He turned toward me and kissed me.
For a moment, I kissed him back, lost in the taste of him, in the feel, in the fact that we weretogethernow, if secretly, and I got to touch him as much as I wanted—
And then I realized we were sliding horizonal. I pushed him up and pointed at his computer. “Ethan! Concentrate!”
“I’m concentrating.” He swept my hair back behind my ear.
“On the wrong thing.”
He groaned. “I can’t believe you’re only using me for my research abilities. Use me for my body, please.”
“Later.”
“Promise?” he asked hopefully.
I jabbed my finger once more at the screen. “Comet!”
He sighed, then continued poking around. The date wasn’t easy to find. Wikipedia only said: “Frederick Gibson discovered Comet C1911d during a routine search for comets.” No further details on timing, just information about the Arborids and the comet’s orbital period. “I’m not seeing it. Did you say people had to file for a discovery? Where?”
“I’m not sure—the local powerhouse astronomy center? Which would probably be Harvard.”
Sure enough, we found a website with serious nineties vibes, declaring that the Harvard College Observatory Bulletins were the Western Hemisphere’s main way of announcing discoveries of comets and novae between 1898 and 1926. They had PDFs of scans of their old bulletins. “There’s one from April ninth, 1911,” I said, my stomach clenching.
We opened it. In bubbly handwriting, like mine at thirteen, it read, “A cablegram received at this observatory from Mr. Frederick Gibson states that a planet has been discovered, positions of which are as follows.” A few lines of numbers followed.
“Planet?” Ethan asked.
I could barely hear him over the pounding in my ears. “That’s how they referred to comets.” I remembered how Andrea had written about Witt’s planet. How she’d longed to discover a comet herself. “Gibson filed for a discovery. The same day Andrea wrotehow dare he.”
“But—Jordan, Andrea worked at Harvard, she basicallylivedat the observatory. If she discovered the comet, how would he have been able to file for it before her? She would’ve had to tell him the positions and everything first, and why would she do that before telling Harvard?”
“I don’t know. But these numbers—look, they match the ones she wrote down in her diary.”
Ethan let out a low whistle. “Looks bad. Though it’s possible, right, they both independently discovered it?”
Like Witt and the other dude. “Yeah,” I admitted reluctantly. “But why would she be so mad if he genuinely found it?”
“Like you said. She’d been trying to do this her whole life.He’d only been interested in astronomy for a few years. I bet it’d still make her furious if he scooped her.”
“True.” But I thought about Rosalind Franklin, who did groundbreaking work on DNA only to watch two men win the Nobel Prize. And Lise Meitner, who didn’t get any credit for nuclear fusion. And the Harvard Computers, called Pickering’s Harem, whose names were below men’s for their own work, or absent. “But this kind of thing happened. A lot.”
“I’m just saying, it could’ve gone down differently.”
Irritation spiked through me. “Why are you trying so hard to defend him?”
“I’m not! I’m trying to make you see we don’t have absolute proof. And I think we need absolute proof before spreading this around too much. I mean, this is a pretty big accusation.”
“Wait.” My eyes narrowed. “Is this about—you?”
He looked confused. “Huh?”
“About your research on Gibson? About the speech you’re giving, the work you’ve done? You think it’d look bad for you if it turned out he was a thief?”
Ethan’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t know! Why else would you care?”
“Because I’m trying to protect your dad,” he half shouted. “The conference we’re presenting at next week? It’s run by theGibsonFoundation, Jordan. Your dad’s trying to get a grant from theGibsons, and the chair is the great-grandson of Frederick Gibson. You think they’ll like it if you call their founder a liar and a thief?”
