Stars Turned Inside Out

by Nova Jacobs

Genres: Literary Fiction; Mystery; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

The discovery of a suspicious death at a famous Swiss physics laboratory sparks a mystery that merges science, philosophy, and the high-stakes race to unlock the fundamental nature of our universe in this thrilling new novel from the Edgar Award–nominated author of the “hugely entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) The Last Equation of Isaac Severy.

Deep beneath the ground outside of Geneva, where CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes subatomic particles at breathtaking speeds, a startling discovery is made when the tunnel is down for maintenance: the body of Howard Anderby, a brilliant and recently arrived young physicist, who appears to have been irradiated by the collider. But security shows no evidence of him entering the tunnel, and for all of the lab’s funding, its video surveillance is sorely lacking.

Eager to keep the death under wraps until more is known, CERN brings in private investigator Sabine Leroux, who has her own ties to the lab’s administration—and more than a passing interest in particle physics. Meanwhile, Howard’s colleague and budding love interest Eve, shattered by his death, determines to reconcile what she knew of Howard with his gruesome fate, wondering if she could have done something to stop it.

As Sabine digs into petty academic rivalries and personal secrets, an escalating international physics arms race heightens tensions and fuels speculation of a mole at the lab—throwing into question loyalties and revealing what sort of knowledge may be worth killing for.

Release date: March 19, 2024

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

October 20

Before

On a breezy afternoon in mid-October, Dr. Eve Marsh claimed a seat at one of the bistro tables fronting the cafeteria known as Restaurant 1. Her colleague and lunch companion, Dr. Arnav Bose, followed, pausing to sweep away a dusting of needles that had rained down from the patio’s resident fir tree. Eve guessed that he was low on sleep, as he sat down languidly and began to arrange his napkin and cutlery with an almost deranged slowness. Cloaked in dark aviators and an old army jacket, Arnav was the only physicist Eve knew who could make the day after a lab all-nighter look like the chic comedown of a party she hadn’t been invited to.

“You never made it home?”

Arnav lowered his aviators, revealing wasted eyes on an otherwise boyish face. “The Machine wouldn’t let me,” he said. “It was like, Come on, Arn, I smashed some protons together just for you. This might be the one.”

“Was it?”

He shook his head and picked up his fork and knife as if it pained him.

The two tucked into their daily specials—an excellent whitefish pulled from the lake, sautéed in butter—but paused midbite when they sensed the surrounding diners turning toward the lawn. A large tour group had appeared on the grass between the cafeteria and the nearest road, Route Niels Bohr, named for the famed Danish physicist and cofounder of quantum mechanics. The Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, or European Organization for Nuclear Research, a laboratory known as CERN, had many such roads. These were part of the bittersweet charm of the place for Eve. She couldn’t go for a stroll around the small city-state of her workplace without being reminded of how brilliant she was never going to be: Route Albert Einstein, Route Marie Curie, Route James Clerk Maxwell, Route Isaac Newton.

Members of the tour group were busy examining a large pipe of painted blue steel displayed along the grass, a replica of the real collider pipe that lay deep underground. “As far below our feet as Lake Geneva’s Jet d’Eau is tall,” their guide explained, “and spanning twenty-seven kilometers—or seventeen miles—in circumference.” The pipe boasted the serifed motto Accelerating Science, and though the default language of CERN was English, the French was included: Accélérateur de science.

“Accelerating science, ha-ha,” the guide shouted with a self-aware grin, eliciting some polite laughter from the group.

This towering man was not an actual tour guide but a Canadian physicist named Niels Thorne. In his finely cut houndstooth blazer and fringed scarf fluttering dramatically behind him, Niels was at any given time the most well-dressed person at CERN—not a particularly remarkable distinction, given that denim and athleisure wear were the lab’s reigning fashions. Still, Niels’s immaculate threads led colleagues to wonder if he came from money, while others speculated his dress was merely overcompensation for a shabby childhood. Whatever the reason, Niels seemed to prefer swanning around their one-square-kilometer campus with guests to doing any real physics.

Arnav contemplated Niels Thorne with growing distaste. The more animated Niels became, the more Arnav scowled. “He should just change his name to Niels Bohr,” he said, letting his fork fall to his plate. “Niels Total Fucking Bohr.”

Eve tried to keep a straight face. Trading groan-worthy physics puns and riddles was a little game of theirs, but the true goal of the game was to receive each one with the utmost seriousness. No eye-rolling, no giggling. “Bohr… Bohr… Didn’t he invent atoms or something?”

Arnav adopted his best tone of condescension: “Well, Ms. Marsh, it’s complicated. Niels Bohr created a model of the atom, wherein the center nucleus is…” At this, he pretended to nod off at his own explanation, head lolling over his plate.

While Arnav’s ongoing contempt for Niels Thorne amused Eve, she couldn’t exactly fault the smartly dressed Canadian for preferring a job as esteemed CERN host to one as CERN physicist. Physics was an angst-making profession these days. Apart from the constant jockeying for positions and funding, there were the various existential crises of the moment. Not that she was going to let herself dwell on these right now; barely out of her twenties, she had nabbed a postdoctoral position here at the most illustrious physics laboratory in the world. She had the greatest job she could imagine, hardly something worth moaning about. Once, as a child growing up in the Arizona desert, staring out at those crisp, impossibly perforated night skies, she had thought being an astronaut would be the greatest job in the world. But when a high school science teacher had said one day in passing that “particle physicists are the astronauts of the small,” she hadn’t been able to shake the idea of high-energy physics as a grand exploration on par with the Apollo missions.

Still, Eve sometimes wondered what it was like for these tour groups to witness serious scientists on the Restaurant 1 patio with their plastic meal trays, chattering in lunchroom cliques or absently forking salad bar into their mouths. She and her colleagues were adventurers of a kind, it was true, drilling down to subatomic levels as if they were space walkers in miniature. But couldn’t every job, no matter how exalted, ultimately be reduced to something that appeared drab? Isn’t most work essentially the same? Whether you’re a film composer or airline pilot or assembly-line worker, aren’t we all just hunched over some piece of equipment, only to hunch at yet another surface to feed ourselves? Sometimes, when she was sitting at her office desk typing a string of code on her buggy computer, she would think: This is particle physics.

The difference, of course, between her job and any other was what happened in the space between the ears: inside one’s “meat computer,” as her dad had liked to call it. (As in, How’s the old meat computer, kid?) Of course, there was also the most complicated piece of machinery humankind had ever built—the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC—whirring away far beneath their feet. These were no small distinctions.

The breeze had shifted and Niels was now out of earshot, but judging from his flailing arms, Eve guessed he was reenacting the pipe explosion of 2008, the result of a helium leak just nine days after the LHC’s maiden run. The visitors all frowned with great concern as Niels no doubt explained how costly this accident had been. That’s when she noticed that the visitors were all astonishingly tall (Swedes? Dutchmen?), taller than Niels, and she idly wondered who these giants might be. They were not ordinary tourists, she knew that much, as most sightseers were relegated to watching the documentary at the entrance’s Globe of Science & Innovation, or to exploring the self-guided museum off the lobby. Niels Thorne, by contrast, catered only to visiting celebrities, journalists, and politicians.

“To my left is the cafeteria known, in CERN’s tradition of numbering everything, as Restaurant 1, or R1,” Niels was saying, his voice audible again as he neared the tables, “which is where we turn simple and complex carbohydrates into the energy that drives the brain of a physicist. You might even say that the Higgs boson particle of 2012 was discovered on the power of our spaghetti Bolognese.” He cackled at his own joke.

“Doesn’t Niels go boating on weekends?” Arnav wondered aloud. “It’d be a shame if he were to be caught in a freak storm, never to be heard from again.” Though Arnav came from a Bengali Indian family, he’d grown up in London and had developed an Englishman’s bone-dry humor.

“I kind of like the Bolognese bit,” said Eve. “There’s an equation in there.” And she began to idly fashion mathematics in her head whereby thousands of plates of pasta were equal to the energy it took physicists to locate a new elementary particle.

Arnav interrupted her calculations. “When was the last time he did any work, you think?”

“Niels works harder than any of us. Have you ever seen him exit the premises?”

He stared at her. She imagined that behind his dark lenses, he was rolling his eyes. Arnav did have a point about the murkiness of Niels’s job. His role at CERN had always been nebulous, made more so by his multipart response whenever anyone asked him what he did. Niels sometimes joked that he was like one of those students who piles on extracurriculars but rarely goes to class, which Eve thought a testament at least to his self-awareness. It had been long assumed that Niels simply lacked the talent to land a serious position on one of the LHC’s four main detectors—like ATLAS or CMS—which were stationed at intervals along the tunnel. Yet to the surprise of everyone, he had very recently nabbed a coveted spot on an entirely new project devoted to hunting down dark matter.

“He is on the xenon tank now,” she reminded him. “That’s not nothing.”

Arnav let his fork hover in the air. “Yes, funny how Niels glommed on to that project at the last possible moment. With pretty scant qualifications in dark matter science, I might add, other than boring everyone within earshot about it.”

She searched his face for signs of professional bitterness. “You can’t be jealous.”

“Don’t be thick, Eve. You couldn’t pay me to go near that xenon monstrosity. Besides, we’ll see how long he lasts.”

Eve looked back across the grass, where Niels continued to shape wide arcs in the air with his beautifully articulated arms. He was mesmerizing to watch. It was no wonder he also headed up the lab’s resident theater group.

“We should stop making fun of him,” she said seriously. “It’s because of people like Niels that we get funding. He also brings culture to this place, or at least makes the effort no one else does.”

Arnav shook his head. “Do you know he actually asked me to join his drama troupe once? Said they needed someone with a convincing English accent.”

She laughed, trying to picture Arnav pacing the grounds muttering Shakespearean verse. “I’d have paid good money to see you in that Much Ado they did in the spring.”

“Oh, is that the play they thought they were doing?” Arnav turned to scan the patio. “And where’s Howard today? Not like him to miss the seafood plate.”

“Maybe he’s finally discarded us.”

Eve was trying to sound like she didn’t care, although she knew Arnav saw right through this. They had known Howard Anderby for two months now, and at the mere mention of his name, Eve still got a little giddy. Her physical reaction to those five syllables, How-ard An-der-by, was completely involuntary, like a playful slap in the face or a one-two kick to the back of the knees. Yes, she had an intellectual crush on him, fueled in part by the fact that she found him mentally inscrutable. Not that she didn’t have a perfectly healthy dose of self-regard on the intelligence front; people had been telling Eve how smart she was since she could talk, and by now the compliment almost bored her. Almost. But she wasn’t the only person who found Howard more than a bit intimidating. Part of this may have been due to the air of mystery that had followed him from his previous position: consultant to a rival collider project that promised to be twice the size and power of the LHC.

Arnav began to laugh.

“What?”

“Look who’s having a tour.”

She followed his gaze across the lawn, where the visitors were now tailing the billowing scarf of their leader toward the road. But one man—who had evidently been hidden at the center of the group this entire time—stood quite still. To her surprise, it was Howard, in his usual jeans and half-tucked button-down, looking after the retreating group with interest.

Without a word, Arnav stood and headed toward him. Eve followed, her heart predictably quickening the nearer they drew to Howard.

“Hey,” Arnav said.

Howard turned, frowning, as if trying to place them, or as if he’d just emerged from an immersive video game and was now adjusting to real life. As his gaze landed on Eve, she saw that his eyes, intense and lovely as they were, were bloodshot. This was hardly uncommon among over-extended postdocs, but he appeared stunningly fatigued.

“Did you see him?” he asked.

“Him who?”

Howard nodded toward the departing visitors. “That man. The small one.”

Eve saw that there was, indeed, a little man trailing the otherwise towering group, his legs working extra hard to keep up. He was partly bald, and his clothes looked worn or secondhand. In front of him, a taller man, walking backwards, had a video camera trained on him.

“You know who that is?” Howard asked.

Eve took a second look. She flipped quickly through her mental roster of various physicists of the moment but drew a blank.

“He’s vaguely familiar, I guess.”

“It’s Wolfgang Shreft.”

“Really?”

Arnav snorted in disbelief. “The German guy who’s friends with Oprah?”

“Well,” Howard replied, “it’s hardly his defining characteristic.”

Eve was amazed that he knew who Wolfgang Shreft was, despite the man’s worldwide fame. Howard, who had always shown indifference to anything in the wider popular culture, never seemed to trouble himself with the things most people liked, let alone bother to keep track of celebrities. Wolfgang Shreft was a self-defined “explorer of consciousness,” but the larger public would more likely have called him a bestselling author or guru. He titled his wildly successful books, which were translated into numerous languages, things like Open Your Eyes to Now and Did You Know That You Are God?. He was also the kind of spiritual figurehead who tended to cite bits of theoretical physics to bolster his own ideas, resulting in a kind of pseudoscientific mysticism that drove practicing physicists—the ones paying attention, anyway—slightly batty.

“Did you speak to him?” Arnav asked.

Howard continued to stare off. “Not as long as I would have liked. I’d been hoping to catch him without his attendant flock this time.”

Eve studied what she now realized was either Shreft’s entourage or film crew, or both. “Wait, you’ve talked to him before?”

“Several times,” he said, still gazing after the group.

Was Howard Anderby starstruck?

Arnav scrutinized his face. “Are you okay?”

Howard looked down sharply, as if newly surprised to find Arnav standing there. “Why are you asking me that?”

“You look a bit crazed, frankly. And we didn’t see you at lunch.”

Howard absently glanced at his watch. “Are we a lunch club now?”

“Well—” Arnav stuttered. “If you put it like that—”

“Coffee later?” Eve broke in, growing increasingly uneasy with this exchange.

At the mention of coffee, Howard seemed momentarily returned to his normal self. “Yes. Coffee. Maybe tomorrow?”

His expression then lapsed into one of singular fixation, and without another word he strode off in the direction of the tour group, leaving his friends staring after him. The entire scene left Eve feeling off-balance. She wasn’t sure if it was Howard’s aloofness, his obvious exhaustion, or his evident enthusiasm for a celebrity guru. But whatever the cause, it had triggered in her a small, growing alarm.