Chapter 12: Professor Specs

MIT’s version of Orientation day was scheduled for Friday, August 15th, A week before that I found myself in a meeting with Professor Simon Drucker and Professor Emeritus Heinrich Wagner, my mathematics and physics advisers, respectively. Curiously, we did not meet on campus, but rather in a somewhat nondescript office building a few blocks away from the USS Constitution.

A sign on the door said Forge Securities. A nice elderly woman led me to a meeting room, where I saw a painting of Forge, the Hero. Forge was one of the earlier American Heroes, a Big bruiser from the 1920’s with an affinity for metals. Bullets didn’t bounce of him, he absorbed them. He was hell on wheels against the gangsters and bank robbers of his day. I wondered about this until Green Comet and Sentinel walked through the door and removed their masks.

“Hi Nate, welcome to Boston,” Comet said. “And welcome to MIT,” Sentinel added. “As you might imagine, we are not Simon Drucker and Heinrich Wagner. They will be out in a bit, but we wanted to introduce ourselves and let you in on a few things that will make your time at MIT and in Boston a little less stressful.”

“Wow,” I said, finally able to get my breath. “Its an honor to meet you both. The original Gadgeteer certainly spoke highly of you,” I nodded at Green Comet. “And though you were never one of the Gadgeteer’s customers Sentinel, everyone speaks of you with respect. Stellar speaks of you with respect,” I added for emphasis. “I appreciate you both taking the time to greet me.”

“You do seem to have a closer relationship with the LA Guardians than with any other group of heroes,” Captain Comet observed. “How did that come about?”

“Stellar. He contacted me kind of out of the blue and suggested I come see him and the rest of the Guardians in Los Angeles at their headquarters. I did, and he, Brainstorm and I visited for a bit then I got introduced to the rest of the Guardians, including Portal. Turns out they wanted to offer me a deal in order to get me to donate the Dragonfly’s ship Gossamer Wings to the new Hero museum in St. Louis. We worked out a deal. Since then Portal has been dating my mom, and they’ve gotten serious, so it’s become sort of a family thing.”

It kind of all gushed out in a rush, which felt a little embarrassing, but they both smiled.

“Stellar has many gifts, some of which weren’t anticipated by the beings who ‘rescued and restored’ him, I would think,” Green Comet said thoughtfully. “One of which is something he has referred to as verständnisvoll, which in German can mean both sympathetic or understanding. In his case, I think he means a sympathetic understanding;

I thought about that. “Yea.” I had to agree. It really did make sense.

“We met with Mike Melville last week,” Sentinel commented. “and he talked about Stellar and the trade you made as well. How have things gone with the saucer?”

“The saucer has turned out to be a real project, but in a good way” I replied. “My girlfriend, a future Hero probably, was able to use her unique ability to penetrate the saucer’s previously impenetrable hull and between the two of us and some handy gadgets we got her open. I eventually hope to use her as a portable workshop for the super suit part of what I do, so I can meet customers away from the Gadgeteer base.”

I gave them an idea of what I had learned over the past year and what I hoped to learn in the coming year and how I hoped to have dual degrees in math and physics when I graduated. Sentinel gave me a good bit of information on resources available here in Boston, and Comet did the same for the New England area as well. I thanked them both for their generosity.

“Your thanks is appreciated,” Comet laughed, “but don’t be surprised when others are similarly benevolent.”

“Gadgeteers, tinkerers and builders are not that common as hero types go,” Sentinel told me. “and the one’s who work without specialization even more so. Established heroes go out of there way to be nice to you guys, cause we never know when we’ll need something from you.”

The door they had come through opened again and two more men came in. These two looked much more like the MIT professors I had expected to be meeting. Sentinel made the introductions and then left me alone with them.

“Quite an introduction to MIT, eh Mr. Dunn?” Dr. Drucker began.

“Yeah. I wish my mom had come with me, she always was a big fan of The Green Comet, and would have loved to meet Sentinel as well.”

“She will have her chances over the course of your time here, I’m sure,” Dr. Wagner assured me. “Now. What do you envision yourself doing during your time here?”

“First, I think I need to understand how others think and learn. How inspiration works for others and to see what tools they use to shape and direct their inspiration. Second, I want to learn how to express what I know in terms that others can understand. It does no good for society if I can invent something, but not teach others how it works. I don’t want what I learn to only benefit me.”

“Very good, That is where we were hoping to lead your thinking today, so it is good to see it is already there.” Dr Drucker gave me a little ‘golf clap’ and a grin.

The two men spent the next hour explaining their expectations and how they would be able to accommodate my hero status, and how they would NOT be able to accommodate it. It made sense and was reasonable, even a little generous, I thought.

I should try to describe my first year, but I will leave it at this. MIT is truly a hotbed of creative geniuses, in the normal sense. The students are inventive, creative, motivated, focused on goals and 99.99% of them are of the ‘work hard and play hard’ philosophy. Things seem to be organized around a lack of rigidity. Dorm life was fluid, ever changing and high energy.

I suffered under it.

When I say that, I am mostly describing my struggle to keep the mad genius in the box. It was incredibly hard to do that at MIT because the very atmosphere there constantly encouraged inspiration streamers. I had to lock myself in my room most nights, put my headphones on and type note after note on the dozens of ideas that The Mad Genius wanted me to do something about. Portal eventually started fetching me on weekends so I could spend time in the warehouse lab working on things to ease the pressure. When I did engage with others, I tried to keep to the purely physical activities, running, Frisbee, soccer. I had to be careful. A poster announcing a kite flying event would mutate into a kite designing and building contest, with the word “kite” being interpreted loosely.

Weekends in the lab meant I was able to work on the saucer. I finally got a look at the where the inner workings used to be; the power systems, gravity engines and the “warp drive” that allowed the ship to flit around the solar system in hours rather than days, weeks or months. I compared the area where the saucers original power plant fit to the space taken up by the HDG that Grandpa Melville had invented, and found them similar, but I had no way to tell if the two systems were comparable power-wise. The HDG was a good 15 to 25 percent more efficient, generating much less waste heat. It was also able to handle 25 to 40 percent higher throughput, which meant it delivered more power at maximum than the ship’s plant could. There was nothing I really needed to do to the saucers power or flight systems. I had already converted the lower level into a fully functional copy of the mobile lab, except it looked much nicer.

When I wasn’t working on the saucer, I was continuing to get a handle on the Portal field and how to use it, Before summer started I felt I would at least have figured out how to make a functional portal operate between two paired portal generators. In between these things, I worked on my lab suit, which I was going to have to come up with a better name for now that I was using it outside the lab.