Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 30 Mlle Ampere

Entering the administrative offices along the quad, Max led Arianna left along a corridor and then right to wide stairs spiraling downward. They came upon a broad landing that had become a common room—Kfêt it was called, a pun resonating with functionality (café), entertainment (fête), and nerdiness (FET)—for the normales et normaliennes; the upper floors of the same building were the students’ residences, and so they didn’t simply study there, they lived there. Students, several of whom Max tutored, were hard at work playing foosball, pinball, and billiards, pulling espressos or beer on tap, or lounging on foam couches. They shouted greetings and invitations to Max and Arianna as they swept by.

Another level down was the bottom, but it led to a hallway lined with windowless offices and one entrance to a passageway, set apart by windowed eye-level portals on swinging steel double doors.

“A tunnel,” he answered to her questioning look. Indeed, a network of them connected the buildings of the ENS, giving refuge from the winter for Parisians not inclined to put up with it, and during the war—which in France means only World War II—refuge from the Luftwaffe. Underneath Rue Erasme, Max and Arianna walked in silence in the passageway’s cold fluorescent lighting.

Admiring the ceramic tiles, feeling them with her hand, she said, “It’s the Metro, Maax.”

“Yes, like the Metro, but dingier.”

“And narrower.”

They were all alone. She waited for him to push her against the wall and take her there, to make a decision and do it. But he waited for her seduction.

“The air in here is different, Maax,” she said. “Different from the outside. Different even from the building.”

“Yes. It’s uncirculated, warmer.”

“Dead?”

“No, not dead. Alive with ancient physics history,” Max said.

They passed by junctions and forks. In some places the ceiling closed in so low on them that they could touch it, and at others it was four or five metres overhead. They were in an unmarked maze but Max knew every turn. One person walked by. He and Max exchanged hellos without stopping, and the fellow’s kind eyes met Arianna’s.

‘That’s Cohen-Tannoudji. Nobel Prize someday. For sure.’ Max whispered to her. It was another confirmation for her that Max kept the best company.

“Maax. Don’t people get lost down here?” she said. “I’m expecting to see decaying bodies.”

“The ones who never found their way out?”

“Yes. It’s creepy, don’t you think?” and she shivered.

He didn’t answer, but squeezed her hand and led them through another set of tunnel portals and they came out, not into daylight, but into what was obviously at least a building.”

They had arrived at the subbasement of the five Laboratoires de Physique on Rue Lhomond, the research home of France’s most selective university, and of Max’s Laboratoire Pierre Aigrain. She soaked up images of peeling paint, nasty bathrooms, unfinished concrete, asbestos insulation wrapped over exposed heat pipes, copper tubing, electrical cabling, and strewn pell-mell, tanks of cryogenic fluids on wheels. The subbasement, Max explained, housed the laboratories for those experiments needing an extraspecial degree of isolation from the vibration of Paris’ moving parts. Again, there were windowless entrances, and because of the snow and the season, and being so far below the beaten path, not a soul, just a hum of machines that Max said were vacuum pumps.

“How far have walked Maax?”

“Three hundred metres maybe.”

“It feels like we’re kilometres from civilization.”