Lloyd gestured at the console. Michiko's eyes went wide. "Sinjirarenai!" she exclaimed. "You got it!"

Lloyd grinned even more. "We got it!"

"Got what?" asked one of the reporters. "Nothing happened, damn it!"

"Oh, yes it did," said Lloyd.

Theo was grinning, too. "Yes, indeed!"

"What?" demanded the same reporter.

"The Higgs!" said Lloyd.

"The what?"

"The Higgs boson!" said Lloyd, his arm around Michiko's waist. "We got the Higgs!"

Another reporter stifled a yawn. "Big fucking deal," he said.

Lloyd was being interviewed by one of the journalists. "What happened?" asked the man, a gruff, middle-aged correspondent for the London Times. "Or, more precisely, why didn't anything happen?"

"How can you say nothing happened? We got the Higgs boson!"

"Nobody cares about that. We want — "

"You're wrong," said Lloyd emphatically. "This is major; this is as big as it gets. Under any other circumstances, this would have been a front-page story in every newspaper in the world."

"But the visions — "

"I have no explanation for why they weren't reproduced. But today's event was hardly a failure. Scientists have been hoping to find the Higgs boson ever since Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg predicted its existence half a century ago — "

"But people were expecting another glimpse of the future, and — "

"I understand that," said Lloyd. "But finding the Higgs — not some damn-fool quest for precognition — was why the Large Hadron Collider was built in the first place. We knew we'd need to get up over ten trillion electron volts to produce the Higgs. That's why the nineteen countries that own CERN came together to build the LHC. That's why the United States, Canada, Japan, Israel, and other countries donated billions to the project as well. This was good science, important science — "

"Even so," said the reporter, "the Wall Street Journal estimated the aggregate total cost for your labor stoppage amounted to over fourteen billion dollars. That makes Project Klaatu the most expensive undertaking in human history."

"But we got the Higgs! Don't you see? Not only does this confirm the electroweak theory, it proves the existence of the Higgs field. We now know what causes objects — you, me, this table, this planet — to have mass. The Higgs boson carries a fundamental field that endows elementary particles with mass — and we've confirmed its existence!"

"No one cares about a boson," said the reporter. "People can't even say the word without snickering."

"Call it the Higgs particle, then; lots of physicists do. But whatever you call it, it's the most important physics discovery so far in the twenty-first century. Sure, we're not even a decade into the century yet, but I'll bet that at the end of this century, people will look back and say this was still the most important physics discovery of the century."

"That doesn't explain why we didn't get anything — "

"We did," said Lloyd, exasperated.

"I mean why we didn't get any visions."

Lloyd puffed his cheeks and blew out air. "Look, we tried the best we could. Maybe the original phenomenon was a onetime fluke. Maybe it had a high degree of dependence on initial conditions that have subtly changed. Maybe — "

"You took a dive," said the reporter.

Lloyd was taken aback. "Pardon?"

"You took a dive. You deliberately muffed the experiment."

"We did not take — "

"You wanted to torpedo all the lawsuits; even after that song-and-dance at the UN, you still wanted to be sure that no one could ever successfully sue you, and, well, if you showed that CERN had nothing to do with the Flashforward the first time — "

"We didn't fake this. We didn't fake the Higgs. We made a breakthrough, for God's sake."

"You cheated us," said the man from the Times. "You cheated the entire planet."

"Don't be ridiculous," said Lloyd.

"Oh, come on. If you didn't take a dive, then why weren't you able to give us all another glimpse of the future?"

"I — I don't know. We tried. Really, we tried."

"There'll be an inquest, you know."

Lloyd rolled his eyes, but the reporter was probably right. "Look," said Lloyd. "We did everything we could. The computer logs will prove that; they'll show that every single experimental parameter was exactly the same. Of course, there is the problem of chaos, and dependent sensitivity, but we really did the best we could, and the result was hardly a failure — not by a long shot." The reporter looked like he was about to object again — probably claim that the logs could have been tampered with. But Lloyd held up a hand. "Still, maybe you are right; maybe this does prove that CERN in actuality had nothing to do with what happened before. In which case…

"In which case, you're off the hook," the reporter said bitterly.

Lloyd frowned, considering. Of course, he probably already was off the hook legally for what had happened the first time. But morally? Without the absolution provided by a block universe, he had indeed been haunted — ever since Dim's suicide — by all the death and destruction he had caused.

Lloyd felt his eyebrows rising. "I guess you're right," he said. "I guess I am off the hook."

Like every physicist, Theo waited with interest each year to see who would be honored with the Nobel Prize — who would join the ranks of Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Pauli. CERN researchers had earned more than twenty Nobels over the years. Of course, when he saw the subject header in his email box, he didn't have to open the letter to know that his name wasn't on this year's list of honorees. Still, he did like to see which of his friends and colleagues were getting the nod. He clicked the OPEN button.

The laureates were Perlmutter and Schmidt for their work, mostly done a decade ago, that showed that the universe was going to expand forever, rather than eventually collapsing down in a big crunch. It was typical that the award was for work completed years previously; there had to be time for results to be replicated and for the ramifications of the research to be considered.

Well, thought Theo, they were both good choices. There'd doubtless be some bitterness here at CERN; rumor had it that McRainey was already planning his celebratory party, although that was doubtless just scurrilous gossip. Still, Theo wondered, as he did every year at this time, whether he'd someday see his own name on the list.

Theo and Lloyd spent the next few days working on their paper about the Higgs. Although the press had already (somewhat halfheartedly) announced the particle's production to the world, they still had to write up their results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Lloyd, as was his habit, doodled endlessly on his datapad; Theo paced back and forth.

"Why the difference?" asked Lloyd, for the dozenth time. "Why didn't we get the Higgs the first time, but did get it this time?"

"I don't know," said Theo. "We didn't change anything. Of course, we couldn't match everything exactly, either. It's been weeks since the first attempt, so the Earth has moved millions of kilometers in its orbit around the sun, and of course the sun has moved through space, as it always does, and… "

"The sun!" crowed Lloyd. Theo looked at him blankly. "Don't you see? Last time we did this, the sun was up, but this time it was down. Maybe the first time the solar wind was interfering with our equipment?"

"The LHC tunnel is a hundred meters below ground, and it's got the best radiation shielding money can buy. There's no way any appreciable quantity of ionized particles could have gotten through to it."