18
His mind was noisy, buzzing, neurons firing frenetic bits of static but generating no response to Dr. Kramer’s inquiry about his relevance to the federal physics project.
What contributions can you offer?
I expect you to provide value.
And Erin, her fingers wrapped around his arm, exerting a pull of gravity to tow him from the office—
What contributions are you offering to our quantum gravity research, Dr. Kramer?
His pulse was frenetic, too. Too fast, irregular, a flicker pulsing in his skull and echoing her words: We’re done here.
Insubordination.
His supervisor would retaliate. Dr. Kramer would retaliate against Erin Monaghan for her disrespect. That wasn’t a hypothesis. It was a certainty.
He will retaliate.
But he couldn’t warn her, his breath accelerating into pain now, his ears ringing, the throb behind his eyes overtaking his vision with a dark, threatening blur—and fuck, not here, because his own office was across the whole width of the watchful bullpen—
Erin hauled him to a recessed door at the end of the hall marked “Fire Exit.”
No alarms wailed when she depressed the metal crash bar to access a flight of exterior stairs leading down to SVLAC’s quadrangle. Summer air splashed his face, cooler than his skin.
“Ah—”
“Come on.”
She let the hinges slam behind them, careless of the noise, while she steered him beneath the redwoods, toward a set of shadowed benches in the fragrant conifer litter. Popular with the lab’s more reclusive scientists at lunchtime, they were deserted now. She shooed a squirrel off the closest seat. “Sit.”
He collapsed.
Breathe. In. Out. I-in—
He dug his fingers into the wooden slats to keep himself upright as he tried to count, dizzy, hyperventilating. Splinters wedged under his nails.
—o-o-out—
“How can I help?”
He couldn’t answer her.
But maybe she understood that, because she perched beside him to narrow their distance. “How would Bunsen help you?”
She knew.
Shame careened through him in a hot, awful tide of self-loathing and humiliation, and no—fuck—don’t see me like this—please leave, please—
“…s-stay,” he said.
She nodded. Erin uncurled his left hand and slid their palms together, intertwining their fingers. The fierceness of the hold could’ve been her grip, or his. It didn’t matter. He clung to it and to her as she extracted the crumpled hutch blueprints from under his arm, their edges limp with his sweat while she spread them over his knees, while she took the pen from behind his ear and uncapped it. She offered the nib to him.
“One.”
She inhaled.
“Two,” exhaling.
He fumbled for the pen. His balance was rickety without his grasp on the bench. She increased the pressure between their hands and said quietly,
“Three.”
A line of pigment straggled across the page.
“Four.”
He tried again, tried to trace the safe, orderly lines of the grid.
“Five.”
His breath was a hiss past his teeth.
“Six.”
He outlined one wobbly square.
“Seven… Eight…”
He traced a second square more slowly, while she counted.
“Nine… Ten… Eleven… Twelve…”
Pen and lines steadying slightly with his focus, the third square was acceptable. Not ruler-perfect, but the quadrants were clear.
“Twenty-six…”
He shifted her elbow aside by an inch to ink his next blocks. The warm weight of her hand remained in his. Nine squares down on the blueprint… and nine across. Inhale, exhale… One hundred and thirty-seven. The space between those squares became a sudoku grid. One hundred and fifty. He could design his own logic puzzle now, but he’d been sketching a constellation earlier today and hadn’t gotten the angle of its rightmost star correct, so he marked the bright points of the northern sky, placing them within the neatness of his graph…
One hundred and eighty-eight…
“Cassiopeia?”
“Yes.”
“The boastful queen. Two hundred and four,”
she exhaled. “I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“You’re on two hundred and three.”
He drew the W line between Cassiopeia’s stars.
“Thanks… and now, two hundred and four. Better?”
“Two hundred and five.”
Better.
Was he?
In the dusky shelter of SVLAC’s redwood grove, duff and shadow and a faint sough of sweet, earthy wind muffling the noise from Ring Road while Erin enumerated their inhales and exhales, while she held his hand, he was breathing.
He’d forgotten not to breathe.
He’d tasted her on his desk, had sheathed himself inside her and gasped out his release against her neck, but this… this was intimacy.
I love…
“Y-you could’ve set off the fire alarm.”
“What?”
As always, it wasn’t what he’d meant to say. He winced, then withdrew his hand to pick at his splinters. “Uh—when we left Modern Physics.”
“I gambled on the alarm being broken. Most of our equipment is.”
She lifted one shoulder, massaging her fingers. “And it was an emergency. Wasn’t it?”
“How did you know that I…”
No, that wasn’t his question.
He swallowed. He abandoned his splinters, capped his pen. “Why?”
“Why what?”
Why did you stay with me?
“Why did you challenge Dr. Kramer?”
“Challenge him? Everything I said was true. All I did—”
“But he—”
“—was give that truth a voice. Besides, he’ll be gone soon, and—look at me. No, not at your grid. Look at me.”
The fingertips of one hand tilted up his chin, opening his throat before it could close again, easing the edge of his panic. She let the dimness breathe between them for a moment. She let him breathe. Then, speaking softly, firmly, “Dr. Ethan Meyer, your work—our work—is good. It’s preliminary, yes. How would it not be? We presented a status report before anyone could reasonably have research information to share. But still: our work is good. Dr. Kramer’s an idiot if he doesn’t understand that. Or worse, if he won’t acknowledge it. Which he won’t, because he—he’s a scientific parasite. I should’ve recognized that before, but I…”
She wasn’t angry.
Or if she was, she wasn’t angry with him.
“Is this what it’s like, working in the Quantum group?”
And because she wasn’t angry, he didn’t trust himself to reply.
He didn’t need to, however; when she went on through his pause, the softness in her voice simmered dangerously. “Then I’m sorry. And I’m sorry if you didn’t know what he was doing. How he was—”
No.
Now, he had to speak.
“No—no, he’s…”
He had to make her understand why, because what if she was right? Scientific parasite. So he clung to the mantra he’d made for himself, since the alternative was to believe her, to believe that all his work had been—no. “Dr. Kramer’s a brilliant scientist. And it’s a privilege to contribute to his research, because his genius is—is…”
…identifying promising research concepts in their infancy, then resourcing and claiming them as yours. Most physicists would’ve been too grateful for your funding and attention to notice until it was too late.
He’d hypothesized the existence of quantum units at Berkeley.
Yes, he’d grown his ideas under Dr. Kramer’s mentorship and resourcing.
But the initial concept that space might exist as minute, divisible chunks?
Mine.
My ideas, my research, my—
He couldn’t deal with that right now, though. Just couldn’t.
Instead:
“He… he was right about my lack of progress on the quantum project. The only useful SVLAC data that we reported was your Hawking radiation signal.”
“Maybe. But even if he isn’t planning to weasel credit for our work—and that’s still an open question—could he really expect anything else at this stage?”
Erin tossed up her hands. “How? Research is a journey. We’re just starting out. Co-pilots. Which means that we’re both responsible for the route. The playlist. The snacks. The result. The story. There’ll be side trips and backtracking, but we’ll still be going somewhere, even if it’s not a perfect line. Perfect is the enemy of good. So don’t you dare take any of the blame or success away from me, or I’ll make your life hell as a backseat driver.”
Could she be right?
Again?
Maybe, but…
“Dr. Kramer will retaliate. For today. Because—”
“—I was insubordinate? Or because I spoke the truth?”
“Yes. Both.”
“Ethan…”
She laughed. She actually laughed. “I’m used to men trying to retaliate against me for being right when they’re not. Or for even just executing my job well. It comes with the territory of being a woman in STEM. So, sure—let him try. Let him see what happens. My brothers never allowed me to win at family game nights or baseball. I could handle their bullshit, and I’ll handle his.”
Let him see what happens.
“You believe that.”
Obviously, she did.
She didn’t doubt herself, all confidence and determination, even after braving Dr. Kramer’s wrath. After incurring it. Demanding it? And he didn’t want to wonder, but—what would the past three years have been like if they hadn’t been rivals? If they’d been neutral colleagues? If she’d even taken his part of an argument on occasion, collaborators instead of adversaries? If fierce, bright, relentless Erin had stood at his side, head high, eyes flashing, her hand in his, an ally, a friend, a lover—
—no.
He wanted her, yes—had wanted her for so long, longer than he’d known—and maybe she even wanted him, sitting in the twilight with dust motes scattering a prismatic glitter on her glasses, waiting for him to stabilize… waiting with him.
But the fact remained: Dr. Kramer would retaliate.
A second fact, almost worse: this was what happened when he surrendered discipline, when he let emotion guide him instead of logic.
A third fact: he needed to regain control. Of himself. Of the situation.
A fourth: if he stood any chance of mitigating her danger, he had work to do.
Today.
“Uh, I… it’s late. I should…”
Clearing duff and gravel from his throat now, he gestured toward the parking lot with a hand that was almost steady. “Thank you for… but Bunsen needs his run, and I…”
“Right, of course.”
She accepted his decision to be finished, to be alone. So easy. She brushed a layer of needles from her jeans and stood. “We both know what happens if you keep him waiting.”
“Yes.”
He dumped their research into his messenger bag, then inched and stalled his way home to Redwood City through the smoggy crawl of a Peninsula commute. After he’d taken Bunsen around Stulsaft Park and eaten something cold in a Tupperware over the sink, he sat down at his desk. But he didn’t drag out his blueprints again. He didn’t drop back into laser angles and cable layouts, into data analysis or hypothesizing about the behavior of electrons at the event horizon of a black hole. He didn’t log into his SVLAC email. He didn’t even begin writing an apology to his supervisor: accept responsibility, then offer up a new research proposal—something, anything to gain leniency. Or at least to avoid additional punishments. He needed to write that apology; the headache compressing his skull synchronized with his own mental pressure inside it. Focus, focus! When he opened his computer, though, he didn’t start drafting excuses or mea culpas. Instead, he clicked into a new browser window.
Dr. John R. Kramer + quantum units
Search results loaded.
He began to read.
Her tires whistled over the pavement, bumping across lane dividers, zipping between cars stalled in traffic. Thinking hard, Erin pushed her legs and her bicycle harder.
Dr. John Kramer.
Despite their adjacent work with optics and lasers—Ethan had admitted that the holometer was based on technology like LIGO—the laws of physics had isolated her department’s research on general relativity from Kramer’s quantum mechanics projects. Until now. Nadine’s surprise that he’d deigned to revise and resubmit a rejected paper for publication had told her all she’d needed to know about him on her first day at SVLAC. While she hadn’t gone out of her way to avoid him, she’d never sought his colleagueship, either. She just hadn’t devoted any mental energy to the man. It wouldn’t have been worth it.
Now, though?
Now, she saw the full narrative arc, and its data was clean, its meaning clear: early aughts… supervisor at Fermilab… published subordinates’ research on quantum effects in avian migration… changed research campuses… SVLAC… time crystals, quantum circuits… first-author papers… Is your old supervisor still at SVLAC?… Promoted to department head… I left, like the others.
She’d spoken the truth in Kramer’s office today.
Scientific parasite.
His appointment at CERN notwithstanding, he was clearly continuing to execute his strategy of appropriating credit for any major research achievements in his orbit: demolishing his subordinates’ confidence in viable ideas, leaving them passionate about their data but so demoralized that they were grateful for him to champion and resource similar concepts, because at least he could see some use for their work. If she and Ethan could resolve the physics field’s most obnoxious paradox by reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theory of space-time, Kramer would want that glory, too.
More trophies for his walls, another Breakthrough Prize, or even a Nobel award.
He’d rob her of these potentialities without shame. He’d also take them from Ethan—Ethan, who was brilliant not because of, but despite, his supervisor’s influence. It was so obvious! Kramer had discarded his earlier subordinates after he’d bled their genius dry: ground them down, burned them out, then shown them the door and let them walk through it on their own. But he hadn’t been able to drive Ethan off. Dr. Ethan Meyer was too smart and too resilient to safely discard. And a man. So, Kramer kept him on, kept stealing his ideas, controlling him by doling out just enough recognition and resources to keep him hopeful. Maybe—maybe—Kramer did occasionally theorize brilliance of his own, but it was Ethan who executed his hypotheses, who made the data fit, who generated extraordinary results with slipshod components—
—who was insanely precise and insanely productive because he had to be.
That second part, a prominent scientist outsourcing experiments to his subordinates, withholding sufficient resources while demanding publishable returns, wasn’t unheard of.
But the first?
The basis of Kramer’s research technique was theft.
Let him commandeer even one more iota of Ethan’s work on quantum units.
Try it.
She sped through a stop sign with her teeth gritted, then skidded to a halt in front of her apartment and wiped sweat from her eyes.
Just try it.
How had Kramer come by his lucrative, prestigious advisory opportunity with CERN’s Director-General, anyhow? She hefted her bicycle over her shoulder and lugged it up the stairs, continuing to think. Ethan had been in Switzerland three years ago, determining that even the nearly seven tera electron volts of Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider weren’t sufficiently powerful for his quantum unit research. He would’ve spent several months with the physicists there, awkwardly networking while attributing too much credit for his work to Kramer. Kramer, who was good at networking; it was both a prerequisite for his position, and a prerogative for his playbook.
Glad-handing and results—however they were acquired—bought funding and blind eyes.
Ethan’s work had facilitated Kramer’s opportunity.
Of course.
She kicked off her sneakers in the entry. They went flying into the living room.
“Erin? Is that you?”
Ashley, perched on the kitchen counter with a glass of wine while her new man stirred risotto on the stove.
“Hi, yeah.”
She didn’t stop, rushing after her shoes and into her bedroom.
It should be Ethan traveling to Switzerland next week.
She didn’t doubt that, or anything else.
None of these insights excused his earlier sabotages, of course. Deflated bicycle tires, missing oat milk, time zone switches. But now… now she knew better why he’d acted as he had, what he’d had to do to survive.
Of course, he had panic attacks. In his position, who wouldn’t?
Had she made everything worse for him, though? No, this was Kramer’s fault. She could handle any fallout, of course—try it, just try it—but Ethan?
Vibrating with unspent fury, she yanked the rubber band from her hair and tapped into her messages with Martina.
Erin
Did you know about Dr. Kramer?
She didn’t send the text, though. Her friend would want to know why she was asking. What she was asking. Then she’d have to explain… no.
Not yet.
Not until she’d dealt with this.
With everything.
Instead, she opened STEMinist Online’s exposé post on the man who had to be Dr. John Kramer. Although the influx of new comments had slowed, the data was still rich. She’d get other data sets, too. A man with practices as slimy and depraved as his had almost certainly committed actionable scientific misconduct during the course of his career. It would be difficult to locate hard proof. He would’ve covered his tracks. He’d had plenty of practice. But she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty in the filth of cyberspace to find gold. Then she’d take him down.
Watch me.
She was in a dangerous mood—itching for action, she almost wished she’d find turkeys planning world domination in the parking lot—when she pedaled up to SVLAC’s security booth the next morning, so early that her breath fogged in the dawn air. A guard on the night shift even stepped out to question her.
“Dr. Monaghan?”
She raised her lanyard with its employee identification card in answer.
“You get a graveyard slot in the experimental halls again?”
“No. Just a busy day.”
He flicked a Warriors bobblehead in the window of his booth, which nodded her past. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
She’d need it.
She selected espresso at the Modern Physics coffee machine and a sudoku grid at her desk. Despite her adrenaline, she needed both the clarity of the puzzle and the caffeine. She’d slept for no more than a few minutes at a time last night, tossing, turning, wondering: should she tell Ethan about her plans to investigate Kramer? Unlike with the inputs for her sudoku cells, she only had two choices.
Tell him.
Don’t tell him.
(Not lie. Just… keep her mouth shut. For once. Again.)
If she told him, would he resist? Would he stonewall her efforts with habit and fear? He might. She wouldn’t know until she spoke. But then again, when had a research project ever begun with a certain answer?
Everything started with a question.
Do I tell him?
No, that wasn’t it.
Do I trust him?
Dr. Ethan Meyer, her academic crush and her adversary, her challenger, her colleague, her collaborator, her artist, her distraction, her grudging inspiration, her…
Yes.
So, after confirming her plans for a noontime call with Nadine Fong—new mother, perennial physicist—about their research budget, she ignored an email from the Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics prompting her to submit an author photo for inclusion with her paper in the journal’s September issue, and pushed away her sudoku grid. She left her espresso and her overflowing inbox, pausing only to answer Leah Haddad’s request for fifteen minutes to discuss a deviant data point in the binary pulsar study.
Leah Haddad
Thanks, Erin. I also wanted to ask you about mentorship opportunities at SVLAC. I know you’re really busy, but do you ever take on interns?
She hadn’t. But if she did? She could support Leah as she entered the STEM field. She could guide other young women interested in physics, too—and not just guidance on copier functions. She could offer feedback and maybe some protection from men like Kramer, could smash glass ceilings and shelter others from the debris, could replicate all that Nadine had done to facilitate her own autonomy and success at the lab, be a role model, a counselor, an advocate, an ally—everything that she’d needed and been lucky to have.
She wanted this. She really did… but it just wasn’t a priority today.
It couldn’t be.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
Let’s talk next week.
She sent her answer with a few quick keystrokes, then moved just as quickly to the parking lot. She was waiting for Ethan by the Modern Physics bicycle racks when his hatchback pulled into its spot, striding to his passenger door before he’d cut the engine, rapping her knuckles against the window.
Morning, she mouthed, ignoring Marco Rossi exiting his sedan and almost tripping over a curb. Then, when Ethan rolled down the glass, “Can I come in?”
“What…”
But he unlocked the door.
She didn’t give either of them time for questions. She slid into the blast of air conditioning, Mumford & Sons, and dog hair on his seat, rolled up the hatchback’s window, silenced his radio, and said, “I’m investigating Dr. Kramer for fraud.”
Shhhhrreeeeeeeeecccchhh!
Tires squealed. The hatchback lurched up over its wheel stop when some reflex saw Ethan stamp hard on the accelerator pedal.
Rossi stumbled back.
He ignored their colleague. So did Erin, hurriedly grabbing the transmission lever to shift the car into park.
“You’re investi—what?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
In the sudden silence and a rising stink of rubber, he turned with tendons jumping in his neck, lips rigid. “Erin, don’t.”
“I’ve already started.”
“Please.”
“I’m sorry. I have to.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have to risk—”
She caught his hands fisting around his keys before the serrated metal broke skin. “Ethan—if it were just you, I’d respect your wishes. I’d leave him alone. Let him continue. I’d hate it. But I’d do it.”
“I—”
“It’s not just you, though. Not just us. It’s all the others. The ones who came first. The ones he hurt first. There’s a forum called STEMinist Online with so much data on what he’s done, who he’s sabotaged. Years and years of it! He’s not going to stop, and I—I have a responsibility to those women…”
Ally. “To the next ones. To myself, too. I hope you can understand.”
“You don’t know what he’ll do.”
“I won’t involve you. Or implicate you. He won’t know. If I fail, you’ll still be safe. If that’s what you want.”
“No. No, that’s not what I—fuck!”
and he abruptly wrenched out of her grip, seizing his phone. He thrust the device at her. “Look.”
“Ethan—”
“Stop talking and look.”
Dr. John R. Kramer + quantum units
“…oh.”
“I just wanted to know,”
and now, his voice was quiet. Terrifyingly quiet, as shocking in its low, taut intensity as his outburst. “What you said yesterday? You were right. His first conceptual articles about quantum units were published after I’d defended my doctoral dissertation at Berkeley. When he recruited me to the Quantum group, he claimed he’d conceived the idea several years earlier during the recession, and now there was finally funding available at SVLAC to pursue experimental research on it. But there wasn’t. I had to write grants for every penny spent on the holometer. There was no money to study quantum units except for what I brought in. I was grateful that he believed in my ideas, but he… he lied to me.”
“He lied to everyone.”
“Which is why you’re not going to stop.”
“No.”
“Then…”
He studied his search results again for the length of a long, long exhale. But when he raised his head, his cheeks and eyes were fever-bright, burning with determination. Not tired, not despairing: dangerous. “You have your whisper network. But you’ll need my data, too.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do, because you won’t stop. And maybe together, we have a chance.”