The Fear Index

find Walton; she wondered how long he had been watching her. ‘Or the Law of Unintended Consequences. You start off trying to create the origins of the universe and you end up creating eBay. Come to my office. I don’t have long, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Are you sure? I don’t want to trouble you. I can always come back another time.’
    ‘That’s all right.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘Is it about making art out of particle physics, or is it by any chance about Alex?’
    ‘Actually it’s Alex.’
    ‘I thought it might be.’
    He led her down a corridor lined with pictures of old computers and into an office block. It was dingy, functional – frosted-glass doors, too-bright strip lighting, institutional lino, grey paintwork – not at all what she had expected for the home of the Large Hadron Collider. But again she could imagine Alex here very easily: it was certainly a much more characteristic habitat of the man she had married than his present interior-designed, leather-upholstered, first-edition-lined study in Cologny.
    ‘So this is where the great man used to sleep,’ said Walton, throwing open the door of a spartan cell with two desks, two terminals and a view over a car park.
    ‘Sleep?’
    ‘Work, too, in fairness. Twenty hours of work a day, four hours of sleep. He used to roll out his mattress in that corner.’ He smiled faintly at the memory and turned his solemn grey eyes upon her. ‘Alex had already gone from here, I think, by the time you met him at our little New Year’s Eve party – or was going, anyway. There’s a problem, I assume.’
    ‘Yes, there is.’
    He nodded, as if expecting it. ‘Come and sit down.’ He led her along the passage to his office. It was identical to the other, except that there was only one desk, and Walton had humanised it somewhat – put down an old Persian carpet on the lino and some plants along the rusting metal windowsill. On top of the filing cabinet a radio was quietly playing classical music, a string quartet. He switched it off. ‘So, how can I help?’
    ‘Tell me what he was doing here, what went wrong. I gather he had a breakdown, and I have a bad feeling it’s happening all over again. I’m sorry.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘I don’t know who else to ask.’
    Walton was sitting behind his desk. He had made a steeple of his long fingers and had it pressed to his lips. He studied her for a while. Eventually he said, ‘Have you ever heard of the Desertron?’

    THE DESERTRON, SAID Walton, was supposed to be America’s Superconducting Super Collider – eighty-seven kilometres of tunnel being dug out of the rock at Waxahachie, Texas. But in 1993 the US Congress, in its infinite wisdom, voted to abandon construction. That saved the US taxpayer about $10 billion. (‘There must have been dancing in the streets.’) However, it also pretty much wiped out the career plans of an entire generation of American academic physicists, including those of the brilliant young Alex Hoffmann, then finishing his PhD at Princeton.
    In the end Alex was one of the lucky ones – he was only twenty-five or thereabouts, but already sufficiently renowned to be awarded one of the very few non-European scholarships to work at CERN on the Large Electron–Positron Collider, forerunner of the Large Hadron Collider. Most of his colleagues unfortunately had to go off and become quants on Wall Street, where they helped build derivatives rather than particle accelerators. And when that went wrong and the banking system imploded, Congress had to rescue it, at a cost to the US taxpayer of $3.7 trillion.
    ‘Which is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences,’ said Walton. ‘Did you know Alex offered me a job about five years ago?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘This was before the banking crisis. I told him that in my view high-end science and money don’t mix. It’s an unstable compound. I may have used the words “dark arts”. I’m afraid we fell out all over again.’
    Gabrielle, nodding eagerly, said, ‘I know what you mean. It’s a sort of tension. I’ve always been aware of it in him, but especially lately.’
    ‘That’s it. Over the years I’ve known quite a few who’ve made the crossover from pure science to making money – none as successfully as Alex, I admit – and you can always tell, just by how loudly they insist the opposite, that secretly they despise themselves.’
    He looked pained by what had happened to his profession, as if they