Lethal Exposure

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A whirlwind of high-energy particles coursed underground along the four-mile circular path. With each pass through the booster, superconducting magnets pumped the particles to higher and higher energies until they collided with a counter-rotating beam at nearly the speed of light, a quarter million of them each second.

The impact sparked microscopic fireworks far grander than anything Dr. Georg Dumenco had seen these Americans display on their Fourth of July celebrations.

The Ukrainian emigre devoted his time to worrying about physics instead of politics. His days of research for political expediency were long over, now that he had fled to America and made his home alone, near Chicago, where he could work at Fermilab’s magnificent Tevatron, the world’s largest particle accelerator-or, as the local newspaper called it, an “atom smasher.”

Even here after hours, twenty feet underground, the buried racetrack of the Main Ring and the parallel Tevatron hummed continuously. When the Fermilab teams had “good beam,” they liked to keep the accelerator running without interruption.

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