17
He’d been right about the location of Modern Physics’ defibrillator: mounted on the wall by the kitchenette in an attention-grabbing red case, its cover stamped with the jagged peaks of a heart rate.
But he’d been wrong to imagine that he could walk past it without thinking of—her legs splayed for him across her desk, spine arched, tortoiseshell glasses misted over black, hazy eyes, throat convulsing as he worked his fingers past the lace between her thighs, as he bent close to inhale her, to taste the heat of her desire—
He thrust a mug into the coffee machine’s slot so hard that the ceramic rattled. Breathe. He didn’t need a defibrillator. He didn’t need caffeine. He needed a damn tranquilizer. At least a cold dose of oat milk. Or ice—that job assignment in Antarctica? Since Antarctica was out of reach for the moment, however, he yanked open the staff refrigerator to grab his creamer. When he swung the metal door closed again, Erin was entering the kitchenette.
The speed of traffic on Sand Hill Road had blown tangles into her hair; her ponytail was loose from its elastic, twisting over her shoulder and catching in the teeth of her utility jacket’s zipper, half-closed over a burgundy sweater. Her lips glimmered where she’d run her tongue across the wind-chapped skin. A tiny fleck of grit dotted her nose.
“Uh.”
His brain blanked. “You have a…”
It wasn’t how he’d meant to greet her. But was there any scenario in which their first conversation after… after… wouldn’t have left him floundering?
One eyebrow lifted. “Something on my face?”
She swiped at her chin.
“A little higher. Just…”
He set aside his carton before he spilled it. He shoved his fists into his pockets. “On your nose.”
“I got stuck behind a street sweeper on Oak Avenue.”
She swiped again. “There?”
“No.”
“Great.”
When she rolled her eyes, dust glittered in her eyelashes. “But are you just going to… maybe not harass people at the coffee machine today, but watch me waste my time like this, when we have project deadlines to meet? …or are you going to help?”
He freed one hand to offer her a napkin.
She ignored it, stepping closer. A smirk scrunched up her nose, pink with the wind of her ride—and God, he wanted to touch her, to tap those tiny wrinkles and that speck of grit, to trace down her cheek to the corner of her lips, to swipe a finger across the chapped skin, savoring this evidence of her brash mastery of the road before slipping his thumb into her mouth, testing the sharpness of her teeth on his skin and the dexterous softness of her tongue—
“Really? No help?”
When she snapped an elastic band around her hair again, its twang jerked through his groin, and her smirk widened with her nod at his brew cooling in the machine. “Then the least you can do is to brew me some coffee. Is that mine?”
Like she’d followed him into his own kitchen to retrieve a familiar mug from the dish drainer. He swallowed so hard that his ears popped. Heat flashed down his neck. “S-sure.”
“Thanks.”
“Um—milk?”
She turned with the mug cupped in her palms. She cocked her other eyebrow at him, cocked her hip against the counter, and slotted a second mug into place. “What do you think?”
I sometimes spike my creamer with coffee.
Hot and flustered, he hadn’t meant to laugh.
“Menace.”
He upended the carton for her.
“A compliment from Dr. Ethan Meyer—for me?”
“Don’t get greedy.”
“I’m not greedy. I’m just…”
she reached behind herself for his filling mug, eyes and lips bright, “…getting your coffee.”
Space-time really was broken.
“Because you had a late night. Milk for you, too?”
“You don’t have any hands free for the creamer carton,”
and before he could rationalize all his why-nots, he took both mugs from her. He set them away on the counter. His fingers were steady. Almost. “You can’t send messages if you’re holding these. Since we’re only communicating by text outside of our project work blocks, you need your hands.”
“Then this must be a work block, if we’re talking at the lab. If my hands are free.”
He nodded. “We never resolved your question about the hutch’s lighting.”
“A critical inquiry.”
“Critical,”
and he swallowed too hard again when her thumb hooked into his pocket, drawing him into her breath and her smile.
“I’m very focused on getting an answer from you, Dr.—”
“Meyer!”
Dr. Kramer.
His department head strode into the kitchenette. Ethan stumbled back against the refrigerator. But though Dr. Kramer’s glance identified their two mugs on the counter, his attention didn’t continue on to Erin beside the coffee machine. Instead, he stepped past her and selected black coffee from the on-screen menu. How could he not notice her?
“Should I expect a delay on your weekly status report for the quantum gravity project?”
“Uh—no.”
“Good. Preparations for my transition will occupy my time until I leave for CERN on Thursday. We’ll review your work this afternoon.”
Dr. Kramer retrieved his coffee and left.
Silence.
Then:
“He wants our status update today?”
Erin’s smile had vanished with Dr. Kramer’s appearance. Now, disbelief slackened her mouth. “Today? What does he think we’ll have to report? We’ve only had two days—three, if you count today—at the lab since you submitted our project charter for review.”
“Yes—but we… we’ve also had Saturday and Sunday.”
Ethan nodded at Tomasz Szymanski entering the kitchenette, requesting confirmation from his colleague, “Five days. That’s a research week.”
Szymanski returned his nod.
“By whose standards?”
Neither of them answered her.
“Fine. I was planning to meet with Human Resources to discuss an increase to our interns’ summer stipend, but if the report needs to be finished today?”
Coffee sloshed up her mug as she shrugged. “We don’t have space booked for a work session, though.”
Their hours in the Sidewinder conference room were scheduled for Wednesday.
“Um.”
Ethan didn’t look at Szymanski when he said, “My office at one o’clock?”
“Five after one.”
He barricaded himself at his desk through the length of the morning and scrutinized row after row of reference data. Despite Erin’s surprise over the timeline for their status report, they had been on their federal research assignment for over a week—if their time spent crafting its charter was included in the total; Dr. Kramer would expect results. Friday’s consultation with the engineers in the West Experimental Hall had gotten… derailed… before they could finalize the structural updates needed in the Matter in Extreme Conditions hutch for their black hole model and before they could run even a preliminary atomic experiment, so that left them with Tuinstra’s data, Ethan’s holometer results, and Erin’s LIGO outputs as pertinent reference material to include in the report. Tuinstra’s data was a simple copy-and-paste from her paper. He knew his own numbers inside out, and Erin had reviewed them yesterday. But he hadn’t gone spelunking into the interferometer’s latest yields, yet.
His fingers inched toward his phone.
No.
He opened their SVLAC communications channel.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Do you have your last six months of LIGO data available?
Dr. Erin Monaghan
Yes. I’ll even share it with you, if you’re sure you want to touch it. (Warning: it might contaminate your own data by proximity.)
Dr. Ethan Meyer
I apologized for that comment, remember? And yes, I do want it.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
Let the record show that I provided a hazard alert. Sending it now. Just give the file a minute to reach your inbox. It’s enormous.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Supermassive data.
He tilted back his headphones to catch her snicker from the bullpen.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
…and supermassive fiscal meetings, too. See you at 1:05 p.m.
He replaced his headphones once he heard her move into a conference room with Rossi and Dr. O’Connor-Young. Then he sketched the Cassiopeia constellation and scarfed down an early sandwich from the cafeteria until her LIGO file came through. Opening its export spreadsheets, he enlarged them on his monitor, rolled his sleeves up over his forearms, and got to work—
—only to surface an hour later with his ears aching underneath the clamp of his headphones, his neck and wrists stiff with the intensity of his focus, still standing despite his lowered desk, and with his brain buzzing like Junipero Serra Freeway at rush hour.
“Because twenty-seven plus eighteen is forty-five. Not thirty-two,”
he confirmed out loud.
The math was easier than breathing.
And the relevant mass delineated in Erin’s data was thirty-two suns. Not forty-five.
It should’ve been forty-five.
Unless…
The clock on his monitor read 1:00 p.m.
He couldn’t wait, pushing past his empty chair hard enough to send it spinning into the wall he shared with another adjoining supply closet—a mop toppled audibly, followed by the clatter of dominoing chemical spray bottles—he rushed to the door, wrenching it open—to find her already there, a hand raised to knock.
“I know I’m early, but—”
“I found something.”
“What?”
“You need to see this.”
Ignoring the heads popping up over cubicle walls in the bullpen, he seized her arm, towing her into his office and back to his desk. Not even her sweater riding up to reveal the jut of her hip bone and the freckles scattered across her stomach could distract him. He turned his monitor to show her the LIGO exports alongside his calculations. “Look. I saw it in your interferometer data. I don’t know what this means for quantum gravity as a whole, since it’s just one event and data point to reference—”
“You saw the principle of… addition?”
She frowned.
“No, I—I’d planned to start Dr. Kramer’s status report earlier, until—but this could be relevant to our event horizon model.”
“What?”
again. But this time, her frown was for the tiny numbers on his screen. Angling her glasses on her nose, tugging her sweater back into place, she dropped her backpack to the carpet and moved closer.
“It’s possible that LIGO is detecting thermal radiation emitting from black holes,” he said.
A breathless pause. She blinked. “What?!”
“SVLAC’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is—”
“—picking up naturally occurring Hawking radiation?”
“Yes. The holometer’s construction and function is based on interferometer technology, so I’m familiar with how your instrument works.”
He highlighted the relevant mass differences, then dragged up a recent multi-messenger astronomy review from Kitt Peak beside LIGO’s raw data; Arizona’s observatory confirmed the merger of two black holes on the same date as the detector’s output. “The mass of the black holes that merged during the interferometer’s activation time was calculated as equivalent to about twenty-seven and eighteen suns, respectively. The merger should’ve resulted in a mass of forty-five suns. But it didn’t.”
“The combined mass is calculated at… at thirty-two suns, instead.”
She verified the documents’ export dates. Her ponytail tilted over her shoulder to brush his arm across the desk. Its strands shivered with the acceleration of her breath. “Which isn’t mathematically possible—”
“Unless some of that mass was lost.”
“And the only way that it could’ve been lost…”
Her eyes flickered up to his. Her pupils were cavernous, now: excitement, incredulous wonder.
“…is if that mass radiated off as gravitational waves.”
“After the initial collision, a portion of the infalling waves would’ve been reflected away from the new black hole. Back to LIGO’s detectors. These second waves would be weaker and slightly delayed when compared with the gravitational waves from the actual merger.”
“They are.”
“Which… which tells us that Hawking’s theory about the emission of thermal radiation from black holes is observable in the wild, not just in a lab. We can measure it through LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves. We might be able to eavesdrop on the behavior of mass and matter at the event horizons of black holes! Actual black holes!”
“There’s your sole-author paper for Nature Physics.”
“Yes!”
But despite her hands clenching with visible adrenaline, she still somehow managed to exhale a breath of skepticism a moment later. “You’d really let me take the credit, though?”
“It’s your research. Your data.”
“That’s true, so thank you. But…”
she leaned forward over his desk on her knuckles, huffing and shaking her head, even while her cheeks flushed and her eyes shone, “…it’s irritating that I’m only getting my second major paper—”
“—and your first one in a mainstream journal—”
“—because you found something in my data that I’d missed. By using multi-messenger astronomy, too! You’re going to be insufferable about your genius in my field, aren’t you? You probably want to be a co-author.”
“No.”
He moved to meet her across his monitor and sudoku calendar. “The sole authorship’s yours, Monaghan. I’d never pollute my reputation in the quantum world by voluntarily associating myself with relativistic mechanics.”
She raised her chin. “Relativistic mechanics is half of our quantum gravity equation.”
“I said voluntarily. Didn’t we agree that none of this is voluntary?”
“Yes, because I can think of much better uses for my time than working on status reports and research bureaucracy with you. Like combing through your data to find something groundbreaking—”
“Groundbreaking?”
He echoed the tilt of her head, which closed their distance by another inch. “More like, breaking space into discrete units.”
“I’m the one who’s good with words.”
Her gaze dropped to his mouth. “Don’t get clever with me.”
Clever. It was Chase Meyer Jr. who was clever with women, not him. But Erin Monaghan was here, perched over his desk, and she was… Erin. Not women.
So, “If you’re so good with words, are you volunteering to type up our report?”
“Do I look like I’m sitting pretty behind your desk, ready to take dictation?”
“No. You’re on my desk.”
One finger lifted to trace along with the pencil he’d tucked behind his ear. “Do you want me on your desk, Ethan?”
Yes.
And: fuck.
Because he did—he did—and he might be clever with her, but Dr. Kramer expected a report on his desk by the end of the workday, which meant that his supervisor was waiting for research results, while he, Ethan, was…
“I… yes—but we agreed that we wouldn’t. We need to focus, and this—”
“We’re not violating our agreement. This isn’t sabotage.”
Erin’s hand slipped down his neck to fist in the collar of his vest, slightly too tight. But steadying, somehow—at least until she continued, “Thanks to Dr. Kramer, we’re even in a project work block today. We need to write his status report. We will. But we also need to be strategic with our resources. Time, focus… and arousal is the opposite of focus. We’ll work on the report once we’ve restored equilibrium.”
“E-equilibrium?”
She nodded, tongue sweeping over her lips. Her eyes gleamed with danger and gold. With promises. “For science.”
…was she right?
He wanted her to be right. He wanted her.
“For science,”
he whispered—
—and then finally—finally, Ethan let himself break. Not a moment of mindless impulse, like in the XCS control room. A choice. In a single efficient motion that manipulated angles and weight and gravity to his desire, he had her on his desk, her legs wrapped around his hips as he dragged the elastic from her ponytail to cradle her head, and he couldn’t breathe for the fierce churn of anticipation and appetite, for his own wanting—having.
Their hungry lips collided. They toppled together back onto a stack of paperwork and sticky notes, almost crushing his laptop. One of Erin’s hands wound into his hair while the other tugged open his vest to unbutton his shirt, and he gasped when her knees hitched tighter around his waist, a savage burst of kinetic energy flipping him over beneath her. Straddling him now, she raked her nails down his stomach and reached for his belt as he fumbled between them to loosen the maddening tightness of her jeans, then swiped his thumb under her waistband.
Lace.
“Fuck—”
She yanked his belt free. His zipper followed. Foil crinkled from her rear pocket when she shimmied her legs bare, kicking away her sneakers. She grinned—“That was a hypothetical activity for today, yes”—before ripping open the condom packet with her teeth and a wild shake of her hair.
He moaned and dug his fingers into the creases of muscle in her thighs, angling her over him again, coaxing her hips lower against his. “You have genius ideas.”
“I know,”
with a scrape of lace against his boxers, her arms arching overhead to toss off her sweater and reveal a camisole clinging to the curves of her breasts and waist. “And I like to hear you say it.”
“Urgh—”
was all he could manage, however, because now her fingers sneaked down to curl around him. The cyclist’s calluses on the heel of her hand jolted his skin with electrifying friction as she firmed her grip on his cock.
“Yes?”
“U-uh!”
The pressure rolling down his length was a sheath of ribbed latex. Choking on another devout fuck, he thrust up against her fingers—and against her easy mastery of his body and brain, too, against those smiles and touches that knew the meaning of his every twitch and whimper. If he didn’t take back an edge of control now, he never would, and he stood no chance if she remained poised over him like this, tantalizing and powerful, so—
“Higher,”
he told her.
“What?”
“Higher, Erin.”
He urged her hips away from his, coaxing her up over his body and his desk, to his mouth.
“Oh.”
For once, she complied. Eyes wide, lips parted, startled and so, so beautiful, she settled where he placed her with her knees splayed around his ears between his wobbling monitor and an equally unsteady desk lamp. He murmured at the apex of her thighs, “Here.”
“…oh!”
Her shudder rippled over his mouth. Erin lurched forward to brace her palms against the wall behind his desk.
Grinning now himself, he stroked up her thighs to trace the lace of her panties between her legs, where it whispered against his lips. He edged the fabric aside, exposing her to the cool air and the heat of his breath.
“Yes?”
“Y-yes. F… for science.”
“Mmm.”
He locked his fingers around her hips to hold her steady. Then he licked past the soft, wet curls to taste her. He set a slow pace, exploring with gentle nips, with firm suction and feather-light brushes, and she was almost motionless for a moment, just quivering in his hands and under his mouth, barely breathing. But when he slipped inside her, easing her closer, easing himself deeper, deeper, and flicked his tongue—her perilous balance on some internal precipice between pleasure and reflexive dominance shattered. Abandoning her brace against the wall, Erin’s fingers knotted in his hair. She ground down against his mouth, gasping, urging him deeper still. He flicked his tongue again. Her hips bucked hard. Again—and now she was reckless, wild, canting to the motions of his lips and tongue and teeth. A pen hit the floor. So did his lamp. The desk creaked beneath them, activating its glitchy elevation sequence.
He didn’t stop.
“Fuck, Ethan—”
She was laughing as they rose, whimpering as he swirled his tongue, and it was glorious.
He only gripped her thighs harder for balance, his own hips jerking while he swallowed her wetness, groaning his satisfaction as he followed the currents of her desire and his, tongue coaxing, fingers digging, caressing, breathing nothing but her, drowning in her rough, tightening joy, her body coiling taut above him, her eyes fluttering, breath stuttering, until—
—until—
Erin buried her teeth in her forearm with a soundless scream. The noise vibrated into his mouth and his ribs, mute and potent. He caught her as she collapsed sideways. Cradling her to his chest, first in silence and then, once he could breathe a little, with wordless murmurs against her hair, he ran one slow palm along her thigh flung across his to soothe her through the aftershocks, gentling her back to herself… but also to prevent her overheated skin from sliding over his groin, because if she touched him right now, he’d embarrass himself like a teenager.
“Good?”
he asked after a quiet minute, when her panting had steadied against his shoulder.
“Ethan…”
Her lips quivered. She raised her head, eyes hazy and shining above the glasses perched low on her nose. “I love science.”
I love—
The words scrambled in his brain, shifting configurations.
But he didn’t say them. Instead, submitting to the simpler desires of his body and finally taking charge of his damn desk, he jabbed the descent button and said, starting to shoulder off his vest, “Yes. Experimental replication of results is key to our discipline, though.”
“Right. So keep the fleece.”
Her thigh flexed with abrupt force, levering him up and over her while she twisted onto her back beneath him. One hand remained tangled in his hair and the other trailed down his chest, across his vest with naked satisfaction to curl around his latex-sheathed cock; obviously, he’d be leaving the fleece on. “But…”
“B-but?”
Though he widened his stance on the carpet for leverage, for restraint, the rasp of her thumb still broke his voice.
“We should try some new data. Determine if we get the same results from this… input.”
It was her smug smile that broke his control, however. A single snap of his hips buried him inside her. He groaned. “Yes. For science.”
“Do you see my hair elastic anywhere?”
Having coerced her unsteady legs back into her jeans, bungled the buttons and zippers closed again, and retrieved her discarded sweater, Erin scanned the carpet while raking the disaster of her hair off her neck. Her glasses were smudged, and she squinted at scattered sudoku pages and minimalist ink sketches of fractal lines on notepaper. A copy of This Is How You Lose the Time War with a canine-chewed corner peeked out from Ethan’s messenger bag behind the door. Dog hair on fleece—that vest—sudoku, ink sketches, sci-fi novels: Bannister. God, the truth was so obvious! Almost as obvious as the three years of data explaining her behavior around him, data that she’d so willfully mis-analyzed. If she’d walked one step farther into his office after his talk for the Department of Energy, she would’ve seen…
“Here.”
Ethan handed her a cleaning wipe.
She couldn’t help laughing. “Not a hair tie.”
He shrugged while he tucked his shirt back into his belt. “Sorry.”
He wasn’t, and neither was she.
“A comb?”
She polished her lenses, then dragged her fingers along her snarled nape again.
“In my car. For Bunsen.”
“Helpful.”
He whisked up a stray strand framing her ear. “How about a rubber band?”
She scanned the floor a second time. Nothing. Martina would kill her for the damage she was about to inflict on her hair. Probably for other things, too. As soon as she finished screaming in—vindicated?—shock.
“It’ll be better than nothing. I can’t walk out of here like…”
She gestured at herself with her free hand, accepting his rubber band and bundling the tangles into a ponytail. “Especially since we’re meeting with Dr. Kramer. I wouldn’t want to pollute your reputation this way, either.”
He’d been grinning crookedly at her a moment before, watching her clean her glasses and tidy her hair while he straightened up the chaos on his desk, replacing a monitor on its stand, re-stacking sticky notes, aligning documents and blueprints, plugging the lamp back into its wall socket. Now, Dr. Ethan Meyer dropped an uncapped pen. The fingers that he’d stroked over her skin, across her lips, into her and through her pleasure, abruptly clenched so hard into his palms that his knuckles blanched. A dot of ink leaked onto the carpet.
“Ethan? What’s…”
“The status report is due in one hour and forty-seven minutes.”
His sentence was blank, inflectionless. Correct and sterile. His fists uncurled as quickly as they’d formed, populating meta-information into the header of a status report template on his laptop. But deep marks from his nails pitted his palms. His eyes darted to the time display on his monitor. 3:13 p.m. blinked to 3:14 p.m. His shoulders were high and taut. Was he even breathing?
She loudly unzipped her backpack and plonked her own laptop onto his desk. He didn’t startle, just went on staring at his screen.
“I know we have our report due soon.”
Now she swiveled her computer into his line of sight. “You probably would’ve finished it last night, if you hadn’t been busy.”
No laughter, no smile.
She pushed on, “But we’re not going to be late. I started drafting notes for it earlier, and while nothing’s been completed in your template, we have a solid start. See?”
He looked at his clock again. 3:15 p.m.
“We can’t perfect the report if we haven’t written it.”
She retrieved his dropped pen, capped it and slid it behind his ear, then nudged his elbow aside to perch on the armrest of his chair. “Come on, critique my notes.”
Maybe it was three years of habit that finally dragged his gaze to her screen. But as she talked through her transcription of their reference materials and research methods with ultracold atoms, electromagnets, and liquid helium, watching him rather than the lines of text and calculations, the tension eased fractionally from his forearms. Numbers and data were safe…
“Stop.”
He tapped her trackpad. “You’ve attributed the material analysis on organic synthetic polymers for the holometer’s lenses to me.”
“Didn’t you run that study?”
“Under Dr. Kramer’s direction.”
He replaced his name with his supervisor’s.
“His department, his lab, his research?”
“Yes—and this reference to the paper on the electromagnetic manipulation of atoms?”
He emphasized a paragraph that outlined aspects of the project’s experimental methodologies and their proposed application.
“From your second publication in Nature Physics?”
“Dr. Kramer was the first author. His credit should come before mine. It was his idea to use ultracold atoms when manipulating their shape and motion to assess new quantum behaviors. I just executed his vision in the experimental halls.”
He jumped her cursor along the text. “Also, the design of the holometer wasn’t my original idea.”
“It’s based on LIGO. Did Dr. Kramer design LIGO?”
“No.”
“Right.”
She bumped his fingers off the keyboard. “Let’s transfer everything into your template and litigate the rest of your critiques there. We don’t want to be—”
“Late.”
“It’s just a status report on a couple days of work. An internal document—”
“—for Dr. Kramer. Due in—”
“Stop. Even if we submit it a few minutes after five o’clock, will that really matter?”
“Yes.”
“To you, or to him?”
“Yes,” again.
He turned back to the report template on his own screen, downloaded the work that she’d shared via email, and began to replicate her notes. Click. A citation of Greg Logan’s quantum unit theories that had informed aspects of his work on the holometer, and consequently on their quantum gravity project, vanished. She watched his progress, frowning. But when he replaced the physicist’s name with a generic credit for Fermilab, a distracting thread of memory tickled her brain: Fermilab, supervisor, subordinates’ research, quantum effects…
“Your exponent value on Planck’s constant is wrong.”
“Uh—”
She blinked. “You’re right. Minus eleven instead of minus one?”
He fixed her notation. He synthesized the evidence for Hawking radiation that he’d located in her LIGO exports—it might be pertinent as project reference material, as well as her trajectory to publication as a first author in Nature Physics—and then scrolled down their document. “Action items?”
They debated their options for next steps and were hashing out a timeline for when they could expect a rush order of liquid helium to arrive at Innovation Drive, when Ethan’s monitor clock flickered to 4:59 p.m.
“Damn.”
He abandoned her mid-sentence to submit their report. No proofreading. “Hurry.”
“Dr. Kramer’s office is—”
“—fifteen seconds from mine.”
He jammed his laptop closed, shoved it into his bag, grabbed their blueprints, and was already at the door before she’d recovered her balance on his spinning chair. He repeated, “Hurry.”
“I’m coming—”
He left her behind, striding after their update email as if he could race it to Kramer’s inbox. Even with her handicapped start from behind his desk, however, Erin outstripped him as he rounded the edge of the bullpen, heading toward a line of offices—larger than glorified janitorial closets, with windows overlooking SVLAC’s evergreen quadrangle outside—reserved for the Modern Physics departmental leadership; his neck was rigid, his breathing was shallow, and his tread had shortened as they approached those doors. She slowed for him, scanning nameplates. Their earlier project meetings had taken place in conference rooms. She’d never had a reason to enter Kramer’s space. She waited for Ethan to draw level with her again, conscious of the eyes on them from the central cubicles, and let him set their pace to a corner office at the end of the hall.
DR. JOHN KRAMER
The knuckles on both Ethan’s thumbs cracked from the pressure of his fingers balling into fists again when he lifted a hand to knock.
“Are you…”
She managed not to touch his shoulder, not to soothe the nape of his neck. She couldn’t manage silence, though, not when he shook his head, not when it felt like a warning. “What—”
He didn’t answer. He knocked.
“Yes?” Kramer.
They entered.
If she had spent any time considering John Kramer’s office, or if she’d had to create a narrative backdrop for him, she would’ve designed a precise, minimalist space in grayscale, devoid of all personality except achievement: sleek, modern, every piece of ornamentation an award—physics or golf—and with the thermostat set several degrees below comfort. She would’ve been right.
What she hadn’t been right about was its chaos.
When Ethan stepped past the door, he almost collided with two movers shouldering a Danish modern couch swaddled in protective bubble wrap out into the hall. A third mover knelt on a series of divots in the carpet that indicated the exodus of other heavy items, offloading the contents of several bookcases and checking the volumes off an itemized list. A fourth man removed plaques, certificates, and signed photographs from the walls, bringing them to archival boxes standing on a massive desk of metal and glass, where Kramer himself evaluated and allocated each item to its appropriate location—storage or shipping to Switzerland—from an Eames chair. The quantum gravity status report was open on his monitor.
“Meyer.”
“Dr. Kramer.”
Since Ethan didn’t advance any farther into the room, she moved past him and stepped over a box of framed university degrees to address his supervisor. “As requested, we’ve submitted an early version of our weekly update on the Department of Energy’s quantum gravity project. However, if this isn’t a good time to review it—”
“I have several questions about your report, Meyer.”
Kramer clicked two fingers at the mover by his bookcases when the man lifted a mounted toroid from a shelf dedicated to prizes and sculptures. “Careful with that. It’s an Eliasson.”
A facsimile of a three million dollar check for the Breakthrough Prize—awarded twelve years previously to Dr. John R. Kramer of Fermilab (Quantum Group) for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Physics—was among the honors ready to be sorted on his desk. No wonder he’d been able to afford an Eames chair.
“Yes.”
Still Ethan didn’t move.
“Are you continuing to design the experimental hutch layout? I see a diagram, but no resultant data.”
Though Kramer tabbed back into their report, he watched the mover wrap up his Breakthrough Prize and a nearby golf trophy in packing foam.
“Um. We met with the engineers to discuss storage space for the liquid helium, a placement of the electromagnet, sight lines for the laser window, and how to configure cables around the existing hutch machinery so that the vacuum chamber isn’t contaminated and there’s no interference with the angles of the lasers or with MEC’s existing e-enclosure—”
His voice cracked. The blueprints tucked under his arm crinkled.
“We have an experimental layout designed, yes.”
Erin willed Ethan to breathe.
They didn’t have the engineers’ signoff on their hutch specifications yet, but—we have enough.
She reminded him, “We also have extant reference data on gravitational waves that could prove pertinent for the project. As Dr. Meyer notes in our update, a recent LIGO readout provides preliminary evidence that the interferometer is detecting naturally occurring Hawking radiation. This might be—”
“Might be.”
“It’s a single data point, so yes. While I have ideas about what a reliable detection of thermal radiation from black holes could tell us about the behavior of mass and matter around event horizons—a central question in quantum gravity research, as you know—we haven’t yet replicated—”
“Monaghan has ideas. Meyer, what is your output?”
“An—an analysis on optimal optical materials for the holometer’s mirrors suggests that organic synthetic polymers are best suited for experiments involving the ambient temperature extremes that generate from liquid helium-cooled atoms and focused laser heat—”
“Your contribution to the project is proposing new practical applications of my earlier materials theory?”
“Um,”
again. Ethan stepped aside for the couch movers returning for Kramer’s bookcases. His hands were still fisted, his knuckles and raised tendons white. “That’s what I always…”
“It was Dr. Meyer who identified the Hawking radiation signals in my data.”
Erin tapped Kramer’s desk to draw his focus. “I didn’t observe them. The gravitational waves were so much weaker than those I usually look for in LIGO’s interference fringes that my Fourier transform didn’t catch them. But Dr. Meyer’s attention to detail—”
“Double-wrap that photograph from the Shoreline Golf Links tournament. It’s signed by the president of the Bay Area Golf Association. Well, Meyer?”
“I confirmed the thermal radiation with a multi-messenger astronomy review from Kitt Peak—”
“I have no interest in Monaghan’s public data pool. Neither should you. What is your output?”
“I…”
Another pause, long enough for the movers to shuffle one of the bookcases out the door. Then Ethan’s head gave a small shake.
Nothing else.
As his tight silence lengthened, Erin’s neck bristled. Award after award and framed abstract after abstract on time crystals, avian migration, quantum circuits, and quantum units went into Kramer’s archival boxes, evidence of past genius—but the only brilliance that he demonstrated today was his identification of failures in process and progress, of supposed problems with other researchers’ scientific inquiries. He was a genius at that. But he made no suggestions for resolving the issues he raised. So:
“What guidance would you offer to Dr. Meyer for his work on our project, Dr. Kramer?”
Kramer almost looked at her. “Monaghan poses a valid question. What contributions can you offer, Meyer? I’ll be unavailable to supervise your work as closely while I’m at CERN. Will I be satisfied with your results? I expect you to provide value.”
That hadn’t been her question.
At all.
And Ethan remained at the door. He made no rebuttal, no defense of his project inputs. He’d been vocal enough in their data, materials, and process debates, competitive, collaborative, and often right, but here he was, standing quietly at the back of the room behind a barricade of boxes, taking Kramer’s unrealistic expectations as fact and his supervisor’s abuse as justified discipline, when she knew that his work was good.
When she knew that their work was good.
Preliminary, but good.
When she knew that he was brilliant.
Even in her earliest and most hostile tirades against Dr. Ethan Meyer to Martina, long before she’d been forced into partnership with him and learned to value his aggravating, effective research methods beside his results, she’d never denied his ingenuity.
But as the familiar heat of anger gathered on her tongue, she recognized that she wasn’t angry with Ethan.
She was angry with Dr. John Kramer: decorated director of SVLAC’s prestigious Quantum Mechanics group, Ethan’s supervisor, de facto mentor—and complete asshole. He was more interested in the packing materials for his awards than in their quantum gravity report, and what he’d bothered to glean from their update was only criticism of their progress. They’d been tasked with researching one of the most fundamental and difficult unsolved questions in physics, and he was dissatisfied that they hadn’t presented publishable findings in under two weeks? He denigrated Ethan’s contributions and demanded that his subordinate provide more and better results, but gave no guidance as to how.
He ignored the merits of Erin’s own work and field.
She hadn’t expected anything else from a man like him.
The way Kramer treated Ethan, however?
For a supervisor to speak to an employee this way—casually dismissive, casually cruel, completely unhelpful, without any fear of repercussion—was wrong. Even a failing one. And Ethan wasn’t failing.
But worse still: Ethan’s rigidity wasn’t surprise.
She knew his surprise, the zest and the spark of it.
No, he was rigid because he’d known to brace himself for this abuse.
Maybe he endured it for the sake of opportunities and funding, or because he thought he didn’t have an option to protest his working conditions under such an esteemed name, not when a line of eager physicists would’ve clogged the freeway to San Francisco for a chance at his position, or because…
Is your old supervisor still at SVLAC?
He is. Promoted to department head, too, and Fermilab, time crystals, quantum effects on avian migration, quantum circuits, first-author papers—
Suddenly, everything slotted into place.
No dissertation awards from Kramer’s alma mater were being packed into his archival boxes; his doctoral work clearly hadn’t garnered him any particular notice. But once he’d networked his way into a leadership position at his first lab—failing upward into management at Fermilab?—and had access to a cohort of research fellows and to their work? A glance at his stack of abstracts confirmed that his first-author papers had begun to appear during the early aughts, in the same time period when, given the duration of his PhD, he’d likely taken on his first supervisory position: the use of quantum effects for navigation by migrating birds, the exotic construct known as a time crystal, quantum circuits, and Ethan’s units. He’d actually framed those abstracts and hung them in his office like trophies! And they were trophies, tributes to his brilliance, because only a genius could specialize in so many diverse areas.
A genius, whose published research was very close to the expertise areas of his mentees: his subordinates and second authors, STEMinist Online’s women. They had their credit—as collaborators. But his was the name associated with the discoveries. With the fame. If the women posting on the forum were right, his subordinates often left his department soon after their papers appeared. Some left the field entirely.
Why would they lie?
They had nothing to gain from venting their anonymous rage on the internet, from passing on their experiences and hardwon warnings. But she? She’d enjoyed the rush of righteous outrage—of entertainment—from their reports. The grueling, demoralizing experiences hadn’t touched her, hadn’t been her responsibility to confront, so she’d treated them like recreational reading.
She’d been part of the problem…
“Well?”
Kramer’s finger rapped his keyboard, a reprimand against Ethan’s continuing silence.
“Uh, I—”
…but not anymore.
What contributions can you offer, Meyer?
She knew exactly what she could offer Kramer, Ethan, all the women from her forum—and herself.
Ethan might think he had to take Kramer’s abuse.
But she didn’t have to take this. Any of it.
She reached across Kramer’s desk and closed their progress report. Click. Now that was surprise. She answered with a smile that showed more fury than teeth and said:
“What contributions are you offering to our quantum gravity research, Dr. Kramer? Nothing that I can see. I don’t think we actually need your input. We don’t need your status update sessions either, and… oh.”
She snapped her own fingers, straightening. “This—this is how you’ve appropriated your subordinates’ work! Demanding all this micromanaging meeting bureaucracy so you can identify interesting research concepts in their infancy, then resource and claim them as yours as you oversee their growth. Most physicists would be too grateful for your funding and attention to notice until it was too late, until the papers were written with your name as a first author. Maybe not even then. It’s almost genius—”
Genius at spotting promising ideas.
And stealing them.
“—but not quite. Not now. So don’t expect credit for our quantum gravity findings in SVLAC’s report to the Office of Science. Instead, why don’t you just enjoy the Swiss golf courses?”
Then she turned for the door. She took Ethan’s arm and led him out of his supervisor’s office before either man could respond.
“We’re done here.”