You haven't produced any results... but I can't keep waiting for you forever.
Shen Le felt a headache coming on. Yet, seeing the old professor drenched in sweat and watching him pleadingly, he still sighed.
"All right, then I'll change the order a little... I'll repair the belt first. Once that's done, I'll make the missing sections of the belt plaques, then fit everything together. Will that work?"
It would have to work, whether they liked it or not. Scowling, the old professor slapped photographs of Shen Le's half-finished work down in front of the students and jabbed at them.
"He funded this project because he wanted help with his work. Now he's practically finished, while you're not even halfway done. What does he need you for? Huh? Tell me, what for?!
"And it's not as though he didn't pay you! He covered the project funding for this whole period, too. If you can't finish in time, all you lose is a paper. You haven't lost anything else!"
That blistering reprimand left his own students hanging their heads in silence. The students from Chang'an Jiaotong University moved their lips, muttering soundlessly, but had little to say in their defense.
That was how competitive research worked. If someone else completed the same project before you did, you ended up with nothing, and even the huge sums you had already spent on research went down the drain.
This time, at least someone else had shouldered both the research expenses and the favors and credibility spent securing the project!
"Then... could we at least have some additional funding? If we're racing against time, we need more people to help adjust the algorithms and check the results. We need more computing power!"
That was certainly possible. Anything money could solve was no problem for