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Back The Cloud Chamber Save as PDF
Chapters (35)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Author’s Note
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty

The first two volumes of the encyclopedia had failed to yield any ideas for a science project, and Nate was tired, so he climbed the steps to his room. With the door safely closed, he took the Topps cards out from his pocket, slit the wrapper, peeled back the plastic wrap. No Roger Maris card after all—just a bunch of rookies he’d mostly never heard of. He studied their faces, grinning up at him. A year from now, two thirds of these guys wouldn’t even be in the majors anymore. They’d be back in the minor league or selling hardware in some place like North Dakota or Missouri. Or shoveling manure, like Rufus.

That’s how it went: A person could think everything was so great for a while there, but odds were high that he’d have a big surprise coming to him. Look at Junie, planning this great circus-theme birthday party. Did she actually think a bunch of kids were going to come to their house, when evidently the whole town thought their family was a bunch of wackos? “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” that woman had said.

Nate took out a book his father had given him, The Miracle of the Night Sky, and opened it to the chapter titled “Black Holes and Quasars.”

The gravitational pull within a black hole is so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape it, he read. Physicists consider that the contents of a black hole have left the universe.

He thought of his father as he must have been before the police found him—wandering over the back forty somewhere—or over near the Landrys’ place, talking to himself as blood dripped onto the snow. He thought about their road trip last fall—the two of them lumbering along a highway in Idaho, his dad in his coveralls, talking about how he would have loved to be one of the Gemini astronauts.

He tried again to concentrate on the words he was reading. The event horizon is a spherical surface that defines the black hole. Once a body of matter enters into a black hole, it can never emerge.

“I’ll find you,” he said into the dark of his room. He wanted to believe that his father heard him.

Eight

THE NEXT MORNING WHEN NATE GOT ON THE BUS, he didn’t look for a seat beside Larry. Today Larry was sitting next to a boy named Travis, one of those fake-type kids who tell the teacher she’s looking nice today, then make cartoons about her where she’s fat and covered with warts. Nate kept close to Junie, his head down and an arm on her shoulder, as he passed the two of them.

He lowered himself firmly into the seat, staring straight ahead, before opening his book. If people were looking at him, he wasn’t going to notice.