Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, closed it, then opened it again. "And if I can prove that CERN had something to do with it?"

"You're not to reactivate the LHC — not at 1150-TeV levels. I'm reshuffling the experimental queue. Anyone who wants to use the LHC for proton-proton collisions may do so, once we finish all the diagnostics, but no one is firing up that accelerator for nuclear collisions until I say so."

"But — "

"No buts, Lloyd," said Beranger. "Now, look, I've got a ton of work to do. If there's nothing else…?"

Lloyd shook his head, and left the office, left the administration building, and headed back.

More people stopped Lloyd on his way back; it seemed there was a new theory being put forth every few minutes and old ones being shot down just as frequently. At last Lloyd returned to his office. Waiting on his desk was the initial report of the engineering team that had been scouring the entire twenty-seven kilometers of the LHC tunnel, looking for any abnormality in the equipment that might have accounted for the time displacement; so far, nothing unusual had cropped up. And the ALICE and CMS detectors had also received clean bills of health, passing every diagnostic test run on them to date.

There was also a copy of the front page of the Tribune de Geneve waiting; someone had placed it there and had circled a particular story:

Man Who Had Vision Dies

Future Not Fixed, Professor Says

MOBILE, ALABAMA (AP): James Punter, 47, was killed in an automobile accident today on the I-65. Punter had previously recounted a precognition vision to his brother Dennis Punter, 44.

"Jim had told me all about his vision," said Dennis. "He was at home — the same house he lived in today — in the future. He was shaving, and had the fright of his life when he saw himself in the mirror, all old and wrinkled."

Punter's death has wide-ranging implications, says Jasmine Rose, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York at Brockport.

"Ever since the visions occurred, we've been arguing about whether they portrayed the real future or only one possible future, or, indeed, whether they might simply be hallucinations," she said.

"Punter's death clearly indicates that the future is not fixed; he had a vision and yet is no longer around to see that vision come true."

Lloyd was still steamed from his encounter with Beranger, and he found himself crumpling up the newspaper page and throwing it across his office.

A philosophy professor!

Punter's death didn't prove a thing, of course. His account was entirely anecdotal. There was no supporting evidence for it — no newspaper or TV show glimpsed that could be compared with others' accounts of the same things, and no one else had apparently seen him in their visions. A forty-seven-year-old could easily be dead in twenty-one years. He could have made up the vision — and a very unimaginative one it was, too — rather than revealing that he hadn't had one. As Michiko had said, Theo had probably ruined his chances of ever getting life insurance by revealing his own lack of a vision; Punter might have decided it was better to pretend to have a vision than admit that he was going to be dead.

Lloyd sighed. Couldn't they have gotten a scientist to address this issue? Someone who understands what really constitutes evidence?

A philosophy professor. Give me a fucking break.

Michiko was doing most of the work related to setting up the Web site; Theo was running computer simulations of the LHC collision on a separate PC in the same room, making himself available as needed to help Michiko. Of course, CERN had all the latest authoring tools, but there still was much to be done by hand, including writing up descriptions of various lengths to submit to the hundreds of different search engines available worldwide. She figured they would have everything ready to go in another day.

A window popped up on Theo's monitor announcing that he had new mail. Normally, he would have ignored it until a more convenient time, but the subject line demanded immediate attention: "Betreff: Ihre Ermordung," German for "Re: Your Murder."

Theo told the computer to display the message. The whole thing was in German, but Theo had no trouble reading it. Michiko, looking over his shoulder, didn't read any German, though, and so he translated it for her.

"It's from a woman in Berlin," said Theo. "It says something like, 'I saw your posting forwarded to a newsgroup I read. You're looking for people who might know something about your murder. Well, a person who lives in the same apartment building I do knows something about it. We all' — it's congregated, gathered, something like that — 'we all gathered in the lobby after whatever it was happened, and shared our visions. A fellow — I don't know him that well, but he lives one floor above me — had a vision of watching a television newscast about the murder of a physicist at, I thought he said, Lucerne but when I read your posting I realized he'd actually said CERN, which, I confess, I'd never heard of. Anyway, I've forwarded a blind copy of your message to him, but I don't know if he'll get in touch with you or not. His name is Wolfgang Rusch, and you can reach him at… ' That's what it says."

"What are you going to do?" asked Michiko.

"What else? Contact this guy." He picked up the phone, dialed his billing code for personal long-distance calls, then tapped out the number that was still glowing on his screen.

A national day of mourning has been declared in the Philippines, to honor President Maurice Maung and all the other Filipinos who died during the Flashforward.

A group calling itself the April 21 Coalition is already lobbying Congress to approve a memorial on the Washington, D.C. mall in honor of the Americans killed during the Flashforward. They propose a giant mosaic, depicting a view of Times Square in New York City, as it will apparently be in 2030, based on accounts of thousand of people whose visions depicted that locale. There would be one tile in the mosaic for each individual who perished in the event, with each tile laser inscribed with an individual's name.

Castle Rock Entertainment has announced a delay in the release of its much-anticipated summer blockbuster Catastrophe "until a more appropriate time."

Separatist sentiment in Quebec is at an all-time low, according to a Maclean's opinion poll: "The apparently certain knowledge that Quebec will still be part of Canada twenty-one years hence has caused even many diehard separatists to throw in the towel," observed a Maclean's editorial.

As an emergency measure to free up doctors to deal with those physically injured during the Flashforward, the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved eleven formerly prescription antidepressants for over-the-counter sales for a one-year period.

That night, Lloyd and Michiko sat again on the couch in Lloyd's apartment, a five-centimeter-thick stack of printouts and reports Lloyd had brought home sitting on the coffee table. Michiko hadn't cried once since they got home, but Lloyd knew that she would doubtless cry herself to sleep again tonight, as she had the last two nights. He was trying to do the right thing: he didn't want to avoid the topic of Tamiko — that, he knew, was tantamount to denying that she had ever existed — but he would only pursue it if Michiko herself mentioned her.