“Congratulations for your credit on the paper,” Vigilant Botrel said, as he sat to breakfast.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Choi Eun-sook told him.
Vigilant raised an eyebrow. “In the ship’s public net. Ernie lists all his papers for any unusual stars or planets we visit, and of course his theories about their formation or other aspects. It’s fascinating really. He has a talent for describing things without all the dense jargon most papers use.”
Choi still looked at him blankly. Omelet poised on her fork uncertainly while she tried to think.
“He named you as co-author on the latest,” Vigilant clarified.
“He did? About what?” Choi demanded.
“I believe the title was, ‘A major planet altering asteroid impact. Rotation and inclination changes from a retrograde strike.’ See what I mean? You can actually tell what the paper is about without a thesaurus or a brain transplant. It’s just one of maybe twenty or so. He listed Jon Burris as co-author on the one he did about the spatial distribution of Brown Dwarfs,” Vigilant said. He seemed quite serious and not joking.
“Oh, we talked about that on orbital watch,” she admitted, wondering if he’d reprove her for inattention on duty.
“That must be it,” he agreed. “He found your hypothesis that it might have been a military action instead of a natural occurrence insightful. Given we have activity in the system that was inexplicably curtailed there certainly may have been a conflict. He is very eager to know what dating of the mining artifacts shows, to know if the events could have occurred in the same time frame.”
“Uh, yeah.” She didn’t have near enough coffee in her to be following this.
Vigilant smiled and gave attention to his own breakfast.
Didn’t you have to give permission for your name to be on a publication? Choi wondered. Was she going to look like an idiot if the miners gave up on the deposit a few hundred years ago? Wait, they said the reflectors had a lot of micro-meteor erosion didn’t they? At least on the ones they found outbound. That had to take awhile. Maybe she wouldn’t look too bad. Even if she did, who would care for a ships officer? She wasn’t a scientist for God’s sake.
“I guess I better read the thing if it has my name plastered on it,” she told Vigilant.
“Well sure,” he said, looking surprised. “Take a look at the earlier ones too.”
In science having someone put your name on an artical without your knowledge would be very wrong. As an “author” you’d be responsible for the accuracy of the text.
Indeed, Ernie is an over-enthused flake. But after you mentioning it I decided to have somebody call him on it. It was fun to write.