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Langdon strode silently behind Vittoria and Kohler as they moved back into the main atrium where Langdon’s bizarre visit had begun. Vittoria’s legs drove in fluid efficiency—like an Olympic diver—a potency, Langdon figured, no doubt born from the flexibility and control of yoga. He could hear her breathing slowly and deliberately, as if somehow trying to filter her grief.

Langdon wanted to say something to her, offer his sympathy. He too had once felt the abrupt hollowness of unexpectedly losing a parent. He remembered the funeral mostly, rainy and gray. Two days after his twelfth birthday. The house was filled with gray-suited men from the office, men who squeezed his hand too hard when they shook it. They were all mumbling words like cardiac and stress. His mother joked through teary eyes that she’d always been able to follow the stock market simply by holding her husband’s hand… his pulse her own private ticker tape.

Once, when his father was alive, Langdon had heard his mom begging his father to "stop and smell the roses." That year, Langdon bought his father a tiny blown-glass rose for Christmas. It was the most beautiful thing Langdon had ever seen… the way the sun caught it, throwing a rainbow of colors on the wall. "It’s lovely," his father had said when he opened it, kissing Robert on the forehead. "Let’s find a safe spot for it." Then his father had carefully placed the rose on a high dusty shelf in the darkest corner of the living room. A few days later, Langdon got a stool, retrieved the rose, and took it back to the store. His father never noticed it was gone.

The ping of an elevator pulled Langdon back to the present. Vittoria and Kohler were in front of him, boarding the lift. Langdon hesitated outside the open doors.

"Is something wrong?" Kohler asked, sounding more impatient than concerned.

"Not at all," Langdon said, forcing himself toward the cramped carriage. He only used elevators when absolutely necessary. He preferred the more open spaces of stairwells.

"Dr. Vetra’s lab is subterranean," Kohler said.

Wonderful, Langdon thought as he stepped across the cleft, feeling an icy wind churn up from the depths of the shaft. The doors closed, and the car began to descend.

"Six stories," Kohler said blankly, like an analytical engine.

Langdon pictured the darkness of the empty shaft below them. He tried to block it out by staring at the numbered display of changing floors. Oddly, the elevator showed only two stops. Ground Level and LHC.

"What’s LHC stand for?" Langdon asked, trying not to sound nervous.

"Large Hadron Collider," Kohler said. "A particle accelerator."

Particle accelerator? Langdon was vaguely familiar with the term. He had first heard it over dinner with some colleagues at Dunster House in Cambridge. A physicist friend of theirs, Bob Brownell, had arrived for dinner one night in a rage.

"The bastards canceled it!" Brownell cursed.

"Canceled what?" they all asked.

"The SSC!"

"The what?"

"The Superconducting Super Collider!"

Someone shrugged. "I didn’t know Harvard was building one."

"Not Harvard!" he exclaimed. "The U.S.! It was going to be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator! One of the most important scientific projects of the century! Two billion dollars into it and the Senate sacks the project! Damn Bible-Belt lobbyists!"

When Brownell finally calmed down, he explained that a particle accelerator was a large, circular tube through which subatomic particles were accelerated. Magnets in the tube turned on and off in rapid succession to "push" particles around and around until they reached tremendous velocities. Fully accelerated particles circled the tube at over 180,000 miles per second.

"But that’s almost the speed of light," one of the professors exclaimed.

"Damn right," Brownell said. He went on to say that by accelerating two particles in opposite directions around the tube and then colliding them, scientists could shatter the particles into their constituent parts and get a glimpse of nature’s most fundamental components. "Particle accelerators," Brownell declared, "are critical to the future of science. Colliding particles is the key to understanding the building blocks of the universe."

Harvard’s Poet in Residence, a quiet man named Charles Pratt, did not look impressed. "It sounds to me," he said, "like a rather Neanderthal approach to science… akin to smashing clocks together to discern their internal workings."

Brownell dropped his fork and stormed out of the room.

So CERN has a particle accelerator? Langdon thought, as the elevator dropped. A circular tube for smashing particles. He wondered why they had buried it underground.