Chapter 18: Finding a College Program

Now that the immediate drama of the impending Program had passed, and nothing of consequence could be done until the spring term began, Tamara resumed her regular school activities and her work at the MRI laboratory.

And Wilson resumed his search for information about defense-related patents. By mid-October, he had finished navigating through the morass of the Defense Department and the Patent Office, where he had only gotten conflicting and confusing information. He needed a personal contact and the only one he had at Defense was the undersecretary of the Navy, Robert O’Rourke. So, after the Alexandres’ patent attorney had also chased up several blind alleys, Wilson decided to call O’Rourke. He discovered that O’Rourke was now an assistant secretary of Defense. He made some calls, got the correct number, and left a message. Wilson’s Medal of Honor seemed to be the passport to get an immediate call back.

Wilson answered the phone.

“Is this Mr Alexandre?” a woman’s voice asked.

“It is.”

“Thank you. Please hold for Secretary O’Rourke.” There was a pause.

“Hello, Mr Alexandre, how are you today and how may I help you—may I call you Wilson?” O’Rourke asked.

“Yes sir, you may, and I called to see if you might be able to help solve what has turned into a bit of a strange problem. It’s nothing serious—yet.”

“That’s intriguing. As I recall, all of my interactions with you have involved strange problems,” he chuckled. “What’s this one about?”

“An invention which may have potential military applications, sir. Perhaps you recall my daughter, Tamara...”

“I do. Delightful young lady.”

“Thanks. She’s quite gifted in technical matters and has become somewhat of an expert in MRI technology. She even has patent applications in the works and several inventions have been licensed already.”

“Impressive. She’s what? Thirteen now?”

“She is that. Both thirteen and impressive,” Wilson agreed. “Last fall, she was working on—I don’t quite understand exactly what the device was—this RF emitter thing, making improvements on its power and efficiency, and wound up making some kind of maser device. A microwave beam projector, she told me.”

O’Rourke grunted. “Huh. I know what masers are. The DoD has folks studying them.”

“That’s what we figured. This device that she’s built has applications in diagnostic medicine and, apparently, also for military technology. We didn’t want to rush ahead with submitting for a patent and have the DoD come visit us and shut her work down.”

“Hmmm. That’s been known to happen. Here’s what I can do. Our DARPA—that’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—has a group studying masers and similar devices and they would be the DoD group most interested in what Tamara has. You mentioned a civilian application too, and there are ways of getting a patent so that its provisions are kept secret. It’s not very well known, but there exists an Invention Secrecy Act, which allows the Patent Office to suppress patent details for those inventions where disclosure to the public may be determined to be, I quote, ‘detrimental to the national security,’ unquote. The DARPA staff can work with you to separate out the secret part of the invention, if possible, and allow you to develop the commercial application. How does that sound?”

“That sounds like just what we need, sir; thanks.”

“We’ll have some folks from DARPA contact you very soon. They’ll want to see the device and review any notes and design documents. You know, the kind of materials you’d put together for a patent application.”

“Thanks for the help, sir. I’ll be waiting for their call.”

“Say, on another matter, I recall hearing that you haven’t responded to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s invitation for your membership.”

“Oh, I guess I forgot to send the form back. Things were very busy then—and they don’t have my updated address either, I suppose. I’ll do that today. Thanks again.”

“And farewell, Wilson. I hope you can get to come to some future Medal ceremonies. You’ve got an open invitation.”

“Maybe I will. Goodbye, sir.”

Later, Wilson filled Tamara in on his phone call.

“So those fed people will want to go to the lab to see my work?” she asked.

“Right. And your notes. The stuff you were assembling for the patent.”

“Okay. I think the superconducting RF reflector I built—that seems to be the key to how the energy pumping happens without a physical container to hold the energized air molecules—might be the key part. That could be worth its own patent. Okay, I have all the info already collected. Tim gave me my own drawer in a file cabinet in his shop and he keeps that cabinet locked too.”

Miami Edison High School: mid-November

One day in mid-November, Tamara was sorting the mail in the school office and noticed a thick envelope. It was addressed to “College Guidance Office” at Edison. What caught her eye was the name of the school—Johns Hopkins University. “Her” research MRI had been developed there—she had developed a very possessive attitude toward that MRI.

She brought the package to Mrs Moore, her counselor, and asked, “This came today. If this is about attending Johns Hopkins, I’m really interested in them as a college. Can I get a copy?”

“Sure,” Moore replied and gave her one of the flyers from the package.

Reading the flyer, Tamara saw a mention of a special scholarship program: Clarke Scholars, which provided a full scholarship to a boy and girl to attend Johns Hopkins and ones to the University of Maryland. She didn’t need the financial support that the scholarship would give, but she was intrigued with the idea of attending Johns Hopkins—maybe she could get to work with the creators of her MRI.

Later at home, she went on line to look into the scholarship. This was a tough one to get, she realized, because she had already taken the PSAT exam and she had scored a 1518. Missing those last two points had irritated her for days. She looked at the test requirements for the Clarke scholarship: A one-hour physics exam covering kinematics, dynamics, Newton’s laws, harmonic and rotational motion, gravitation, and energy and momentum; and a one-hour AP math exam covering areas including Euclidean geometry, inequalities and constrained extrema, series and differential equations, and statistics and probability.

Wow, she thought. This exam is for high school kids? This is no SAT. They’re looking for really advanced kids here.

There was a humanities part also. You had to write two essays, the first one would be on a current social problem in the world and a second one would address a question drawn from one of twenty-five influential works of literature. The website gave a list of the works chosen for the following year’s four-hour exam, which would be held in late January at sites designated on the application page. Miami was on the list of sites. The site recommended that the exam be taken in the applicant’s senior high school year.

To even apply to take the exam, she’d have to submit a transcript of her grades, a list of her extracurricular activities, and a description of any notable accomplishments in a technical or social area. The application also required three letters of recommendation. The application deadline was September 30.

Damn, Tamara thought. Grades, I’m good there. Extracurricular? Can’t use zapping kids’ chips, I’m sure about that. The MRI work, sure. Office aide? Maybe. Oh, right—the tutoring I do. Also my patents and the medical journal papers I’m a co-author on with Beauford. Maybe I need to add another extracurricular activity? I’ll check into that before I send in the application.

What caught Tamara’s eye was that as a Clarke Scholar, she would have the opportunity to work in the labs at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory. Tamara looked at the list of projects that the scientists and engineers at the APL were working on ... and one of them was related to the work that she was currently doing with her MRI. Another APL project seemed to be related to what she had begun studying after making her maser discovery; it involved investigating superconducting mesoscopic systems under RF excitation—and an APL project was actually using Andreev reflections and electron scattering to do that work.

She saw that there were a number of research papers published on the APL site, so she downloaded several in the superconducting applications area. Something there had caught her attention and she decided to pursue that line of thought.

Early December

As the winter break approached, Tamara was immersed in her college physics class, her high school studies, and her MRI work. She continued to make refinements on the RF circuits that she had designed, seeking to make them smaller and more efficient. But she held off on doing much more work on the special coil windings, which, together with the collimating reflector she had designed, had produced that inadvertent maser effect. She didn’t want to waste any effort if the feds were going to confiscate her invention.

A week before the winter break, Wilson got a call from someone who identified herself as being from DARPA.

“Hello, is this Mr Wilson Alexandre?” He acknowledged that it was. “I’m Dr Helene Tarmson from DARPA. Secretary O’Rourke told you that I’d be contacting you.”

“Not you specifically, but yes, that someone at DARPA would call.”

“I understand that your daughter has developed a maser application which could have military uses. He said she’s only thirteen years old, too.”

Wilson chuckled. “True, thirteen, going on twenty-five or so.”

Tarmson laughed. “Like that, is she? Got one like that myself. Listen, I’m the lead scientist in our maser group and in charge of military applications. I’d like to come visit next week, if possible, with another member of my team and look at what your daughter’s developed. Secretary O’Rourke told you that we’d need the documentation?”

“He did and it’s ready. And your coming next week will work with Tamara; she’ll be on break and can spend time with you then.”

They exchanged contact information and schedules, then disconnected. During their visit during the following week, Tamara spent two full days at the MRI lab with the DARPA scientists. They were in awe of what she had done with the experimental MRI unit and its array of external coils. Tamara showed them how the array of a miniaturized version of her maser generator, less the virtual chamber and focusing grid, was used in various compact external coils.

“And this version improves image resolution by a factor of almost 100,” she told them. “When I was working with this idea, I wondered if I could direct the RF pulse into the target organs instead of creating an omnidirectional pulse. Doing that would increase efficiency, so I made a focusing grid out of superconducting materials and connected its operation to the operation of the RF source. But when I was working with tuning the pair, I discovered that a continuous RF signal somehow got amplified exponentially until this beam of RF energy emerged from the generator. The field strength produced was like inside a microwave oven, but in a collimated beam, almost. Materials in the beam heat up very rapidly. That’s when I realized that this is dangerous and could be used as a weapon.”

Tarmson was examining the device and then looked at the circuit and the focusing grid.

“This is simply amazing,” she said. “We’ve been trying to get this effect for several years now—and you’ve done it without even using a chamber to contain the excited molecules. And by using air molecules, you’re producing a range of radio frequency emissions. This opens up an entire new area of investigation, Tamara. How would you like to come to work for DARPA? That’s only half in jest; this work is impressive and so is your documentation.”