A few weeks passed. The red alert JARVIS had sounded in the Kuiper Belt turned out to be a false alarm, as three successive waves of deep-space interceptor probes launched by Tony confirmed. The object was only the wreck of a Kree Empire advance scout ship, crippled beyond repair and flung off course by a gravitational disturbance. The alien pilot inside had long since frozen solid. Tony's deep-space satellites kept the wreck under close watch, and nothing more came of it.
New York's morning rush hour was still a hopeless snarl, but otherwise, all was peaceful. Stark's drones had chased even the petty thieves off the streets, driving the city's crime rate to a new low.
The United Life Sciences Research Center in Lower Manhattan.
The third-floor laboratory was now Jane's Astrophysics Institute. Honestly, Chen Xiao had only made room for her experiments because watching Thor trail after Jane all day was too pitiful. It definitely had nothing to do with the pile of gold coins Thor had brought him.
Sunlight slanted across a chalk-dusted windowsill and fell on a humming centrifuge.
Thor hunched his towering frame over the bench, a frayed white floral apron tied around his waist. With a fine-bristled brush in hand, he carefully scrubbed a quartz test tube no thicker than his thumb.
His arm was thicker than an ordinary person's thigh, with veins knotted across his forearm. Holding the fragile glass, he kept his fingertips stiff and even held his breath.
"Thor, the voltage on spectrometer three has drifted another 0.3 millivolts. Can you steady it?"
Jane Foster wore her hair loose and rimless glasses on her nose. With half a pencil between her teeth, she kept calculating formulas on a sheet of scratch paper without looking up.
"Right away, Jane. Leave it to me."