Montoisey
GEORGE Griffin inhaled the scents of pine and sunshine-heated rock, feeling the tensions and stresses of the week drain from his shoulders as he stepped forward to the precipice. Below his vantage point on the peak of Montoisey was a kilometer of steep drop-off. At its base the green and brown Plain of Geneva spread out like an intricately detailed map. He had reached this high platform of bare rock by taking the cable car above the French village of Crozet, riding the chair lift to Montoiseau, then hiking the last 300 meters lugging his 15 kilo backpack, the British Airways baggage tag still attached, that contained his parasail.
He turned to savor the sweeping panorama from this high point of the Jura Massif: the Alps before him dominated by the white spectacle of Mont Blanc, the blue sweep of Lake Léman, and the green richness of the Rhone Valley. This was a beautiful and very special place, a place of power. The bankers, the diplomats, the high energy physicists of the world all came here to do their important work.
The parasail wing, a bright pink horseshoe of polyester and kevlar, lay on the rocky slope behind him. George knew from the feel of the wind teasing at his beard that its velocity was all right. Nevertheless, he checked it with his small wind gauge. The LCD readout hovered around 21 kilometers per hour, comfortably below the 26 danger level that would prevent control.
He was about to do a solo from a cliff, which was reputedly a bad combination. His parasail group in Seattle wouldn’t approve. They considered flights without a partner risky and launches from a cliff-edge downright dangerous. But he didn’t much care what they thought. He was always careful, and he trusted his own skills. If something did happen one day, well, c`est la vie. Nobody lives forever, and the danger gave shape and bite to the experience.
He turned from the cliff edge to face the parasail, grasped its front risers and brake lines, and pulled hard. The wing responded, rising like a great pink kite until it was almost overhead, arching above him like a bright pink air mattress designed for a giant. The polyester cells fluttered and sang as the wind off the Plain of Geneva gave them life and form, tugging at the leg loops and chest straps of his harness, urging him upward. George scanned the thin kevlar lines and the long parallel cells, searching for subtle irregularities or snarls that might kill him. Finding none, he turned and walked to the edge of the precipice. As he reached the edge, the wind rose to meet him and lifted him off. He was flying free, and a rush of exhilaration hit like a great wave.
George reminded himself that flying and falling have identical feelings, at least for a while. He quickly checked the variometer of his GPS monitor. It was OK, although his rate of descent was a bit too high. He adjusted the speed tabs until the indicated descent rate was where he wanted it. Finally he had time to consider comfort. He moved the molded seat into position, releasing the painful cutting tension of the leg loops, and then deployed the speed bar and moved his feet to it. Now he was relaxed and comfortable and in full control. This was what he had come a third of the way around the world for.
He grasped the thin kevlar steering lines, made a few experimental swings, then angled out over the Plain in search of the thermal, marked by a spiraling hawk, that he had spotted from the chair lift. He soon found it and began to spiral upward too. His variometer indicated that his rate of descent was now a negative 30 meters per minute. The updraft had overcome the pull of gravity, and he was truly flying.
George now had time to look around at the familiar landscape near the CERN laboratory where twelve years ago he had lived and worked. He loved this place, the spot where he had spent most of the best years of his life. He was glad to be back, glad to have a free Sunday here.
He studied the French Alps, seeking peaks he had climbed and climbing routes he had used with CERN co-workers years ago. Looking far to the south-east, he could see the city of Geneva at the edge of long Lake Léman, the city’s famous jet fountain making a white exclamation point in the distance. He remembered pleasant walks with Grace through the twisty streets of the old part of Geneva, exploring the little shops and looking for good but inexpensive restaurants. Closer he could see the Geneva Airport, where he’d arrived yesterday, and the vee-shaped CERN main campus, sprawling across the Swiss-French border and pointing in his direction. To his right he could see the CERN North Area, with its hanger-like experiment buildings and cross-shaped office complexes. Further north he could see the town of Gex spilling down the slope of the Jura, and near it he thought he could make out the buildings above the tunnel that contained the old LEP accelerator and the detector, where he had worked for four years before moving to Fermilab. That tunnel, which burrowed under the Jura Mountains, the French countryside, and the airport, now housed the new LHC accelerator and the ATLAS detector, his group’s principal competition.
George pulled on the right control line and stepped on the speed bar, terminating his lazy spiral and angling out toward the CERN campus, searching for another thermal. The view, the solitude, the control, the element of adrenaline-laced danger, it was all wonderful. It made him feel young again.
He recalled that once long ago when he was a student looking for a summer job, a personnel clerk at an employment agency had pointed out that George’s job application form listed his recreational activities as reading, writing, skiing, glider flying, and wind surfing. These, the man advised him, were all solitary activities that branded him as a loner. The major corporations were looking for team players. The man had suggested that George perhaps might want to change his entries to amateur acting, softball, volleyball, and touch football. George had declined.
Dammit, he was a loner. Since adolescence he’d detested team sports. Even paragliding he preferred to do alone, without the bother of arranging to go with a partner or group. He was at his best when he was working on a problem alone, with nobody asking questions or offering distractions, when he could hone his concentration to a white-hot pinpoint focus that cut through the crap and got to the roots of the puzzle.
Yet somewhere along the twisted path of his professional and academic career, he had stumbled into experimental particle physics, perhaps the most over-organized and team-oriented form of experimental science. He did not really mind working with a thousand other people, harnessed together to build and milk data from the largest, most expensive, and most complex experimental hardware in the history of the human race. But every day he endured the frustrations of having to work with a group, unable to make decisions and take actions without consulting others, touching the proper bases.
Loners, no matter how good, did not make much of a splash in experimental particle physics. Loners were not the stars of the field, the guys who went to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize when their group discovered something spectacular. It was the operators, the hyperactive organizers who could put together a team of 800 physicists and 1500 technicians and could badger everyone into working at maximum output for three or four years who rose to the top and got the glory and acclaim.
People like Jake Wang, the spokesman and leader of George’s group at the SSC, the Chinese wild man who offended everyone and was the butt of more jokes than George could count, people like Jake got the acclaim. Somehow he always managed to understand the physics a few microseconds before anyone else in the room and to push hard in the right direction before anyone else had decided what the right direction was. George and Jake had been graduate students working together at the SLAC laboratory in California, long ago.
Jake had been a very green graduate student then, his English not very good, his physics ideas off target, his behavior in confrontations tending toward overt hostility. While George had followed his own planned course with reasonable success, he had watched and noticed as Jake had transformed himself, asking subtle questions in private and remembering the answers, working hard until he became an articulate speaker, demonstrating a consummate mastery of the physics literature, learning to argue and convince without offending, learning how to tell other people what to do and have them do it. A year after George had gone to CERN, Jake had left SLAC with a reputation as the most promising new Ph.D. in experimental particle physics. He had gone on to a good postdoc, a better faculty appointment, and to Jake-initiated research that by a stroke of luck had made quite a splash and had led to his becoming spokesman for the LEM collaboration at the SSC. Jake was probably headed for a Nobel prize. The LEM group would earn it, and Jake would collect it.
George, as a group leader in LEM, was probably as high as he would ever go in the hierarchy of high energy physics. LEM would be his last experiment. For the next twenty years he could look forward to grinding out data, solving technical problems, doing good physics in harness with a thousand others.