Oddone, who assumes the Director's office on July 1, picked up the theme: "When Burnham built the Columbian Exposition, the world came to Chicago. When we build the ILC, the world will come here."

To Oddone, a focus on leadership means results will follow. He described Fermilab as the world leader in neutrinos, in flavor physics, and at the high-energy frontier. Without new investment in a domestic accelerator program, he saw the lab falling to a secondary position by the next decade. "But with new and re-directed investment," Oddone said, "we would have a powerful new discovery machine at the energy frontier with the International Linear Collider, accompanied by a powerful neutrino program. Our goal is to have no question about the ILC by 2010, and to position the US and Fermilab to host the ILC."

Fermilab has a strong start on establishing that position with the Tevatron, which Oddone called "the greatest window into new phenomena until the Large Hadron Collider" begins operations at CERN later this decade. Oddone said the lab must deliver on what he called its "ships of the line:" results from the CDF and DZero colliders throughout the remaining run of the Tevatron; a major role in LHC and at the Compact Muon Solenoid detector experiment, for which the lab is the US headquarters for 400 collaborators from 37 US institutions; results from the neutrino experiments MINOS and MiniBooNE; and continued success of the lab's diverse capabilities in astrophysics and computing.

Oddone noted that MiniBooNE is slated to present results later in the year in its search for a fourth kind of neutrino, and "all hell will break loose if they see a signal." He saw strong possibilities at the Tevatron for relating the masses of the top quark, the W boson and a Standard Model Higgs particle: "Everything points to a low-mass Higgs," he said, "and the Tevatron could also provide valuable exclusions." He also noted potential in B(s) mixing and supersymmetry, adding: "At the Tevatron, luminosity is everything."

And at the LHC, the luminosity is expected to be seven times that of the Tevatron. A global machine in its own right, the LHC poses a critical question: "How to we involve the people who helped design the machine into the operation of the machine?" Oddone asked. "We must create a remote 'virtual reality.' It's very important to the future of the LHC." Fermilab, for example, is creating extensive infrastructure support for US/CMS. "Fermilab will have a central support role," Oddone said. "It's a long tether, but the experience here must be almost equivalent to the experience at CERN."

The stakes couldn't be higher. "We have to make the LHC successful before anything else," Oddone said. "If the LHC is not successful, there will be no ILC."

Building an R&D program for the ILC, Oddone said, involves establishing world-class expertise in superconducting RF technology in the US. It also means ramping up the infrastructure at Fermilab for cryomodule assembly and testing, and integrating those capabilities into the global effort. Barry Barish, director of the ILC Global Design Initiative, expects to have a design by the end of 2006, and Oddone said he would like to see international funding agencies having "a serious discussion."

Fermilab, meanwhile, is well along in serious discussions about its own new initiative in neutrinos: the NOVA experiment, an off-axis detector for the NuMI/MINOS beam located at the surface in another northern Minnesota location, with an 810-km baseline. There is also extensive investigation of a possible Proton Driver, which Oddone said is similar to the ILC in most of its length and would help develop superconducting RF technology. The Proton Driver's capabilities would also include production of an intense neutrino beam. "Now we have the most powerful neutrino beam in the world at 200 KW," Oddone said. "With upgrades by 2008, we will have 440 KW. Stopping the Tevatron in 2010 would mean 660 KW. The Proton Driver and other schemes could push that to 2 MW."

Collider Run II with the CDF and DZero detectors is expected to end around 2009. With the cancellation of BTeV and of a kaon experiment, Oddone said the lab has done "everything we can do, short of shutting down the Tevatron" to make the best use of limited resources. But Oddone said the result was a "strong focus now," to develop options or "branches" for decisions to enrich the research program-decisions that will add up to no little plans.