As they moved down the hallway, Kohler gave an accepting nod. "I suspect you and I will understand each other perfectly, Mr. Langdon."

Somehow Langdon doubted it.

As the pair hurried on, Langdon began to sense a deep rumbling up ahead. The noise got more and more pronounced with every step, reverberating through the walls. It seemed to be coming from the end of the hallway in front of them.

"What’s that?" Langdon finally asked, having to yell. He felt like they were approaching an active volcano.

"Free Fall Tube," Kohler replied, his hollow voice cutting the air effortlessly. He offered no other explanation.

Langdon didn’t ask. He was exhausted, and Maximilian Kohler seemed disinterested in winning any hospitality awards. Langdon reminded himself why he was here. Illuminati. He assumed somewhere in this colossal facility was a body… a body branded with a symbol he had just flown 3,000 miles to see.

As they approached the end of the hall, the rumble became almost deafening, vibrating up through Langdon’s soles. They rounded the bend, and a viewing gallery appeared on the right. Four thick-paned portals were embedded in a curved wall, like windows in a submarine. Langdon stopped and looked through one of the holes.

Professor Robert Langdon had seen some strange things in his life, but this was the strangest. He blinked a few times, wondering if he was hallucinating. He was staring into an enormous circular chamber. Inside the chamber, floating as though weightless, were people. Three of them. One waved and did a somersault in midair.

My God, he thought. I’m in the land of Oz.

The floor of the room was a mesh grid, like a giant sheet of chicken wire. Visible beneath the grid was the metallic blur of a huge propeller.

"Free fall tube," Kohler said, stopping to wait for him. "Indoor skydiving. For stress relief. It’s a vertical wind tunnel."

Langdon looked on in amazement. One of the free fallers, an obese woman, maneuvered toward the window. She was being buffeted by the air currents but grinned and flashed Langdon the thumbs-up sign. Langdon smiled weakly and returned the gesture, wondering if she knew it was the ancient phallic symbol for masculine virility.

The heavyset woman, Langdon noticed, was the only one wearing what appeared to be a miniature parachute. The swathe of fabric billowed over her like a toy. "What’s her little chute for?" Langdon asked Kohler. "It can’t be more than a yard in diameter."

"Friction," Kohler said. "Decreases her aerodynamics so the fan can lift her." He started down the the corridor again. "One square yard of drag will slow a falling body almost twenty percent."

Langdon nodded blankly.

He never suspected that later that night, in a country hundreds of miles away, the information would save his life.

8

When Kohler and Langdon emerged from the rear of CERN’s main complex into the stark Swiss sunlight, Langdon felt as if he’d been transported home. The scene before him looked like an Ivy League campus.

A grassy slope cascaded downward onto an expansive lowlands where clusters of sugar maples dotted quadrangles bordered by brick dormitories and footpaths. Scholarly looking individuals with stacks of books hustled in and out of buildings. As if to accentuate the collegiate atmosphere, two longhaired hippies hurled a Frisbee back and forth while enjoying Mahler’s Fourth Symphony blaring from a dorm window.

"These are our residential dorms," Kohler explained as he accelerated his wheelchair down the path toward the buildings. "We have over three thousand physicists here. CERN single-handedly employs more than half of the world’s particle physicists—the brightest minds on earth—Germans, Japanese, Italians, Dutch, you name it. Our physicists represent over five hundred universities and sixty nationalities."

Langdon was amazed. "How do they all communicate?"

"English, of course. The universal language of science."

Langdon had always heard math was the universal language of science, but he was too tired to argue. He dutifully followed Kohler down the path.

Halfway to the bottom, a young man jogged by. His T-shirt proclaimed the message: NO GUT, NO GLORY!

Langdon looked after him, mystified. "Gut?"

"General Unified Theory." Kohler quipped. "The theory of everything."

"I see," Langdon said, not seeing at all.

"Are you familiar with particle physics, Mr. Langdon?"

Langdon shrugged. "I’m familiar with general physics—falling bodies, that sort of thing." His years of high-diving experience had given him a profound respect for the awesome power of gravitational acceleration. "Particle physics is the study of atoms, isn’t it?"