The Trinity Paradox Read Online Free PDF

up, meet her at the coffee shop at the Los Alamos Inn. The news of the sabotaged MCG experiment must be all over the headlines by now. The United Conscience Group would treat her as a hero.
    As she reached the clearing she slowed her pace, not wanting to reveal herself. It sounded like a construction crew hard at work even in the bad weather. Saws buzzed, hammers pounded nails ...  
    As Elizabeth crept to the edge of the woods, her lips clamped. Her delusions crashed around her again.
    Mud covered everything. Aluminum-sided Quonset huts dotted the clearing in a haphazard order. Poles carrying electrical wires ran between the buildings. The few wooden buildings looked more like thrown-together shacks.
    This should have been downtown Los Alamos.
    Men wearing khaki uniforms and steel helmets directed traffic around the sloppy construction site. None of the roads looked paved, just mud and some gravel, with brown puddles in ruts, no sidewalks or gutters. Spattered jeeps drove up to the Quonset huts. And the other cars looked like they had been taken from old Untouchables reruns on TV.
    Elizabeth took an unsteady step backward. Her breath came in short, labored spasms. Mind games, she thought. I’ve gone completely bonkers.
    But yet ... the impossibility of it all ... the noises, the smells, the sights ... if she didn’t know better, she could just as well be back in World War II. She couldn’t make up details like this—she didn’t know anything about history. But the activity surrounding the isolated mesa seemed more appropriate for wartime Los Alamos-
    She stopped. Fifty years ago this place had been wartime Los Alamos. And the height of the Manhattan Project. The birth of the atomic bomb.
     
    Elizabeth stepped back into the woods and sat on a boulder of crumbling tuff. Not a speck of graffiti marked the boulder surface, though it lay close to the main road.
    She couldn’t have been tossed back in time! That MCG explosion had somehow sent her back into the past? What about all those lectures in her undergraduate days as a physics major, talking about how time travel violated every principle of modern physics from entropy increase to causality?
    Yet she couldn’t deny what she saw. Something big was going on, right where Los Alamos should be, and the city itself had vanished. How many times had she driven past the sprawling administration building, pointing out the headquarters of the bomb factory to her activist friends? What if she had suffered some sort of concussion and was simply hallucinating? A simpler answer to accept, perhaps. For all she knew, she was still lying back at the explosive site, bleeding to death, while her mind refused to accept the inevitability of dying.
    Elizabeth chewed on her lip. The hunger in her stomach was real enough, as were the blisters on her feet. Maybe she needed to play this out, see what her subconscious had in store for her. Maybe it was trying to get her to accept Jeff’s death.
    Had he even died?
    She slapped her hand against the rough surface of the boulder. It stung. The rock seemed solid enough.
    She knew she couldn’t just sit there. Night was coming fast, and she needed to get into a shelter, find some food. Even if the whole thing was in her mind.
    Taking a deep breath, she set out in the rain, straight for the center of activity.
     
    “Over here, hon! Quick now—get yourself out of the rain!”
    Elizabeth could not make out any features through the downpour, but she spotted a tall woman motioning to her. “Can’t you hear me? You’ll catch your death of cold.”
    Elizabeth lowered her head and trudged through the mud to the woman, who fluttered around her like a clucking hen. “Put this blanket around you. Did you just get here on the bus? What were you doing out in the trees? Not a good day to take a walk, and you shouldn’t be out there alone.”
    “I can take care of myself.” Elizabeth pulled the green Army blanket around her and let the woman lead her