"Look," she said, "I've been divorced once already. I'm not naive enough to think that all marriages will last forever. Maybe Lloyd and I will break up at some point. Who knows?"

Theo looked away, unable to meet her eyes, unsure how she'd react to the words he felt bubbling up within him. "He'd be a fool to let you go," he said.

His hand had been lying on the tabletop. Suddenly he felt Michiko's hand touching his, patting its back affectionately. "Why, thank you," she said. He did look at her and she was smiling. "That's the nicest thing anyone ever said to me."

She took back her hand… but not for a few more delicious seconds.

Lloyd Simcoe walked from the LHC control center to the main administration building. It normally took fifteen minutes to make the journey, but it ended up lasting half an hour because he was stopped three times by physicists going the other way who wanted to ask Lloyd questions about the LHC experiment that might have caused the time displacement, or to suggest theoretical models to explain the Flashforward. It was a beautiful spring day — cool, but with great mountains of cumulonimbus in the bright blue sky rivaling the peaks to the east of the campus.

At last he entered the admin building and made his way down to Beranger's office. Of course, he'd made an appointment (for which he was now fifteen minutes late); CERN was a huge operation, and there was no way in which you could just drop in on its Director-General.

Beranger's secretary told Lloyd to head right in, and Lloyd did just that. The office's third-floor window looked out over the CERN campus. Beranger rose from behind his desk and took a seat at the long conference table, much of which was covered with experimental logs related to the Flashforward. Lloyd sat down on the opposite side.

"Oui?" said Beranger. Yes? What is it?

"I want to go public," said Lloyd. "I want to tell the world about our role in what happened."

"Absolument pas," said Beranger. No way.

"Dammit, Gaston, we have to come clean at some point."

"You don't know that we're at fault, Lloyd. You can't prove it — and nobody else can, either. The phones have been ringing off the hook, of course: I imagine every scientist in the world is getting calls from the media asking for opinions about what happened. But nobody has connected it to us yet — and hopefully nobody will."

"Oh, come on! Theo says you came storming over to the LHC control center right after the Flashforward — you knew it was us from the very first moment."

"That's when I thought it was a localized phenomenon. But once I learned it was worldwide, I reconsidered. You think we were the only facility doing something interesting at that time? I've checked. KEK was running an experiment that had started just five minutes before the Flashforward; SLAC was doing a set of particle collisions, too. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up a burst at just before 17h00; there was also, just before 17h00, an earthquake in Italy measuring three-point-four on the Richter scale. A new fusion reactor came online in Indonesia at precisely 17h00 our time. And there was a series of rocket-motor tests going on at Boeing."

"Neither KEK nor SLAC can produce energy levels close to what we were doing with the LHC," said Lloyd. "And the rest are hardly unusual events. You're grasping at straws."

"No," said Beranger. "I'm conducting a proper investigation. You're not sure — not to a moral certainty — that it was us, and until you are, you're not saying a word."

Lloyd shook his head. "I know you spend your days pushing paper around, but I thought in your heart you were still a scientist."

"I am a scientist," said Beranger. "This is about science — good science, the way it's supposed to be done. You're ready to make an announcement before all the facts are in. I'm not." He paused, took a breath. "Look," he said, "people's faith in science has already been shaken enough over the years. Way too many science stories have turned out to be frauds or hype."

Lloyd looked at him.

"Percival Lowell — who just needed better lenses and a less-active imagination — claimed to see canals on Mars. But there were no canals there.

"We're still dealing with the aftermath of one idiot in Roswell who decided to declare that what he was looking at was the remains of an alien spaceship, instead of just a weather balloon.

"Do you remember the Tasaday? The stone-age tribe discovered in New Guinea in the 1970s that had no word for war? Anthropologists were falling all over themselves to study them. Only one problem — they were a hoax. But scientists were too quick to want to get on talk shows and didn't bother to look at the evidence."

"I'm not trying to get on a talk show," said Lloyd.

"Then we announced cold fusion to the world," said Gaston, ignoring him. "Remember that? The end of the energy crisis, the end of poverty! More power than humanity would ever need. Except it wasn't real — it was just Fleischmann and Pons jumping the gun.

"Then we started talking about life on Mars — the antarctic meteorite with supposed microfossils, proof that evolution had begun on another planet besides Earth. Except that it turned out the scientists had spoken too soon again, and the fossils weren't fossils at all, but just natural rock formations."

Gaston took a breath. "We've got to be careful here, Lloyd. You ever listened to anybody from the Institute for Creation Research? They spout absolute gibberish about the origin of life, but you can see people in the audience nodding their heads and agreeing with them — the creationists say the scientists don't know what they're talking about, and they're right, half the time we don't. We open our mouths too early, all in some desperate bid for primacy, for credit. But every time we're wrong — every time we say we've made a breakthrough in the fight for a cure for cancer or we've solved a fundamental mystery of the universe and then have to turn around a week or a year or a decade later and say, oops!, we were wrong, we didn't check our facts, we didn't know what we were talking about — every time that happens we give a boost to the astrologers and creationists and New Agers and all the other ripoff artists and charlatans and just plain nut cases. We are scientists, Lloyd — we're supposed to be the last bastion of rational thought, of verifiable, reproducible, irrefutable proof, and yet we're our own worst enemies. You want to go public — you want to say CERN did it, we displaced human consciousness through time, we can see the future, we can give you the gift of tomorrow. But I'm not convinced, Lloyd. You think I'm just an administrator who is trying to cover his ass, indeed, the collective ass of all of us, and of our insurers. But that's not it — or, to be honest, that's not entirely it. Dammit, Lloyd — I'm sorry, more sorry than you can possibly imagine, about what happened to Michiko's daughter. Marie-Claire gave birth yesterday; I shouldn't even be here — thank God her sister is staying with us — but there's so much to be done. I've got a son now, and even though I've only had him for a matter of hours, I could never stand losing him. What Michiko has faced — what you're facing — is beyond imagining to me. But I want a better world for my son. I want a world in which science is respected, in which scientists speak from hard data not wild speculations, in which when someone reports a science story the people in the audience will sit up and take notice because something new and fundamental about the way the universe works is being revealed — rather than having them roll their eyes and say, geez, I wonder what they're claiming this week. You don't know for a fact — for an honest-to-God fact — that CERN had anything to do with what happened… and until you — until I know that, no one is giving a press conference. Is that clear?"