Camp 32 from an online map provided with the registration process. Higgsfest was sprawled across a fat rectangle of farmland, oriented northwest-southeast, sloping slightly down to the southeast, on 175 acres directly west of the CERN buildings. The French-Swiss border, spiking crazily across the map like the flight path of a hummingbird around a mound of purple sage, was a chief organizing feature. One of the spikes constituted the grounds’ north boundary, and also the east boundary, before suddenly darting off again, at a right angle, east through the heart of the CERN campus.

The south boundary was formed by a farm road, the Chemin du Tonkin, extending from the border on the east and traveling across to the medieval hamlet of Bourdigny Dessus, which poked into the southwest corner of the festival grounds. The hamlet looked at the back of the bulk of the festival stage, and its few buildings. Modern plumbing and parking areas provided nicely for the logistics and security required by the stage performers, celebrities in line with the Higgsfestian demographic, such as Sting, Bono and Paul McCartney. Administrative functions, V.I.P. amenities, a Higgsfest store, the media trailers, medical services and a large mess tent were strung eastward along Chemin du Tonkin. Bisecting the grounds from south to north was another asphalted farm road, Route de Bourdigny, providing easy access, either by foot or 12-passenger electric shuttles, from the north campsites to the Tonkin facilities, which Russ and Parnell soon dubbed the “Gulf of Tonkin.”

A second mess tent occupied the northwest corner of the grounds. The video screens and large trailers containing showers and toilet facilities were spotted in alternating fashion along the east and west perimeters. Rows of green two-person tents marched north to south down the festival grounds, separated by 10-foot “streets.” Street One served tents backed up against the border, then, moving south, Street Two, Street Three, etc. At either end of each street was a short aluminum riser with connections for battery rechargers. The entire festival space was a Wi-Fi hot spot. The site had been set up by a company with 15 years’ experience setting up sites for 5,000 or more for the Komen 3-Day Breast Cancer walks in cities across the United States, and they had thought of everything.

Russell, riding the 10-passenger shuttle through the campground on Route de Bourdigny, called up to the driver: “Street Five!” The cart slowed, and stopped, and Russell stepped off lightly, constantly aware of the torques and strains that hard ground impact imparted to his two hip implants. He wanted those babies to last a thousand years, not the 15 as advertised. Camp 32 was four tents east on Street Five. Neither man had wanted to be backed up against a boundary, particularly when the boundary was an international border, and one of the nations was France. Their spot was four tents in from Route de Bourdigny because ten decades of watching football and baseball games had taught them never to sit next to, or any closer than four rows behind, an aisle. But they were close enough to move quickly, if they had to.

Then, in the blink of a nanosecond, they had had to.

“Get some pictures?” Russell asked, dropping his laptop bag inside the tent flap and turning around. From where he stood, without even a turn of the head, he could see 90 percent of the crowd, the stage, the Alps in the distance to the south, the CERN complex on the left, and to the west, the prominent, forested ridgeline called Cret de la Goutte which hours earlier had rendered history’s first western sunrise.

“Some,” said Parnell, sleepy-eyed, casually flipping open his laptop. Russell sat, and looked at the photos. The first image was the ridgeline trees bursting into flames from the sunlight slicing through. The second was the diamond-on-the-rim-of-the-world moment in the first instant that the sun started to clear the trees.

Russell grunted. “Seen these,” he said off-handedly, for his partner’s benefit. He didn’t bother to mention the pride that filled him when screens in the CERN Media Center began showing the two images over and over, crediting the Chronicle Website and, Parnell Cox.

“Where’s the Mont Blanc photo?” Russ asked. “Wasn’t that the first one?”

“Archived,” said Parnell. “I’ve been a busy boy.” In the previous hour, PayPal’s servers had slowed to a crawl processing fees flying into Parnell’s account. Spinning around the globe were fifty-four Parnell Cox photos from Higgsfest, already landing in page layouts, both online and paper. Photo editors were scratching their heads until they bled, looking for photo combinations that were least likely to be duplicated by a hundred other publications. Many papers were digging for the local angle. The New York Times was already deploying a dozen photographers to positions that might give them the most stunning angle of the sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty.

“Well, now,” announced a happy, feminine, tenor voice. “Is this where I might find the famous Parnell Cox?”

Parnell laughed, and without turning around, said, “Hello, Leigh.”

“Hey,” said Russell. “What about me?” You didn’t have to know Leigh long to become the kind of friends who kid.

“Oh. Hi, Russ,” said Leigh, stepping into view. Khaki shorts, gray teeshirt, strawberry blonde hair in thick curls to her shoulders, green eyes, engaging smile. She was a Californian, a writer and midwife, about 45, from two streets over. She gave Russ a friendly pat on his head. “You been busy, too?”

“Well, it has been a pretty good news day,” he said. “I just got back from checking out the Media Centre for signs of intelligence.”

“You know,” said Leigh, her lilt dropping a notch toward baritone, and seriousness. “It’s amazing, how casual we can be about all this.”

“Hell,” said Russ, whose thin, straight lips and brooding eyes made him appear more serious than he was. “I’m already on three heart prescriptions. You learn to breathe slow and easy.” Parnell, two inches taller than Russ, and 25 pounds lighter, and a jogger, eyed his friend appreciatively. He had witnessed Russell Hartnett breathing slow and easy walking into a Zona Rosa apartment to interview a cartel informant whose boss had sworn to dunk Russell an inch at a time, starting with his feet, into a nice, hot vat of acid.

“Did you find out any good stuff?” Leigh said.

Russell shrugged. “I found out they know about as much as we do. I did talk to a scientist friend of mind in California, at Caltech. He was like a little kid. It’s Day One, he says! Live it up!”

“Caltech?” Leigh said. “What’s his name?”

“Esty Hernandez,” Russ answered. “Actually, Dr. Reyes Hernandez. He’s the best in the world at explaining stuff like this to a person like me. I thought about Chapter One, talking to him.”

“Really,” said Leigh, in surprise. “That is in fact my number two reason for coming by this morning.” She stopped to laugh. “If it IS morning. When the hell is Happy Hour in this new world, anyway?”

“That’s one of the things that Esty told me. He said we will have to find out for ourselves,” Russell said. “So your number one reason is to worship Parnell (laughter), and your number two reason is . . . “

“Chapter One,” she said.

The Higgsfest organizers, in hand with the theme of nature and wonder, had hoped for a collegial environment, in which spontaneous group conversations broke out around the grounds. They had even built it into their planning. Four times a day — two in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the early evening — the large video screens spaced along the east and west festival perimeters featured discussion hours, transmitted from the CERN Media Center, where leaders in various professions gathered from studios around the world to shoot thoughts at topics like, “The World Can’t End, God’s a Type A,” and “How I Learned to Love the Higgs Boson.”

The video on the big perimeter screens was fed through coaxial cable from the Media Centre. But the audio was a streaming feed from a CERN server, so instead of a blanket of sound across the campground, individuals could bring in the audio on their laptops. To those in the crowd who were over 40, it was just like a drive-in movie.

Even without the official encouragement, informal chat had developed, like campfire talk, from the festival’s earliest hours, springing from the social and inquisitive energies the campers brought with them. By May 29, the random arrangements across the festival grounds had acquired ongoing structure, groups of eight to 15 people pulling up camp seats once or twice a day to shoot the universal bull.

“It’s like the old salon concept, goes back to the 1700s,” Russell had said on May 27 to a gathering of six that had developed around Camp 32. “It started right over there, you know,” he said, darting a glance toward France where, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, salons were hosted, usually in someone’s home, for the purpose of raising awareness through enlightened and stimulating conversation.

Many groups even decided on an official name. In the dusk of May 27, the group of six christened itself “Chapter One.” They had met in the morning and afternoon of the 27th, 28th, and 29th, and had agreed to meet again late in the evening, after the big Higgs boson collision. Then something happened, and the sun, which had just set, came up again over Cret de la Goutte. Not long after, the CERN brains were saying the old May 29 was now the new Day One. May 28, the old yesterday, would become Day Two, the new tomorrow. In the new Day One, new salon groups began forming, not so much from social energy this time, but from overheard theories, both of disaster and survival.

Russ looked up at Leigh, mocking seriousness. “You realize we have already met twice today.”

Leigh folded her arms and aped a narrow-eyed, stern look. “It’s not like we don’t have anything to talk about. I think we’re lucky this particular day is twice as long as it was supposed to be.”

“How about we get some sandwiches first,” said Parnell. “Is it lunchtime?”

“We can discuss that,” Leigh grinned. “It’s always noon somewhere.”

“Hey, I can tell you what time it is,” Russ said. “I figured it out on the bus. I can’t stand not knowing the time. See, look at my watch. It says 4:30. That means 4:30 a.m. because my watch thinks it’s tomorrow morning. But that’s four and a half hours after midnight. When this thing happened, I checked my watch. It was 9:27 p.m. So round that to 9:30. Two and a half hours before midnight. So then add four and a half and two and a half, and that’s seven hours. Subtract seven from 8:30 p.m., and that means it is now 1:30 p.m., in this new time. Only I think it would be 12:30 p.m., new time. I think.”

“Wow, Russell,” Leigh muttered. “You really DO need to know what time it is.”

“You keep rounding off minutes like that, you’ll be losing whole months by New Year’s,” Parnell said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Russell growled. “Let’s go get some sandwiches. Probably use a bottle of wine, too.”

/�W”[