Read Online Ground Zero (The X-Files) by Kevin Anderson, Chris Carter (Creator) - Free Book Online

was just remembering that, according to his file, Dr. Gregory had worked on nuclear weapons since the days of the Manhattan Project. He was present at the Trinity Test, then worked at Los Alamos.
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    THE X-FILES
    He took part in many of the H-bomb detonations in the fifties.”
    Mulder stared at what appeared to be the largest mushroom cloud, an enormous eruption of water and fire and smoke out in the ocean. It looked as if an entire small island had been vaporized. Handwritten on the bottom border of the glossy were the words “Castle Bravo.”
    “Must have been quite something to see,” he said. Scully gave him a quick surprised look. “Not something I’d ever want to see,” she said.
    He quickly ran a hand through his mussed hair. “Rhetorically speaking, I meant.” He read the strange names scrawled on each of the photos. They had been written with different pens but obviously by the same hand. Some of them had faded over the years; others had retained their color and darkness better.
    “Sawtooth”
    “Mike”
    “Bikini Baker”
    “Greenhouse”
    “Ivy”
    “Sandstone X-ray”
    “What’s this, some kind of code?” Mulder said. Scully shook her head. “No. Those were the names of the test shots, different bomb designs. Each one was given a kind of nonsense name. The tests themselves weren’t a particular secret, just the details of the device, time, anticipated yield, and core assembly. One whole series of underground blasts out at Nevada was named after California ghost towns. Another series used the names of various cheeses.”
    “What a bunch of funny guys.”
    Mulder left the photo gallery behind and stepped 56
    GROUND ZERO
    into the large, disorganized office where Gregory had done his work at home. Despite the clutter of papers, notes, and books scattered in various piles around the room, he suspected that Dr. Gregory could have found any item at a moment’s notice. A den or an office in the home was a man’s private sanctum, and, despite the random appearance of all the paraphernalia, over the years the old scientist must have gradually arranged it exactly the way he wanted. Now, seeing unfinished ideas jotted down on yellow legal pads and in bound lab notebooks, Mulder experienced the poignant sense of a life suddenly stopped. It was as if an amateur filmmaker had placed his videocamera on PAUSE
    while Dr. Emil Gregory did an EXIT STAGE LEFT, leaving all the props in place and untouched.
    Mulder carefully looked at the notes, papers, technical reports. He found a stack of colorful travel brochures for various small Pacific islands. Some were flashy and produced professionally while others appeared to be crudely made by people who didn’t exactly know what they were doing.
    “You don’t expect to find anything here, do you?” said Scully. “It’s unlikely that Dr. Gregory ever took any classified work home.”
    “Probably not,” Mulder said. “But he was brought up during the Manhattan Project days. Security was a little more lax than it is now, since everyone was working on the same team against the same bad guys.”
    “And here we are still building bombs to fight against the bad guys—yet we’re not at all certain who the bad guys are anymore,” Scully said quickly, almost as if by reflex. Mulder looked sidelong at her, raising his eyebrows. “Was that an editorial comment, Agent Scully?”
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    THE X-FILES
    She didn’t answer. Instead she picked up a framed certificate that had been taken off the wall and set atop one of the low bookshelves. Mulder could still see the naked nail on the wall where it had hung.
    “I wonder why he took this one down,” she said, tilting it so he could see.
    The certificate was a competently made printout from a laser printer with a logo designed with a low-end computer art program—just a joke, but someone had obviously spent a lot of time on it. The symbol in the center of the parchment was a stylized bell with a clapper dangling beneath its