40. Bop - Lords of Serendipity

Jack was supposed to go for a walk with Essem that night. They did this a couple of times a week. She took off her flat leather slippers and walked barefoot, which he found charming. More than charming. They chatted about what was happening at the university, at universities everywhere, complaining about everything like professors do anywhere and always. They only argued whether things were worse than ever or had always been this way if you looked closely enough. Which is what he had to do now, at Martin’s research. Which threatened everything, including his own life at Serendipity, where, for the first time in his career, Jack felt like a somebody.

On their walks, Essem had started calling him Rajaly.

Raja? Really?

No! I said Rajaly. Definitely don’t let this go to your head, Jack.

Hard not to.

You think it means “king,” don’t you.

Doesn’t it?

Rajaly is short for Rajaliya. That’s the nickname my colleagues have given you.

Which means?

“Eagle.” Sinhala for “eagle.”

Because I’m American?

In a sense. Because they think you’re a bird of prey. Which is how I came up with my own nickname for you.

Which is?

Bop.

Bop, said Jack.

They were standing under one of the great mai mara trees that dominated the old campus greens, its dark brown trunk wide as a car, its thick leafy branches soaring and falling like a mess of wooden rainbows.

Yes, Bop, said Essem. She smiled.

As in . . .

Swooping down before flying back to America. Because you are flying back to America, aren’t you?

She posed this question now and then, as a kind of mutual reminder that yes, they enjoyed walking around campus together, and it wasn’t just because they liked walking, but what did it matter? He wasn’t staying.

As far as she knew, that is.

Jack hadn’t told her about Quinn’s plans for him, or his openness to those plans, even if he still didn’t believe in them himself. Staring up at the whirring fan blades and ignoring all the small lizards scissoring along the walls late at night, he also held back the notion that Elizabeth would be happy for him, where he was, what he was doing, and with whom. Jack still loved his late wife, and he didn’t need to wager with Pascal to believe in her, whatever that meant. And while with Helen there had been guilt at the brief prospect of something, there was no guilt here. He found Essem more than just charming, but things between them would only ever go so far if he was only here for a year to run a lab. There’d be no point. Neither was rich enough to fly over for weekends, and both were middle-aged enough to be too tired for Zoom dates and time zones.

When he canceled their planned walk that night, Essem texted back to ask if everything was all right. He lied and said yes and left the lodge and went back to the lab. It was nearly dark. The streetlamps lining the way to his building flickered with moths. The grad students had left for the day. He wanted to go over their findings about Martin’s data one more time without them there waiting to be assured everything was going to work out for the best. Because if they were correct, nothing was going to work out for anyone.

Hallo, sir, good evening, said the nighttime security guard. He stood up and bowed.

Good evening.

Forget something, sir? No need to come, you could have called and I would have sent an honest boy. See? This is why he is with me. Just in case you require assistance and so you don’t have to leave the residence.

There’s someone else with you, behind the desk? said Jack.

Now get up! Get up or I’ll thrash you! said the security guard, looking down.

A boy no older than ten appeared by the side of the desk, chewing his fingers and clutching a robot dinosaur. He was wearing a men’s winter jacket over his suit of thin, pinstriped pajamas.

Does he come to work with you every night?

Every third night, sir.

Why is that?

Because his other brothers come on the other nights, sir. Makes sense, no? That way I always have someone fresh, ready to assist you.

The security guard was smiling and breathing heavily. He had a terrified look in his milky brown eyes. Jack wondered what he’d find if he looked behind the desk. A whole family sleeping there? More likely the guard was bringing a different child each night to try out the air-conditioning, to sleep and dream a night in a building from someone else’s future.

He went to the lab and turned on the lights and machines and pulled up the reports from the graduate students just as Quinn texted, asking when he was free to chat and suggesting tonight would be best, in person. It would only take a few minutes. Jack had an idea what that was about. Mysteriously, unbelievably, maybe even, now, suspiciously, Quinn had let Jack know he was being considered for the position of pro-chancellor of the new campus of Serendipity University. Quinn had nominated himself campaign manager of sorts. But Jack didn’t want to call Quinn back and intrigue about the job any more than he wanted to see Essem, never mind Martin, who was planning to come to campus to give his big lecture about his major discovery.

Everything was going to work out, or Martin was cheating.

He was cheating.

Alone in the lab overnight, Jack went through the material Krisanthi and Piyal had prepared for him. For months now, they had received data sets every few days that Martin developed from the gigapixel-sized photographs of the sky the new telescope was taking. Martin also provided them with algorithms he’d written that were designed to compare the data over multiple instances and identify the appearance of new signals. They sent their work back to him, and he submitted it to the theorists working on the project, who compared it with their models. A few weeks earlier, the Serendipity lab detected something new in the data. It fit the theorists’ model for the celestial event of two neutron stars colliding. The theory was that this would give off so much energy before becoming a black hole, it would shake space itself. The model predicted the evidence would be a glow of light that remained for several days after the stars became a black hole. The afterglow. The graduate students found the data version of the afterglow in one of the sets Martin had sent them, and they found the same one again and again in subsequent sets.

And that was the problem.

Krisanthi and Piyal told Jack that what they were finding was statistically impossible, at least to them. It wasn’t just the same signal they were finding every time, but the same signal with the exact same array of background noise, of interference from other sources of light, of changes in the earth’s atmosphere that always needed to be filtered out. How could these sources of interference never change, if, as had been generally understood in the field since the sixteenth century, the earth, the sun, and other stars moved?

Jack leaned his forehead against the computer monitor and sighed. His teeth ached. He massaged his jowls. He must have been clenching his jaws while going through the data and algorithms all these late hours. He’d done so more closely now than earlier, he had to admit. But that was because he’d seen so much good work from Krisanthi and Piyal at the start. They were slow, careful, diligent. As was always the case with graduate students not named Allard Hamburger, he’d come to trust them. He’d also started doing more cursory checks before the material was sent back to Martin.

Had this been Martin’s expectation, all along? Had he waited until Jack became comfortable enough and then started doctoring the data, thinking mere Sri Lankan graduate students would never detect it? But they had, and how it pained Jack that when they had told him, they were so worried they’d done something wrong.

Earlier that day, in the lab, he had assured them they wouldn’t get in trouble for identifying something that could be potentially wrong, for their asking him for a separate assessment. That was good data scholarship.

Thank you, Professor Jack. But actually, good data scholarship is not the issue, said Piyal.

What is then?

It’s just that, what will happen now?

I’m going to look into this, Jack had said. I’m going to check your work, and if what you’re claiming is accurate, I’m going to inform people about what’s going on, beginning with Martin.

And then we’ll lose our jobs, said Piyal.

And we are both already in contact with professors in the US and UK who want us to join their labs for postdocs, because of our connection here.

To me?

Sorry, no, sir. To Professor Martin. We were hoping he would provide references.

And you want to keep that connection, knowing what you know now?

They stayed completely still and said nothing until Jack changed the subject.

He loathed Martin for making him ruin their chances like this at the very start of their careers. Also, for his laziness—using the same made-up signal and noise each time for the afterglow—and for his arrogance, his presumption that they would never detect it.

Jack winced. It was as if someone were pulling at his heart with a pair of tweezers, like an eagle was roosting on his chest, and digging in, not flying away.

He was no raja, no Rajaly.

What if he was the pigeon?

What if Martin had been sending him doctored data since they’d first met in Italy, to see if he would notice, and when Jack didn’t, he decided to put him in place at Serendipity as a front for his great, faked discovery?

And what was worse, Martin predicting Jack wasn’t a good enough statistician to figure it out, or Martin predicting Jack wasn’t a good enough person to do something about it when he did?

Someone tapped on the front wall of the lab. It was the security guard and his son. The guard was holding out a cloudy bag of yellow and brown spicy mix. The boy was still holding the robot dinosaur.

Jack declined the snack.

The security guard smiled and walked away. But the boy stayed there, playing with the zipper on his ski jacket and studying Jack.

He got up from his desk and walked toward the boy, who froze like a hunted chipmunk.

Jack was going to invite him to come in and see the computers while there was still time. Having failed to stop Allard, he was going to stop Martin, a far more successful, influential cheater. But also a lazy and arrogant one. Jack would confront him when he came to Sri Lanka in two weeks. That would be more than enough time to assemble the case against him. At which point, all of this would come to an end.

The boy backed away from the lab just as Jack started to crouch and gesture that it was okay to come in. He kept backing away and suddenly fell into someone else, dropping his toy.

It was Quinn, grinning and nodding at Jack as he gave the boy his dinosaur.