Erin snatched her mug from the machine. “You have no idea what my research or publishing situation is. TheJournal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysicsjust accepted my sole-author paper on tidal disruption events—”
“Sole author? Good for you. But that publication has a readership of—what? A hundred people? Not much reach in the field, and not much opportunity for citation. Not likeNature PhysicsorReviews of Modern Physics. And you still have…” he paused, “six papers to my seven.”
“I’d much rather have just one sole-author paper published in any journal, if the alternative is being Dr. Kramer’s lackey and second author. No matter how many publications that position got me!”
He took another sip. “A publication is a publication. Numbers don’t lie. You’re behind.”
“You’ve had access to the lab machinery for more months than I have—and anyhow, LIGO’s database takes time to update with all the readings coming from Washington and Louisiana, so my exports take longer to render than your holometer’s isolated data sets—”
“Excuses? I didn’t expect that,” and he watched, satisfied, as the annoyed color on her cheeks seeped lower to stain her throat.
“I’m not making—” She took a swig of her own brew, and choked.
“You put in four shots of espresso,” he told her, smirking at her contorted face. “I thought you might’ve been trying to boost your productivity, to make up for lost time in the experimental halls, but now it’s clear that—”
“—that unlike you, since it seems you’re just going to harass people at the coffee machine all morning, I have a sole-author paper accepted for publication—and things to do,” and then she strode away, pausing only to empty her noxious concoction into the sink.
Laughter rose up in his chest. But before he could call out after her with one last parting shot—something clever, he didn’t know what—Dr. Tomasz Szymanski entered the kitchenette with yesterday’s mug in hand.
“Dr. Meyer,” and a nod.
“Dr. Szymanski. Late night?” Still smiling, he gestured at his colleague’s mug, which bore telltale rings of dried coffee.
“I have not yet gone to bed, and I have just now returned to my desk. I have been in the West Experimental Hall since yesterday morning. It is the last day of my data collection cycle. I have been busy. As have you, I see.” Szymanski nodded after Erin’s retreating figure. “She is angry again, yes?”
“Isn’t she always?”
Pushing back his sandy hair with a shrug, Szymanski rinsed his mug and placed a fresh one into the coffee machine. “What is the trouble today?”
“The scheduling calendar for lab time is down. She probably didn’t get a slot. Or if she did, not one that she wanted.”
“Hmm.” Szymanski selected his creamer. His tone was very bland when he inquired, “Dr. Meyer, you did not break the calendar for her?”
Coffee sloshed over Ethan’s mug onto his thumb. “What?”
“You did not break the calendar for her?”
“No! I’d never intentionally inconvenience a colleague that way.”
“Any colleague but…”—Szymanski dusted cinnamon over his drink—“…Dr. Erin Monaghan?”
He’d phrased it as a question. It wasn’t. Fastidious Szymanski wouldn’t make such a claim without data to back it up. Ready data, and plenty of it. Three years of evidence was incontrovertible proof, Ethan had to admit. But then, he’d never denied the facts. It wasn’t as if he was the only guilty party in the situation, either.
Erin Monaghan had caused so much damage by signing her tricksy initials—
God, when he’d been at CERN, he’d actually anticipated seeing her again.
He hadn’t known who she was, though. What she was like. What she’d done.
Idiot.
It had taken him months of sleepless nights to alleviate Dr. Kramer’s displeasure over theNature Physicsfiasco. He’d explained the revision error to the journal’s reviewers, of course; they’d identified problems in the paper’s data upon its initial submission, although with a name like Dr. Kramer’s listed as the first author and his sign-off on the revisions, they likely hadn’t reviewed the edits as closely the second time around. That was a procedural failure on their end. It was no use blaming the reviewers, however, because Dr. Kramer blamed Ethan.
That would’ve been bad enough—very, very bad—but there had also been the accompanying fallout of damage to Dr. Kramer’s professional standing from the publication, which had cost him his collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. After his testy exchanges with theNature Physicsreviewers, Ethan had put his own holometer lab time on hold and spent six months running calculations on a variety of Dr. Kramer’s other quantum hypotheses in an effort to regain even a modicum of his department head’s confidence. The formulas still haunted him.
In his frustration and fury during those first horrible days after the paper’s release—it had been retracted, but the harm had already been done—he’d reacted to Erin Monaghan’s sabotage with his own machinations around time zones and the lab time schedule. A quick switch between a.m. and p.m. on her calendar when she was away from her desk had been so easy.
Only later, after he’d slogged through the backlog of emails accumulated during his stint at CERN, had he located a note from Human Resources, alerting him about a document signing mix-up in Erin Monaghan’s onboarding process two months before.
