Read The Gates (2009) for Free Online Page B

and his mother was, like him, asleep in bed, the figure of a woman standing at the garden gate, staring intently at his bedroom window, her eyes burning with a cold blue fire.

VII
In Which the Scientists Wonder What the Bit Was, and Where It Might Have Gone
    W HILE S AMUEL SLEPT, A group of scientists huddled over a series of screens and printouts. Behind them, an uncompleted game of Battleships lay forgotten. “But there’s no record of anything unusual occurring,” said one. His name was Professor Hilbert, and he had become a scientist for two reasons. The first was that he had always been fascinated by science, particularly physics, which is science for people who like numbers more than—well, more than people, probably. The other reason Professor Hilbert had become a scientist was that he had always
looked
like a scientist. Even as a small boy he had worn glasses, been unable to comb his hair properly, and had a fondness for storing pens in his shirt pockets. He was also very interested in taking things apart to find out how they worked, although he had never discovered how to put any of them back together again in quite the sameway. Instead, he was always trying to find some means to improve them, even if they had worked perfectly well to begin with. Thus it was that, when he “improved” his parents’ toaster, the toaster had incinerated the bread, and then burst into flames so hot they had melted the kitchen counter. The kitchen had always smelled funny after that, and he was required to eat his bread untoasted unless supervised. After he spent an hour with their radio, it had begun picking up signals from passing military aircraft, leading to a visit from a couple of stern men in uniforms who were under the impression that the Hilberts were Russian spies. Finally, young Hilbert was sent to a special school for very bright people where, to his heart’s content, he was allowed to take things apart and put them together again in odd combinations. He had started only one or two fires at the special school, but they were small, and easily extinguished.
    Now Professor Hilbert was trying to make sense of what Ed and Victor were telling him. The collider had been shut down as a precaution, which annoyed Professor Hilbert greatly. Turning the collider on and off wasn’t like flipping a light switch. It was a complicated and expensive business. Furthermore, it generated bad publicity for everyone involved in the experiment, especially as there were still people who were convinced that the collider would be responsible for the end of the world.
    “You say that a particle of some kind separated itself from the beams in the collider?”
    “That’s right,” said Ed.
    “Then passed through the walls of the collider itself, and the solid rock around it, before disappearing.”
    “Right again,” said Ed.
    “Then the system began rewriting itself to eliminate any evidence of this occurrence?”
    “Yes.”
    “Fascinating,” said Professor Hilbert.
    What was strange about this conversation was that at no point did Professor Hilbert doubt the truth of what Ed and Victor were telling him. Nothing about the Large Hadron Collider and what it was revealing about the nature of the universe was surprising to Professor Hilbert. Delightful, yes. Troubling, sometimes. But never surprising. He was not a man who was easily surprised, and he suspected that the universe was a much stranger place than anyone imagined, which made him anxious to prove just how extraordinary it really was.
    “What do you think it might be?” asked Ed.
    “Evidence,” said Professor Hilbert.
    “Of what?”
    “I don’t know,” said Professor Hilbert, and rambled off sucking his pencil.
    Hours later Professor Hilbert was still at his desk, surrounded by pieces of paper on which he had constructed diagrams, created complex equations, and drawn little stick men fighting one another with swords. He had also gone over the system records for the past