Flux, chapter 5
Concrete Flux
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⬅️ Previous chapter
Late May 2009
“I don’t have time for this nonsense,” Grace says.
James shifts his weight. The metal folding chair creaks. “My board is unhappy. They think you’re taking advantage of us. They’ve directed me to—”
“See, this is why I’m not in the corporate world. Life’s too short for bullshit politics, frat boys meddling where they don’t belong, issuing directives.” A vise squeezes her chest. Not now. Four doses in, she can’t touch albuterol again for hours. Her head is already trying to levitate off her shoulders.
He opens his laptop. “Let’s talk about your research.”
Fuck this pompous asshole. “My research is impeccable.” She checks her phone. She should’ve left ten minutes ago. If there’s any traffic, she’ll be late for class. The dean chewed her out last week for being late so often.
His water bottle is unopened. She finished hers in three swallows. She reaches across the table for it just as he turns the laptop around. Their arms bump.
“I was just—I’m really thirsty,” she croaks.
“Oh, by all means,” he says. He holds the bottle out to her like a dead thing. “I don’t touch the stuff.”
“Water?”
He laughs, showing a gold crown on a bottom left molar. “Bottled water. It’s killing the planet.” He pulls a pricey stainless-steel bottle from the outer pocket of a black ballistic nylon briefcase. The gas flame / water ripple logo is stenciled on its side. Of course they have eco-swag.
Grace twists the cap off her plastic bottle. “That’s a good one.”
His bottle’s blue carabiner rattles. “Moving on. I’ve been puzzling over your last dataset.” He scrolls through a spreadsheet. “See how Dazzler has these gaps while Daredevil’s levels are continuous? And Beast and Warbird are even more confusing. Your numbers contradict our logs. What’s the problem?”
This overdressed New York suit might as well have reached across the flimsy folding table and punched her in the solar plexus. She ransacks her rattled mind for some jargon to put him off. “The . . . power supplies were faulty on a few instruments. But we’ve corrected them all. You must be reading it wrong. It’s good data.”
The blue eyes narrow. “Which is it then? Faulty power supplies or good data? I know physics is tricky, but what’s your excuse?”
Her blood thickens with indignation. No, see, Grace has a very special relationship with physics. She loves that mathematics can describe, reveal, even predict behaviors with the reliability of a sage. Masses accelerate. Heat transfers. Everything goes somewhere.
Her high school physics teacher was responsible for her learning to pilot a glider. She was enchanted by his enthusiasm for how air travels at different velocities across two sides of a shape. To put immutable laws to useful purposes like sailing and flight is to her a kind of power flirting with magic.
“It’s good data,” she repeats.
“Your good data, by my calculations, has a 12-day gap.” He’s speaking to the screen, as if the spreadsheet were on trial, not her. “That’s not good, it’s shoddy.”
She pulls the laptop closer, twists it. “Show me.” If she had a hammer, she’d smash it.
He drags it back and twists it to face him. He won’t look up from the screen.
Who is this fucking guy? How could she not have heard anything about him till now? Should she even believe this asshole?
He runs his finger around his collar again. “I’m worried we’ll have a flowback event here.”
“You should be.”
“By my calculations, it’s already happened. At Daredevil.”
Calculations this, calculations that. What calculations is he talking about? Grace’s instruments logged a massive methane release when Daredevil’s fracturing fluids returned up the wellbore. But she hasn’t been able to correlate it with either Dazzler or Beast. Getting good numbers from Warbird is critical. “Big methane flushes aren’t out of the question during flowback. That’s why—"
“It’s why we need reliable data. From reliable instruments.”
The way he leans into the reliables is both annoying and oddly endearing. He . . .cares?
Grace sighs, takes a long swallow of water with closed eyes. Counts to ten. “I don’t know what calculations you’re making, but we’re close to having enough data to get an accurate picture of where and how these methane releases are—”
“That’s certainly what you promised when we signed you. But now with your 12-day gap—”
“Not a gap.” She’ll have to let the we signed you go for now.
“—it begs the question, are you cooking your books? I ask myself, why would Dr. Grace Evans engage in such blatant, and frankly obvious, corruption?”
Grace seethes. How easy it would be to choke him out with his precious pink paisley tie. “I have never,” she starts, but her voice is shaking. She swallows, ignores the tightness in her chest. “I don’t falsify data.”
“And my answer comes back . . . To advance her career. Happens all the time.” He glances up at her, then returns his eyes to his laptop screen. “I’ve read that academic science is a cutthroat career.”
“Be serious. Next you’ll accuse me of sucking up to all the climate-change funders by dumping on the poor beleaguered fossil fuel industry.” She gulps more water. “Spare me.”
He laughs. Laughs!
Her anger propels her to her feet. The chair clatters to the floor. “You think because you snooped online you’ve got me all figured out. You don’t know the first thing about me.” Her voice is a knife slicing the smile out of his smug face.
The bastard. He remains cool. Taps the top of his laptop screen. “Oh, I know a great deal about you.” When he looks up, his blue eyes have cooled from southern gulf to glacial melt.
Grace and James face off in the drilling din. Everything in the thin office is vibrating. Every molecule in the plastic wall panels, in the Masonite floor, the metal file cabinets, every cell in Grace’s body, the crinkly water bottle in her hand, down to the Bledsoe boot and the collagen in her abused ligaments. What she wouldn’t give to be soaring again, high over this hellish place, buoyed by the sky. To escape the insane project of disgorging the earth’s guts. To breath clean, clear air.
“Dr. Evans,” he says. “Please sit.” Exasperation shows through his polish. Did he expect her to go down without a fight?
She considers throwing the bottle at him. Instead, she limps to the kitchenette. A cracked glass pot of sludgy coffee smokes on its burner. She pulls two more bottles of water from the mini-fridge and rummages for something to eat. No to the cheese peanut-butter crackers, yes to the half-eaten Hershey’s chocolate bar.
Back at the table, she works a limp piece free for herself and offers the rest to James. “Probably not fair-trade rainforest certified.”
“At least it’s locally made by third-generation union artisans.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself.” The chocolate restores her a bit. “Let me see that spreadsheet.”
The rows of numbers calm her. She makes a decision. Stares right at him. His eyes are disarmingly blue. Like lenses an actor would wear for a movie.
“Okay, yeah. There is a gap. Twelve days. And, true, I was counting on nobody noticing. Well done, you.” She swigs the plastic water. “It was a simple equipment glitch, nothing nefarious. Once I gather two more weeks from that well and from here, I can be more confident in my theory.”
“It’s three.” He’s enjoying this. “Three wells.”
She waves a hand. Her fingers are sticky from the chocolate. “Nothing gets past you, does it? Fine. Three wells. You’re missing the bigger point here.”
“Which is?”
She pivots the laptop and opens the third spreadsheet tab. “I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. It began with the well casing pours on Beast in April.”
He leans in, hooked. His hair hints of campfire.
“The conductor casing pour was on April 7 and 8. Methane was detected at 0.0001 meters-cubed-per-hour. A negligible, safe baseline. The surface casing pour was the following week. Methane at 0.02 the next day. A two-hundred-fold increase overnight. And then, on day three—”
“0.04? Are you shitting me?” His face slackens with amazement. “A four-hundred-fold methane increase from baseline in three days? Are you certain?”
“No, I’m not certain. Only a hack would be certain with this. Which is why I need more data. It is a shocking failure, if true. And Dazzler is even worse, based on preliminaries.”
“Where?” He opens tabs and scrolls around. “Could it be biogenic? Cow farts and such?”
“Burps, not farts. We wondered, too, if it’s methane from a surface source, or even naturally occurring subsurface. So we did an isotope signature analysis.”
She had to borrow time on a colleague’s mass spectrometer, a guy she doesn’t know well. He made her feel poor for asking. She and Barbara hauled samples down four flights of stairs to his basement lair in the middle of the night, because that was the only time he offered. His benches were crowded with crap, so they had to stage everything on chairs and the floor. His per-sample fee was yet another thing she hadn’t budgeted for, plus the hassle of transferring funds from her grant to his. She offered to buy a case of kim wipes or PCR plates to keep it simple, but he insisted on money.
She has her eye on a refurbished mass spec. Whenever the twenty grand they’re asking for it materializes out of thin air.
James’ blue eyes were eager. “And?”
“Nope,” she says. “It’s carbon thirteen, but heavier. Classic shale gas signature. From the drilling, hundred percent.”
He presses back in the chair, unbuttons his top button, yanks loose the knot of his tie. “This is straight-up brilliant. It’s exactly what I need.”
She’d have thought her news that three brand-new cement well casings are failing from jump would be met with dismay, not glee. As much atmospheric methane as her instruments are catching, she can’t help worrying about local subsurface water. She wonders if area farmers would consent to water testing. Or allow her to place air monitors on their property.
“It’s incontrovertible proof.” He draws out the word like a Broadway show tune.
“It does seem so. I’ll know for sure in a few weeks.”
“Oh, we don’t have that much time. I need it next week.” He pulls the tie off altogether and flings it on the table. “Big board meeting. They can’t say no to a pilot study now. I’m designing a triple-wall casing, but they hate the price tag.” He’s suddenly manic, the birthday kid who actually got the pony. “This industry has an abysmal record. It’s an open secret. Casing design hasn’t changed in decades. How do we expect the same shit to perform any better here? Hell, we don’t even follow the Petroleum Institute’s recommendation for a hundred-foot casing depth below deepest drinking water.”
It takes her a moment to process his torrent of words. “Why the hell not?”
He snorts. “Because Pennsylvania only requires fifty feet. And guess who helped write those regs.”
Grace could guess Hank Cowan, but she puts her hands up, palms out. “Don’t tell me.” She feels contaminated enough by this company.
“Three wells. Three mother fucking wells.” He crams the last of the chocolate in his mouth and sucks on a fingertip.
Grace fizzes with the certainty that her work matters. Her obsessive, detailed research will have an immediate practical purpose. She still doesn’t know a thing about this guy, but she likes the way he eats chocolate. That has to count for something.
“Whatever you had planned for today, cancel it,” he says. “We need to strategize. I have ideas.”
Grace checks her phone. Fuck it. She’ll email her students to cancel and assign a paper. After Barbara’s pestering about her why, Grace had ended the last class with a writing exercise on the prompt, What’s most important to you? They can drill down on that.
James stands to stretch. “There’s no time to waste on cobbled-together science-fair equipment. To make the most compelling case to my board, I need hard data, facts, a solid basis for recommendations.”
Grace, still composing the email to the students, waves him off.
While they had scribbled answers to What’s most important? (or more likely, scrolled their Instagram and Snapchat feeds), Grace made her own list under the heading Why.
For the money
Fame and glory
No good at anything else
Easily bored
Not a people person
Solve mysteries of nature
Intellectual stimulation
Then she crossed out everything and scrawled:
Good at puzzles
Tinker and build things
Need to eat
She’d torn the page off the pad with a flourish that echoed through the quiet room. A few students looked up like startled deer. At the top of the fresh page, she’d written, Don’t like, then crossed it out to write Hate.
Begging for money
Kissing up to the dean
Department politics
Creeps
Potluck lunches
Lazy research assistants
Teaching
Students
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” James says. “You need money and real equipment. We need more reliable data. The solution is for United Energy to fund your research. It’s my job to clean up our act, but I can’t do it without solid data showing us where we’re fucking up.”
Grace had to pester and beg for nine months just for access to their well sites. Now here’s this possibly insane guy, first questioning her integrity and threatening to kill her project, and now offering her the keys to the car? She feels like Robert Johnson at the crossroads.
“I know it sounds nuts,” he says.
“Whatever this is, how do you expect me to trust you? You just accused me of corruption.”
He waves a hand. “I know, I know. I had to see for myself how you’d react.”
“Oh, so I passed some sort of sick test?”
“Hang on.” He forages in the kitchenette and returns with an open package of Twizzlers. “Emergency stash.” He tears into one like a cowboy with a piece of jerky.
Grace’s mind is a swirl of what-ifs and but-maybes. To calm the turbulence, she chews a length of ridged cherry plastic rope.
“There’s something about working your jaw muscles this hard,” he says.
She nods and swallows. “You can either chew or argue. Not both.”
“And the sugar rush. The nostalgia of your fourth-grade teacher’s cough drops.”
“My fourth-grade teacher was a monster,” Grace says. “She wouldn’t give a cough drop to a dying child.”
He leans back in his chair. Takes a swig from his fancy water bottle. “The great Dr. Grace Evans. This is your Robert Johnson moment, eh? What do you say?”
Her first coherent thought is of that refurbished mass spectrometer. Her stomach flutters like first love. Hell, she could buy a new one on their dime.
“How much are you offering?” she asks.
“How much do you need?” He scrutinizes his laptop, chewing an entire Twizzler in under twenty seconds. A beaver couldn’t do better. “I say, you’ve been thinking too small. Go big or go home.” He turns the laptop to show her a spreadsheet.
“I know I’m breaking all the rules,” he says. “The way you win a negotiation like this is to make the other guy, or woman, name the number first. But I can see you’re no-nonsense, so let’s just get right to it.”
Grace’s eyes stray to the bottom number. It’s more than she’s seen in all the years she’s been a research scientist. All the years, combined. She feels queasy, possibly from the Twizzlers, but mostly from the thought of all that money. She looks up. He’s grinning.
“Your mouth is hanging open. I assume that’s a yes?” He turns the laptop back to face him. “We can do great things together, Grace.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Dr. Evans, I mean.”
For that much money, he can call her whatever the hell he wants.
He crams the last Twizzler into his mouth. Grace is suddenly starving. She needs more or she’ll eat her own hand. She scrubs her face and leaves her hands there to collect herself. So tempting. So so tempting. But how can she say yes? She can’t. Can she? It’s a violation of every kind of ethic. Isn’t it? She shakes her head. Money is a means to an end, that’s all. Who cares where it comes from, she’ll put it to good use. She’ll ask him about strings. Insist on full autonomy, full transparency. Does she know any lawyers? Or law students? She can’t afford a real lawyer.
“It’s . . . interesting,” she says, carefully staring past his shoulder to the back wall. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“I get it. It’s a big decision. Think fast, though. This is a great opportunity, and it’s what you want, isn’t it? Life’s too short for half measures, Grace.” He presses his hands on the table as if to brace against a stiff wind. “Besides the board meeting, which I can probably finesse—those guys don’t understand science anyway—we’re opening five more sites in the next month and, by my calculations—” He pauses to draw a breath and consult his laptop. He presses a finger into the screen, and looks up with those blue, blue eyes. “You’re due to run out of money in about a month.”
Next chapter ➡️
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A suit that actually cares? I'm suspicious... 🤔
So good, I’m just catching up! You’ve created some really great tension between these two already. I’m intrigued to see where it goes.