10
Tuesday’s lab time and the whole of Wednesday passed in a whirlwind of graphics, data collection, and sleepless hours spent preparing for the impending federal visit. Somewhere in the helix of Dr. Kramer’s demands, Ethan managed to submit the Eischer-Langhoff grant application. He celebrated by stretching his neck away from his computer and reading a single page of This Is How You Lose the Time War at… was it really after three o’clock in the morning?
Bunsen’s runs were abbreviated jogs around the patio.
Still, he paused in the Modern Physics kitchenette on Thursday to inconvenience Erin by dumping the last of the oat milk into his mug—even if this super-quantity of creamer made his caffeine almost undrinkable. He smirked at his rival’s outrage as he tossed away the carton in front of her, his mug overflowing. Coffee spilled out onto his jeans when he tried to carry it down the hall to his office. His messages with Forster kept him smiling, though.
Forster
Approaching the sudoku starting line. Twenty-two hours to go. I hope you’re quick on the draw.
His pen paused mid-doodle. He snorted.
Ethan
Puns? This early?
Forster
I told you: I’m a menace.
Ethan
Remind me not to get on your bad side.
Forster
As long as I win tomorrow, I’ll keep the peace.
Forster
…unlike the turkeys by my office building. They were circling some roadkill today like they were ritually resurrecting it. I bet they’re planning a remastered version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds—but this time, they’ll have zombies on their side.
He snorted again.
Ethan
The humans will have you, though.
Forster
Not if these feathered dinosaurs take me out before the battle starts. Then you’ll be the only one who knows their plan, humanity’s lone hope.
Ethan
A New Hope?
Forster
Yes. The conflict will be called the Starling Wars.
His laughter propelled his chair away from his desk. His head smacked into the wall. But he grinned while he rubbed at the ache.
If he executed his role during the government visit perfectly, maybe Dr. Kramer would promote him to an office with windows, where he could monitor SVLAC’s own turkeys—or even just move him to a room that didn’t smell faintly of cleaning chemicals from its proximity to an adjoining janitorial closet.
But no promotion would materialize if he didn’t focus.
So he blotted the coffee from his jeans, wheeled himself a few inches back to his desk, and opened his inbox. At the top was his supervisor’s feedback about a white paper summarizing the Quantum group’s work.
Meyer:
The graphics are accurate.
Increase the font size on the paper heading.
Format the document as a PDF and print it.
—Kramer
He savored his department head’s approval for a moment. Maybe those windows weren’t such a moonshot dream after all? Then he confirmed the number of copies required and sent his order to the Modern Physics media room. He inspected every plastic-bound report for errors as it emerged from the printer, checking for the slightest misalignment of margins or tables, but each one was right. Since Dr. Kramer’s office door was closed, he slid a copy into his supervisor’s mailbox. The report was a triumph, a clear articulation of both the theory and practice of quantum measurement, with reams of meticulous footnotes and complex, elegant graphics—but its excellence was simply meeting expectations for Dr. Kramer. It didn’t merit a closed-door interruption. Excellence should be a normal expectation for himself, too. With Dr. Kramer as his mentor, it eventually would be.
He strode back toward his desk from the Quantum mailboxes, past an intern gingerly punching codes into a cranky copy machine by the kitchenette—which was empty. So, he could spare three minutes to brew a drinkable cup of coffee, couldn’t he? As long as it was an espresso. Fifty milligrams of caffeine would speed him through the afternoon at twice his usual productivity. The start button depressed under his thumb, and—
Beep. Beeeep. Beeeeeeeep!
An angry mechanical chirp sounded. Steam whirred from a vent behind the machine. Lights blinked on its menu screen.
Beeeeeeeep! Beep.
Had Erin crossed the appliance’s wires this morning? Or registered his fingerprints to activate a security alert? His ideas for sabotage ran riot—but then ordinary espresso began to drip into his mug. The lights on the device were green; he frowned. If it wasn’t the coffee machine, then what…
“Do you need help?”
Her voice.
She wasn’t in the kitchenette. She was in the hallway, ferrying her own armload of reports past the door without even glancing inside to see him, nonplussed and holding a normal brew. And she wasn’t addressing him with a sardonic offer of assistance, either.
“Leah?”
Leah Haddad. She was one of the Modern Physics interns, wasn’t she? The one he’d passed at the copier.
“Um… sorry, it’s just… the machine—”
Beep, beep. Beeeeep.
“I think I… broke it?”
“Let’s see.”
Thump, and the electronic ruckus stopped. “No, not broken. It just needed a whack. There’s probably a jam. Can you check the paper tray?”
Gliders rattled, then snagged.
“Unless you were using this—what even is that color? chartreuse?—flyer paper to make reminders for Human Resources about taping down loose cables, this wasn’t you. Someone else left the jam, and you got stuck in it. Let’s get that shredded sheet out.”
Paper squealed as it was extracted from the machine’s rollers.
“Thanks for fixing it, Dr. Monaghan. Sorry.”
“Call me Erin. But don’t be sorry for dealing with someone else’s mess. Be annoyed that they left it for you. And remember: we fixed it. Let me know if the scanner gives you grief.”
Her sneakers moved on toward the bullpen.
We fixed it.
The copier hummed to life. A paper tray was filled. Its scanner chirped. When the automated stapler choked on its own teeth, the intern’s tap, tap, tap got it moving again.
We.
Taking her cue from Nadine Fong, she tossed that word and its implicit praise around so casually, while Dr. Kramer—
Ethan poured his untouched mug of espresso into the sink, squashing the thought. His supervisor was a genius, not a handholding teacher, and his rival was wasting her time coaching an intern to use outdated office equipment when she should’ve been preparing for the Department of Energy’s visit. A scientist with Dr. Erin Monaghan for a mentor would never learn independence or time management. Or excellence. With Dr. Kramer, he’d someday have it all.
His someday didn’t come that week, but Friday morning arrived with him already showered after a quick run with Bunsen, shaved, and brewing his own coffee when his alarm blared its wake-up warning. He was wrung out from four days of insomnia and anxiety, but now adrenaline jangled in his nerves, triggering a surge of alertness to power him through the next twelve hours. Any come-down crash over the weekend would be worth it.
He’d deal with the fallout when it arrived.
And maybe, maybe if there was a lull in his workload after the government visit…
Maybe he’d ask Forster to join him for a drink.
But first: today.
He unearthed a suit in charcoal wool from the rear of his closet, knotting a tie and shrugging into the jacket before readying the sudoku sheet that they’d chosen by mutual blind agreement for their race.
Ping.
Forster
I’m ready to win. Ready for your defeat?
Forster
(I should warn you: I’m not a good loser. I’m a menace, remember?)
She was a menace to her siblings. He could’ve said the same of Chase. But that was where the similarities between their brothers seemed to end. Whenever Forster mentioned them, it was with a casual and playful—if occasionally irritated—fondness. They called her a menace, and she embraced the term because it so clearly wasn’t derogatory. Or if it was, there was too much history and love behind the epithet for it to hurt. Despite their distance in Michigan, she was close with her family—and an abrupt pang of longing stabbed under his ribs, bitter and sweet.
She was waiting for his reply, however. He tapped back into their thread.
Ethan
My stopwatch is set.
Forster
And—go!
With the blank squares of a sudoku grid under his hand, he couldn’t dwell on the fresh and sudden tension in his body that had nothing to do with the government’s visit, couldn’t dwell on the unsettling reality that beyond their texts, Forster was surrounded by real people, people she knew and loved—not just the violent, tender characters of Red and Blue from This Is How You Lose the Time War, like him. He couldn’t brood on the fact that he was only one small cell in the graph of her life.
He was embarrassingly grateful for that, and scribbled a final 7 just as the timer ticked past his record.
Ethan
Done.
Forster
(New Photo Message)
The picture was a screenshot of her clock. She’d finished eight seconds behind him.
Forster
Damn. But hear me out: I was using a pencil. The graphite broke.
A second picture provided evidence.
Forster
I claim the right to a rematch!
Laughter curled his tongue. He breathed and relaxed back into his desk chair, reaching for his mug.
Ethan
Accepted. But no third chances. Use a pen next time.
Forster
That’s insane. What if I make a mistake?
Ethan
Don’t.
Forster
Ugh. Teach me your flawless puzzle technique.
Ethan
Only if you concede defeat next time.
Forster
Never!
Their argument went on until almost eight o’clock, when the time demanded the truce that they’d refused to call for themselves. Then Ethan brushed his teeth until his gums ached, rubbed Bunsen’s ears for good luck, and creaked out the door in a pair of stiff Oxfords. But despite the leather pinching his feet as he merged into the southbound lanes of Junipero Serra Freeway, he caught his slight smile in the rearview mirror. He swiped inside the Modern Physics building, bypassing the kitchenette this time—he had other things on his mind—and turning down the hall toward his office, straightening his tie, sidestepping a line of jugs waiting to fill a nearby water dispenser—
He almost collided with Erin Monaghan.
Again.
Unlike that first morning, however, she was also wearing a suit.
Instead of Oxfords or her usual sneakers, she’d paired her gold-flecked ivory tweed jacket and trousers with formidable heels that elevated her height to match his. They were eye-toeye. Seen so closely now—too closely—her tortoiseshell glasses reflected reticulated metallic rings around her pupils. (Had he never noticed that detail before? Or forgotten it? How?) A single strand of hair over her ear had escaped from her high, tight bun. It drifted in the office air conditioning, tickling her neck and the edge of her parted lips—iris, juniper. His own breath fogged her lenses.
Fuck.
But he cataloged every particular without stepping away, staring because he couldn’t stop himself. She stared straight back. And apparently he’d stopped breathing while he gawked—suffocation was better than inhaling her scent again, wasn’t it?—because only an oxygen deficiency could explain the heat in his face that was creeping down his chest. His pulse throbbed under his jaw, in his ears and skull. Still, he didn’t move.
Erin was the first to recover, of course.
After a startled, unblinking moment, her mouth clamped shut. She narrowed her eyes. Her fingers darted to her lapels, as if itching to fold the tweed forward over her blouse. Her heels edged sideways to circumnavigate the obstacle he’d made of himself. But the water dispenser jugs blocked her way, and his damn Oxfords fixed his feet to the floor.
A flush of irritation swept over her cheeks, dipping along her throat, not stopping at the neckline of her usual graphic t-shirt or sweater but traveling beneath her collarbones now, under the buttons of her blouse and her silk camisole.
He inhaled again. He had to, dizzy, too hot—so hot—and—
“Here you are, Erin.”
“Meyer.”
Again, like that first day: Dr. Kramer.
His body torqued to face his department head coming down the hall. But it wasn’t just Dr. Kramer approaching. Nadine Fong walked with her fellow supervisor past the bullpen, one hand supporting the belly that extended far past her open blazer and the other raised in greeting to her junior colleague. Erin took advantage of his angled shoulders to slip by, her heels stabbing the carpet as she moved to join Fong.
“Do we need any final changes to our visuals before the Secretary arrives?”
“The graphics are fine. Better than fine, which you already know. No, it’s not that. Erin, did you reserve a seat for Dr. Quarles’ presentation?”
“She’s a Sakurai Prize recipient and former president of the American Physical Society. Of course I did. If there’s time after her talk, I have questions prepared—”
“Quarles isn’t speaking,”
Dr. Kramer cut her off.
Fong sighed. “Her outbound flight after the ICTP conference has been delayed.”
The International Centre for Theoretical Physics was in Trieste.
“She’s still in Italy?”
Ethan’s voice jumped octaves. But at least he got the words out.
“Which means that there’s no keynote speaker on site for the Secretary’s visit. That’s a problem, Meyer.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Erin and Fong traded a silent “Houston.”
Dr. Kramer, however, crossed his arms. He tapped his own elbow with an index finger. When Dr. John Kramer identified a problem, there was one acceptable result: it got fixed. Fast.
He tapped a second time.
Ethan couldn’t quantum-leap Dr. Helena Quarles across the Atlantic. The odds that another physicist of her caliber was in the Bay Area today and available on six hours’ notice to run a presentation for the Department of Energy were too small to measure, even for him. So the substitute speaker had to be someone from SVLAC’s staff who was on campus and had time to put together a talk.
Not Elias Schulz, busy with wining, dining, and glad-handing promises of funding.
Not Nadine Fong, shifting from foot to foot, eyeing the bathroom down the hall.
Tap.
Producing a presentation to Dr. Kramer’s standards would take days: speaker notes, click timings for animations, drafted answers to potential questions.
But:
Tap tap. Tap tap tap—
“I’ll do it,”
he heard himself say. “I’ll give the talk.”
Silence.
Erin’s mouth fell open again. Then:
“You’re offering to present, Dr. Meyer?”
Fong paused her fidgeting. “Are you prepared?”
“I will be,”
he told Dr. Kramer—then waited for an agonizing second until his supervisor’s fingers settled, until he nodded.
“You have work to do, Meyer,”
serious and unsmiling.
“Yes,”
he exhaled.
But if Dr. Kramer didn’t smile, Erin did. She ran her tongue along her lower lip, and there was naked, unsettling calculation in her gaze. “Good luck.”
Losing her sudoku challenge to Bannister wasn’t what irritated her this morning.
It was her feet.
She’d accepted the necessity of ordering a ride service today, since the formality of her clothes and hairstyle weren’t conducive to cycling. But she wished that she’d foreseen the equal necessity of packing a pair of flats. The nude adhesive strips that she’d taped behind her ankles to create a buffer between her skin and the crisp, elegant leather of her heels was doing its job—Martina had mentioned that particular sartorial hack, and she’d be treating her friend to bottomless mimosas over a post-Pilates brunch on Saturday in gratitude, if she could still hobble to the restaurant—but her arches were already aching and the shoes’ wicked pointed toes were squashing her bones.
How did Adrian’s Manhattan dates and business associates do it?
Was there some trick with gel supports? Or maybe the women just got on with work or pleasure to take their minds off the discomfort. Which was what she needed to do.
Leaving Ethan Meyer and Kramer by the water dispenser, she waited for Nadine to complete her pilgrimage to the bathroom, then retreated into her supervisor’s office.
Good luck.
It was.
“I’m sorry to hear about Dr. Quarles. But this could benefit us. Even Dr. Meyer can’t be in two places at once, and if he spends the day preparing his talk, he can’t pitch his research during the department tours—or one-on-one with the Secretary of Energy by serendipitously running into her on campus.”
“But you can.”
“Yes.”
She flipped through a document she’d assembled about their department’s work on pulsars and her own LIGO research. Beneath a series of charts tracking the alignment between predicted and observed radio wave frequencies from a neutron star, the page was packed with graphics illustrating the compression and dilation of space-time on Earth from the passage of astrophysical gravitational waves. They were graphics that even a layperson would find compelling; she’d used Bannister’s art as inspiration. The Secretary of Energy’s position was a political appointment, and she couldn’t make assumptions about the depth of Elise McCandless’s science expertise.
Bracing a hand against Nadine’s desk to relieve the pressure on her feet, she went on, “Everything that Dr. Meyer communicates to the Secretary will need to happen during his presentation. Which means that I can redirect the conversation—or refute something in it—if I need to.”
“Erin, you don’t…”
Nadine’s lips pursed. But then she just shook her head and reached for the document. “What’s your plan for Secretary McCandless?”
“Our research explores renewable interstellar energy sources and how the movement of astrophysical bodies impacts space-time. It’s groundbreaking work. Or ground-rippling work, in my case. I can’t let a slumping economy stymie that. I’ll figure out a way to talk privately—or semi-privately—with her today. Even better, I’ll corner someone from the Office of Science. They’ll have more understanding of the subject matter and less security to navigate. Marcie explained the tour schedule, so I know where to be to meet them, and when. Once I get their attention, how can they not be fascinated?”
“While quantum physics, on the other hand, is generally incomprehensible to everyone except experts—”
“—especially with Dr. Meyer speaking. If he sticks to his normal presentation playbook, a non-specialist audience won’t find him interesting at all. If they even stay awake.”
“But you’re a good speaker, Erin. Though if you could be a kind one, too…”
She was a good speaker. Usually.
She’d been headed to Nadine’s office to confirm her plans for the day, but she’d run up against Ethan in the hall, just like on her onboarding day at SVLAC—and the abrupt and level meeting of their eyes—slate and blue starred with mica—with the warm, bitter spice of fresh aftershave prickling her nose (he’d been unshaven before; she would’ve remembered this), hair rising on her nape so that she itched to draw her jacket closed over her blouse, wishing that its closure were a zipper rather than delicate gold buttons, something quick and forceful and efficient—followed by a lurch in her stomach—
—Easy, Monaghan—
Damn him.
He wouldn’t rattle her again. Wouldn’t silence her. The shock was over now, her resistance against it—against him—was prepared, and this day was too important to bungle over aftershave or disturbing dreams. So:
“I am a good speaker,”
she repeated Nadine’s assertion. I will be. Then she glanced at her watch. “And it’s game time.”
The Department of Energy’s tour began with opening remarks and an orientation from the lab’s director over coffee and pastries at the Science and Public Support building. Since maneuvering a scooter in heels was a stunt that even Wes wouldn’t pull, she winced her way over from Modern Physics on foot and arrived just as a government motorcade rolled past the gatehouse. She knew better than to approach the cars, stationing herself instead at the building’s main entrance with her staff badge displayed. Elias Schulz and his assistant walked past her to meet the Secretary, but she focused on the security vanguard advancing toward her location by the doors.
“Welcome to the SVLAC National Laboratory,”
she greeted them.
Their faces were expressionless behind the armor of sunglasses and earpieces. Ignoring her, they took up positions flanking the entryway. She moved aside without protest. She’d expected this.
“You’ve already swept the area and know the campus layout, but you might not know that Blue Bottle—that open-air cafe just down Ring Road?—will have better coffee than anything from the cafeteria. Just in case you get a break later.”
No response.
“Also, they make danishes on Fridays.”
Still nothing.
Well, she’d have other opportunities, though it would’ve been better to establish herself now with the Secretary’s security team. Disappointed but undaunted, she was turning away, prepared to try her luck at lunch, when one of the suits behind her coughed.
“What kind of danishes?”
Erin had to suppress a satisfied smile before she answered, “Cream cheese.”
Then she kept walking, giving the officials a respectful berth and making no attempt to speak with the Secretary or the staff from the Office of Science.
That would come later.
She was in.
She spent the rest of the morning blocking out her department’s research schedule for the upcoming quarter, assigning Marco Rossi and Sandra O’Connor-Young to oversee data collection cycles for their binary pulsar study and slotting in interns to assist with cleaning the radio wave signal exports. Leah Haddad had experience with running a Fourier transform, didn’t she? Nadine had mentioned the cohort’s various interests and backgrounds while introducing the group to their department. And she was smart but very diffident, so maybe she should lead the intern group’s data review… The facilitation of growth opportunities aside, however, it was mindless work, just playing Tetris with time. Her focus remained on the Department of Energy’s schedule.
9:00 a.m. – Opening remarks, orientation, and breakfast
9:45 a.m. – Klystron gallery and Linac Light Source tour
:30 a.m. – Visit discovery site of desmostylian fossil
11:15 a.m. – Break
11:45 a.m. – Archival Survey of Space and Time (ASST) camera tour
12:30 p.m. – Lunch
Fund-hungry physicists had to eat, too.
She was at the cafeteria when the tour group arrived for lunch. One of the security guards that she’d approached earlier stood by the balcony doors. He was wiping his mouth with a napkin from Blue Bottle.
“Was the danish good?”
She began to assemble a meal tray, slowed by the stack of reports under her arm and her glances at the cafeteria’s entry. Secretary McCandless was approaching.
“Yes.”
“Did you get the cream cheese one?”
“Yes.”
The Secretary crossed the lunchroom with her entourage and the security guard opened the doors onto the balcony, where a catering spread from Evvia was reserved for the federal personnel. Elise McCandless smoothed back her expensively colored hair when a gust of wind blew in from the terrace, revealing a pair of striking diamond studs in her ears.
Perfect.
“Ooof.”
Erin wrenched a recalcitrant plastic cup from its stack with a noisy pop. She shrugged at the Blue Bottle guard. “You know, I’m studying gravitational waves produced from the movement of astrophysical masses—like the collision of black holes or neutron stars—by looking at their impact on space-time. It takes a monumental amount of force generated from thousands of light-years away to show even a tiny data blip on our monitoring equipment. Imagine if that same force, that pressure, originated on Earth. It’d be enough to make diamonds! I’m still not sure that the pressure could be greater than the vacuum sealing these cups together, though.”
Her intentions couldn’t have been more obvious if she’d been holding up a neon sign that read “Pay Attention and Money to Me!”
But the Secretary paused. Her diamond studs glittered. “SVLAC’s research could be used to make gemstones?”
Yes!
“No, Madam Secretary. At least…”
She took an experimental step forward. The security guard didn’t stop her. She was discussing fashion and had good danish recommendations. No threat. “Not yet. But my department’s work indicates that there are other natural high pressure and high temperature zones in the universe with the potential to create diamonds from carbon, beyond those occurring under the Earth’s mantle. With the right equipment and funding, we might be able to harness the forces producing those pressures and temperatures. Scientists at NASA have already found nanodiamonds in meteorites! They’re too small for use in jewelry, though. And standard lab-grown gems are commercially available, of course, but just imagine: ethically produced interstellar diamonds…”
“Which department is that?”
“Relativistic Mechanics.”
“Not Quantum Mechanics?”
A man from the Secretary’s retinue raised a question now. His badge identified him as the Director of the United States Office of Science. “The general consensus seems to be that quantum is the future of experimental physics. But clearly, there are other relevant fields.”
“My group works with areas of mechanics that are compatible with special and general relativity, sir. Tangible, observable physics and,”
Erin tapped her documents, “tangible, observable reports on radio waves emitting from binary pulsars. If we can capture those radio waves—which should be much easier than capturing the force of colliding black holes, in all honesty—they could potentially provide unlimited and reliable power sources for astronauts in orbit.”
“Really.”
He eyed her files. “Do you manage this group?”
“Dr. Nadine Fong heads the Relativistic Mechanics group. I’m Dr. Erin Monaghan.”
He appraised her as he’d appraised her papers. Then he extended a hand. “Dr. Richard Hall.”
“Welcome to SVLAC, Dr. Hall.”
Before she and the Director could advance their professional courtesies further into outright networking, a mass of hungry government officials compelled the guard to take his charges out onto the balcony for lunch. She retreated without protest, abandoning her tray and her cup to grab a prepackaged salad. She hummed “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
while she walked back to Modern Physics. She hardly felt her blisters.
She was still grateful to take a seat in Maiman Auditorium that evening, and surreptitiously eased her chafed, swollen feet out of her heels. She had no intention of moving for a while, anyhow; Hall had invited her to join him in a row behind Secretary McCandless and her security detail. He’d listened to her formal research presentation during a lightning round of department tours, and now she had his ear for the next hour, too. Likely his interest, as well—Ethan Meyer was awkwardly clearing his throat into a microphone at the podium, a slide packed with microscopic numbers and dense text glowing behind him on the projector screen.
“Secretary McCandless and distinguished guests from the United States Office of Science, welcome. Dr. Helena Quarles was scheduled to address you tonight, but she’s unfortunately been delayed in Italy. So instead—I’m Dr. Ethan Meyer, from Quantum Mechanics at SVLAC.”
He ran his fingers through his hair in a short, brusque gesture, as if searching for the pen or pencil that he sometimes stuck behind his ear. He’d either attempted to pat down his cowlicks with water, or else sweat was beading on his temples. His tie looked too tight. “This evening, I’ll discuss the research that Dr. John Kramer’s department is conducting on quantum measurement. When a half-reflective mirror splits perpendicular laser beams and bounces them along a pair of thirty-meter tunnels—the beams are calibrated to register the precise locations of the mirrors—”
His data was immaculate, like always. His analyses were sound, obviously. But his constant clarification about the early status of his work overbore its genuinely compelling results. Head cocked, Hall squinted at the print on his slides and frowned.
Under-promise, over-deliver was Adrian Monaghan’s mantra. Ethan’s conscientious scientific caution was doing him no favors with the politicians, however. Erin took full advantage of that.
“Relativistic mechanics functions at a much broader scale than the quantum field,”
she murmured to the Director. “Quantum is useful for micro-scales, but my department’s scope is the rest of the galaxy.”
“You mentioned black holes earlier.”
“Yes. Gravity loses its predictive power around them. As does relativistic mechanics. More than the generation of diamond-level pressure zones, that’s why it’s important to study their behavior through the proxy of gravitational waves. If we can determine why gravity fails to reliably affect matter and why geometry becomes ill defined around black holes—if we can replace our current singularity theories with fact—then we’ll have solved one of the greatest outstanding questions in physics. There also won’t be a need for two contradictory theories of reality anymore, and—”
The crackle of a microphone drowned her out before she could explain the extent of the gulf between her field and Ethan’s, and why they collided at the rims of black holes. Before she could argue why her field—why she—was on the right side of scientific history, too.
“…I’ll take questions.”
Ethan’s credits faded to the white of a blank projector beam. Fragments of applause rippled in fits and starts through the auditorium as the audience realized that his talk was finished, some flinching awake and others putting down their phones. Despite his frown, Richard Hall was among those clapping, as was Secretary McCandless.
So Erin leaned forward. “I have a question.”
“Monaghan.”
Because she was watching for it, she saw his fingers clench on the edge of the podium, saw the corners of his mouth tighten.
He knew what she meant to do.
But hadn’t he done the same to her? During their all-hands: Dirty results… fraudulent data. Turnabout was fair play. Now here he was, standing in Maiman Auditorium’s very public spotlight of his own volition, ripe for a fall.
For her revenge.
This was easy.
“Your research concerns a measurement of the smallest possible unit of space. A quantum. This requires isolating that unit, doesn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“And space—space-time—is a wave.”
“Relativistic mechanics and your own experimental research both currently assert that as fact,”
with a shrug, adding quickly, “However, unlike LIGO’s gravitational wave measurements that require verification with multi-messenger astronomy, the holometer has no implicit noise to scrub from its signal. The accuracy of its readings is never subject to human error when running a Fourier transform, and it doesn’t need external—”
“A wave is inherently in motion, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but what does that have to do with—”
“For your holometer to yield meaningful results, you’d need to isolate a unit in a moving wave. Isn’t the limitation of the Quantum Mechanical Model that it can’t show speed and position at the same time? By the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, you’ll never know exactly where your unit is. How can you measure it if you can’t locate it?”
“The Quantum Mechanical Model can’t show the speed and location of an electron simultaneously. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Model will fail when applied to measuring a quantum of space.”
“You can’t be sure, though.”
“I—”
Rigorous, exacting, honest Ethan Meyer wouldn’t promise certainty if he couldn’t validate his assertion with data. His fingers spasmed again.
“Relativistic mechanics, on the other hand, has no such practical limitations. General relativity has passed all observational tests. It’s consistent with experimental data. Which can be collected accurately. It seems that you can’t say the same.”
The quiet as she sat back in triumph from her tabletop microphone was very loud. Ethan abandoned the stage a minute later after giving only the briefest of thanks for the audience’s attention and consideration, face set as he shoved his laptop into his bag with unsteady hands. When it became clear that he wasn’t coming back to the podium for an encore no one wanted, Schulz and his assistant had to finish the night. Hall passed Erin a business card while the audience filed out of Maiman Auditorium.
“I’d welcome additional details about your department’s gravitational and radio wave research. You’re working at the vanguard of physics. I’m interested to see more from you, Dr. Monaghan.”
“I’ll send the information on Monday.”
“Good. Now, I have some people I’d like you to meet.”
Mind buzzing with names, credentials, positions, funding lures, and the pulse of fading adrenaline, she wobbled back to the Modern Physics building almost an hour after Ethan’s talk had ended. She’d made connections with the federal officials, had seen her rival publicly, definitively silenced in a forum much more consequential than an internal research meeting—if her gut twinged at a flash of memory articulating his lowered eyes and shaking fingers, she squashed it—and she’d even survived the day in heels. She was secure in both her research and her control as she stepped past the badge scanner. (She did kick off her shoes in the hall, though.) Because if she could manage all this, then her tongue-tied moment by the water dispenser must’ve been a fluke. Right?
She padded to the bullpen in semi-darkness. The building’s central nervous system had powered down for the night and she made her way toward her desk by the dim hints of emergency exit lighting, Modern Physics’ fluorescent bulbs and air conditioning off, its chairs deserted, office doors closed and locked.
All except one.
The rapid scratch of a pen, the hiss of curses, a paperweight or book flung against the wall—
Thud!
Harsh, shallow breathing in the silence.
Someone else was still here, too.
She was in his doorway before she even knew she’d moved.
Ethan Meyer was slumped at his desk. His head rested in his hands, fingers kneading his forehead and tugging at his hair. Scraps of graph paper littered the floor around him, fanning out beside an overturned calendar that he must’ve thrown at the door. His breath hitched and his shoulders shuddered. His eyelids were pinched closed.
She didn’t mean to speak. She wouldn’t have. But when her own breath caught with an unexpected twist in her chest, he jerked up, eyes opening—black, wilder than his hair.
One jagged inhale. Then—
“Please go,” he said.
Simple, quiet words.
Please.
Not even a demand.
Please go. Toneless. And all at once… suddenly… she had nothing to say. So she went, and she left her triumph behind with him.