No Beatles songs.
Where was she?
What was she playing at?
Scheming for the Secretary of Energy’s visit, making strides on the Eischer-Langhoff application, solidifying her department takeover, bolting down her lunch in the cafeteria—when she wasn’t eating a sandwich at her desk, glasses smudged from impatient fingers pushing the frames back up her nose, shoulders hunched in focus toward her monitor—before rushing back to Modern Physics on a scooter.
On Thursday, Ethan got to the parking rack first. There was one scooter left.
Erin came striding out the door from the Science and Public Support building, aiming directly for it. He took hold of its handlebars at her approach. A familiar flush rose across her cheeks as she registered his presence. She caught her breath and hesitated for a moment, scanning the pavement around them—empty of turkeys, rattlesnakes, and alternative scooters—but then continued on in the direction of Ethan and the racks, hands fisted, scowling.
His stomach flipped in a victorious somersault. “Going somewhere in a hurry, Monaghan?”
“Yes.” Her teeth snapped.
“Youwere. It seems like I got the last scooter.”
“Good for you.”
“Did you want it?”
“Obviously.”
He leaned back against the rack, fiddling with the handlebars. “So, we have a problem.”
“Really.” Another flash of her teeth. Not a question. Then, unexpectedly, disconcertingly, she smiled. “No.Youhave a problem—”
—and she lunged forward to wrench the scooter out of his grip. His stomach flipped again, the loss of its ballast tilting him off the rack. Erin’s smile tilted, too. She sneered at his empty hands while she pivoted her purloined handlebars toward Ring Road, planting one sneaker on the scooter’s running board.
“Enjoy your walk back to Modern Physics.”
Somehow, he got a foot in front of her wheel. “You can’t just—”
“Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do!”
She pushed off against the pavement and left him by the racks with a rubber skid mark across the top of his shoe. She hadn’t eased back on her acceleration or swerved to avoid him—had he expected her to?—and he’d barely avoided a crushed ankle by tripping out of her way. Cursing under his breath, he watched her glide down the road. Only when she passed the Blue Bottle coffee stand and swung out of sight did he bend to probe his toes.
The damage to his sneaker was no worse than if Bunsen had chewed on it.
He walked back to the Modern Physics building and deflated Erin’s bicycle tires.
That evening, he gave the shoe to Bunsen.
At least the dog didn’t get sick from his gift or from anything in Stulsaft Park during their post-work run. He was grateful for the sake of the golden retriever’s gut, for the security deposit on his condo, and for his own schedule. Already stretching into dinnertime—a convenient excuse to miss the Meyers’ Sunday gatherings—his workday crept later over the next two weeks, first to ten o’clock, then eleven, before edging past midnight. But he wouldn’t have slept, anyhow. Not until both his grant and his funding pitch to the Secretary of Energy were perfect. Bunsen sprawled across his feet and Ted Chiang’s collection of science fiction short stories were good company in the silence. Whenever Tomasz Szymanski’s icon went live on SVLAC’s instant messaging system between eleven o’clock at night and three o’clock in the morning, however, he frequently found himself with questions about his colleague’s LED research. They were tangential to his own quantum measurement work at best, but still:
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Could LED infrared radiation potentially illuminate space and matter at micro-scales, if enough energy was applied?
Dr. Tomasz Szymanski
You are working at this time?
It was almost two thirty. Bunsen had given up hope of coercing Ethan into the bedroom, but had managed to get him from his desk to the couch and into a pair of flannel pajama pants. The dog twitched in his sleep on the cushions now, kicking Ethan in the kidneys.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
You’re working, too.
