Ground Zero (The X-Files) Read Online Free PDF

Hollywood’s meager special effects budgets of the era.
    One of the health-and-safety technicians gave them a quick briefing on how to use the radiation detector. The tech swept the sensor end up and down the hall, taking a sample of normal background readings. “Seems to be functioning properly,” he said. “I checked the calibration just a few hours ago.”
    “Let’s go inside, Mulder,” Scully said, standing at the door, obviously impatient to get to work.
    Carrera used the key on her badge again, pushing the lab door open. Mulder and Scully entered Dr. Gregory’s laboratory—and the radiation detectors went wild. Mulder watched the needle dance high up on the gauge, though he didn’t hear the frying-bacon crackle of Geiger counters used so often in films. The silent needle’s signal was ominous enough.
    Within its concrete-block walls, this office had somehow been the site of an intense burst of radiation that had blistered the paint, seared the concrete, and melted the furniture. The flash had left residual
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    and secondary radioactivity that still simmered, only fading gradually.
    Behind them Rosabeth Carrera closed the door. Mulder’s breathing resonated in his ears in the self-contained suit. It sounded as if someone were breathing down his neck, a long-fanged monster riding on his shoulder…but it was only echoes inside his hood. Claustrophobia hammered around him as he stepped deeper into the burned laboratory. Looking at the melted and flash-burned artifacts sent a shudder down his spine, tapping into his long-standing revulsion of fire.
    Scully went straight to the body, while Mulder stopped to inspect the heat-slumped computer terminals, the melted desks, the flash-burned papers on the bulletin board and on the work tables. “No indication of where the burst might have originated,” he said, poking around the debris. The walls were adorned with images of Pacific islands, aerial photos as well as computer printouts of weather maps of the ocean wind patterns, storm projections, and blistered black-and-white prints of weather satellite images—everything centered on the Western Pacific, just past the International Date Line.
    “Not the sort of stuff I’d expect a nuclear weapons researcher to collect on his office walls,” Mulder said. Scully bent over the scarecrowish burned body of Dr. Gregory. “If we can determine what he was working on, get some details of the weapons systems and any tests he was planning to run, we might come up with a more clear-cut explanation.”
    “Clear-cut, Scully?” Mulder said. “You surprise me.”
    “Think about it, Mulder. Despite what Ms. Carrera said, Dr. Gregory was a weapons researcher—
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    what if he was working on some new high-energy burst weapon? It’s possible he had a prototype in here and he accidentally set it off. It could have flash-fried everything you see here, killed him…if it was just a small test model, its effect would be limited. It might not destroy the entire building.”
    “Good for us,” he said. “But look around—I don’t see the remains of any weapon, do you? Even if it exploded, there should be some evidence.”
    “We should still look into it,” Scully answered. “I need to take this body in for an autopsy. I’ll request that Ms. Carrera find us a local medical facility where I can work.”
    Mulder, preoccupied by Gregory’s bulletin board, reached out with a gloved hand to touch one of the curled papers still fastened by a slagged push pin to the crisped cork board. When he brushed the paper with his fingertips, it crumbled into ash, rippling away into the air. Nothing remained but a powdery residue.
    Mulder looked around for thick stacks of paper, hoping that something might have been left intact, like the photos on the walls. He searched Dr. Gregory’s desk for piles of technical reports or journal articles, but found nothing. Then he noticed the unburned rectangular marks on the