Has Anything Ever Exploded?

The University of Sutherland gives you a visitor’s coat at the door, and every coat is too big. The tour of the biology building takes forty minutes. There are eleven of you on it, and one of you is Tobias, who is nine, and who has brought exactly one question.

He asks it at the first bench. “Has anything in here ever exploded?”

“Not in this room,” the guide says. “This is where blood samples are counted. They’re kept at four degrees, which is roughly the temperature of a fridge at home, and nothing in this room is allowed to get warm.”

Nobody else asks anything. Two of the adults are looking at their phones.

At the second bench, where a shallow tray of insects is being photographed under a lamp, he asks it again.

“No,” the guide says. “Most of what’s studied on this floor is smaller than a grain of rice. Behind you there are two hundred mice, whose growth is measured every Friday, and they haven’t exploded either.”

In the third room the walls are lined with grey metal cylinders that are taller than Tobias is. He doesn’t wait for her to begin.

“Has anything in here ever exploded?”

“This is the first room where that’s a fair question,” the guide says. “The cylinders contain hydrogen. They’re checked twice a day by somebody whose whole job is checking them. So, no.”

At the door you hand the coats back, and Tobias asks his question for the fourth time, about the whole building this time.

“Yes,” the guide says. “Once.” She points at the ceiling above the door, where there is a black mark about the size of a dinner plate. “In 1997 a student who had been told to heat something slowly heated it quickly instead. Nobody was hurt. The ceiling has never been painted.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s the only part of this tour that anybody remembers.”