“You think he changed the physics in a small area?” the national security advisor asked. “Would that have caused the explosion?”

“Possibly,” Weaver said. “But probably not. What we have now is some sort of gate. Bear with me here, and I’ll say that this is informed speculation, also known as a wild guess. But what we might have had was a universal inversion; we turned outside-in.”

“What?” the president said.

“Think about a balloon, Mr. President,” Weaver said, frowning as he tried to convert very complex theory into reasonable analogies. “You put a hole in the balloon and the air goes out. But you still have the balloon. Now, reach in and pull the balloon inside-out. We were actually the outside, now we’re on the inside.”

“That’s…” the Homeland Security director said, then stopped.

“Crazy, right,” Weaver replied. “The point is that if a Higgs boson was formed, it would be a universe. If the conditions were wrong, we’d be sucked into that universe and it would become the ‘outer’ universe. I could imagine some secondary effects would occur.”

“Such as a nuclear explosion,” the NSA said, dryly.

“Such as a very high end kinetic energy release,” Bill Weaver said with a nod. “Which would look an awful lot like a nuclear explosion. And at this point we get into pure speculation because there is no theory to support what we’re looking at. That big black ball could be a boson, but it does not meet the theory of a Higgs boson particle or its effects. Yes, something came through, that might have been from a Higgs boson universe but, again, it doesn’t fit the theory. Shouldn’t be able to get in or out of the universe.