Nothing

Trapped beneath a bombed-out building, a young man faces death in a cramped cellar with only a failing flashlight and an unlikely companion: an elderly scientist. Buried under tons of rubble, cut off from rescuers, the two have little hope of escape—and even less time to wait for help.

The old man proposes a desperate experiment based on the hidden emptiness within matter. If the young survivor can learn to see both his own body and the surrounding stone as patterns of energy and nothingness, he may be able to pass through the ruins instead of digging through them. It sounds impossible, but with the shelter collapsing around them and death drawing closer, the young man agrees to become the subject of an untested experiment in willpower, hypnosis, and atomic theory. This compact science-fiction tale turns a bomb shelter into the setting for a startling challenge to the nature of reality.