Free The Measures Between Us by Ethan Hauser

for several more years.”
    â€œReally? Years?”
    Jack nodded. “They say that’s the only way to come up with a full enough picture.”
    â€œOf what, though?”
    â€œThe weather,” Jack shrugged. “The people—it’s part psychological and part scientific.” He thought of the questions and answers he listened to in the library, the stories of strangers along the rising river.
    â€œWhat if they don’t find anything?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œWhat if they just end up back where they started, with a lot more science but no answers about what it all adds up to?”
    â€œI guess they’ll keep going, then.”
    â€œWhat if they can’t wait?”
    Cynthia had circled to one end of the river while Jack stood opposite her. He had known she would like it here, this randomroom with a whole alternate world inside. All over campus and all over town people were walking around oblivious. They didn’t know you could fit a waterway into a lab, didn’t know there was a mad scientist conjuring up cold snaps and droughts. He was happy to see her so excited, since she could be so remote sometimes. And it was a different sort of detachment than he remembered from high school. Back then she drifted in and out of her own head, but rarely with Jack, who was proud to be one of the few people she was close to. She was different now, though, and he couldn’t tell whether it was only because they were getting close again after years apart or whether it was something more.
    â€œLet’s get those moviemakers to build us something,” Cynthia said.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œI don’t know, but I’d like my own river, in my basement. My dad could rig up something to let just enough rain in, some piping through a window. He even has ducks ready to float up and down it.”
    â€œWe can bribe them,” Jack said.
    â€œThe ducks?”
    â€œThe set builders,” he said with a laugh.
    â€œWhat do they like? Maybe they just like building shit. If I could build this stuff, you wouldn’t have to pay me a cent. My parents could come up to my room and they’d be amazed at what I’d been doing all that time.”
    Cynthia walked toward Jack, skimming the water with her hand. He didn’t want to leave yet and he hoped she didn’t, either. What if they stayed all night, he wondered, lay down and dreamed up valleys, mountains, oceans, lightning storms that froze the sky. “Twenty miles in a few seconds,” she said when she got tohim. “I bet you never knew I could walk so fast.” Again she dried her hand on her pants, then gently palmed his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
    â€œYou’re welcome,” he said, turning from her, suddenly shy. “We’ll have to come back sometime.” He thought about showing her his data on the wall, but he wasn’t sure where, in the vast sea of maps and legends, it was. “Next time we’ll figure out the weather.”
    She looked confused, and he jerked his chin at the glass vitrine. “We’ll program a big storm.”
    â€œDoes it do tsunamis?”
    â€œI guess we’ll have to find out.”
    Field notes
    Data entry: Jack C.
    Low Water Records for the Sparhawk River at Grover’s Crossing
    (1) 1.20 ft. on Aug. 23, 1985
    (2) 2.20 ft. on Sept. 16, 1975
    (3) 2.38 ft. on Sept. 27, 1991
    (4) 2.45 ft. on Oct. 10, 1992
    (5) 2.78 ft. on Sept. 22, 1994
    (6) 2.98 ft. on Oct. 13, 1983
    (7) 3.01 ft. on Oct. 14, 1985
    (8) 3.23 ft. on Nov. 23, 1978
    (9) 3.41 ft. on Aug. 7, 1988
    (10) 3.67 ft. on Nov. 1, 1989
    Weekly maximum flow (CFS): 7893.0–15,997.0 (Jun.–Sept.)
    Weekly maximum flow (CFS): 4238.0–8198.0 (Oct.–Dec.)

Chapter Seven
    Henry’s postdoc fellowship required him to teach one course, to first-year graduate students in psychology. In the months before the semester began he would get