“Dr. Kramer,” he said.
“Meyer?”
“Yes.” He stepped closer, barreling ahead before he could think of anything but what he had to say. “You contacted Dr. Ronald Sams from theJournal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysicswith a claim that Dr. Monaghan’s pending paper is fraudulent. That she’s committed scientific misconduct. Retract your allegation.”
Silence.
The demand had surprised his supervisor.Anydemand would’ve been a surprise. But it was only a moment before the skin beside Dr. Kramer’s mouth tightened. He didn’t deny the charge. His briefcase gave an ominous creak. “Or? Careful, Meyer.”
He didn’t stop, didn’t breathe, and pushed forward into the danger of his manager’s pause. “Or I’ll update every experimental holometer data set—mydata analyses, frommyinstrument, frommyhypotheses—that you’ve ever used in a paper. Change them. Then I’ll contact the journals.Nature Physics. TheInternational Journal of Quantum Information. All of them. The Eischer-Langhoff grant reviewers, too. I’ll give them the new numbers, and I’ll lie. I’ll claim that you manufactured the earlier data sets to support your theories.Fraud.”
“I see.” A vein ticked over Dr. Kramer’s right eye. Then, “Who do you expect to believe you?”
“I have a paper trail from your revisions to the Eischer-Langhoff grant. You instructed me to change the data in Table 5 when it was already correct—and you might’ve been looking at an older set, but there’s already evidence that you manipulated data on time crystals in an earlier paper, so we—”Facts.He continued, slower, “Your subordinate on the time crystal project might’ve had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but we know that you stole and falsified her work. Just like you stole the idea of data fraud in Dr. Monaghan’s research from me. Like you stole everything.”
“You have no proof.” Leather creaked again. “Which is irrelevant, however. Because the papers that you claim you’d report to the grants and journals list you as a second author. Remember that, Meyer.”
How could he forget?
Erin had nailed the brutal truth months ago with her jeer in the kitchenette, that he was nothing but Dr. Kramer’s lackey and second author.
Except—no. That wasn’t right.
Dr. Ethan Meyer, your work is good, she’d also said.
The holometer was his.
The quantum unit concept was his.
Dr. Kramer’s early exports hadn’t been corrupted, had they? They’d been garbage from the start, generated only to simulate work. They’d never been real.
Nothing original.
All the data—and the evidence for sizing quantum units, preliminarily confirmed by the University of Amsterdam’s black hole model—was his, Ethan’s; Dr. Kramer would have no way to refute his lie by proving that any of the numbers had been retroactively falsified. Since he refused to share their raw exports with other scientists, and the exports themselves were overwritten every month by SVLAC’s budget operational software, there was no one to support a challenge to Ethan’s allegation of fraud by providing backup copies of the holometer data.
The work:mine.
But if all this was accurate, it also didn’t matter. His name was linked with Dr. Kramer’s on their articles. Damaging his supervisor’s credibility would destroy his own. So his threat was a nuclear option. If Dr. Kramer refused to retract his allegations to Sams and if Ethan executed his pledge—committing scientific misconduct himself, knowingly and maliciously falsifying data—then no reputable journal would publish papers from either of them again.
No publication, no funding.
No funding, no research.
No research, no career.
They’d both be blacklisted.
Erin would be safe.
“I know,” he answered his supervisor now. “Your name is on my research, and if you don’t retract your claim, reporting fraud to the journals could cost me my career. But I won’t lose my ideas—and when did you last publish anything significant that wasn’t based on my work? If you don’t retract the allegation, what willyoulose?”
Then he walked away.
As he strode past the empty bullpen and the kitchenette, elation swelled through the adrenaline pulsing in his stomach. His parting shot had been the truth: his work was the backbone of Kramer’s present achievements.My research. My success.Erin was right.Again. It was a truth he’d buried deep and tried to ignore, because there was nothing he could do except endure it and hope that, if he did everything Kramer asked, did everything right, then maybe someday his supervisor would recognize him, would recognize and honor his contributions… so he’d cached his knowledge, hidden it away from himself, but Erin had always gotten under his skin. She’d always found his weak points. Now, she’d found this courage, too.
This truth.
The Modern Physics doors slammed shut at his back.
