Extermination Day by William Turnage Read Free Book Online Page B

an interest in someone opened both minds and mouths, especially in women. “I wouldn’t mind having something else to talk about, think about, for a few minutes.
    Holly blushed. She was attractive—mid -twenties—thin and athletic with long blond hair pulled back tightly. She had high cheekbones, full lips, and bright green eyes.
    “I’m just a graduate assistant working under Dr. Conner, so not many people around here take my ideas seriously. Dr. Chen does seem to understand the importance of my work, however. My field is largely theoretical whereas much of the staff here focuses on practical-based disciplines, especially engineering. When I was interning at CERN and everyone was analyzing the so-called God particle, my theories on quantum mechanical black holes were largely overlooked. That was until we starting seeing anomalies in the data, strange readings that matched my theories but no one else’s at the time. You see, it was my idea that these mini black holes were actually small gateways to other dimensions. I wrote a paper on it that was largely dismissed, although many said that the equations did make sense. Then it was probably two days or so after my article was published that Dr. Chen called. He asked if I would like a chance to prove my theories, even if it meant leaving CERN.”
    She sipped from a cup on the table, then played with her napkin. “CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was still the largest particle collider in the world and at the time there were no plans to build another. There was nowhere else on the planet that could create the mini black holes that I needed to test my hypotheses. I told Patrick this, but he was persistent. He wanted me to come out to the New Mexican desert and see a project they were working on that would change my perspective, change everything, he said.
    “I’d heard of him before, everyone had. A Nobel Prize winner in physics at the age of thirty-four and chair of the Theoretical Physics Department at Harvard, he was world renowned. The problem was, no one had heard from him in about ten years. He just up and quit his post at Harvard and said he was going to work on a government project that would take up all his time. No one knew what that project was, and Patrick was very aloof about the whole thing. It was quite a shock to the intellectual community. So when I got a call from him out of the blue to work with him on this secret project, I was out the door and in Carlsbad a week later. That was two years ago, when the first tests started.”
    Holly paused to take another sip of coffee, and Jeff said, “The testing of your theories, the mini black holes?”
    “Well, yes. When I got here, Patrick showed me the underground base. Much of what you see here today.” She waved a hand over her shoulder. “Of course we had a much smaller prototype dome at that time. But the particle collider, the one you see stretching out in the cavern, that was here and in place. Who would’ve thought that the largest particle collider ever built was located underground and kept secret all these years? Even today the scientists at CERN don’t know about it. I have no idea where they received their funding from to get this thing going, but it had to have cost billions. Multiple billions. And the scientific talent they’ve pulled in is just amazing. Of course the pay is better than anywhere else I could’ve gone. The only drawback is that we aren’t allowed to publish anything since what we develop is strictly top secret.”
    “It is incredible, isn’t it,” Jeff said, playing along. “I feel lucky just to be here.” Very true since Jeff knew full well the cost of not being there would have been his death tonight. “That must have been an exciting time for you when you arrived.”
    “You wouldn’t have believed it. It was like waking up to Christmas every morning. When Dr. Chen showed me what they’d developed, I couldn’t take it all in. Not only had they been able to