Easy, Monaghan…
“Damn!”
Ethan pulled his hatchback off Ring Road and parked in a paved lot outside the experimental buildings. Edging between a shipping container and a forklift, he badged into the West Experimental Hall, opening the door wide enough to bump against a bicycle stationed by the entry.
Erin Monaghan’s wheels.
His watch read a full minute after twelve o’clock. He’d caught her infringing on his hours and violating the lab calendar. Exasperation mingled with satisfaction as he made his way through the hall’s vestibule, then into the central corridor with its branching arteries of control rooms and hutches. He scanned himself past the MEC door—and yes, Erin was there inside, bundling a jacket into her backpack, a wall of monitors still displaying the interference fringes from her latest LIGO cycle beneath wreaths of bundled cables. The area engineer was consulting a research schedule on a tablet and pulling up a list of requirements for the room’s next scientist: him. Dr. Martina Perez was inputting laser specifications into her controls under her colleague’s terse direction.
A tinny Beatles song played from someone’s phone.
“You said you’d warn me…” Erin mumbled something quick and heated under her breath to Perez, dragging a braid out from under the strap of her backpack.
He let the door slam shut behind him.
She startled at the noise, and grimaced. He folded his arms over his vest, static snapping from a few stray Bunsen hairs; a flush stained her cheeks, overbearing the chill of her frown to creep down her neck and under the collar of her graphic t-shirt. But then she adjusted her glasses with a stiff, defiant motion and raised her chin. Fluorescent illumination flared off her lenses while John Lennon crooned about kaleidoscope eyes.
He crossed his arms tighter.
Because who the hell had scored such a slow tempo for the song? It was like listening to molasses, to the passage of light-years between Maiman Auditorium’sclap, clap, clap…
Data fraud.
When he swallowed with a dry mouth, his ears gave a painfulpopof punctuation.
Mercifully, Erin averted her gaze to zip her bag.
“You’re over your time, Monaghan.” Glad that his voice didn’t crack, even more grateful to redirect his own attention, he tapped his watch. “Not—not that I’m surprised, though. You can barely manage the timelines for journal submissions. Why would you be punctual in a control room? Or anywhere else, since—”
But she didn’t cut him off with the interjections he’d expected, and his caustic, aborted commentary died away with the Beatles’ tune, the engineers staring at him, Erin staring at the floor now—again—with her lips pursed until she finally said, stiff and polite, “Thank you for your assistance, Drs. Hasselblad and Perez. I’ll see you next Tuesday. When will LIGO’s data exports be ready?”
“They need to synchronize with the Washington and Louisiana databases, so forty-eight hours, give or take.”
“That’s fine. I apologize for running over time.”
She wasn’t apologizing to him.
But: “For someone who studies space-time, your own sense of—”
He was repeating himself. He knew it. He couldn’t stop.
And still, she didn’t look at him. She was rude, she was late, and she was—leaving.
When she strode back out into the hall, however, her backpack knocked hard into his ribs. Then she bit out two brief words of acknowledgment. “Dr. Meyer.”
Dr. Chase Meyer Jr.: medical doctor, BMW driver, engaged.
Dr. Ethan Meyer: none of the above, and every family dinner or call reminded him of that, but here at SVLAC, he was someone with value, someone with—
—no answer today for her brusque words and backpack.
The door to the control room clicked shut behind her, cutting off any other retort to her dig that he might’ve made—when had she ever called himDr. Meyer? only his surname—and jolting his focus back to the engineers watching him over their computers and instrument panels. His fingers curled into his palms under their continued scrutiny. Dr. Hasselblad had the grace to return to his scheduling tablet, but Perez raised an eyebrow.
“Dr. Meyer, are you all right?”
“I…” Maybe Erin’s backpack had hit him harder than he’d thought. Rocking forward off the heels of his metal-capped boots, he reminded himself to breathe. “I’m fine. Are the lasers ready?”
“Almost.” Perez turned back to her controls. “I need to confirm the position of the holometer’s optical instruments. There was an earthquake with a one point six magnitude on the San Andreas Fault over the weekend, and since the machinery isn’t in an isolation chamber like the particle accelerator and LIGO, its mirrors might have shifted. I’m checking the instrument readings.”
