“Most of the faculty of the university was, presumably, off-campus when the event occurred.” The briefer was from the FBI, which was one of a dozen agencies trying to make sense of the “event.” No name had stuck to it, yet. It was not “Pearl Harbor Day” or “9/11” or “the Challenger.” It was just “the event.” The day still hadn’t passed. By tomorrow, or the next day or the day after that some glib newsman would hang a moniker on it that would stick. But for right now, glued to their TV, tying up the phone lines, people just referred to it as the White House spokesman had as “the event.”

“Presumably because many of them lived near the campus,” the briefer added. “The president, however, lived in Winter Park, outside the blast zone, and one of our agents contacted him. The center of the event, where the…”

“Globe,” the National Security Advisor prompted. “Or hole, maybe.”

“Where the globe now… floats… was where the high energy physics lab used to rest.”

“Industrial accident,” the President said, then laughed, humorously. He’d by now seen the Defense Department estimates and the “updated” estimates from FEMA, which were climbing higher as the day progressed. “The mother of all industrial accidents. Who?”

“The president was unwilling to directly point fingers but we believe that it was probably an out-of-control experiment by this man,” he said, flashing a slightly Asian-looking face onto the screen.