Andronescu's Paradox

Armageddon is about to happen, but it's not what you think. This war is not going to blow anything up; it's just going to turn everything off . . .

On the top floor of Cornell University’s Clark Hall, physicist, Homer Layton and his three young PhD assistants are on the brink of a breakthrough, a way to induce a minute slowing in the flow of time. They suspect that their so-called “Layton Effect” will probably not turn out to be useful for anything, but the paper they plan to write will be a bombshell in the world of theoretical physics. But then Loren Martine, the youngest member of Homer’s team, notes something Where time is slowed, the energy in combustible materials is insufficient to flash. Things can still burn—though a bit more slowly—but nothing can explode. They envision a kind of Layton Effect flashlight that could stop a gun from firing, and realize it could also stop a bomb from exploding, even inhibit a war from happening.

It’s all pure theory until events in Washington suddenly bring the prospect of war all too close. With missiles incoming and outgoing, they turn on the effect to abort the war. As a side-effect, they have also repealed most of the last hundred years of progress. And now the real adventure begins.