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thing.”
    “Well, I’m in charge of our primary project, but Landon Donovan runs the place. You must know about him, too.”
    “Yeah. He picked up the pieces from the first one, the project the government started in Waxahachie. That one was killed by Congress a while back, right? Because of budget cuts?”
    Mike finds it difficult to believe that she already knew who he was. Surprised that she listened closely enough to stories about the super collider to have this conversation with him.
    And the dark outline of her mascara. Lips the color of California redwood.
    “Landon and his investors,” he tells her, “tried to buy the land that had been allotted for the original super collider, because much of the underground tunnel had already been dug. But there were too many owners and not enough cooperation. The reason the project stayed nearby is because of the cheap land, and because one of the largest investors is from Texas. All the biggest things are required to be in Texas, you know.”
    “Who is this investor?”
    “I don’t actually know. Landon is our chief executive, but the rest of the ownership has chosen to remain anonymous.”
    “So what do you do there, exactly?”
    “On my project we’re looking for a particle that was first theorized by Peter Higgs.”
    “That’s right. The God particle.”
    Dopamine levels in his brain must be soaring, he is so giddy and confident. “You know about that, too?”
    “Well, in my job it pays to actually
comprehend
what comes down on the feeds.”
    “Rather than just watch our press conferences to check out all the good-looking physicists?”
    Kelly grins. “So why do they call it the God particle?”
    “A famous physicist, Leon Lederman, he came up with the name. See, we have this theory to describe the particles of matter and energy that make up the universe. It’s called the Standard Model. But for it to work the way we think, it’s got to have this field—the Higgs field—and our machine is supposed to be able to find it. The Higgs field is special because we think it played a role in the universe forming the way it did. I guess Lederman was trying to be melodramatic.”
    “What made you want to study physics?”
    “Curiosity, I guess. I’ve always been interested in understanding how things work. As a kid it was mechanical things, like my bicycle or an automobile engine. Now my job is to figure out how a much, much bigger machine works—the whole universe.”
    Kelly, who has been holding her place in
Huckleberry Finn
since they began talking, replaces her hand with a bookmark. She sets the volume aside and turns further toward Mike. Opening herself to him. A small confirmation of the larger-scale theory.
    “So I take it you’re not a particularly religious person?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Because you called the universe a machine. I tend to think of it more as a miracle.”
    “Oh, it’s a miracle all right. Just the sheer size of the thing is a concept beyond anything you or I could comprehend. And when you think of the interaction of all those particles and energy, and gravity collapsing matter into stars, and some of those stars exploding, ejecting heavier elements that eventually end up as planets orbiting stars, including at least one that somehow produced an organism complex enough to ask questions of the universe that spawned it—hell, I don’t know if ‘miracle’ is a big enough word to describe something like that.”
    “That’s an interesting point of view,” Kelly says. “But all that randomness, all those accidents . . . doesn’t that seem a little—I don’t know—coincidental to you?”
    “It can. But when you think about how long the universe has been around, and how big it is—probability indicates that even the most unlikely events should occur sometime.”
    “You think?”
    “Yep. There’s even math to back me up on that.”
    “But who says the math is right?”
    “Well, if you do work like mine, if you want