Chapter 29: University

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland: two months later

Tamara was halfway through her first semester. This was nothing like high school; even her attending college classes while in high school didn’t prepare her for the intensity of full-time college life. She was indeed living in one of the freshman dorms, as Jill had told her she would. But she didn’t much care for her roommate.

Beverly—she wanted to be called “Bev”—turned out to be a clueless, stuck-up party girl. She also tried calling Tamara “Tammy” on a number of occasions, but after Tamara had corrected her each time with no apparent success, Bev found that the next time that she said “Tammy,” she felt ill. Bev must have been a slow learner, Tamara thought, because it took a whole week of episodes of her being ill before Bev finally figured it out—don’t say “Tammy.”

Tamara wondered how the girl had been admitted, since she was so clueless about simple things and seemed to care little for her classes. At least Tamara had never seen her studying.

The JHU roommate-matching program needs a CPU transplant, Tamara thought one evening as she was trying to study and Bev was blasting her music. Tamara sighed and wafted a tiny cloud of light pink taste with faint streaks of brown at Bev, who turned pale and rushed to the bathroom.

This was the fourth time I needed to do that, Tamara muttered as she turned the music down. It’s too cold to walk to the library. I’m missing Miami already. They say it snows here, too. Not looking forward to that...

Then she thought of what Emma had told her about Alaska and the Program (not happening) there. She shivered—both at the thought of the cold there and Emma’s attempts to escape the Program’s clutches.

Thinking of Emma, Tamara was getting impatient. Emma had promised her that she’d allow her to begin working with her in the spring semester.

“Tamara, dear, it’s way too much to jump into a regular research load before you’ve even gotten a few courses under your belt whilst living in a uni environment, innit,” she had admonished Tamara after she had complained about being put off. “Believe me, you’ll understand after a few weeks of classes, won’t you.”

Now Tamara did understand. But living with Bev certainly wasn’t helping any. And apart from the occasional nausea treatments, Tamara didn’t want to use her abilities to influence Bev any further.

Well, I can only hope that Bev decides to go out for a sorority or something next semester, Tamara mused. That might keep her busy and away from here more.

Although Emma wouldn’t allow Tamara to begin on a research project of her own yet, Tamara did have weekly meetings with her, and she learned that Emma was involved in a very interesting battery research project. Emma had funded a research center at Cambridge University to develop new battery technologies and was herself currently working on the quantum theory of electrical energy storage in different substrates, especially using semiconductor-infused polymers as the substrate for embedding molecular lattices which could stably store energy.

At their last meeting before final exams, Emma asked her, “Tamara, I spoke to your profs and they all said that you’re doing just fine in your classes; as well, your marks remain excellent as is your participation in class. How do you regard your fitting in at uni socially?”

“Oh, thanks, Emma. I knew my grades were fine. I wasn’t sure about the class participation since I tend to be outspoken. If someone says something that’s not right...”

“Stop, stop,” Emma laughed. “I do swear, you’re just like me. I did the same thing—only stopped when it got me branded by teachers as a troublemaker. Your professors aren’t anything like my teachers were, are they. They say your participation is just fine.”

Tamara nodded. “Oh, good. Since they never said anything to me, I never knew.”

“And socially? You haven’t been holed up in a library cubicle this entire autumn, have you?”

“Um, not really. You know, before coming here, I divided my days between high school, college classes, and the med school MRI lab. So I’m really used to being very busy all the time. So if I tell you the truth, please don’t be mad at me, okay?”

Emma grinned at her. “What are you confessing to? Overworking yourself?”

“I don’t think learning new stuff is overworking. So, this summer, my family went back to Haiti to close out their affairs there, and I had a whole new insight about my sensory abilities. It occurred to me that animals—lots of plants too—can communicate by scent, that is, chemically. We already know about how nerve cells transmit information; from neuron to neuron, it’s chemical too. Neurotransmitters are released at the synapses, from axon to dendrite.

“But there’s also a huge electrical component in information transfer in the nerve cell; those are the signals that the EEG can detect. At the med school lab, working with Dr Beauford—he’s a neurosurgeon but also has a doctorate in neuroscience—I learned about how nerve cells work. The cells have three parts: the dendrite, the soma, and the axon. The synapses are at the distal end of the axon, and glial and Schwann cells insulate the axons—the myelin. The oligodendrocytes are myelin precursors.

“So this information about neurons triggered my affinity for electrical circuits; I’ve seen how the nerve cell works like an electrical circuit component. While I was working in Beauford’s lab, I came across a new study about how nerve cells work. The key seems to be in the dendrites, which appear to work very much like transistors—switches—and perform binary operations with electrical signals. They receive input from the synapses of axons of other neurons and transmit those signals to other nerve cells and so on to the body’s muscles and other body functions, like the endocrine system’s secretory cells.”

Emma grinned at the lecture. “So all this is in favor of...? It’s fascinating, I’m sure.”

Tamara gave her a grin back. “So what I was coming to is my insight. I think that the brain can send signals externally in two ways: electrical and chemical. And my abilities are probably based on both ways. So my current extra-curricular research is on neurological stimulation of the endocrine system and the chemicals produced. I’ve been reading articles in the medical literature on those topics.”

Emma sat back and exhaled. “And here I was convinced that keeping you out of the lab would make you concentrate on your class studies. I was wrong again; you’re truly too much like me, Tamara. So, back to my original question ... any social life?”

Tamara grinned. “Well, in the one free hour I have in each week ... Seriously. I do socialize. I get together with some of the Clarke scholars quite a bit; Jill and I hit it off so we meet several times a week. I like Terence and we do study sessions together sometimes. I help him with French since I’m a native speaker and we’re both very advanced in math so we’re taking the Fourier Analysis class and have a study group for that. I also like Peter and we have lunch together several times a week too.”

“Which Peter?”

“Oh right. I forgot that there’s a Peter in the junior class. No, Peter Winsberg, my freshman counterpart. The other full Clarke scholar. He’s dual majoring in math and Double E and is pretty cool too. We talk about electrical engineering a lot,” she giggled.

“Ah, so finally something we differ on,” Emma chuckled. “When I was in uni, I didn’t socialize much, and never with boys. Of course, I completed uni and high school at the same time, didn’t I. I didn’t do much in the social department. Now then. It would appear that you can handle working on a project in addition to your classes...”

She stopped as Tamara exclaimed, “Yessss!”

“ ... so I’m going to be a taskmaster here and first have you work under my direction. When I’m convinced you can be independent, we’ll discuss the projects I know you’re keen to start on. But good research requires good discipline, clear planning, and reasonable goals, doesn’t it. One doesn’t accomplish much if one just ‘tries stuff.’” She made finger quotes. “Agreed?”

“Oh sure,” Tamara was fairly bouncing in her seat. “I suppose, since you’re doing that theoretical battery work, you want me to try to adapt your ideas into physical structures.”

“That’s precisely it. That will give me the opportunity to see how you are able to discipline your scientific curiosity and as well, give me early indications that show if my ideas have merit. Okay, my dear, I need to hustle off to my Intro to Physics class now, so I’ll see you after the holiday. I needn’t tell you to do well on your finals. Have a wonderful winter break and come back ready for some hard work,” Emma grinned as they hugged.

Emma’s introductory physics class was still one of the most popular science courses at Hopkins; the students loved Emma and she loved teaching them.

Late December

Tamara flew home for the holidays. She was happy to be warm again; the cold gray days of the late-fall mid-Atlantic coast were somewhat depressing, so seeing the sun when she left the airport cheered her right up. She was glad to be heading home for the end-of-the-year celebrations. She was even happier when her dad told her that the kidnapping case was “mostly closed.” Those responsible were now behind bars, but the FBI couldn’t give out any more details other than to say that Tamara was no longer a target.

Tamara recalled the Christmases when she was a child in Haiti—the greetings of “jwaye Nwèl” and “joyeux Noël,” “happy Christmas” in Kreyòl and French, which rang out everywhere on the local streets during the weeks before the holiday. She recalled how, as a child on Christmas Eve, she would clean her shoes, fill them with straw, and place them under the scraggly pine-tree branch that they called a Christmas “tree” next to the nativity scene there, in the hopes that Tonton Nwèl, “Uncle Noel”—Santa, would take the straw out and bless her by filling her shoes with gifts.

Some of those customs changed somewhat in her family when they came to America. There was still a tree—far more robust than the pine branches they could get in Haiti. The happy Christmas greetings still abounded everywhere in Little Haiti, but the commercialization of the holiday led to the giving of more substantial gifts than a little candy or a small doll left in or next to her shoes. Or in Tamara’s case, a book.

Now that she was at home, she looked forward to her family’s traditional service in the ounfò, which was followed by the Christmas “baths,” a spiritual cleansing of her body of all of the bad experiences she had experienced during the past year. Wearing loose-fitting white garments, the vodouisants silently poured the cleansing waters of her mom’s family recipe over themselves to wash away any evil traces that might remain on them. After this was done, they would silently make a brief visit to a crossroads—a nearby street corner—carrying a symbolic offering together with the unused bath preparation materials, and leave those remains behind. Then they would return home, taking a different route—by not retracing their steps, the evil wouldn’t follow them home.

There was also a very late dinner on Christmas eve, which began after the religious observances. Called “réveillon,” from the French réveil, meaning “awakening,” since in Haiti (and in the diaspora too), the meal frequently lasts until dawn; in Tamara’s family it usually consisted of fried chicken with rice and beans and didn’t last all night.

Christmas day was a day of rest and the Alexandres typically had an open house for friends and congregation members to visit. Tamara always loved this season and was happy to be home to enjoy it.

Two days after Christmas, Tamara checked her student account on the Johns Hopkins website to see if her grades had been posted yet. They had been, and she was happy to see that she had preserved her “A”s in all her classes. That meant that Emma was sure to let her begin working in the lab for the spring semester.

Tamara decided to see if Beauford was at work, but when she called his office, she learned that he was on a two-week vacation with his family, so she’d have to put off seeing him until at least spring break, since she had to return to school right after New Year’s Day. Even though the spring semester didn’t begin until the last week of January, Tamara was scheduled to return for the school’s “Intersession,” a three-week period when the university offered specialized classes or allowed students to do research projects for credit. Emma had told her to register for two credits of research during Intersession.

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore: two months later: March

March was a sloppy month in the mid-Atlantic states, Tamara decided. At least this year it was. After two days of intermittent snow, the weather turned to freezing rain and the snow on the streets and walks turned into slush—a new experience for Tamara—as was her first experience with snow in late January, when her spring semester had begun. That’s when she learned that her favorite roommate, Bev, was not returning to school. It seemed that majoring in parties wasn’t a very good idea for maintaining one’s grades. By March, Tamara was still lacking a roommate, which was just fine with her. A number of fellow students in her dorm wing also found themselves without a roommate; that’s more kids who didn’t take school seriously, Tamara figured.

She was having a wonderful time in school this spring. Her classes were very interesting and the profs were decent. Best yet, Emma had set her up in her lab in the Physics-Astronomy Building. So far, Emma had her working with the materials that Emma had brought from her lab at the APL which they had used during the Intersession period: polymer sheets of varying thickness doped with Emma’s superconducting formula. The thinnest of these sheets, ones only a hundred micrometers thick, were used to make superconducting wires by rolling them into tight cylinders and heat-annealing them to set the inclusions’ lattice structure.

Emma’s current experiment, which Tamara was performing, was to cut the polymer sheets into small squares of a few centimeters’ size and stack them, alternating with thin wedges of silicon semiconductor material, like a sandwich, and then tightly compressing the resulting stack of polymer squares. Some of Emma’s calculations showed that this configuration had energy-storage possibilities. They nicknamed this setup a “pancake.”

A week before spring break, Tamara stopped off at Emma’s office.

“Emma,” she said as she knocked, “I’ve been getting only a tiny response with the latest pancake version. I looked at your math and don’t see why these designs aren’t working. We should get something. What if we try amplifying the electron flow? Maybe this thing needs a kick-start, like with using SETs? That’ll move the electrons since they’ll flow with no voltage applied.”

“Hmm. It shouldn’t need that, but why not try,” Emma mused. “Well, you’re the electronic circuit nerd. Try a setup like that and see if the pancake responds.”

Back in the lab, Tamara assembled a small charging circuit using a single SET with its superconducting gate connected to a small power source, a 10 ampere-hour, 12 volt sealed lead-acid battery. She wired the SET’s sink, the device’s output, to the latest pancake device—then had an idea. Recalling how capacitors are made, instead of using her latest square pancake, she took a very thin sheet of the superconducting film she was using to make the pancakes, covered it with an equally thin sheet of dielectric material, and rolled them up into a tight 50 x 8 millimeter cylinder, slipped it into a heat-shrink tube, and then shrunk it with a heat gun.

She connected the resulting tubular device to the output of the SET circuit and tested that configuration and was delighted to see that her design could indeed store energy and the measured values closely matched Emma’s calculations. How much energy it stored, and whether the device could produce any, would have to wait until tomorrow, since it was late now, she suddenly realized. She pulled the connecting wires off the battery and coiled up the tubular circuit assembly’s connecting wires, putting the little cylinder and its wires into a plastic shoe box. Then she slipped the battery into its case, put it away, shut down the test equipment, stowing that away, and put the rest of the items she had used back into their proper drawers.

When she checked Emma’s office on her way out, her door was locked; she was gone for the day.

Oh well, I’ll talk to her tomorrow, Tamara thought.

Early the next morning, Tamara’s phone rang. It was a worried Emma.

“Tamara, are you okay? I got a call that my lab was damaged last night.”