. Jonah Bekele, Communications. This is Mr. Marrow.”
“Mr. Marrow.” She looks past Jonah to me and smiles. Scandinavian accent, faint. “Yes. You’re expected.” She checks something on the tablet. “And the camera?”
“Mine,” I say.
“Of course.” She steps back to let us through.
Jonah puts the car in gear. Before he moves I lean across him toward the open window.
“Audit,” I say. “The machine or the people?”
“Processes.” Her hand sits on the top of the door, two fingers only. “There is an audit every year.”
“At four in the morning.”
“The site is quiet at four in the morning.” She says it with no weight on it at all and takes her hand off the door. I let it go. It’s four in the morning and I’m here for a hut.
Her shoes pass the window as we roll through. Good walking shoes, new, not a speck of dust on them from a gravel yard in a field in a drought. Twenty-nine degrees, and her collar is dry.
Jonah’s phone goes before he’s even turned off the engine. He listens, says “Now? Maintenant?” and then “D’accord, d’accord,” and hangs up with his eyes closed.
“They want me back for the live stream. Someone from Geneva television.” He opens his eyes. “Twenty minutes. I’ll come straight back for you. Please don’t touch anything. I’m serious, Elias. Nothing.”
“I never touch anything.”
“You filmed the cake.”
He leaves me in the yard with the roar of the cooling units and the lightning over the hills, and drives off far too carefully. The woman with the lanyard has gone somewhere. I knock on the door with the smiling face.
Inside, the hut is cold.
It’s the only cool room I’ve been in for a week. Two rows of equipment racks run down one side, fronted with glass, full of blinking hardware and fat cable bundles tied off with Velcro. Along the other side there’s a desk with four monitors, two office chairs, a kettle, and a mini fridge covered in stickers from somewhere called the Kiel Institute of Applied Field Physics. Everything hums. Under the hum, low, there’s a second sound, a slow, deep tick like an old radiator warming up.
A young man in a CERN polo shirt is eating a sandwich with the focus of someone who has not eaten since lunch. He waves the sandwich at me.
“Journalist?”
“Journalist.”
“Luc.” He swallows. “You want a Coke? We have too many Coke. Somebody ordered Coke for a party of twenty and there are three of us.” He opens the fridge without getting up, rolling his chair backward to reach it. “My mother will call in two hours. Every night, eleven o’clock, but tonight I told her I’m working, so she will call at six instead. I’m all she has, she says. It’s a lot of pressure.” He hands me a can. “Please don’t write that.”
“I won’t write that.”
“Anaïs,” he calls down the hut. “He’s here.”
Anaïs Ferrand comes from the far end with a tablet held against her chest. She’s in her early thirties, small, dark hair twisted up and pinned with a pencil, and she’s chewing the cap of a biro that has been chewed flat. She shakes my hand quickly. Her fingers are cold from the air conditioning.
“Fifteen minutes,” she says. “I’m sorry. It’s a boring experiment.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
She looks at me for a second longer than I expect, as if checking for the joke, and doesn’t find it funny or unfunny. “Okay.”
We sit at the desk. I set the camera on a small tripod and angle it at her, and she tucks a loose strand of hair back behind her ear and then pulls it loose again.
“Tell me what VSM-7 does,” I say. “Like I’m a retired chemistry teacher in Shropshire. Because that’s who reads this.”
“The vacuum,” she says, “is the lowest energy state of the universe. Empty space. We think it is truly the lowest. There is a small possibility it is not, that there is a lower one, and if there were, that would be very important. So in some rare collisions we look for patterns that would tell us.”
“And?”
“And it’s stable.” She shrugs. “It stays the lowest. We check again. Still the lowest. That’s the result.”
I laugh, and she almost smiles.
“So why keep checking, if it’s always—“
The answer comes before I’ve finished the question, in complete sentences, in the rhythm of something said many times to people with lanyards. Everyone who has ever sat on a funding panel talks like that.
While she explains the sensor array, which she calls Sieve, and the software that reads it, I let the camera run and I look at her hands. The left one holds the tablet flat on her knee. Every few seconds her thumb wakes the screen and she glances down, not at me, and back up. The pen cap is between her back teeth now and I can hear it creaking.
“And the coil?” I say. “Jonah called it a calibration coil.”
“Yes. For calibration.”
At the end of the racks there’s a yellow-and-black warning sign on the wall, a magnet symbol and a figure with a pacemaker crossed out, and a field strength printed underneath. I don’t know what the number means. But I have stood outside MRI rooms in hospitals with Nora, years ago, when she was training, and I’ve read their signs while waiting, and those signs were calmer than this one.
“That’s a big warning for calibration,” I say.
“It’s underground. Below us. The sign is regulation.” She taps the tablet. “Everything is regulation.”
Her phone rings. Not the tablet, a phone in her back pocket. She looks at the screen and answers, turning away from the camera, and speaks German, low. “Ja.” A pause. “Ja. Verstanden.” She hangs up. Luc has stopped eating and is watching her over the top of his monitor.
“Luc,” she says. “Can you check the chiller outside?”
“I checked it at four.”
“Can you check it again, please.”
He opens his mouth, closes it, and puts down the sandwich. “Okay.” He takes a torch from a hook by the door and goes out into the heat. The door bangs behind him, and the roar of the cooling units comes and goes in the gap.
“He’s young,” Anaïs says, to nobody.
On the monitors, long columns of numbers scroll up and up. One of the screens turns a soft amber and gives a single chime, like a lift arriving on the wrong floor.
“What’s that?”
“Trigger buffer.” She’s typing. “It’s nothing. It happens.”
The pen cap cracks between her teeth. She takes it out of her mouth and looks at it like it belongs to someone else.
I’ve spent twenty-five years in rooms where people were waiting for something they’d been told was coming. A shelling that was scheduled. A convoy that was late. A phone call from a hospital. There is a way people sit in those rooms, forward on the chair, weight on the balls of the feet, eyes on a door or a window or a screen, pretending to be busy with their hands. I haven’t seen anyone sit like that in two years.
Anaïs Ferrand is sitting like that.
“Is something about to happen?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. She isn’t looking at me at all now. She’s looking at the amber screen, where one line of the numbers has frozen and the rest keep scrolling past it. The deep tick under the hum is getting faster. Or I’m imagining it. The can of Coke sweats a ring onto the desk.
On the camera’s little flip-out screen, under the image of her face, the timecode reads 04:41:06.
I put my hand flat on the camera body and turn the flip-out screen in toward the desk, where she can’t read it, and I don’t stop the recording.
“Stop talking,” she says.