Hannah was back at the Higgs Centre café. She looked around, caught a glimpse of gorse and grass outside the window, the backside of Blackford Hill. At the far end of the café she spotted who she wanted to talk to and sized them up. The three of them were eating lunch from canteen plates or their own bright Tupperware. They looked like astrophysics postgrads, to be fair. Noah, Xiang and Louisa, from the States, China and France, respectively, according to the institute website’s contact page. These were José’s colleagues in the exoplanet PhD group. Scattered around the functional café space were other groups of postgrads, Hannah briefly wondering which table was astrobiology, which was early-galaxy formation. She wondered if there was a pecking order, like other workplaces.
She touched the back of a spare chair at their table.
‘Can I join you?’
They looked confused, she was encroaching on their lunch, this never happened. She’d asked José to make himself scarce at lunch today so she could give them the once-over.
‘I’m Hannah Skelf,’ she said, sitting down. ‘I’m joining you guys after the summer.’
‘Didn’t José give you the tour?’ Noah said. Confident eastern-seaboard accent, the group’s self-appointed spokesperson.
‘Yeah, but I wanted to come back and, you know, soak up the ambience.’
She put a French accent on the last word then cringed when she saw Louisa’s face. Louisa was tall and skinny, hair in a sharp fringe, cardigan over a green checked shirt.
‘It’s good to meet you,’ Noah said.
He was tall too, and slim. He wore a T-shirt with an equation on it under his open checked shirt. Xiang was short and stocky and he bucked the checked-shirt trend in a navy, thick-checked jumper, trousers that could best be described as slacks.
‘Did you enjoy the tour?’ Xiang said. His English was very good. She glanced round the table. Academia was such an internationalist enterprise, she wondered about the after-effects of Brexit, how that would play out, bad consequences spreading everywhere.
‘Yeah, great,’ Hannah said, putting on a smile. ‘Can’t wait to get started. And José seems nice.’
They nodded noncommittally, as if rehearsed. Hannah spotted a glance between them but couldn’t decipher it. She decided to brazen it out.
‘Is he OK?’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’ Louisa said. Her French accent made her sound more relaxed than she looked, fork paused over her plastic container of salad leaves.
‘I thought I heard something about him,’ Hannah said. She pretended to try to remember something. ‘That happened when he was an undergrad?’
They nodded at each other, then Hannah.
‘Microwave Boy,’ Noah said, suppressing a smile.
‘Ping,’ Xiang said. ‘Dinner’s ready.’
Louisa placed a hand to her lips to hide a smile.
Hannah nodded as if it had just come to her. ‘He was the guy that discovered FRBs in Seville.’
Noah rubbed his hands together. ‘Only it was just that his colleague’s lasagne was ready.’
Hannah looked round the table until they stopped moving. ‘But isn’t what you’re doing here just the same?’
Louisa and Xiang frowned at their leader.
‘We’re classifying exoplanets,’ Noah said. ‘You’re joining us, right?’
Hannah suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to step into this. It was benign stuff compared to some cliques and peer pressure, but it was the same wherever you went. She knew why she’d never made many friends on her undergraduate course, she wasn’t the type to join in, swap banter and platitudes all day. She was interested in the work but maybe she didn’t want to be a part of this after all.
‘So you think SETI is wasting its time?’ she said.
‘Not at all,’ Louisa said, looking round the table for support. ‘We all believe intelligent life is out there.’
‘But?’
Noah leaned forward. ‘It’s not going to announce itself by sending Morse code to a postgrad student in Edinburgh.’
‘Morse code?’
Noah opened his hands wide. ‘We know what José has been saying.’
Hannah stared at him, blank face.
Noah shuffled in his seat. ‘He thinks we’ve been pranking him.’
‘He didn’t say that,’ Hannah said.
‘He didn’t have to,’ Louisa said.
‘Well, are you?’ Hannah looked around the table.
Noah pushed his empty plate away. ‘We’ve got better things to do than falsify data to make José believe in little green men. Have you any idea how much work that would take? To make believable fake data showing FRBs amongst a light-curve data set, the particular one that he was looking at?’
‘I don’t,’ Hannah said. ‘But it sounds like you do.’
‘We don’t even have access to the data he’s talking about,’ Louise said. ‘It’s not part of our work, it’s the planet hunters’.’
‘So what’s going on here?’
Noah stood up and Xiang followed his lead.
‘Ping,’ Xiang said, looking to the women working behind the café counter. ‘Maybe their microwave is strong.’
Louisa closed her Tupperware with a click and stood. With the three of them standing over her, Hannah felt like she was back at school, enduring the scorn of a girl clique because she was gay, or because her gran drove a hearse and touched dead bodies, or because she had depression and self-medicated, or some other pointless slight about her black hair and matching nails, or her biker jacket, or the fact she loved physics.
‘We have to go,’ Noah said. ‘We have planets to categorise.’
This was meant as a cutting slight but Hannah burst out laughing.
They headed out of the door, and Hannah sat at the table, staring at the smears on Noah’s plate, listening to the murmur of conversation. She looked at the chatting women behind the café counter and thought she heard the ping of a microwave.