The Strongest Thing We Know About

The machine that had scanned Grandpa Theo made him take off his watch, his belt, and the little metal pin in his collar.

"They said it could pull a wheelchair across the room," Soren said. He had his notebook open on his knee. "A hospital MRI. They told us a story about a guy who forgot to leave his oxygen tank outside."

Maya was watching the tablet, where the technician had let them keep the looping image of Grandpa's knee in gray and silver. "It lines up the water in you," she said. "All the little spinning bits. It flips them and listens to them flip back."

"Protons," Soren said. "In the hydrogen."

"Whatever they are. The magnet's so strong it grabs the inside of you and you don't even feel it." She tipped her head. "That's the strongest magnet I've ever been inside of."

"It's the strongest magnet most people are ever near," Soren said. He flipped a page. "I asked. It's about sixty thousand times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. The whole Earth. And it's just a tube in a room."

Grandpa Theo was asleep with the rails up. The hallway hummed.

"Sixty thousand," Maya said. "Okay. So what's the strongest one there is?"

Soren stopped writing. "Strongest what?"

"Magnet. Anywhere. If this tube can grab my insides, what's the biggest grab in the universe?"

He pulled up the search. He read for a while. Then he read it again, because the first time he didn't believe the word.

"There's a kind of dead star," he said. "A neutron star. When a big star collapses it gets squeezed into a ball about the size of a city, but it weighs more than the sun."

"A city that weighs more than the sun."

"A spoonful weighs as much as a mountain. That's the normal kind." He looked up. "Some of them have magnetic fields. The strongest ones are called magnetars."

"How strong."

Soren put the tablet down like it had gotten heavier. "The MRI is sixty thousand Earths. A magnetar is about a thousand trillion."

Maya didn't say anything for a second.

"Read me the number with the zeros," she said.

"It just says a thousand trillion. A quadrillion times the Earth." He found the next line. "It says if one were a thousand miles away from us, it would wipe every credit card on the planet. The strip on the back. Gone."

"A thousand miles is nothing," Maya said. "That's like the top of the country to the bottom."

"A thousand miles is nothing for a star," Soren agreed. "And it says." He stopped. "Maya, it says at that distance it would distort the atoms in your body."

"Distort how."

"Your atoms aren't little balls. The electrons are sort of a cloud around the middle. Round. The field is so strong it would squeeze the cloud. Stretch every atom into a thin shape. Like cigars."

Maya looked down at her own hand. She turned it over. Made a fist, opened it.

"Every atom," she said.

"In you. In the floor. In Grandpa. Every one. Same direction."

She was quiet again, and then she said the thing he hadn't gotten to.

"That's not the magnet pulling on metal. That's the magnet reaching inside the metal. Inside everything. There's no taking your watch off." She held her hand up to the light from the window. "You can't leave yourself outside the room."

"No," Soren said.

Grandpa Theo shifted but didn't wake.

"Okay, but where are they," Maya said. "If one were a thousand miles away it would un-person us. So they're not a thousand miles away. Where's the nearest one."

Soren scrolled. "Closest known one is. Around nine thousand light-years."

"That's so far the credit cards are safe."

"That's so far the light leaving it now won't get here until we're old," Soren said. "And here's the part." He turned the tablet so she could see the line, like he needed her eyes on it too. "Sometimes they hiccup. They have starquakes. The crust cracks and the field snaps and they put out more energy in a fraction of a second than the sun does in a hundred thousand years."

"From cracking."

"From cracking. And in two thousand four, one of them flared, and it was so strong it hit Earth from across the whole galaxy and it compressed our magnetic field. Ours. The Earth's. From fifty thousand light-years." He looked at her. "It happened in the daytime. Most people felt nothing. Some satellites noticed."

Maya stood up. She went to the dark window and looked out at the parking lot lights and past them at the small number of stars you could see over a city.

"So the same week that happened," she said slowly, "somebody on Earth was getting an MRI. Lying in the tube. Thinking that tube was the strongest thing that would ever touch them."

"Probably a lot of somebodies."

"And the actual strongest thing reached out from the other side of the galaxy and pressed on the whole planet, and the person in the tube never knew, and the doctor never knew, and the magnet that lined up their insides was a toy." She breathed on the glass and the fog of it spread and shrank. "A sixty-thousand-Earth toy."

Soren wrote a line. His pen pressed hard enough to dent the next page.

"Here's what I can't hold," Maya said, still at the window. "That tube made Grandpa take off his watch. The little pin. His belt. It was the strongest, most careful thing in the building. And it isn't even a rounding error. Out there is a dead city-sized star that would feel us through our skin and through the floor and through the watch you forgot to take off, all at once, atom by atom, and it does this without trying. It's just lying there cooling off."

"Lying there being the strongest thing we know about," Soren said. "Nine thousand light-years away, by accident."

Maya turned around. "Get the tablet," she said. "What direction. I want to know which window."

Soren tilted the tablet flat and let the little compass arrow swing. It searched, wobbled, settled. He stood and carried it across the room to the dark glass, and the arrow held steady, pointing low through the parking lot lights toward a patch of sky with nothing in it that either of them could see.