The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

enough to assemble her thoughts. “Right now, the business of running the world is on hold. Right now, the most powerful people on Earth are sitting by their phones. Including the American president. Who just lost his wife. He can’t focus on that, any more than I can focus on what happened to my father, because right now the worst-case scenario we’ve ever imagined is threatening to come true. And until you read that text on my wall, I didn’t see any real way to stop it.”
    They came to an elevator. She pressed the call button pointing down.
    “This building is called Border Town. Tangent’s home. It’s in eastern Wyoming, seventy miles from the nearest anything.”
    The doors opened with a chime, and Travis followed her in. Turning, he saw a panel of floor buttons that started with B1 and descended all the way to B51. B10 was presently lit. He thought he knew which button she’d press, even before her hand went to the array. He was right. A few seconds later they were dropping toward the bottom of what was essentially a buried skyscraper.
    “What’s Border Town on the border of?” Travis said.
    As evenly as she might have said Nebraska or South Dakota, Paige said, “Another world.”
    B51 was nothing like the corridor they’d left above. Concrete floor, walls, ceiling. From the elevator it extended sixty feet and then opened up to an undefined space beyond, vast and pitch black. The tunnel might have led onto a darkened football field.
    Paige moved toward the open end, but turned in at a doorway thirty feet shy of it. Travis followed her into a room that looked like a bunker that scientists would’ve sheltered in during atom-bomb tests in the fifties. Like the hallway, everything was concrete. Antiquated computer terminals hunkered at the far end of the room. Nearer to the door, current issues of Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal lay on some of the desks. Despite the place’s mausoleum atmosphere, it apparently saw some use.
    Paige opened a cabinet and withdrew a tan spiral notebook.
    “At one time, only this floor of the building existed. It was the site of a Department of Energy project, the Very Large Ion Collider. Sixty billion dollars and ten years to build. It went operational on March 7, 1978. It was used exactly once.”
    She handed him the notebook. Up close he saw rust-brown fingerprints on it that could only be blood. Similar stains had soaked deep into the pages at the book’s edge.
    “Read this,” she said. “It won’t take long, and it speaks for itself better than I can.”
    With that she took out her cell phone. Travis opened the notebook while she called upstairs to catch up with the preparations going on in her office.
    The blue lines on the paper had faded almost to nothing, but the text, handwritten in black ink, remained sharp and easily read:
     
    VLIC GENERAL COMMENTS LOG
     
    (SEE DATA LEDGERS FOR ALL SCIENTIFIC RESULTS)
     
    MARCH 7, 1978—14:33 UTC
     
    Well, it begins today. We’re all so excited we can’t put it into words.
    I’ll make this opening entry quick, since we have a lot going on. First, the point of this ledger: to record the human story of this place. Someday we may want to write a popular book about the VLIC, in the style of Feynman or Sagan. A log of people’s personal experiences here would be great for that. So no pressure, guys. Just jot down what you’re feeling. Anticipation, frustration, anything.
    Here’s today so far. Very, very exciting around here. Many of us have been on board this project for the entire decade that VLIC has been under construction, so to finally be just hours from the first shot is a kind of excitement I’ve never felt before. About twenty DOE people will be here for it, including Secretary Graham. He met with us earlier. Nice enough. He seems to have a good grasp of what this place means to physics and all science, in passing anyway, although after he stepped out someone said he probably would think an off-shell W boson was something at Taco Bell, haha. (No offense Mr. Secretary if you ever read this, we kid around a lot.)
    Predictions for the first shot? Ha, not on your life. Obviously there’s the expectation that we’ll raise the lower bound on the Higgs by another percent of the standard model’s prediction, but no one’s saying it’ll happen on the first shot! I would stick my neck out and say I hope, in time, we get an even more significant result than that, but I don’t want to look back on this