Los Alamos, New Mexico is about a three-hour drive down to Albuquerque. My wife and I, after a delivery meeting at the labs, had taken the potassium Iodide tablets Dr. Hans Bethe had instructed us to consume and were prepared to take the rest of the pills in the...
Pat came in through the closed door as I got off the phone. Her barging in part of the continuing exhibition of disrespect she’d been exhibiting from the beginning. No bonus apparently meant anything to her. “You want to knock in the future?” I asked her, pointedly....
I continued to stare at the man, wanting to ask how he’d come to be in my room through a locked door. As I prepared to recover myself from the shock and get back into the real world again, the bathroom door opened, and a rough looking man stepped out. “Oh, sorry, had...
There was no point in asking my wife anything or filling her in about the potential mission. She would say no and very forcefully, at that. Then she would worry that I might overrule her and do it anyway. I would not. I was never going to step into the jungles of...
Kris Anderson kept moving, looking around my office, which unaccountably had a wood fireplace set in one corner. “Nice idea,” he said, pointing at it, “wish I’d thought that far when I was building the winery.” I thanked him but didn’t inform him about Allen Weh...
A sense of great power, seemingly not entirely rational, overcame me as I felt the bottom of the balloon basket leap upward, causing my knees to bend slightly. A simple brass lever being moved less than an inch had released tens of pounds of propane instantly, to be...
I had to get away from the office, people, and everything that might allow me to continue to communicate with the outside world. I was not ready for any of it and whatever I said to anyone would be a mistake. The side entrance to the short hall that allowed me to come...
I drove to Kris Anderson’s winery and looked around. The place seemed dead with no cars around or even a pick-up. There were plenty of collections of heavy earth-moving equipment surrounding the huge warehouse where I presumed most of the winery was run, wine was...
I ran through the open garage and on into the house through the kitchen door. The living room was to my right and Marcinko was sitting on the couch that faced me and the television set angled to his right. Mary stood talking to him but had not seated herself. “What...
I turned toward the big tent where everyone was gathering for the first class, but I walked as if on some sort of surface made of Jello. Ben’s comment, driving into my heart like a lance, caused me to literally shiver in apprehension. If McCain would do such a thing,...
I suddenly realized it was time to return to the base and continue the training. Deerhunter was a long movie, at just over three hours, but there was organizational work to be done to continue building a lesson plan and then maximizing the use of Nguyen and Kingsley....
“Look at the night, and it don’t seem so lonely. We fill it up with only two…” by Neal Diamond interrupted the Christmas music I’d put on, as Pat walked through the door to my office. “We got tired of Christmas music,” Pat announced, and then looked at the expression...