Chapter 8: The Nothing That Is
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
...
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
...
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
...
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
...
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
...
~Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man"
Bruce walked into the lab, following the sound of vigorous swearing.
A woman with her back to him smacked a distressingly delicate-looking piece of equipment. "Stupid machine!"
"That interferometric particle spectrographer steal your quarter or something?" Bruce joked.
The woman spun toward him. She was younger than he'd guessed, with dark hair, dark glasses, and a small, pale, chiseled face. She gaped at him for several seconds.
"Do I have something in my teeth?" he joked.
"No. Sorry. It's just...You're Bruce Banner. I'm a huge, huge fan. I must've read your paper on passive gamma ray radiography a hundred times before I got it."
"Thanks?"
"That came out wrong. I mean it was just so well written that I read it even when the math was way over my head. I'm Darcy. Doctor Darcy Lewis." She stuck out her hand. "It's an honor to meet you."
"Thor's told me a lot about you." He gingerly shook her small hand with his enormous green hand. "We'll be working together. Can I help you with anything? I could take a look at this gadget." He gestured at the particle spectographer she'd just been chewing out.
"I don't know what's wrong with it. I've cleaned the lenses, reset the angle, and adjusted the aperture widths to everything I can think of, and it's still just giving me jibberish." She lightly hit a stack of printed readings.
He looked over the readings, hoping he might find something that would indicate what was wrong with the machine.
"I'm not usually like this," Darcy said. "It's just that Jane's been missing inside that thing for weeks, and I have no idea what happened to her. I don't know if she's even still alive."
Bruce wished he could tell her what he'd learned from Doctor Strange: that everyone in Westview was alive and, to all appearances, well. But he'd promised to keep Strange's involvement a secret. "I'm sure she's okay," he said in a reassuring tone with absolutely nothing to follow it up with.
She was right about the particle readings: they seemed simultaneously incomprehensible and physically impossible. Something about them bugged him. They reminded him of something, but he couldn't put his finger on what.
"I want her to be okay, so bad," Darcy said. "You know, before I met her, I was majoring in political science. Then we found Thor and...the world's just been crazy ever since."
"Did you really tase Thor the first time you met him?"
"He was being weird," she replied defensively.
"Sometimes things are exactly what they first appear..." He paused and looked at the particle readings again. "Oh my God."
"What?"
"What if the spectographer's not malfunctioning. What if all these readings are true?"
"That's impossible."
"I have seen a lot of things I thought were impossible in my life. I mean, I am one. But if these are right, what does it look like? What does it remind you of?"
"Vacuum soup."
"Exactly. Virtual particle froth, but a few dozen orders of magnitude stronger."
Darcy shook her head. "If that were right, the air would be exploding, and we'd all be dead."
"Unless the antimatter were being siphoned off somehow."
Darcy shrugged. "Okay. If those two completely impossible things were true, that would explain what we're seeing."
"It would explain more than that. If it's true, and we figure out what's doing it, that could solve one of the biggest mysteries in the universe."
"You mean asymmetry?"
"Exactly. Why there's something instead of nothing."
"But it's impossible," Darcy repeated. "You can't make something out of nothing."
Bruce had, he realized. Pretty recently. He'd brought half of all living things back into the universe, undoing Thanos's Snap. But he didn't bring that up.
"You detected a sudden jump in electromagnetic distortions on June 30th and July 6th, right?"
"Yeah. But this," she gestured to the mass of energy they were studying, "didn't start until the night of July 7th, about 22 hours after the second spike."
"When did Dr. Foster first start measuring that distortion?"
"Back in March. Why?"
Bruce frowned. "I was hoping to look at readings going back to January. I suspect there was a jump then too."
"Well, a jump in unexplained electromagnetic distortions might've had a measurable effect on ionosphere observatories. I can make a phone call."
"Yeah. Do that."
She took out her cellphone and scrolled through her very long contacts list, then put her phone to her ear. "Hey, Doctor Korpela. How are you? It's about seven p.m., why? ...Oh, I'm sorry, did I wake you up? Sorry. Hey, can you look up some data for me? ...Could you see if there were any unexplained discrepancies in electromagnetic frequency resonances of the ionosphere back in January? ...Sure, I can wait." She glanced up at Bruce. "I'm on hold. This will take a few minutes."
"I'm going to make a phone call."
He stepped out of the lab and dialed Clint, who answered quickly.
"Any news, Banner?"
"Maybe. We're getting some really weird readings from the phenomenon we're trying to figure out. Hey, you know how you said you passed out when you were in Westview, and it looked like there might've been some kind of explosion?"
"Yeah."
"Do you remember what day that was?"
"Uh...let's see. It was January 22nd."
"What time was it?"
"Late afternoon. Four o'clock-ish."
"Thanks. We're checking to see if there were any weird readings around then."
"Let me know what you find."
Bruce returned to the lab. Darcy was off the phone.
"Does around 4 p.m. January 22nd ring a bell?" Bruce asked.
She dropped open a notepad, in which she'd scrawled, "22 Jan 20:38:19 UTC."
"That would've been 3:38 in the afternoon in the Eastern Time Zone," she said. "How did you know that?"
"Two people reported unexplained explosions in Westview, one on June 30th and one in January. I'm betting there was another one on July 6th."
"Think they were caused by antimatter?" Darcy asked.
"It's possible. If they were, it's a miracle no one was killed."
Darcy turned toward the window, toward where the town of Westview should have been, her expression bleak. "That we know of."