The Elementary Particles Read Free

the far bank, a young, dark-haired Arab boy was taking off his shorts. Fundamental questions remained to be answered in biology. Biologists acted as though molecules were separate and distinct entities linked solely by electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. Not one of them, he was sure, had even heard of the EPR paradox or the Aspect experiments, nor taken the trouble to study developments in physics since the beginning of the century. Their view of the atom had evolved little from that of Democritus. They accumulated reams of repetitive statistics in the hope of finding some immediate industrial application, never realizing that their very methods were now threatened. He and Djerzinski were probably the only members of the National Scientific Research Center who had studied physics and who understood that once biologists were forced to confront the atomic basis of life, the very foundations of modern biology would be blown away.
    Desplechin thought about this as night fell over the Seine. He could not begin to imagine where Djerzinski’s thinking might lead; he did not even feel able to discuss it with him. He was almost sixty years old and, intellectually, he felt that he was over the hill. The homosexuals had left now, and the bank was deserted. Desplechin couldn’t remember when he last had an erection. He waited for the storm.

3
    The storm broke at about nine o’clock that evening. Djerzinski listened to the rain and sipped cheap Armagnac. He had just turned forty—perhaps he was having a midlife crisis. Improved living standards meant that a forty-year-old nowadays was in excellent physical shape. The first signs that one had crossed a threshold—whether in physical appearance or in the slowing of the body’s responses—and begun the long decline toward death, tended to appear at forty-five, perhaps fifty. In any case, the typical midlife crisis was sexual—a sudden frantic pursuit of young girls. This was hardly the case for Djerzinski. He used his cock to piss, nothing more.
    The following morning he got up at seven, took his copy of Werner Heisenberg’s autobiography,
Physics and Beyond,
and headed for the Champ-de-Mars. The dawn was limpid and cool. He’d owned the book since he was seventeen. He sat under a plane tree on the Allée Victor-Cousin and reread the chapter in which Heisenberg, recounting his years as a student, tells of his first encounter with atomic theory:

It must have been in the spring of 1920. The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into a great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger one drew together in an attempt to blaze new paths, or at least to discover a new star by which they could guide their steps in the prevailing darkness. And so, one bright spring morning, some ten or twenty of us, most of them younger than myself, set out on a ramble which, if I remember correctly, took us through the hills above the western shore of Lake Starnberg. Through gaps in the dense emerald screen of beech we caught occasional glimpses of the lake beneath, and of the tall mountains in the far distance. It was here that I had my first conversation about the world of atoms which was to play such an important part in my subsequent life.
    At around eleven the heat began to become oppressive, and Michel went back to his apartment. He undressed completely and lay down. In the three weeks that followed he barely moved. It is easy to imagine that a fish, bobbing to the surface to gulp the air, sees a beautiful but insubstantial new world. Then it retreats to its world of algae, where fish feed on one another. But for a moment it has a glimpse of a different, a perfect world—ours.
    On the evening of 15 July he phoned Bruno. His half brother’s voice on his answering machine was coolly ironic over a jazz riff. Bruno had a leather jacket and a goatee. To enhance his streetwise image he smoked cigarillos,