"Will Sanduleak rebound again?" asked Lloyd. "Can we expect another neutrino burst?"

"Probably," said Wendy. "In theory, it will rebound several more times, sort of oscillating between being a brown hole and a neutron star until stability is reached and it settles down as a permanent, but non-rotating, neutron star."

"When will the next rebound occur?"

"I have no idea."

"But if we wait for the next burst," said Lloyd, "and then do our experiment again at precisely that moment, maybe we could replicate the time-displacement effect."

"It'll never happen," said Wendy's voice.

"Why not?" asked Theo.

"Think about it, boys. You needed weeks to prepare for this attempt at replicating the experiment; everyone had to be safe before it began, after all. But neutrinos are almost massless. They travel through space at virtually the speed of light. There's no way to know in advance that they're going to arrive, and since the first rebound burst lasted no more than three minutes — it was over by the time my detector started recording again — you'd never have any advance warning that a burst was going to occur, and once the burst started, you'd have only three minutes or less to crank up your accelerator."

"Damn," said Theo. "God damn."

"Sorry I don't have better news," said Wendy. "Look, I've got a meeting in five minutes — I should get going."

"Okay," said Theo. "Bye."

"Bye."

Theo clicked off the speaker phone and looked at Lloyd. "Irreproducible," he said. "The world's not going to like that." He moved over to a chair and sat down.

"Damn," said Lloyd.

"You're telling me," said Theo. "You know, now that we know the future isn't fixed, I'm not that worried, I guess, about the murder, but, still, I would have liked to have seen something, you know. Anything. I feel — Christ, I feel left out, you know? Like everyone else on the planet saw the mothership, and I was off taking a whiz."

The LHC was now doing daily 1150-TeV lead-nuclei collisions. Some were long-planned experiments, now back on track; others were parts of the ongoing attempts to find a proper theoretical basis for the temporal displacement. Theo took a break from going over computer logs from ALICE and CMS to check his email. "Additional Nobel winners announced," said the subject line of the first message.

Of course, Nobels aren't just given in physics. Five other prizes are awarded each year, with the announcements staggered over a period of several days: chemistry, physiology or medicine, economics, literature, and the promotion of world peace. The only one Theo really cared about was the physics prize — although he had a mild curiosity about the chemistry award, too. He clicked on the message header to see what it said.

It wasn't the chemistry Nobel — rather, it was the literature one. He was about to click the message into oblivion when the laureate's name caught his eye.

Anatoly Korolov. A Russian novelist.

Of course, after that man Cheung in Toronto had recounted his vision to Theo, mentioning someone called Korolov, Theo had researched the name. It had turned out to be frustratingly common, and remarkably undistinguished. No one by that name seemed to be particularly famous or significant.

But now someone named Korolov had won a Nobel. Theo immediately logged onto Britannica Online; CERN had an unlimited-use account with them. The entry on Anatoly Korolov was brief:

Korolov, Anatoly Sergeyevich. Russian novelist and polemicist, born 11 July 1965, in Moscow, then part of the USSR—

Theo frowned. Bloody guy was a year younger than Lloyd, for God's sakes. Of course no one had to replicate the experimental results outlined in a novel. Theo continued reading:

Korolov's first novel Pered voskhodom solntsa ("Before Sunrise"), published in 1992, told of the early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union; his protagonist, young Sergei Dolonov, a disillusioned Communist Party supporter, goes through a series of serio-comic coming-of-age rituals, fighting to make sense of the changes in his country, ultimately becoming a successful businessperson in Moscow. Korolov's other novels include Na kulichkakh ("At the World's End"), 1995; Obyknovennaya istoriya ("A Common Story"), 1999; and Moskvityanin ("The Muscovite"), 2006. Of these, only Na kulichkakh has been published in English.

He'd doubtless get a bigger write-up in the next edition, thought Theo. He wondered if Dim had read this fellow during his studies of European literature.

Could this be the Korolov Cheung's vision had referred to? If so, what possible connection did he have to Theo? Or to Cheung, for that matter, whose interests seemed commercial rather than literary?

Michiko and Lloyd were walking down the streets of St. Genis, holding hands, enjoying the warm evening breeze. After a few hundred meters passed with nothing but silence between them, Michiko stopped walking. "I think I know what went wrong."

Lloyd looked at her, his face a question.

"Think about what happened," she said. "You designed an experiment that should have produced the Higgs boson. The first time you ran it, though, it didn't. And why not?"

"The neutrino influx from Sanduleak," said Lloyd.

"Oh? That might indeed have been part of what caused the time displacement — but how could it have possibly upset the boson production?"

Lloyd shrugged. "Well, it — it… hmm, that is a good question."

Michiko shook her head. They began walking again. "It couldn't have an effect. I don't doubt that there was an influx of neutrinos at the time the experiment was originally conducted, but it shouldn't have disrupted the production of the Higgs bosons. The bosons should have been produced."

"But they weren't."

"Exactly," said Michiko. "But there was no one to observe them. For almost three whole minutes there wasn't a single conscious mind on Earth — no one, anywhere, to actually observe the creation of the Higgs boson. Not only that, there was no one available to observe anything. That's why all the videotapes seem to be blank. They look blank — like they've got nothing but electronic snow on them. But suppose that's not snow — suppose instead that the cameras accurately recorded what they saw: an unresolved world. The whole enchilada, the entire planet Earth, unresolved. Without qualified observers — with everyone's consciousness elsewhere — there was no way to resolve the quantum mechanics of what was going on. No way to choose between all the possible realities. Those tapes show uncollapsed wave fronts, a kind of staticky limbo — the superposition of all possible states."

"I doubt that wave front superposition would look like snow."

"Well, maybe it's not an actual picture; but, regardless of whether it is or isn't, it's clear that all information about that three-minute span was censored, somehow; the physics of what was happening prevented any recording of data during that period. Without any conscious beings anywhere, reality breaks down."

Lloyd frowned. Could he have been that wrong? Cramer's transactional interpretation accounted for everything in quantum mechanics without recourse to qualified observers… but maybe such observers did have a role to play. "Perhaps," he said. "But — no, no, that can't be right. If everything was unresolved, then how did the accidents occur? A plane crashing — that is a resolution, one possibility made concrete."

"Of course," said Michiko. "It's not that three minutes passed during which planes and trains and cars and assembly lines operated without human intervention. Rather, three minutes passed during which nothing was resolved — all the possibilities existed, stacked into shimmering whiteness. But at the end of those three minutes, consciousness returned, and the world collapsed again into a single state. And, unfortunately but inevitably, it took the single state that made the most sense, given that there had been three minutes of no consciousness: it resolved itself into the world in which planes and cars had crashed. But the crashes didn't occur during those three minutes; they never occurred at all. We simply went in one jump from the way things were before to the way they were after."