Endo

Endo by D. T. Hopmann

Crossroads I passed a large stone church whenever I walked home from the east side of campus, a route that took me through the quiet neighborhood just south of the university. Normally there was a strong contrast between the constant perpetual activity on campus and the quiet of these tree-lined streets, a contrast that was always welcome as my mind sorted out all the concepts and theories and techniques I worked so hard to absorb each day. That day, though, the streets were solidly lined with parked cars as family, friends and colleagues paid last respects to Dr. Orgard, Professor of Chemistry, whose untimely death had been announced three days earlier. I myself hadn’t known him, but I knew from the student paper that his death had been a surprise, that the cause was a fall from a third-story balcony, and that it was seen as a double tragedy as his wife had just died in a single-car accident two months earlier. The exact circumstances surrounding his fall were unclear, but some seemed to think his wife’s death had played a role in his own. For a block or so I thought about Dr. Orgard and the world he left behind, musing as I walked. I wasn’t really into chemistry, but as a technologist I respected science and those who were good at it. Dr. Orgard was well known in petrochemicals and was reportedly close to a breakthrough that would make gasoline burn much more efficiently. I supposed there were several ways of accomplishing that, and I believed I had heard of several, but they shared a common problem: cost. It did no good to pay twice as much for something that only worked, say, 50% better. There had to be a net benefit, a way of making it cost effective in high volume. I supposed this was why I pursued technology instead of pure science—I was always interested in the practical more than in the theoretical. From interviews the paper did with his grad students, it sounded as if Dr. Orgard’s near-breakthrough was not only practical, it promised to radically change the economics of gas-powered cars. A discovery like that could do many good things, like easing demand and reducing emissions, and I hoped his colleagues and grad students would be able to carry on in his place. The school hoped so as well. Research grants were off in the past two years and getting much worse. The school’s stellar reputation for innovation had begun to flounder, and there was a lot of pressure on staff and grad students to produce patents and papers. Right now, it was unclear if anyone would or even could complete his work. Even within the academic world there was stiff competition between competing theories, competition for grant money, guarded secrets and the like. Science, for all its claim as an open exchange of knowledge, was heavily influenced by the realities of money and ego. The church bell rang sharply just as I reached the sidewalk directly across the street, jarring me back to the present. A moment later a casket emerged, and behind it people began filing out. The pallbearers moved carefully down concrete steps and toward the waiting hearse, the mourners murmuring behind them and the church organ playing slow chords as a backdrop to the recession. Dr. Orgard was a stranger to me, yet the sight chilled me. It reminded me of the last funeral I had attended. It reminded me of my family. I lowered my eyes and walked quickly, winding up the curved, canopied avenue and arriving home with yet another dimension to the odd, off-balance feeling I had had since the previous afternoon. My mind wandered back to that event as I walked. I had seen something unexpected in the lab, and while it didn’t seem overly important at the time, it somehow contradicted my understanding of the way things worked. I felt distracted, disenfranchised, as if being pushed through a door into a new world. The professor’s funeral seemed to amplify that feeling, and when I finally sat down in my quiet apartment I hoped a moment of solitude would pull me out of this unusual state of mind. That strange feeling stayed with me until later the next day, Thursday evening to be precise, as it neared 7 pm and time for our weekly ritual. I almost didn’t go, but I knew my friends expected me and I hoped the distraction might put things back on the right track. Besides, a more pleasant distraction would be there, though I had yet to admit to myself that this was a motivation. I left my just-off-campus apartment on foot and turned right toward the Pizza Box. It was already mostly dark, and although October second is barely into fall, we were getting enough wind and mist to produce a chill. By the time I’d walked the five or so blocks to our favorite haunt I was pretty damp, and my friends were already there and the pizza had already been ordered. “Hey, Kevin, over here,” called Ryan. Ryan was a true technical guru, the kind who knew how everything worked, it seemed, but without a practical bone in his body for anything except electronics. Lanky and wire-haired, he had once tried to look the part of the scientist by growing a beard, but it really didn’t work for him. It took the rest of us several weeks before we delicately persuaded him to shave it off and be himself. I thought in the end he was more comfortable being an actual genius instead of the stereotype of a genius, but maybe I was just projecting my own feelings onto him. I had always found it odd that some people want to live in costume as if desperate to tell us something about themselves, and Ryan wasn’t that kind of guy. I moved to where my friends had shoved two tables together and noted that I was the last of our group of regulars to arrive. They were each half a glass ahead of me and in full winding-down mode. Next to Ryan as usual sat Rebecca, a sweetheart of a girl although quiet. We had tried calling her Becky for a while, but it never quite fit. Rebecca spoke infrequently—although she and Ryan seemed to communicate pretty well—but when she did speak she had something worth hearing. She was an electronics engineer, like the rest of us with the exception of Aimee, a physicist, and in under four years had graduated with a double major in software and electronic engineering and an impressive GPA in both subjects. It was not an easy feat, and getting it done had earned her the respect of our whole group. Meticulous and detailed, she was well suited for her research project in computer system optimization. Rebecca smiled at me as I took off my jacket, hung it on a peg and sat down at the long table. To my left sat Weber, the dreamer, and Aimee. How they ever got together I’d never know, but somehow they were perfect for each other. Weber was constantly enthralled with some new idea that was sure to make him millions when and if he left school for the real world. He had the smarts to pull it off, too, if he could stay on one idea long enough before another caught his interest, and he was the type that could sell seawater to a sailor. Aimee was a natural beauty, tall and slender, always poised, passionate about technology and generally regarded as the top PhD candidate in the Materials department. As the electronics world got ready to move beyond silicon, we all knew Aimee would help lead the way. Together she and Weber were an impressive pair: he the imagination, and she his anchor in the real world. At the far end sat Kate, talking rapidly about something painfully intense. She acknowledged me with a flashing smile and lively eyes, pausing just long enough to catch a breath before continuing. That was our relationship. There was something special, a potential energy that seemed just at the edge of reach. Was it wishful thinking? It often felt as if we were moving toward each other, but we hadn’t seemed to make progress, and I could never tell if it was me or her or just circumstance preventing it. Anyway, these were my friends and I truly loved them, possibly more so for having no family left of my own. For all that, I could feel myself outgrowing academia. My friends, it seemed to me, could stay at the U for the next fifty years and eat at this pizza place every week. They never talked seriously about doing anything else—except for Weber, of course, but he had yet to find an idea worthy of long-term commitment. He and the others seemed overly comfortable here, as if school were an end in itself instead of a means to an end. For me it was beginning to seem selfish, somehow, to be building an unused storehouse of knowledge as though intellectual gratification was the only goal. It felt…unfulfilling. Maybe it was an insecurity of sorts, a need to show I really could do something of value. In any case, I felt more ready to move on than it seemed my friends did, and thinking about it made me start to miss them already. I had been quiet for a moment, chewing and sipping as these thoughts passed through my mind, and Kate, never one to let a person withdraw, decided to engage me in the conversation. “Kevin, did you tell Ryan about your big discovery? Ryan, Kevin did the coolest thing in the E2 lab the other day.” She went on to introduce what she had only seen from a distance and then passed the conversation to me for the detailed description. I don’t know if it showed, but I was really taken by surprise. All the off-balance sensations I had since that event came flooding back, and I found I was reluctant to discuss this openly. I wasn’t sure why I felt like that. Was I simply unable to describe something I had yet to understand, or was I being more selfish? It wasn’t for fear that they would steal my thunder—in fact, I didn’t even know if there even was any thunder. But until I was sure I simply wasn’t ready for this conversation. Kate sensed my hesitation and immediately moved out of habit to fill the conversational gap. All I could do was to shake my head at her and hope she’d stop. She did, but not before shouting over the din that I’d “found a way to suck energy right out of the air!” I nearly choked, but countered with a small laugh that dismissed at her comment as a silly exaggeration, and then changed the subject to ask about her car. Thankfully, she moved on to an energetic description of the repair costs she’d narrowly avoided. Had she picked up on my head shake? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was being overly sensitive, but something else happened just then. Her comment about “sucking energy” seemed to turn the head of a stranger in the room. A man I’d never seen before, a man who didn’t look the academic type at all, appeared to take an interest in our table. His eyes scanned my face and then Kate in profile before he turned back to his table. Of course, I knew Kate got a lot of looks from guys; I supposed it was nothing out of the ordinary. Another slice of pizza and a second beer took my mind off the stranger for a bit. I found myself repeating and listening to several of the old stories we shared, feeling them getting a little more elaborate with each telling. We laughed, we joked, and we pontificated on the future of technology, the profound effect it was sure to have on us and the profound effect we were sure to have on it. Sometime during that hour or so the stranger left. I hadn’t seen it, but I do remember glancing up to see his empty chair and feeling somehow relieved. I was not accustomed to the uncertainties I felt, and they gave me an unexplained feeling of vulnerability. It got to that time when it’s either leave or order another pitcher, and we collectively reached for jackets and backpacks. We parted outside the Box and I began the short walk to my apartment alone, the night chill and penetrating mist cutting through the dullness brought on by beer and pizza. I was again able to focus, and my focus was on that thing I had seen in the lab. Something like this, this phenomenon, could be big. No, scratch that. It could be important. But was that my well-trained technical insight talking, or was it pride and imagination? Or was it simply hope? Once home I hung my damp-again jacket to dry and changed into the pajama pants and long sleeved t-shirt I would wear through the night. Walking through the apartment was giving me the same feeling of premature nostalgia I had felt with my friends, sensing the time was not far off when I’d be leaving for a different life. The end of this school year, probably. This life had rich character, like my apartment with the dark quarter-sawn oak trim, the plaster walls, even the creaky old wood floor. The next life held promise. Potential. The stuff of hope and imagination. And it held uncertainty. As soon as I was settled, my mind returned to the lab. The whole thing started to feel unreal again. I worried that I was remembering the event wrong, or that my imagination had gotten off its leash. But no, that wasn’t the case. Last night I had almost been willing to dismiss it, but Kate’s comment gave the event validation. Another had seen it. It wasn’t like a UFO sighting. I began to visualize each step of that day in the lab. I saw the parts in my hands and watched myself toying with them absentmindedly. Then I remembered turning on the signal generator and energizing the coils—first one, then two more—for no reason other than that I was bored and they had been left sitting out by some hurried student. And then I remembered feeling the vial with the ion sample get cold, and I relived the puzzled feeling it gave me. My memory replayed the thought that I must be imagining the cold, and then it replayed the moment of realization. Dew was forming on the sample. The sample was truly cold. With my mind now back in the present, the scientist in me—all engineers are part scientist, after all—kicked into gear. Clearly energy, thermal energy, was being drawn from the sample. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so where was it going? And what was making it go there? Ever the technologist, I moved to my desk and started a log file. First I captured as much as I could remember of the event itself. Then I editorialized, adding my reactions and a few theories of explanation, and then noted a few experiments that might help clear up the mystery of what I had seen. It was one of those moments of clarity a person gets once in a while, and my fingers tapped the keyboard effortlessly for two hours before quitting for the night. Continues...