Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(68)

And Dr. Dubois wasn’t alone. He’d had another team going over the equations at the same time. Louis had just returned from a meeting with Dr. Freidrick Haus, Nobel laureate mathematician and team lead. As he’d expected, Dr. Haus’s team also confirmed Dr. Stephenson’s work.

Louis leaned back in his chair, shoving his fingers under his reading glasses to rub his red eyes. As hard as it was to believe, the American physicist was rewriting the world’s understanding of physics at a pace that had shocked the thousands of scientists working on the ATLAS project to their core. And Louis had no doubt that, when those papers were released to the public, they would have the same shocking impact on the scientific community at large. If the world survived the current crisis, there’d be a lot of textbooks heading directly to trash bins, which was precisely where they belonged.

Louis rose from his seat and walked across his office, pausing to retrieve his black London Fog raincoat and umbrella before heading for the building exit. A cold, steady rain had drenched most of Europe for the last three days and the weather report held little promise of improvement. A massive cold front cut its way across the EU map, its blue curve sporting eastward, facing blue triangles stretching from Finland down to Italy’s booted heel. Right now it was stalled, blocked by a massive high-pressure system that had set up shop over western Russia.

Nodding at Elynn Stadich, the front desk security guard, Louis pulled up his raincoat collar, unfurled the umbrella, and stepped out into the gray wetness of the Swiss morning. He’d decided to make the walk to the ATLAS facility to clear his mind. Five minutes into the hike, he regretted his decision. The temperature hovered in the low forties, which wasn’t so bad, but the whirling wind made his umbrella less than useless. As one of these gusts almost succeeded in springing the umbrella inside out, Louis gave up, stowed it into its handle, and accepted that his head was going to get a thorough drenching. He didn’t really think it could get much wetter anyway.

As he stepped into the entrance to the surface facility that led to the ATLAS cavern, Louis removed his raincoat, then leaned over to wipe and shake the moisture from his head and neck.

“Dr. Dubois, I thought they provided you with a car and driver.”

Louis turned to see the grinning face of Gary Levin, one of the top graduate students assigned to the program.

“Looked like a nice day for a stroll.”

“Guess I don’t want to walk with you on a bad day, then.”

Gary handed him a white hard hat, waiting as Louis adjusted it to fit his head. “Guess I should have brought you a towel too.”

“I’ll dry off on the way down to ATLAS.”

The smile faded from Gary’s face as if it had been wiped from a blackboard. “When was the last time you were in the ATLAS cave?”

“Tuesday. I’ve been holed up reviewing Dr. Stephenson’s latest paper for the last couple of days. Told Sophia I didn’t want to be disturbed unless a critical problem came up.”

The grad student inhaled deeply, frowned, and then continued. “I probably shouldn’t be the one to tell you, but you’re not going to like what’s happening down there.”

The cold hand of dread grabbed Dr. Dubois’s esophagus and squeezed. “What do you mean?”

“I guess I’d better show you.”

Passing down a narrow hallway with a silver conduit running down the center of the eight-foot ceiling, Louis paused at a locker to hang his raincoat and umbrella inside. Turning, he followed Gary through several more rooms and hallways, the noise of heavy construction equipment growing in volume as they made their way toward the ATLAS cavern.

They stepped onto scaffolding high up on the cavern wall. As always, the scene affected him on multiple levels. All those years building this place, and now they were working at breakneck speed disassembling the massive detector and enlarging the cavern to make room for Dr. Stephenson’s wormhole generator, all the while making sure nothing disrupted the containment field isolating the November Anomaly.

Suddenly Louis froze. One large section of the ATLAS detector’s massive end cap dangled from a ceiling crane, trailing metal scraps and cables, as if a gigantic maw had grabbed the device and ripped out a huge chunk.

“What in God’s name?”

A wave of nausea and dizziness almost buckled Louis’s knees.

“Dr. Stephenson’s order. He’s personally supervising the dismantling operation.”

“Dismantling?” Louis sputtered. “That’s wanton destruction. Where the hell is he?”

As Gary pointed to a tiny figure gesturing to the construction crew on the far side of the cavern, Louis cursed, then clambered down the stairs leading to the cavern floor. By the time he reached Dr. Stephenson, his breath hissed out in short, ragged gasps.

Grabbing Dr. Stephenson by the shoulder, he spun the American scientist to face him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Stephenson’s gray eyes took in Dr. Dubois as casually as if he’d just asked to schedule a meeting.

“The crew was falling behind schedule. I am changing that.”

“By destroying billions of dollars in instrumentation? We’re supposed to be dismantling ATLAS so that it can be reconstructed once we’re done here. You’re ruining decades of work.”

Dr. Stephenson pursed his lips. “Dr. Dubois. What portion of this piece of junk do you think needs saving? Since you probably haven’t understood a word I’ve presented in my papers, this may not have occurred to you, but your little science project is over. The technologies and energies we are about to create in this cavern go so far beyond anything ever contemplated on earth; they make the Large Hadron Collider laughable.”