The Technologists (26 page)

Edwin took measurements on the model as Marcus read out the locations and times.

“Are you finished in there?” Daniel French inquired with a knock at the door. “Five more minutes before they return.”

Marcus called out their thanks.

“I think we have what we need. Here are my preliminary calculations on the rate of distribution,” Edwin said, holding up a piece of paper.

“Already!” Bob exclaimed. “That’s fantastic, Eddy.” Then, to himself, he said, “Hold on. Look at fireplugs.”

“What, Bob?” Edwin asked.

“Remember what that laddie Theo said, Mansfield, about the workman repairing the fireplugs on that street? Fireplugs get damaged from time to time, but the odds of multiple ones needing repair … it sounded odd to me at the time, but I didn’t think more about it. Look at the neat arrangement of the fireplugs squaring the area of the disaster. What if the fireplugs were used to release the chemicals that caused the glass to melt?”

“We’ll go back right away—” Marcus began.

“No point, the experimenter is too careful,” Bob said. “Any evidence of it would have been removed by now, but if we can include the position of these fireplugs”—he pointed to the tiny models of the water hydrants—“in our calculations, our precision may be greatly increased.”

Edwin already began doing this. “We can put it all together downstairs by testing some combinations of chemicals to see how quickly they spread,” he said, as they quietly slipped out of the Architecture Department.

Back in their basement laboratory, Edwin prepared the series of chemical tests while Bob helped Marcus in designing trial experiments for their underwater equipment. Many hours later, darkness had fallen outside and each of the three had taken a turn lying on the rough brick floor to rest.

“Say, look at this,” Bob, perching himself on a stool, whispered to Marcus while Edwin had his nap.

Marcus took the piece of notebook paper Bob was proffering. “What is it?”

“A list I found that Edwin made of important mathematic, scientific, and technological questions yet to be solved. Thirteen of them. It fell out of one of his books.”

Marcus read it over. “Do you plan on resolving these in our leisure time?”

“I thought we could post the list on the wall of the laboratory, and each place our initial by one we would like to do before we enter the heavenly kingdom.” Receiving no response from Marcus, he added, “It would help our rooms look more like a real society or club, you know.”

“We are not a real society, Bob.”

“Treason!”

Marcus laughed as he handed the sheet back. “Post it if you wish, if Edwin allows it.”

“Allows it?” Bob protested.

“Allows it?” Edwin asked as he sat up, rubbing his eyes and stretching out a big yawn.

After enduring a lecture from Edwin on the morality of looking at a sleeping man’s papers, Bob got his way and the list took its place on the laboratory wall.

Later, just as Marcus was taking his turn on the floor, closing his eyes with relief, he was jolted by the sound of shattered glass and Edwin shouting. Marcus pushed himself to his feet.

“What happened?” Bob asked, coughing.

“The tube slipped out of my hand—I almost had it!” Edwin said with frustration.

“Turn on the ventilating fan!” Marcus said.

The fan yanked the gas through its moving teeth, but was no match for the lingering fumes. The three boys covered their mouths with handkerchiefs and barreled into the hallway.

There, a trill of feminine laughter startled them. Ellen Swallow stood in the doorway of her laboratory. She was smiling, which for her almost counted as a fit of hysteria. She wore a dark outfit that looked like a gymnastics uniform, with a black apron over it, and her hair was wrapped in a series of intricate braids that could only be described as convoluted and would have been roundly condemned by any modern ladies’ magazine.

“Yes?” Bob said to her, not certain how else to express his annoyance.

She threw her sharp nose in the air and remarked, “Sulfuric acid with … fluoride of sodium.”

“Right,” Edwin said, then looked at his friends. “Exactly right! But how did she know that?”

Ellen’s steel-gray eyes turned deadly serious. “Because I know what you’re doing, Mr. Hoyt,” she warned. “And now it stops.”

N
OT AGAIN!
was what Ellen H. Swallow had thought some two weeks earlier, when, from her half window in the basement, she saw the mud-encrusted police boots climbing the steps into the Institute. She knew if the sort of anti-science frenzy she had already witnessed grew worse, the already financially tenuous Institute would be hanging by a thread.

It is left to you, Ellen Swallow!
was the next thought that crossed her mind.

She would have to work in secret. There were so many suspicions of their institution that any sign of entanglement with mischief could grow out of control quickly. She could relate to this, because Ellen Henrietta Swallow
was
the Institute of Technology. She, too, could not make a single misstep.

The morning the harbor disaster had transpired, Ellen had been returning to Boston from Worcester, where she had visited her mother. From the window of her rattling train—she always sat by the window of any conveyance—the harbor appeared to be afire.

Not again! Not that her first career at college was curtailed by similar troubles, but her aims had been cut short nevertheless, just as her current ambitions could be if dark clouds collected over Boston and the Institute. She had entered Vassar shortly after the women’s college opened. Ellen had never had formal schooling whatsoever before; her parents were so disappointed in all the town schools that they decided to teach her themselves. They did so faithfully, and what they didn’t impart to her she studied on her own. When Vassar accepted her it was as a junior. It suited her to have two years at the women’s college instead
of four, since she had to pay her own tuition and expenses. Even on her winter holidays, when she visited home she helped in her father’s store for extra money, during which time she organized the entire stock of inventory and did the bookkeeping. To her father’s chagrin, she flatly refused to allow his customers to smoke in the shop on her watch.

“Why do you sell us tobacco if you don’t expect us to smoke it?” asked a man smoking a pipe by the stove on a cold day, as Ellen ushered him out the door.

“I sold you molasses as well,” offered Ellen, “but we don’t expect you to stay here and cook it up.”

She liked the other girls at Vassar well enough, though was surprised when she counted twenty-two of them who wore their hair flowing to their waists without any attempt at doing it up. It was as though they had not dressed. Their bonnets, which they claimed were the latest fashion from Paris, were so small you would need a microscope to find them.

The only genuine trouble in her two years at Vassar was that the college’s administrators wouldn’t let her study enough. They feared if a student broke down from overwork it could prove to the world that girls could not get a college degree without injuring their health, which ultimately, as alleged by some medical experts, would disrupt their menstruation and future childbearing. With a death by suicide and one by illness among the student population, limitations became even stricter. But persistent Ellen received special permission to rise earlier than the other girls, and she soon discovered that she could study for nine hours without interruption before getting a headache from reading too long.

During an elective course in science, Ellen and a small group of girls volunteered to analyze anything that came their way, from shoeblacking to baking powder. Her immersion in this endeavor, her fascination with it—her talent for it!—convinced Ellen to try chemistry as her life work. But after she was graduated from Vassar, everything seemed to stop short at one blank wall after another. Despite all her hard work, a degree from a women’s college proved insufficient to secure her admission into her newly chosen profession. She was living in purgatory, fretting and fuming so much that she began to think she couldn’t live much longer. She was thwarted and hedged in on every side, as though God wouldn’t
help her a bit and man was doing his best against her, and her own heart even turned traitor.

She felt like the prophet Baalam, obstructed everywhere by an angel he could not even see.

If she were to cut the new path she imagined, she now knew she would need to demonstrate her qualifications as a scientist by pioneering her way through a new type of scientific education, the one begun a few years before by the Institute of Technology.

It was her birthday, December 3, when she sat down to write a letter to the Institute. Less than two weeks later she received a note from President Rogers. “Can you come to Boston before many days and see me? I will say now that you will have any and all advantages that the Institute has to offer without charge of any kind. I congratulate you and every earnest woman upon the result.” Ellen knew, even in her joy at the news, that her admission, however noteworthy, was but a single step. Without an income, she would hardly be able to afford to live in Boston, which even in the last two or three years had become more crowded with laborers, who had formerly lived in rural towns but now needed to find positions in industry. Then there was the fact that many landladies would not accept “lady college students,” never having heard of the exotic species, despite Ellen’s pointing out that, unlike her male brethren, she did not smoke or wear boots in bed; many others did not take on single women, or admitted only a limited number, so that their house would not be alleged to be a brothel. Ellen finally found an arrangement with a landlady named Mrs. Blodgett, whose daughter had been a classmate of Ellen’s at Vassar. Mrs. Blodgett would provide food and board in return for Ellen cleaning, cooking, keeping peace among the servants, and organizing the boardinghouse ledgers, whenever she was not doing her studies for the Institute.

Ellen promised her father, who worried about her safety, that she would bring to Boston a pearl-handled revolver she had won in a shooting contest when she was fifteen. She purchased several cartridges for it and carried it in her coat pocket when she was walking in the city alone, especially at night; fortunately, she had not yet had an occasion to brandish it against any of the rapists he’d imagined populated the city.
When she read details about such terrible incidents in the newspapers, she assured herself that she could defend her sanctity. Although she was not adverse to experiencing romantic love and physical passion, should she ever encounter it, she was not afraid of going through life without that experience. But it did frighten her deeply to think of being deprived of her own choice in a matter of intimacy.

After only a few months at Tech, she was visiting her family in Worcester when word came that her father’s right arm had been crushed in a railroad accident while he’d been helping a friend who worked for a shipping company. Holding back her own anguish, she helped restrain him on the bed while the doctor amputated his arm, which almost took away her reason entirely. In his suffering and delirium, his cries for the arm that was not there, he looked to no one else but his Nellie for the four days before he died. After that, she sometimes feared she would give up her place at the Institute before the spring was over. For months, she went back and forth between Worcester and Boston every day so her mother would not be alone, yet she still succeeded at her studies.

For what special mission was God preparing her? In this dark time, she learned that she had the will and power to control her mind, to a degree. She never could have lived through those sad months if she had for an instant allowed her thoughts to dwell on the terrible scenes of her father’s death. She dreamed only once of him dying, one night after sitting on her sofa in Boston mending a dress and thinking of home. Now when such thoughts ever came to her mind she shut the door tightly against them and directed her attention elsewhere, taking a book to read or a pencil to plan something for her future. Her mental focus seemed very like a child to please—so easily was it diverted from morbid and uncontrolled things.

Calmness and self-reliance: Those were the most wonderful Christian graces.

Most of the other students at the Institute took their positions for granted, but not Ellen, not for a moment. They wasted their time during breaks playing football and baseball, but not Ellen, though she would sometimes watch them run around outside her basement window, half of her wishing she could join in their silly, manly contests, the more sensible
half of her ready to compose a paste of chloride of lime to treat their grass stains.

Her own stains changed almost daily. Sometimes, the skin on her hands was tinted blue, sometimes brown, sometimes both. Her dresses often boasted holes from acids, some of which could even penetrate her oversize rubber apron.

When they saw her inside the Institute, some of the Tech students hissed or made smacking sounds to mimic kissing. Others took off their hats and stopped all conversation in favor of chilly politeness. Whether polite or unfriendly, they all stared, and she hated herself whenever she felt color rising to her cheeks as she imagined what they were thinking. She far preferred being ignored. When she had to walk through the Institute building, she would usually shield herself with a stack of books over her chest, and if she had no choice but to wait on a bench for a passing throng of students in order to reach the stairs or supply closet, she would busily knit and never look up from her needles and ball of yarn.