The Director-General stopped talking. Lloyd considered all this for a time, then said, "I can handle it."

Beranger nodded once. "Bien. We'll call a press conference." He looked out his window. "I guess it is time we came clean."

Day Five: Saturday, April 25, 2009

The administrative building at CERN had all sorts of seminar halls and meeting spaces. For the press conference, they were using a lecture hall with two hundred seats — every one of which was filled. All the PR people had needed to do was tell the media that CERN was about to make a major announcement about the cause of the time displacement, and reporters arrived from all over Europe, plus one from Japan, one from Canada, and six from the United States.

Beranger was being true to his word: he was letting Lloyd take center stage; if there were to be a scapegoat, it was going to be him. Lloyd walked up to the lectern and cleared his throat. "Hello, everyone," he said. "My name is Lloyd Simcoe." He'd been coached by one of CERN's PR people to spell it out, and so he did just that: "That's S-I-M-C-O-E, and 'Lloyd' begins with a double-L." The reporters would all receive DVDs with Lloyd's comments and bio on them, but many would be filing stories immediately, without a chance to consult the press kits. Lloyd went on. "My specialty is quark-gluon plasma studies. I'm a Canadian citizen, but I worked for many years in the United States at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. And for the last two years, I've been here at CERN, developing a major experiment for the Large Hadron Collider."

He paused; he was buying time, trying to get his stomach to calm down. It wasn't that he had a fear of public speaking; he'd spent too long as a university professor for any of that to remain. But he had no way of knowing what the reaction would be to what he was about to say.

"This is my associate, Dr. Theodosios Procopides," continued Lloyd.

Theo half-rose from his chair, next to the lectern. "Theo," he said, with a little smile at the crowd. "Call me Theo."

One big happy family, thought Lloyd. He spelled Theo's first and last names slowly for the reporters, then took a deep breath and pressed on. "We were conducting an experiment here on April 21, at precisely 1600 hours Greenwich Mean Time."

He paused again and looked from face to face. It didn't take long for it to sink in. Journalists immediately started shouting questions, and Lloyd's eyes were assaulted by camera flashes. He raised his hands, palms out, waiting for the reporters to be quiet.

"Yes," he said, "yes, I suspect you're right. We have reason to believe that the time-displacement phenomenon had to do with the work we were doing here with the Large Hadron Collider."

"How can that be?" asked Klee, a stringer for CNN.

"Are you sure?" called out Jonas, a correspondent for the BBC.

"Why didn't you come forward before this?" called the Reuters reporter.

"I'll take that last question first," said Lloyd. "Or, more precisely, I'll let Dr. Procopides take it."

"Thanks," said Theo, standing now and moving to the mike. "The, ah, reason we did not come forward earlier is that we didn't have a theoretical model to explain what happened." He paused. "Frankly, we still don't; it has, after all, only been four days since the Flashforward. But the fact is we engineered the highest-energy particle collision in the history of this planet, and it occurred precisely — to the very second — at the moment the phenomenon began. We can't ignore that a causal relationship might exist."

"How sure are you that the two things are linked?" asked a woman from the Tribune de Geneve.

Theo shrugged. "We can't think of anything in our experiment that could have caused the Flashforward. Then again, we can't think of anything else other than our experiment that could have caused it, either. It just seems that our work is the most likely candidate."

Lloyd looked over at Dr. Beranger, whose hawklike face was impassive. When they'd rehearsed this press conference, Theo had originally said "the most likely culprit," and Beranger had sworn a blue streak at the word choice. But it turned out to make no difference. "So are you admitting responsibility?" asked Klee. "Admitting all the deaths were your fault?"

Lloyd felt his stomach knot, and he could see Beranger's face crease into a frown. The Director-General looked like he was ready to step in and take over the press conference.

"We admit that our experiment seems the most likely cause," said Lloyd, moving over to stand next to Theo. "But we contend that there was no way — absolutely none — to predict anything remotely like what happened as a consequence of what we did. This was utterly unforeseen — and unforeseeable. It was, quite simply, what the insurance industry calls an act of God."

"But all the deaths — " shouted one reporter.

"All the property damage — " shouted another.

Lloyd raised his hands again. "Yes, we know. Believe me, our hearts go out to every person who was hurt or who lost someone they cared about. A little girl very dear to me died when a car spun out of control; I would give anything to have her back. But it could not have been prevented — "

"Of course it could have," shouted Jonas. "If you hadn't done the experiment, it never would have happened."

"Politely, sir, that's irrational," said Lloyd. "Scientists do experiments all the time, and we take every reasonable precaution. CERN, as you know, has an enviable safety record. But people can't simply stop doing things — science can't stop marching forward. We didn't know that this would happen; we couldn't know it. But we're coming clean; we're telling the world. I know people are afraid that it's going to happen again, that at any moment their consciousness might be transported once more into the future. But it won't; we were the cause, and we can assure you — assure everyone — that there's no danger of something similar happening again."

There were, of course, cries of outrage in the press — editorials about scientists messing with things humans were not meant to know about. But, try as they might, even the sleaziest tabloid wasn't able to come up with a credible physicist willing to claim that there was any reason to have suspected that the CERN experiment would cause the displacement of consciousness through time. Of course, that engendered some halfhearted comments about physicists protecting one another. But polls rapidly switched from blaming the team at CERN to accepting that this was something that had been utterly unpredictable, something totally new.

It was still a difficult time personally for Lloyd and Michiko. Michiko had flown back to Tokyo with Tamiko's body. Lloyd, had, of course, offered to go with her, but he spoke no Japanese. Normally, those who spoke English would have politely tried to accommodate Lloyd, but under such dire circumstances it seemed clear that he would be left out of almost every conversation. There was also the awkwardness of it all: Lloyd wasn't Tamiko's stepfather; he wasn't Michiko's husband. This was a time for Michiko and Hiroshi, regardless of whatever differences they'd had in the past, to mourn and lay to rest their daughter. As much as he, too, was crushed by what had happened to Tamiko, Lloyd had to admit that there was little he could do to aid Michiko in Japan.

And so, while she flew east to her homeland, Lloyd stayed at CERN, trying to make a baffled world understand the physics of what had occurred.