The Technologists Read online

  “My feathers were well oiled when I arrived, Mr. Richards. Criticism runs off. The more I make myself useful, the more allies I have. That is why I carry around needles, thread, pins, and scissors at most times. I do not scorn womanly duties, and each time I sew up a professor’s papers to be more easily carried or tie up a sore finger or dust the table, there is a smaller chance of a fuss being raised about my presence.”

  “Well, I would have knocked them around for teasing you.”

  “And suppose someone were to suggest I ought to return to Salem?”

  Bob chuckled at the statement before recognizing his own coinage. “That’s different, Professor. That was before I knew you. And I was honest about what I thought! It would have crazed me to not know the underhanded tricksters.”

  “Serenity is not natural. It is a virtue. I know the world questions whether a girl can get a science degree without injuring her health. I intend to demonstrate that it is not only possible, but desirable—even if it takes me through the desert of old maidenhood. Mr. Richards?”

  “Yes, Professor,” he heard himself answer with amusement but also real deference.

  “You recall when Mr. Hoyt initially experimented with the chemical compound when trying to arrive at the formula that would have caused the destruction on State Street. Do you remember the tint to the glass in your laboratory after his mixture escaped and discolored it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “The perpetrator we are looking for probably went through several trials to arrive at the right compound, perhaps similar to our own.”

  “I suppose that would be natural, but what …” He paused when she wrested his walking stick from his hand and hoisted it upward. The tip was pointed to a small ventilating window on the third floor of another brick building a few doors down the street.

  From where they stood, it appeared that a distinctive mixture of brown and pink spotted the window glass.

  “Our day has come, Professor,” he whispered. “You’re one of us now. Stand beside me. Be prepared for anything.”

  “I am.”

  * * *

  “MR. MANSFIELD!”

  Nearing the Institute that morning, Marcus stopped at an unexpected sound: his name. He touched his hat upon seeing the speaker. “Why, Miss Agnes, Miss Lilly. I wish you ladies good morning. Miss Lilly, I am glad to see you looking recovered.”

  “Hmph!” Lilly replied.

  The pleasant surprise of Agnes’s appearance there was diminished by her companion, dressed in a stylish, heavy dark dress as though she were on her way to a funeral. She fixed him with a distinctly evil eye.

  “I wouldn’t expect to find you out here on a Saturday,” Marcus said. “Aren’t you at Temple Place this morning?”

  Agnes tried to smile but instead dabbed tears from her eyes.

  “What is it, Miss Agnes?”

  “Oh, I’ve done something terrible!” Agnes said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told Papa …”

  “What did you tell him?” He took her by the shoulders and held on tightly, but she broke down into tears again. He began to panic at her words. He reassured her that she would be all right, but she only shook her head in despair.

  “She told her father she wished to study science at one of the Catholic academies.” Lilly spoke the words as though they were in a courtroom and he the accused. “That she then wished to enter a women’s college and study science and perhaps astronomy, as girls our age have begun to do in some parts of the country.”

  Agnes flushed in embarrassment, and nodded an admission to her part in the story.

  “What happened? What did he say?”

  “He was furious with her, naturally,” Lilly continued, “and believes—quite rightly, I say—her new desire has come from being in the employment of Professor Rogers. He has forced Aggie to resign her place and move back with her family. You see, Mr. Mansfield, we serving girls are meant to be machines, with particular functions that cannot be disrupted without consequences.”

  “Miss Agnes,” Marcus began, then guided her as far away from Lilly as he could manage. “Aggie,” he said, “does this have something to do with the list you gave us?”

  She nodded and composed herself to explain. “Investigating the ledgers for you, and poring over all the complicated details about the chemical supplies, gave me such a thrill. It made me wish more than ever to study something real, to learn science—true science, not minerals meant to keep little girls occupied until their manners can be ‘finished’ and they can learn to keep house for the rest of their bodily existences—and be finished, indeed! I was doing something, however small—doing something important—like you and your friends do. I was not a nothing anymore, not just a servant to someone else.”

  He took her by the shoulders again. “Agnes, did you tell your father?”

  “What?”

  “Did you tell him about me or the Institute or what we’re doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he asks too many questions, if he discovers that you gave us information, it could put me and Rogers and, as a consequence, our entire college at grave risk.… You must obey him for now.”

  “Must I?” Her body stiffened and her lips quivered.

  “For now, please, yes. Just satisfy him for now,” he said. “You cannot understand what it means.”

  She wrenched violently away from him. “Is that what you worry about? When I am the one accused of being unwomanly and unreligious!”

  “No. You misunderstand …”

  Her voice broke with anger and sounded as though it belonged to another person entirely. “No, I don’t, Mr. Mansfield. I thought you were a different man.”

  “Agnes!”

  “Maybe I am prideful to think it, but what I do with my life matters as much as what you do with yours, Mr. Mansfield.”

  “What did I tell you?” Lilly made no effort to lower her voice as she led her visibly shaking cousin away. “I told you he was unworthy, from the very first moment I laid eyes on him.…”

  * * *

  “NOW I KNOW WHAT YOU MEANT,” Frank Brewer was saying fifteen minutes later as a rattled Marcus met him on the front steps of the Institute. “At the machine shop, I mean. About all eyes being only on you. Good morning, old friend. How I have waited for this, Marcus! I owe it all to you.”

  It was Inspection Day for sub-freshmen at the Institute. This was an opportunity for prospective candidates for admission to Tech to receive a tour of the Institute and learn about the admissions examinations and the courses. Marcus had sent a card to Frank’s boardinghouse reminding him to attend, though after the events of the past month, staining the reputation of both science and technology, only a fraction of the expected sub-freshmen were present. Thirty or possibly forty had been anticipated; instead only twelve young men arrived.

  Now that the day had come for Frank’s visit, Marcus was consumed with worry from all sides. Waiting for Bob and Ellen’s return from their expedition to the laboratory district, he worried that he had snarled them into his own mad obsession with saving the Institute and put them in danger. He worried that the self-declared “avenging angel” who had shown up at the Institute would return, exposing them to the public. As for Agnes … he was stricken to the core by how he spoiled their encounter. If her father asked enough questions of people—especially Lilly Maguire—Mr. Turner could be led back to Marcus and then complain to the Institute. Worse still, she now detested him, and with cause, after his shameful display in the face of her tears.

  “When was it you knew it?” Frank asked Marcus, pulling him out of the crater of his thoughts.

  “Frank?”

  “When did you know this was the right place for you to be?” Frank’s steps had started to slow down the farther along through the Institute they proceeded.

  “There are some here who still would say it is not, Frank.”

  “That is how you know it is.” Frank nodded vigor
ously at his own adage. “Right, that’s some dreadful good common sense, Marcus. I can prove to them eventually I’m not too big for my breeches. I’m up to snuff, ain’t I?”

  Marcus put his arm around Frank’s shoulders. “A pinch above it, my friend.”

  As Marcus led Frank through the different laboratories, he noticed out of the corner of his eye yet another cause for concern—Hammie, exiting Professor Runkle’s study. Now, with Runkle serving as acting president in Rogers’s absence, any student seen visiting his rooms was the object of immediate speculation. Hammie seemed unruffled, whatever the nature of the interview had been, and sailed along in the opposite direction, without noticing Marcus and Frank.

  “There go three words that would make me stay well away from this place,” Frank said, rolling his eyes in an exaggerated motion in Hammie’s direction. “Chauncy Hammond, Jr.”

  “He will be graduated soon, anyway,” Marcus reminded him.

  “But there will always be Someone Someone, Jr., with the same airs about him. The airs that shout: ‘I belong—you do not!’ ”

  As Frank spoke, his posture straightened and his narrow chin rose. Marcus could not help recognizing the telltale signs: trying to mend threadbare duds into something like the newest fashion, a studied nonchalance meant to seem polished and enlightened, a change in physical bearing. Resenting “collegey” airs even while trying them on. Marcus had been through all of it himself as a freshman, and Frank’s presence was an uncomfortable reminder and a challenge to where he found himself now. Had Marcus done what he had set out to do? Had he become a true collegey, even after four years, and if so, was he better or worse for it?

  “I’ve found there is more to Hammie than I had expected.”

  “Don’t be fooled, Marcus. He is cut from another cloth, and not one to envy.”

  The more he thought about Hammie in Runkle’s study, the more it chilled Marcus’s blood. Had Hammie observed more than they realized about the Technologists’ true purpose? What could Hammie have been saying to Runkle behind that closed door? Perhaps Runkle was merely informing Hammie that he had earned the position of First Scholar over Edwin. Whatever the conversation had been, Marcus would have no choice but to question Hammie about it later. It would be a true test of Hammie, whether he would attempt to deny having met with the professor.

  Entering the college’s study room, Marcus and Frank were preemptively hushed by a table of students in the corner before they even said anything.

  “Who are those scrubs?” Frank whispered.

  “Tech’s architecture students. They’re the tyrants up here—the earth must stop revolving on its axis while they examine their drawings. You will learn, Frank, that the architecture students and engineering students do not live in harmony. At most colleges, the rivalry is freshes against sophs. But here at Tech it is the future architect who is on occasion delivered to his course in a potato sack by a budding engineer.”

  Marcus was keeping a close eye on every clock they passed throughout their tour, expecting Bob and Ellen to have returned. What could be delaying them? Had they found something? He hoped someone had not found them.

  At that moment, Hammie brushed past them into the study room, half-singing, half-humming the stave of an opera, which he was conducting with great delicacy using a pencil. He joined a table of sophomores and juniors, mostly mining engineers and a few chemists.

  “You gents have started without me?” Hammie asked, squeezing himself in. “Well, I see it’s my turn.”

  “You always win, Hammie,” complained a player from one of the younger classes.

  “Hallo. Is this one of our sub-freshmen?” Albert Hall approached the pair in a dutiful whisper. “Albert Hall. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Hall, this is my friend Frank Brewer,” Marcus said.

  “Pleasure!” replied Frank.

  “Mr. Brewer, it’s one of my obligations as a charity scholar, nor is it an entirely unpleasant one, either, to welcome all prospective students to the Institute,” Albert droned as he shook his hand with a formal stiffness, staring too intently at his face. “Pay no mind to any architects. You look familiar. I know—from our visit to the locomotive works.”

  “Frank and I were employed together before I came,” said Marcus.

  Albert stopped midshake and reclaimed his hand. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Pardon, Mr. Hall?” Frank asked, his brow knotted.

  “What I mean,” Albert started again, licking his lips, “is that some in the faculty had been urging our dear Professor Runkle to decline any charity scholars in the future. Perhaps Mansfield already told you. They desire college fees more than they desire eager young men like Mansfield and myself.”

  “Rogers won’t allow that,” Marcus was quick to say.

  “When you’re ill of health, when you’re under siege …” Albert closed his eyes as though in prayer, and his sentence melted away unfinished. “Well, when his health is restored, we shall see. If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen. Please enjoy the day, Mr. Brewer, and do search me out if I can be of any further help. Try not to be late for the tour.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Frank said to Marcus.

  “Frank, it is only one faction. Really.”

  Marcus and Frank remained where they were, standing silently in front of Hammie’s table. Hammie and his companions were playing a modified game of hazards. Since being seen with dice would risk their being admonished, instead they each mentally calculated the probability of how a hypothetical dice throw would turn up.

  Hammie celebrated some invisible advancement of his score before noticing Marcus. “There you are, Mansfield,” he called, ignoring the architecture students’ renewed hisses, then looked Frank over. “Why, I’ve seen this fellow.”

  “I’m Frank Brewer, one of the machinists for your father’s works.” Neither offered the other his hand, and while all three preferred to ignore it, there was a palpable awkwardness to the encounter.

  “I knew I had. Seen you.” Hammie stared off across the room.

  “You’ve seen him with me,” Marcus said, keeping the exchange alive.

  “Oh, yes, yes, I might have, indeed,” Hammie said, a little friendlier. “Did you know I’ve just a while ago spoken privately with Uncle Johnny?”

  That was Hammie’s nickname for Professor Runkle. “Oh?” Marcus replied, trying to sound as casual as possible about it. So much for trapping him in a denial.

  “Not by choice, believe me. What a bore Uncle Johnny is—if only President Rogers would return. He has the only real character and spark in this place.”

  “What was it he wanted to speak to you about?” Marcus pressed.

  “It seems he heard something through his window of our conversation with that lunatic—you know, the scar-faced wild man, the one who looked like some kind of wicked prophet.”

  Marcus was thankful that, because they were in the study room, Hammie was whispering and the other players at his table were too absorbed with their calculations to pay attention. “Hammie, what exactly did Runkle say?”

  “He’d heard that lunatic accuse us of secretly examining the catastrophes around the city. You know the time I mean? Out in the fields? Brace yourself, Mansfield. Uncle Johnny wanted to know if there was some truth to the matter.”

  Marcus waited.

  “Say, what do you think those blasted architecture boys would do if the legs of that table were to collapse as soon as they sat down next time?” Hammie speculated when the architects-to-be hushed them again. “I think my brain is going soft with so many ignoramuses around here.”

  Marcus and Frank each appeared shaken and worried as they stood in the shadows—the dark shadows thrown by Albert’s assertion about Frank’s diminished chances of attending Tech, and now Hammie’s oblivious revelation about Runkle—both of them lost in thought and fear.

  “Hammie,” Marcus finally asked, “what did you say to Ru— Uncle Johnny?”

  “I was honest. Told him it
was all stuff and nonsense!” Hammie continued, laughing out of his nose with a honking noise. “Just like everything around here. More … blabber.”

  XXX

  Dig

  MARCUS FORCED HIMSELF to remain impassive in the face of the ominous news. At least Frank would be occupied for the next hour or so without him. To Marcus’s surprise, Frank asked him if he could stay behind and join Hammie’s group for another of their strange silent games, this time whist, in which plays were communicated by tapping under the table using the “dashes” and “dots” scheme of the telegraph operators. After that, he would be joining the half dozen other sub-freshmen on a tour of the building organized by Mrs. Stinson, the chemical laboratory assistant.

  Marcus excused himself from the study room and repaired to the basement to rinse his face and regain his bearings. On his way, a freshman stopped him and told him what he expected and dreaded: Runkle wanted to see him at his earliest convenience. It was rich, really. Here he was, promoting a friend’s candidacy to the Institute, when on the very same day the acting president was likely about to throw him out on his ear!

  He took temporary refuge in an empty lecture hall, where he reflected on everything he had accomplished and enjoyed over the last four years, trying to decide how to defend himself. Even forty minutes later, as he stood in front of the door to Runkle’s study, he still hesitated before knocking.

  “Mr. Mansfield. Please. I’ve been expecting you.” Runkle pointed to a hard wooden chair on the other side of his desk.

  John Runkle had a Quaker calmness about him. He passed Marcus a sheet of paper. “Now, I shall have to ask you a question and I hope you shall not take offense. Did you draw this, Mr. Mansfield?”

  On the paper was a caricature of Runkle fishing, using his lecture pointer as a rod and a basket of calculus problems as bait. Underwater, clutched around the basket, were true-to-life renditions of the students in the Class of ’68.

  “I didn’t, sir,” Marcus said, struck by the incongruity of studying a cartoon before the desk of the somber, brilliant mathematician.