“No, sir, they weren’t,” Weaver said, shaking his head. “If they were, the President’s order would, obviously, be impossible.”

“Where did… ?” the science advisor said then stopped at a raised eyebrow from the defense secretary.

“Dr. Weaver, though his association with the Department of Defense, has access to restricted files…”

“Are you saying this was a DOD project?” the Homeland Security director asked, his fleshy face turning ruddy in anger. “That it actually was a bomb project?”

“No,” the defense secretary said, definitely. “Let’s try to leave the rumors to the press, okay? Dr. Chen had funding from the National Academy of Sciences,” he said, gesturing at the science advisor, who blanched. “From at least three nongovernmental agencies and from the DOD. Most of it was private funding. But for the DOD grant, and we pass them out for quite a few things, he had to make his reports and projections classified. I’m not sure that there’s no open source but everything in the last year or so is black. I don’t even, frankly, know why or how he got funding from us. But we fund quite a few purely theoretical projects because, sometimes, they pay off.”

“And it was these classified documents you saw?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir,” Weaver replied. “I was interested in the physics. If you can change physics in a limited area you might be able to do a lot of things, Mr. President. I hadn’t anticipated this sort of explosion or I would have rung the alarm bells. But there are other applications. Change gravity in a limited area and you’ve got a much better helicopter. Not to mention lightening the load on infantrymen. Change the physics another way and, yes, maybe you get a bang. I’d been thinking about some uses for the people who pay my salary, Mr. President. Besides being fascinated with the math. But I didn’t anticipate this at all.”

“Okay, so we have a gate and physics we don’t understand but might eventually,” the national security advisor said. “And since we don’t understand the physics, we don’t know what the eventual outcome might be.”