hler's mobile command center.
Langdon followed through a mechanical door into CERN's voluminous main lobby.
The Glass Cathedral, Langdon mused, gazing upward toward heaven.
Overhead, the bluish glass roof shimmered in the afternoon sun, casting rays of geometric patterns in the
air and giving the room a sense of grandeur. Angular shadows fell like veins across the white tiled walls
and down to the marble floors. The air smelled clean, sterile. A handful of scientists moved briskly about,
their footsteps echoing in the resonant space.
"This way, please, Mr. Langdon." His voice sounded almost computerized. His accent was rigid and
precise, like his stern features. Kohler coughed and wiped his mouth on a white handkerchief as he fixed
his dead gray eyes on Langdon. "Please hurry." His wheelchair seemed to leap across the tiled floor.
Langdon followed past what seemed to be countless hallways branching off the main atrium. Every
hallway was alive with activity. The scientists who saw Kohler seemed to stare in surprise, eyeing
Langdon as if wondering who he must be to command such company.
"I'm embarrassed to admit," Langdon ventured, trying to make conversation, "that I've never heard of
CERN."
"Not surprising," Kohler replied, his clipped response sounding harshly efficient. "Most Americans do
not see Europe as the world leader in scientific research. They see us as nothing but a quaint shopping
district-an odd perception if you consider the nationalities of men like Einstein, Galileo, and Newton."
Langdon was unsure how to respond. He pulled the fax from his pocket. "This man in the photograph, can
you-"
Kohler cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Please. Not here. I am taking you to him now." He held out
his hand. "Perhaps I should take that."
Langdon handed over the fax and fell silently into step.
Kohler took a sharp left and entered a wide hallway adorned with awards and commendations. A
particularly large plaque dominated the entry. Langdon slowed to read the engraved bronze as they
passed.
ARS ELECTRONICA AWARD
For Cultural Innovation in the Digital Age
Awarded to Tim Berners Lee and CERN
for the invention of the
WORLDWIDE WEB
Well I'll be damned, Langdon thought, reading the text. This guy wasn't kidding. Langdon had always
thought of the Web as an American invention. Then again, his knowledge was limited to the site for his
own book and the occasional on-line exploration of the Louvre or El Prado on his old Macintosh.
"The Web," Kohler said, coughing again and wiping his mouth, "began here as a network of in-house
computer sites. It enabled scientists from different departments to share daily findings with one another.
Of course, the entire world is under the impression the Web is U.S. technology."
Langdon followed down the hall. "Why not set the record straight?"
Kohler shrugged, apparently disinterested. "A petty misconception over a petty technology. CERN is far
greater than a global connection of computers. Our scientists produce miracles almost daily."
Langdon gave Kohler a questioning look. "Miracles?" The word "miracle" was certainly not part of the
vocabulary around Harvard's Fairchild Science Building. Miracles were left for the School of Divinity.
"You sound skeptical," Kohler said. "I thought you were a religious symbologist. Do you not believe in
miracles?"
"I'm undecided on miracles," Langdon said. Particularly those that take place in science labs.
"Perhaps miracle is the wrong word. I was simply trying to speak your language."
"My language?" Langdon was suddenly uncomfortable. "Not to disappoint you, sir, but I study religious
symbology-I'm an academic, not a priest."
Kohler slowed suddenly and turned, his gaze softening a bit. "Of course. How simple of me. One does not
need to have cancer to analyze its symptoms."
Langdon had never heard it put quite that way.
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
W hen 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?"
Kohler shook his head. "Atoms look like planets compared to what we deal with. Our interests lie with an
atom's nucleus-a mere ten-thousandth the size of the whole." He coughed again, sounding sick. "The
men and women of CERN are here to find answers to the same questions man has been asking since the
beginning of time. Where did we come from? What are we made of?"
"And these answers are in a physics lab?"
"You sound surprised."
"I am. The questions seem spiritual."
"Mr. Langdon, all questions were once spiritual. Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion
have been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand. The rising and setting of the sun
was once attributed to Helios and a flaming chariot. Earthquakes and tidal waves were the wrath of
Poseidon. Science has now proven those gods to be false idols. Soon all Gods will be proven to be false
idols. Science has now provided answers to almost every question man can ask. There are only a few
questions left, and they are the esoteric ones. Where do we come from? What are we doing here? What is
the meaning of life and the universe?"
Langdon was amazed. "And these are questions CERN is trying to answer?"
"Correction. These are questions we are answering."
Langdon fell silent as the two men wound through the residential quadrangles. As they walked, a Frisbee
sailed overhead and skidded