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Authors: Richard Phillips

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #High Tech

Wormhole

BOOK: Wormhole
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2012 Richard Phillips
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by 47 North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN-13: 9781612184951
ISBN-10: 1612184952

For my lovely wife, Carol, who believes that finishing a task is at least as important as starting it.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

CHAPTER 74

CHAPTER 75

CHAPTER 76

CHAPTER 77

CHAPTER 78

CHAPTER 79

CHAPTER 80

CHAPTER 81

CHAPTER 82

CHAPTER 83

CHAPTER 84

CHAPTER 85

CHAPTER 86

CHAPTER 87

CHAPTER 88

CHAPTER 89

CHAPTER 90

CHAPTER 91

CHAPTER 92

CHAPTER 93

CHAPTER 94

CHAPTER 95

CHAPTER 96

CHAPTER 97

CHAPTER 98

CHAPTER 99

CHAPTER 100

CHAPTER 101

CHAPTER 102

CHAPTER 103

CHAPTER 104

CHAPTER 105

CHAPTER 106

CHAPTER 107

CHAPTER 108

CHAPTER 109

CHAPTER 110

CHAPTER 111

CHAPTER 112

CHAPTER 113

CHAPTER 114

CHAPTER 115

CHAPTER 116

CHAPTER 117

CHAPTER 118

CHAPTER 119

CHAPTER 120

CHAPTER 121

CHAPTER 122

CHAPTER 123

CHAPTER 124

CHAPTER 125

CHAPTER 126

CHAPTER 127

CHAPTER 128

CHAPTER 129

CHAPTER 130

CHAPTER 131

CHAPTER 132

CHAPTER 133

CHAPTER 134

CHAPTER 135

CHAPTER 136

CHAPTER 137

CHAPTER 138

CHAPTER 139

CHAPTER 140

CHAPTER 141

CHAPTER 142

CHAPTER 143

CHAPTER 144

CHAPTER 145

CHAPTER 146

CHAPTER 147

CHAPTER 148

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Rodger Dalbert stepped out of the black Mercedes, almost losing his footing on the icy blacktop. His driver reached out to support him, but he waved the hand away.

“It’s OK, Carl. I’ve got it.”

“Black ice is a bitch this morning. Thought we’d slide off the road in that last roundabout.”

Rodger smiled at the bigger man. “That crossed my mind.”

An icy blast of wind forced Rodger to duck his head, seeking some protection behind his overcoat’s high collar. Damn, it was cold. Of course, what could one expect of March in Switzerland?

On the bright side, Meyrin wasn’t far outside Geneva. Rodger had always loved Geneva. Too bad his schedule wasn’t going to allow him to tour more than the airport. Oh well. He’d known his personal life would suffer when he’d agreed to chair PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Hitching his overcoat more tightly around his neck, Rodger hurried out of the wind and into the building that would host today’s conference, a review of ongoing repairs on the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. The most ambitious science project ever undertaken by man occupied a monstrous tunnel a hundred meters below ground, just west of Lake Geneva, its twenty-seven-kilometer circumference crossing the border between France and Switzerland in multiple spots. This building sat seventy meters above a cavern in which the huge ATLAS detector enfolded LHC Point One, a beam interaction point where two super-accelerated proton beams collided...at least they did when the whole thing was working.

“Dr. Dalbert. I am so pleased you could make it.”

Rodger turned to see Dr. Louis Dubois, the famed French physicist who headed the team of ATLAS scientists, approaching from across the room. The man had aged since last Rodger had seen him, at a conference in New York, long black hair flowing down over his shoulders as if he had just stepped out of a Paris salon, looking more like a twenty-something Yanni than a Nobel Prize–winning quantum theorist. Now, he wore it tied back in a greasy ponytail, as if he hadn’t bothered to wash it in weeks. His eyes, which seemed to have sunk back into his face, showed a fatigue no sleep could wash away.

“The pleasure is mine, Dr. Dubois. I apologize for my tardiness. The drive took us a bit longer than expected this morning.” Rodger nodded toward the reception desk. “Should I sign in?”

“No need. I have your badge right here. Now, if you’ll follow me, the conference is about to begin.”

Passing through a doorway, Dr. Dubois led Rodger down a short hall and then turned right into a room that was much smaller than what Rodger had expected. The conference table
seated a dozen, but today only three people occupied its chairs. Dr. Dubois, with Rodger in tow, now made a grand total of five.

As Rodger seated himself, Dr. Dubois moved to the head of the table and began the obligatory introductions.

“Good morning to you all. Although most of you have already met, I will make my way around the table.

“On my left is Dr. Robert Craig, chief scientific advisor to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense.”

The stocky redheaded man inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“Continuing in clockwise fashion, Dr. Klaus Gotlieb, scientific advisor to the European Commission.”

Rodger recognized the bald, birdlike visage of the older man from an August meeting in Stockholm. Although he’d only chatted with the scientist briefly, the encounter had felt interminable.

“Next we have Dr. Pierre Boudre, senior astrophysicist for the European Space Agency.”

Raising his left eyebrow ever so slightly, Rodger glanced across the table at the slender Frenchman. He had known and liked Pierre since they had collaborated on the International Space Station for NASA. The man was brilliant, and endowed with an affable personality that could charm a group of locals at a Houston coffee shop as effortlessly as society’s elite at a Long Island social. But what was he doing here?

For that matter, what was Rodger doing here? What had been billed as a conference on the status of LHC repairs was clearly nothing of the sort. Five people? This wasn’t enough for a round table discussion, much less a conference. And the makeup of the group. Two French, one German, a Brit, and an American. Something about the mix didn’t seem right for an LHC discussion. The project was a worldwide collaboration. So what was this about?

“And on my right is Dr. Rodger Dalbert, chairman of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“As for me, I am Dr. Louis Dubois, and I am the senior physicist for the ATLAS experiment. Actually, that title is a bit presumptuous, since we have over two thousand five hundred physicists from thirty-seven countries collaborating on this experiment. Let’s just say ATLAS is my baby and a very big baby at that.”

Rodger heard chuckles of approval from the small assemblage.

Dr. Dubois paused, then spread his hands, palms up, like a pastor about to call his flock to prayer. “It is by now obvious to you all that this is no conference on the LHC repair schedule. I apologize for the subterfuge, but I am quite certain you will soon understand why we deemed this necessary, given the current situation...one that requires deft handling to avoid undesirable media involvement.”

Rodger’s pulse quickened. Media involvement? Had the CERN scientists made a breakthrough? Had they finally established definitive validation for the physics standard model? But then why not just present their results? Nothing about this made any sense.

BOOK: Wormhole
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