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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

“It’s not your fault,” he said to her. “I wanted to do this by myself, is all.”

Nate studied Naomi’s face, not square in the eye, but glancing, so it wouldn’t be obvious. If it weren’t for her glasses and that crazy hair, she wouldn’t be totally bad-looking.

The thing was, she had this expression. The girls everyone thought were so cool, like Pauline, mostly looked bored. That was how people did it, if they were cool. Whereas with Naomi, she just seemed so eager all the time.

“So what do you want to do?” she asked him. “I could come over to your house after school. We could talk about it.”

“I don’t know,” Nate said, but she was already working out the plan.

“It’s probably better at your house than mine,” she told him. “Things are kind of difficult at my house.”

Like they weren’t at his.

Nine

IN THE END, NATE MET NAOMI AT THE LIBRARY. HE brought along a stack of old Scientific American magazines that he and his father used to pore over in the barn when they were supposed to be tending the cows. Their favorite feature was the column called “Amateur Scientist,” which included experiments readers might try at home.

“I’d forgotten about this one,” Nate said, flipping through the pages of one well-worn issue. “Here’s something my dad and I always meant to build someday.”

“Tell me,” Naomi said.

“Back in 1912 in Austria this guy named Victor Hess started sending up balloons to measure the levels of radioactive ions from rock and water at higher elevations,” Nate explained. “But instead of finding what he was expecting—namely, that the higher up the balloons went, the less radiation there’d be—the opposite turned out to be true. So Hess formed a theory that some kind of radiation was entering our atmosphere not just from the earth, but from some unknown source in outer space. Then a few years later a guy named Millikan came along and conducted experiments that proved there was some extraterrestrial source of radiation. He called it cosmic rays. Turns out they’re around us all the time. Millions of them. The only problem is, you can’t see them.”

“So what’s our project?” Naomi said, twisting her hair. Nate had seen her do that when she was drawing sometimes, in study hall, and figured it meant she was concentrating hard.