Launch Pad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  “You ready to head over?” asked a male voice with a British accent.

  Bev spun her chair around. In the doorway leaned Rodger Butler, the new chemistry professor. He was tall and red-headed like her, and the Dean had joked they could be brother and sister. She kind of liked Rodger, so she preferred not to think of him as a brother. He had freckles and green eyes, while her blue eyes sat in a freckle-free face. Totally different to her way of thinking.

  But why was he here? What had she forgotten? She glanced at her dinosaur calendar and saw the scribble “P. O.” in black magic marker on the last Thursday underneath September’s triceratops.

  “The plagiarism orientation?”

  “The plagiarism orientation,” he confirmed. “We can go together. Or,” he said, looking around and grinning, “we might just stay here and unpack your office.”

  Bev had given up being embarrassed by the unopened cardboard boxes stacked around and on top of the old, beat-up university furniture. She wondered why she even had all that stuff when all she really needed was a desk and a computer. Just to fill the office? It was the biggest office she’d ever had. The size of it seemed like overkill. Unpacking would just be another interruption to her research. The plagiarism orientation, too. Another interruption in a day of interruptions. Week of interruptions. Month of interruptions. Semester of interruptions.

  Her first month as a professor and it was already as she’d been warned by Marty Schwartz, the department chair. “It’s going to be busy, and as busy as you think it’s going to be, it will be even busier.”

  She stopped that depressing train of thought. This faculty position was her dream job and it would be as wonderful as she let it be—or as bad. In any event, attending University orientation events was part of her job. After her first semester she’d be considered “oriented” and freed from that particular set of obligations, at least. Bev saved her workspace and stood up. “I’m coming,” she said, her smile gone.

  “I see my effect on the joy of others is not as positive as I’d like.” Rodger sniffed his underarm and scowled. “It isn’t all that bad, is it? I did remember to bathe today. Both sides this time.”

  She let the corners of her mouth twist up into a smirk. “Sorry. It’s just that I was making a little progress with my imaging code and I don’t really want to change gears right now.”

  He gave her a serious look. “I understand completely, but it is our destiny to change gears for the greater good of the university, isn’t it?”

  Bev smiled.

  “Well, if you put it like that. Okay, let’s go learn how to catch cheaters in the age of paraphrasing software.”

  Rodger held the door open for her, and shut it behind them.

  “You can say that again, but in slightly different words, of course.”

  Rodger was rather fun to be around, she had to admit, her irritation at the interruption fading. If only there were enough time to just be around anyone, to hang out, but there was no way she’d make progress on her research and get tenure doing anything but staying focused. Still, she’d try to make the best of these required social moments.

  “Sure,” she said, as they made their way down the long corridor. “Let’s develop the skills to identify Wikipedia entries revised by computer for the benefit of sneaky students wishing to avoid thinking for themselves in the year 2033.”

  “Well, when you put it like that, brilliant! I can’t wait!”

  She let herself smile big.

  O O O

  Bev resisted the urge to look at her watch. That would look bad to the other faculty and the couple of dozen students in the auditorium. The seminar speaker, a collaborator of Marty’s, was taking his sweet time explaining the significance of a new class of variable star identified in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope archives and seemed oblivious to the fact that it had to be past five o’clock.

  She remembered when she’d looked forward to talks on subjects outside her own specialty. Now that she was a professor and not a student, there were times they seemed more of a burden, even the interesting ones, unfortunately. They just broke up the flow of the day too much.

  She wondered if any cookies remained from the pre-talk snacks she could snag for a light dinner. Bev knew it wasn’t a healthy idea, but carbohydrates would tide her over and let her put in a few more hours before heading home. She could work from home, but sometimes found herself crawling into bed before she was really ready to. Having a bed nearby was too tempting. She really wanted to run some sanity checks on her code, which she’d named Vizier, with some test data before getting back to the real thing.…

  A round of polite applause snapped her back to the moment. Bev sat up straight and joined in, feeling guilty. She hoped no one would her ask any questions.

  A few minutes later she was checking out the snack cart at the back of the auditorium, disappointed that there were only peanut butter cookies left, which she didn’t care for, when someone spoke to her.

  “Dr. Rix-Johnson?”

  Bev half turned, feeling literally like a kid caught raiding the cookie jar, and saw one of the new grad students. A dark-haired, heavyset guy, named Dino, if she remembered correctly. “Yes?”

  “I wanted to ask about doing a research project with you.”

  “Okay,” she said. Her brain raced ahead to the possibilities.

  Mentoring grad students was part of the job, and she wanted grad students. Good ones, anyway. She knew that at the start of research, training a student was slower than doing the work herself, but if they were good they’d pay off the investment in a few years. She’d also been advised to try to get a student to defend their PhD before she came up for tenure review, so she had already envisioned this scenario.

  Dino here, probably only a decade younger than she was, could be her first PhD student. She decided not to put him off for later but to give him a quick pitch now.

  “I have a starter project that would be perfect,” she said, eagerly. “Star spot migration in close binaries. The data set is sitting there, waiting for someone to give it some attention. It should lead to a nice little paper.”

  Bev herself had started on binary stars first and knew how interesting they were. She hoped she was projecting that enthusiasm.

  Dino stared back at her, seeming to want her to have said something else. After an uncomfortable silence, he said, “I really would prefer to work on exoplanets. I was told that you as an Argus team member have advanced data access.…”

  “Yes!” Bev replied. “It’s going to be so great! But the mission is pushing limits and has some unique idiosyncrasies. After you get the basics down on the star spots, you’ll be in a much better position to tackle something more challenging like Argus data and the weaker signals from exoplanets. You need to really understand the analysis and how to troubleshoot problems first.”

  “I see,” he said, looking down at his shoes. He didn’t seem to share her enthusiasm. She pushed a little further.

  “There’s no reason you couldn’t get a paper done by this time next year. You’re second-year, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’d be well positioned to start a PhD on Argus data at that point.”

  “But not right away?”

  Bev felt a little twinge of impatience with him.

  “No, but there’s a lot to learn first with the code and techniques. A lot of literature to master, too. But it’ll be really great.”

  “I see,” he said.

  Her sales pitch wasn’t working. Bev sighed.

  “Tell you what. Come see me next week and we’ll get started. Get you some papers to read to get the background.” She thought about her schedule and decided it made sense to put her interruptions together. “There’s a faculty meeting next Wednesday afternoon. We could meet just after that, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said thoughtfully.

  Bev nodded and smiled at him as he turned to go. She scooped up a handful of the smelly cookies in a napki
n—calories were calories—and felt energized for the second shift.

  Even though it would add to her workload, she was excited because she was going to have her first grad student.

  O O O

  Bev stared at the blonde-haired undergrad, in his university sweatshirt and matching baseball cap that seemed to be the uniform of male students here, struggle to articulate his thoughts. She resisted the nearly overpowering urge to just give him the answer. Her official office hours were nearly over as indicated by the scribble on her dinosaur calendar (now featuring an Allosaurus), but she’d promised her students that as long as they waited, she’d see them, and she knew there were at least three more in the hallway.

  She had jumped at teaching astrobiology. It was one of her favorite subjects even though no extraterrestrial life had been yet confirmed so the whole topic was literally theoretical, but there was a lot to teach nonetheless: astronomy, biology, geology, philosophy, some engineering. She had not appreciated how exhausting it was to teach to 300 in a giant lecture hall, nor how stringent the requirements were for freshman science seminars. D or lower meant university probation and the loss of a scholarship. That stricture stressed out a lot of students for whom math and conceptual reasoning were not their strongest skills. Moreover she was not being a pushover with the grades, which was keeping her office full.

  Bev kept up her stare and her silence, forcing him to answer.

  “Six point five?” he finally said, gazing at the calculator app on his phone as if it were an exotic alien life form.

  “Six point five what?”

  “Alien civilizations we can communicate with.”

  “Where?” she pressed.

  “In the galaxy?”

  Close enough. Sometimes it was like pulling teeth, but she nodded encouragingly at him.

  “Correct! Drake’s equation is just a way of formalizing our uncertainties so we can attack the problem somewhat more quantitatively and with real data. It’s probably not really six, since many of the input probabilities are not well known and probably not the values given in the problem, but we’ve made real progress. They’d only started finding exoplanets a few years before I was born, and now we have a pretty good idea of how many stars host Earth-like planets in their habitable zone.”

  The vacant way he looked back at her made her suspect that he still wasn’t getting it even though he’d eventually worked through the math in the homework example. She could just give him a metaphorical pat on the head and let him go, but what was the point of doing something if you weren’t going to do it well? Teaching evaluations counted for tenure, too. So how was she going to get through to him? What had Rodger suggested at the science education workshop? Being less abstract and more concrete?

  Then Bev considered another approach to the Drake equation that might make it more relatable.

  “Do you like to go out on dates?”

  He jumped a little in his seat and his face contorted in horror. “What do you mean?”

  The poor boy! She hadn’t transitioned well at all. In retrospect, her question did sound bad. Well, she was in for a gram, and might as well go in for a kilo. She sat back in her chair so as to look less threatening.

  “I’m just trying to make an analogy to a situation you’re more familiar with. Okay?”

  He visibly relaxed. “Okay.”

  “Imagine you go to a big campus party and want to meet someone there to date. How do you think you might be able to figure out how many dateable people might be there for you to meet?”

  “I could just go there and see, I guess.”

  Pulling teeth … She took a deep breath and decided to get him started.

  “Sure, but how about we approach it with a little math?” She could simplify the problem and see if a few leading questions would get him to start thinking critically. The party was like the galaxy, and people at the party were like stars, and while she could begin with equating the rates of star formation and of people arriving, along with stellar lifetime as the equivalent of how long people remained, she cut to the chase. “How many people are at a big campus party?”

  He looked at the ceiling for a moment then answered. “A few hundred. A big one, probably four hundred. Something like that.”

  Good. He already sounded more confident.

  “And would you say that you’d be able to make four hundred dates if you talked with everyone there?”

  “No,” he said, chuckling about it while he considered that. “Not at all.”

  She decided to skip a couple of factors that might be too personal, imagining Rodger teasing her about it later, or worse—the Dean not teasing her—and skipped ahead again. The important thing was the concept. “You’re a discerning guy with high standards, I’m sure. Maybe there’s only ten percent of the people there you might want to date?”

  He laughed a little. “Yeah.”

  “And ten percent of four hundred is…?”

  “Forty.”

  “And do you think some of those forty might already be in relationships and not open to dating?”

  “Yeah, say half. No, a quarter. A lot of couples on this campus.”

  Were there? She’d been too busy to notice. “Okay. And because you’re a friendly, charismatic person, how about we say the fraction that you talk with that would go out with you is one hundred percent?”

  He laughed again, but nodded.

  This was going fine. He was leaning back in his chair, resting his hand on a cardboard box, and engaged in a way he hadn’t been when it was all about stars and alien civilizations.

  “So let’s multiply that all out,” Bev said. “The number of potential dates at the party is equal to…?”

  “The number of people at the party, four hundred, times the fraction I’d like, times the fraction that are single, times the fraction that would like me—a hundred percent on that last one. I get ten. But I’d stop after one. All you need is one good one.”

  His comment struck her as more profound than he probably intended. But one good what? One good relationship? Or could it be one good job? Or perhaps one good scientific discovery to be remembered for? She wished she knew for sure. It seemed too hard to accomplish them all.

  “I suppose,” Bev agreed after a moment’s reflection. “But let’s apply that to astrobiology. Imagine Earth’s trying to find a date with an alien civilization. Or at least some texting.”

  “Huh,” he said. “The Drake equation is just a kind of interstellar dating equation, isn’t it? Intelligent life is just picky about what kind of star systems it shows up in.”

  “Yes! You could put it that way. Makes more sense now? Not just a math problem?”

  “Yeah.” He stood up to go, but turned back. “Yeah, it does. Thanks. Not all my teachers would make the extra effort like you did, especially talking about dating. But I got it.”

  Bev felt a mild blush, and a sense of accomplishment. “Great. Can you send in the next in line?”

  “Sure, Professor,” he said, grinning. “Happy to.”

  If she were going to lose her research time today, she hoped the remainder of her students would have similar breakthroughs. She could calculate the odds, but she decided to remain optimistic and assume it would be one hundred percent.

  As the student walked out, however, she realized she hadn’t caught his name, and that took the edge off her good mood. Just because she had a big enrollment didn’t mean she couldn’t make some personal connections, did it? She’d just have to make more of an effort. She could be good at this, and maybe be that one good teacher that changed lives. It would take more time, but Bev promised herself to try to get the names, even if it were just those visiting during her office hours.

  O O O

  Bev sat in her office rereading an email about a calibration issue with the Argus data that required the reprocessing of everything she had done to date. All the uncertainties had to be modified, and in her image reconstructions their values were critical in distinguishin
g what was real and what was noise. Any work done now would not be reliable. This would set her back a couple of weeks at least, although she could continue to test and optimize her code even though she didn’t have any actual reliable data to analyze. She felt weary just considering it.

  Another email popped up. It was from Rodger.

  Hi Bev,

  Care to pop out for a drink tomorrow? Dinner, too, if you like.

  Cheers,

  Rodger

  She stared at the screen and went into a little panic. Was he asking her out as a friend and colleague? Or was he asking her out on a date?

  And why didn’t she have a local friend to talk with about it?

  She read the message over and over, wondering what to do. She liked Rodger. Under different circumstances, she might be interested in dating him, and maybe more. But right now? Right now was for working her butt off to make sure she got papers published, grants funded, students taught, and got tenure. There would be time for dating later, but if she got distracted and failed at this job, well, that was disaster. It would break her heart more than she could imagine a man doing so.

  Rodger was a funny, smart, talented guy. He could probably date all the time and still get tenure. He wasn’t going to wait, not the six years for tenure or for her.

  But what if he was just being friendly? She could use a little break for a drink, even dinner. She had to eat, after all. There was a new sushi place, and she hadn’t had sushi in forever.

  But, no. Better not to take the chance. Right now her attention had to remain focused like a laser beam on making sure she was on track for tenure.

  Was she making a mistake? She did like Rodger. What was wrong with a little social life? She could do more than one thing at a time, surely.

  No, she told herself firmly. There would be time for that later, when she had tenure.

  The lonely part of her offered a wistful compromise. One drink outside of work couldn’t hurt, could it?

  But what if she stayed for more than one? Or even dinner?

  Bev’s thoughts bounced back and forth between her options, until she noticed that a half hour had passed. She smacked a firm palm down on her desktop.