“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 inNature 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.”
