“If most of us is empty space,” said Marvin, “then something small enough could travel through that empty space.” He paused, and in the pause he turned toward Nicky, just barely turned. It was so slight a movement that no one could have accused him of deliberately addressing his next remark to Nicky. Then he said, “It could go right through you.”
I looked around the table. Judging from the looks, Marvin had struck a nerve.
“You mean something could be going through me right now?” asked Nicky. He put his hand on his stomach, then looked down and slowly pulled his hand away, as if he expected to see blood.
“Could be,” said Marvin. “You know, there are tiny little meteorites falling out of the sky all the time.”
Nicky’s mouth twitched, and the skin under his eyes puckered. He glanced upward. For the first time in my experience, he looked vulnerable.
“And then there are rays,” said Marvin, with a resigned shrug, as if to say that it was a shame we were doomed to death by rays but there wasn’t anything any of us could do about it but live our lives and hope to be missed for a few more years.
Nicky swallowed hard.
“X rays,” said Marvin. “Gamma rays. Cosmic rays.”
Nicky pressed his hand against his stomach again. Matthew wore a small smile.
“But that’s beside the point,” said Marvin. “I just wanted to say that there’s a lot of empty space in us—”
“Right,” I said. “And there’s a lot of empty space outside us—”
Marvin smiled at me, then turned back toward Nicky. “So some of the empty space in you”—he nodded at Nicky—“could be mixed up with the empty space outside of you.”
“It’s hard to tell where you stop, see?” I said.
“What the fuck are they talking about?” asked Nicky, looking around the group. It was obvious to everyone, I think, that he’d been shaken. He was still holding his hand to his stomach, for one thing, and his voice had none of the old edge.
“Do you have to say that?” asked Matthew.
“Fuck you,” said Nicky.
“Oh, very good,” said Matthew.
“How would you like your face punched, Barber?” asked Nicky, as if he were offering to do Matthew a favor. “We’ll conduct a little experiment to see where my fist stops and your face starts.”
“Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Patti.
“We are?” said Matthew.
“Yes,” said Patti. “I think Nicky and Marvin have put us on the right road.” She consulted a page in her ring binder. She had been taking notes. “Marvin has suggested the theoretical underpinning,” she said. Chewing and snapping her gum, she looked around the group to see if we agreed. We must not have been wearing satisfactory expressions, because she said, to explain her position, “I think that business about the space that’s in something and the space that’s not in it is really what we ought to be thinking about. I mean,” she said putting her thumb and forefinger to her mouth and with her tongue pushing her wad of pink gum between them, “who’s to say where my Zwischenraum stops and the Zwischenraum in this gum starts, you know?” She popped the gum back into her mouth and resumed chewing and snapping it. “And Nicky did his part. He came up with an idea for an experiment.”
Nicky clenched his fist and grinned.
“Of course, he was only kidding about punching Matthew,” she said. “Weren’t you, you big jerk?” The way she said “big jerk” was so full of promise that I would have been delighted to hear it applied to me.
“If you punched Matthew,” she said, “and we looked at it as closely as Quanto the Minimum looked at everything, we really might wonder where your fist stopped and Matthew’s face started. I think we should work on that. You were only kidding, of course, Nicky, but we could take off from your idea and come up with some experiments that we might really be able to do.”
“Glad I could help,” said Nicky. “We made a start, right?”
“Right,” said Patti.
“You know what that means,” said Nicky.
“What?” asked Marvin.
“That means we can knock off,” said Nicky.
He was right. We were only required to make a start. Once we had done that, we could knock off, so, with unanimous relief, we did.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 598, Mark Dorset considers Science: Methods of: Experiment and Imagination (Hypothesizing) from this episode.
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🎧 598: “If most . . .”