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REACTIONS
The professor had been working all night long and he was very tired. The experiments, so far, had been a disappointment. Several times the professor had spilled a concoction or two and the stench was nauseating. When the professors assistant came in with another pot of coffee, she noticed at once the horrible odors. "What on earth is that smell?" She asked. She looked and sounded like the Professors mother, even though she was much younger than him. The Professor did not seem to notice. He lowered a small metal rod into a green solution that was being heated by a crusty old Bunsen burner. A small plume of smoke rose off the liquid surface. Miss Winston, the assistant, coughed once and left the room. Just then, the Professor, who had been working on nuclear fusion for months, found that he had his answer. The chemical reaction taking place between the rod and the liquid was emitting more energy than it took to create it. FUSION! The Professor started to take notes. It was extremely important that all the variables were written down accurately so that the experiment could be duplicated. While scribbling, the Professor absent-mindedly removed the rod from the beaker, laid it on a small metal tray, and forgot about it. Now, there are many types of nuclear reactions, and just because someone is attempting to produce a fusion reaction doesn't mean he won't create an entirely different type of reaction. This was the case with the Professor. As a matter of fact, this particular type of reaction was only achieved one other time in the past fifteen billion years or so. One might say that the professor was a very smart man to find the particular set of elements that resulted in this type of reaction. Or, one might say, it was meant to be. So it was that the metal rod began to glow. Then it broke apart into small bits of gleaming, enormously bright beads of light. These little light bits swirled and spiraled into the air and landed around the room. Wherever they touched down they created the same wonderful reaction that had taken place in the rod. Soon the room had quite a few isolated pools of intense light swirls and spirals. Various colors created the most startling auras around the everyday items in the Professors laboratory. It was at this moment that the Professor noticed the phenomenon. It was too late for him to stop it, let alone understand it. The reactions were so beautiful that he sat there mesmerized for several moments until he realized that the effect was spreading. By then it was way too late. There came a moment shortly thereafter when the room was 'saturated' with the effect. At that moment the reaction began to increase geometrically as the walls, floor, and ceiling glowed with a colorful intensity. The professor himself was engulfed, and the atoms that comprised his aging body burst in a glorious display of light and radioactivity. For a moment the Professor had a wonderful feeling of being "At One with the Universe." Which, in fact, he would be very shortly. After the laboratory ceased to exist it wasn't long before the town was a mysterious glow on the horizon. The boys at the Government Nuclear Facility in Colorado thought the Russians had bombed us. They didn't have time to react. Twenty minutes after the reaction had begun, the Earth was glowing five times brighter than the sun. Within the hour the solar system had become visible from outside the milky-way. By this time the reaction was totally out of control. The entire Galaxy became a fantastic, unbelievable light show that wouldn't last long enough for beings in other Galaxies to observe it, let alone comprehend its dire implications. In fact the neighboring Galaxies soon began to rival the bright splendor of the milky-ways' demise. Then it happened all at once. The Universe went out with a bang! |
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