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Chapter 12

When the Marshalls met with Principal Jessup, Stuart told me afterward that they had insisted that a school board member and the school’s solicitor be present at the meeting. He told me how Gerry went on the attack before the principal even finished greeting them.

“Gerry asked Jessup,” Stuart said to me, “how he dared to ignore the State Department letter about Program participation. Jessup said he hadn’t been aware of that letter until Sam had mentioned it on the school’s stage. So Gerry showed him a copy; it clearly stated that U.K. national students were not to be selected to participate in the Program. The letter was dated in August and with it there was a postal receipt from Sam’s school showing it had been delivered. Jessup told us that he had asked the Program person about why she ignored the State Department letter.

“Apparently the Office of Social Awareness thinks that they can ignore international agreements, because from what Jessup said that he was told by the school’s Program representative, the U.S. State Department has no authority over the Program. So that’s one issue that Dad’s going to have to clear up, and right damned quickly too. But I needed to set these gits straight.

“So I asked Jessup to consider what would happen when the monarch of the United Kingdom demanded that the U.S. ambassador attend her and she delivered an official objection to the United States government concerning the government’s treatment of her citizens. Our embassy here could easily make that happen, I told him. That’s when I took on my Royal Marine persona and gave him a recruit’s tongue-lashing: ‘Since you are the official in charge of this school and not the Program person whom the feds assigned to the school, you are the official responsible for ignoring the Program exemption for a British diplomat’s child—not that Program woman. As well, you must realize that all of your school district officials would be held accountable, just as you would be. Do you think that your president would ignore a continuing international incident that YOU precipitated, Mr Jessup? Do you think that the president would be somewhat cross with your governor? Do you seriously believe that the federal Program office will overrule the president?’ Then I asked their solicitor to tell Jessup what would likely happen next, after the president finished admonishing the miscreants in his administration.

“She told Jessup that if such a thing happened, that he would at best be sacked and at worst, never find a position in education anywhere in the country.

“Then Jessup deflated, but told us that this meeting was about Sam’s disrupting order in the school, not about any federal requests being ignored. He mentioned how rude she was in speaking to him, threatening to scratch and kick him. He also said that Sam had been inciting the other kids and that was why he couldn’t allow her to remain in the school.

“I first responded to his complaint about her being rude, ‘Someone tells you that they plan to assault and sexually batter you. Do you stand there and smile and tell them to go right ahead? Or do you tell them what their consequences would be? Sam wasn’t being rude; she was giving you a fair warning of how she’d respond to your threat. And how was she inciting the other pupils, then?’ I asked. ‘She’s telling them not to cooperate,’ he answered. I disagreed and told him, ‘I heard from several other sources that what she told the pupils was that she herself was refusing and that others had the right to refuse, just as she had. She’s not telling them what they should do. Is there any school rule which states that pupils can’t exchange truthful information? Because that’s all she’s done.’

“And I ended with a warning to them. I mentioned that I knew all about the Program enforcers and how they were employed, and warned their school board person and their solicitor that if either of my children were removed from school by any Program official, it would be handled as a kidnapping of a diplomatic official’s dependent. That meant that the FBI and U.S. Marshals’ office would descend on the school and arrest everyone involved—the Program official, the entire school board, plus the school’s administrators, would be charged with kidnapping, a class one felony, and I was certain that they wouldn’t want that to happen. That shook them up, I do say.

“The atmosphere in the room was a bit tense, but I did get Jessup to back off from the idea of expelling Sam, especially after I told him how much legal force we could muster against the school district. I asked them if they wanted to take on the legal resources of the British government.”

“So where does this leave Sam now?” I asked.

Stuart answered, “Where she was before, but now the kids think she’s a hero for resisting the way she did. The school district’s solicitor also admitted to us that Sam was correct; if a staff member tried to forcibly strip a student, it would be a felony, and she had informed Jessup of that fact after Sam’s assembly when he had contacted her for advice. So all the pupils in her school now know that they can’t be forced to be in the Program, thanks to Sam. I’m impressed at how strongly she stood up to the school officials.”

“Sam’s a courageous girl,” I agreed. “Andrew told me she’s now known as that ‘clothed Program girl.’ Everyone in the school knows her and saw what she did on the school’s stage. She’s been having loads of fun with the idea of a textile Program too, using it to ridicule the whole idea of the Program. She did some wild things, too, until the teachers twigged to her game.”

Stuart laughed. “I won’t ask.”

“I’ll tell, though. In one class, the teacher wanted her starkers for some kind of anatomy demo. She got up and said, ‘It’s fine; I’m wearing my Program outfit now. So demo me, then.’ The class laughed. The teacher said, ‘I can’t show anything with your clothes on.’ So that little imp looked around the room, saw an anatomical model at the back, and went to pick it up. She brought it to him. ‘Here’s your demo. I’ll hold it while you do the demo. I’m totally cooperating, you see.’ The class thought that was brilliant but the teacher was quite cross with her, she told me. He sent her back to her seat.

“Sam feels very strongly about how wrong the Program is. She could have simply taken her exemption and kept quiet. But she told me, when she heard my story of how kids in my school resisted the Program and knew that her own school would be starting it this autumn, that being starkers wouldn’t particularly bother her but she would not abide being forced into it. And that she’d try to make sure everyone knew that.”

~~~~

I spent much of the last two weeks of September getting organized at the APL and by early October, I was commuting there daily. Obviously I don’t have a driver’s license—even being emancipated, I still was not eligible for age-related privileges like driving or voting. I considered the various alternatives and then settled on hiring an executive car service. Using them, I could ride in comfort in a limo with a little desk and get some work done. And there was lots of work—not only my research, but I needed to review the work of the UAF engineering team, look over the various patent licensing proposals I was having prepared, and sort through all of the seminar requests I was still receiving.

At my first day at the APL, I had gotten a very warm greeting. And I was impressed by the “space” that they had organized for me—a lovely office and a nearby lab. Both were small but then, so am I, and I wasn’t really sure what I could use the lab for right now; the lab work I had needed to do up to now was actually engineering work and not applied physics. But my new colleagues (that sounds so brill) assured me that I’d come up with something. They did have facilities for doing semiconductor work here, but the equipment was currently fully committed. I wondered if I could raid my old uni, UAF, for people... Well, first I’d need to see if that could be done ethically.

I did have plenty of ideas where I could use my approach to solid-state physics, perhaps investigating quantum communication using the Josephson effect—this area of research has been around maybe 20 years or so, but I have a few ideas that go in a slightly different direction and it was one of the areas of expertise at the APL. Another Josephson application, one that had occurred to me when I first got the superconductivity idea, involved Andreev reflections and electron scattering. This could be useful in studying superconducting mesoscopic systems; this is the scale of the electronics used in integrated circuit chips. Yeah, I had lots of theoretical work to keep me busy; no need for a lab just yet.

And I really do need to see if I can get to teach a basic physics class at the main campus. Yes. Plenty of work.

~~~~

It was a Monday in early October. I had spent the day at the lab working on several ideas which were all converging. As my colleagues had predicted, I had gotten an idea which would require some engineering work, so I needed some money for equipment and a technician or two—perhaps a grad student or postdoc. So I had begun to sketch out a quick research grant proposal. I also contacted some physics grad students I had worked with at UAF to learn about their post-graduation plans, and as a fall-back plan, sent an email to my trustee to learn if any royalty or licensing income could be made available as seed money for this idea. I was busy with this preliminary planning all that Monday and Tuesday, so when I got home that evening, I was fairly knackered.

Then after dinner that evening, Gerry wanted to discuss her family’s plans for the next few years with me to see how they would fit with my own plans. The Marshalls have been planning to remain in the U.S. after Stuart retires from the Marines. Gerry has a master’s degree in adolescent education from a British university and was taking a few classes here in the States to allow her to become licensed to teach here. Stuart holds a doctorate in political science from the London Economics Institute (wow, that’s ace. Who knew?) and has a few open offers to teach at several area universities too, and they liked the educational opportunities their kids had here better than in the U.K. I thought with my work at the APL, I could be well served by remaining in the area too, and of course I wanted to be close to Andrew. Gerry and I were discussing my ongoing work with the kids and I told her how Abi was starting to take her work seriously now. I pulled out my mobile to show her some current work that Abi was doing and how clever the girl was; I was determined to get the kid to be serious at her schoolwork. I was ready for bed; the last two days had been busy for me, especially in the lab, so I went to my room to get some sleep.

Too early in the morning, I heard the distinctive ring of my mobile. I fumbled around. Oops, I had left it on the kitchen table upstairs. I looked at the clock. 5:30 frikkin’ a.m. Jeez, who calls at that hour? ... Uh oh, hope it isn’t about Uncle Scott...

Stuart called from upstairs. “Emma? Your mobile...”

“Please get it and answer!”

Damn, I hope it’s not the hospital.

I ran up the stairs and heard Stuart talking on it as I came into the kitchen.

“...what? A very important call? Who is this?” he said.

“...”

“You’re calling from Stockholm? Sweden?” Stuart repeated.

Ohmygod, it can’t be. It can’t. There’s no way. Impossible. I grabbed the mobile from him.

“Hello? This is Emma Clarke... erm...”

“Dr Emma Clarke? This is she, correct?” A male voice. Fairly heavy accent.

“Yes sir, and...”

“Dr Clarke, this is Lars Hagenstir, secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It’s my pleasure and honor to notify you that you have been selected as this year’s Nobel Laureate in Physics.”

My head was spinning. Is this a hoax? He had the right kind of accent...

“Dr Clarke?” He was chuckling. “Are you there?”

“Yes. I’m totally stunned.”

“Indeed, I tend to get that kind of reaction. I’m delighted to be the first to offer you my sincere congratulations, Dr Clarke.”

“Erm... is there someone else... a shared prize?”

“The Academy voted for you alone, Doctor. Now, the public announcement will be made at noon here in Stockholm, in about a half hour. Be prepared for the press to descend on you soon after. Staff from the Academy will be in touch with you within a week; the awards ceremony is here in Stockholm on the 10^th of December. Good bye, and fare well.”

I sat down in shock. How could it happen to me? Only older people get it. How could that happen so fast? I couldn’t recall any other case of a Nobel being awarded so quickly... well no, there was. I recall that in the late 1980s there was a physics Nobel, also for high-temperature superconductivity work, and I think that it was also given something like two years after the work was done. My work is fundamentally different to theirs, and we were able to make a working prototype circuit very quickly. Maybe that’s why this was decided so quickly as well. Still, this is lightning fast...

I realized that Stuart was squatting at my side, trying to get my attention.

“Emma? Emma... are you okay? What was that call? Is everything all right?”

I shook myself... then broke into tears. “I won... the bloody Nobel... am I dreaming? I can’t believe it...”

“What! Stockholm. Early morning call! Of course. They announced the Medicine Prize yesterday. Emma! My God! Hey, Gerry!” he shouted. “Brilliant news! Wake up!”

Gerry came running down and the kids came trundling after her, rubbing their eyes.

There was a cacophony of questions about what had happened. I was still too shocked to speak so I nodded to Stuart.

He put an arm around me, now stood next to my chair. “You heard the mobile ring?”

They nodded. Abi didn’t; she’d sleep through an earthquake.

“Emma just got a call that she’s won the Nobel Prize in Physics. That call came from Stockholm.”

Now I wasn’t the only one in shock. But soon everyone recovered and I was showered with praise and congratulations. Of course we had to ring up Uncle George... heh. Wake him up early too. He was overjoyed with the news. We turned on the TV and at 6 a.m., the news program had the announcement—so did the radio—and the commentators promised interviews when I could be contacted.

Blimey, interviews. Then I realized that the press really didn’t know where I was. They possibly could track me through the embassy or UAF, but not for many hours yet. They could try contacting my coauthors but finding their numbers would take time. I decided that if my mobile rang with an unknown number, I’d let it go to voice mail. Friggin’ interviews. Maybe I could get advice from my APL colleagues—even hide out there till I was ready to face the press. I was beginning to yearn for my prior anonymity.

We had a mini-celebration until everyone needed to leave. Stuart was gonna be late; he had gotten up early for a breakfast meeting but he rang up the others to explain. They were very understanding.

~~~~

My driver picked me up at the regular time and I spent time in thought on the way to the lab. And when I walked into the building, that’s when the real pandemonium broke out! It was such a whirlwind that I can’t recall very much detail. Everyone was so happy for me and so complimentary. I also learnt that three physics faculty members at JHU, who had stellar international reps, had been contacted by the Nobel Committee over the summer for their input on my work and they had been very supportive—they had attended my seminars. And JHU had four physics prize winners in the past and several of the uni’s current faculty members were Nobel laureates too. Who knew? That many in one uni? Glad I decided to sign up here, then.

Dr Wilson stopped by the lab and he put me in touch with two of the current laureates and they told me how they had handled the press when their prize had been publicly announced. That was good information to have.

Someone mentioned that the news reports were talking about how I couldn’t be located; no one knew where I lived and my old address in Alaska wasn’t valid. I had texted Mrs F about my getting the prize but I hadn’t thought to warn her about reporters so she was confused by all the media people coming to her door so early in the morning. Fortunately she put off requests for my contact info, claiming her ignorance. I had also texted my group at UAF and had begun getting congratulatory calls from them just before 1 p.m. They told me that the press was coming there too, trying to locate me, but they wanted my permission to release my contact info. So I told them to wait. I’d see how long I could stay hidden. My colleagues thought it was amusing.

I wasn’t about to get any work done today, though, and then got an idea, so I rang up Uncle George. He wasn’t available, but Anston was, and was agreeable to act as my press manager for now. He had heard about the Nobel and was, well, you know, very congratulatory—I’ll skip repeating this now for each person I met. So at about 1:30, I was back in my car service limo, headed for the embassy. About five minutes later, I got a ring from the APL director; some press people had stopped by there on the chance that someone there might know how to contact me. He was noncommittal about my whereabouts; he was also helping me play the “where’s Emma?” game. (Heh heh. There’s a Sesame Street book named “Where’s Elmo?” I had a copy when I was younger. I also had a copy of “Where's Wally?” It’s a Brit book and I loved it. I saw copies in a bookstore in the mall recently but you Yanks changed its title to “Where's Waldo?” Why do you blokes have to change everything? Come on, I mean, a book title? Need I mention for proof, a certain title change from “Philosopher’s Stone” to “Sorcerer’s Stone”? Go look it up. Q.E.D.)

At the embassy, I met with Anston and we worked up a press release and I made some notes for my opening statement (the other laureates’ advice: keep it really brief; let them ask the questions); then he rang up a few contacts and got a press conference arranged for 6 p.m. that evening. Uncle George dropped into Anston’s office and greeted me with, well, you know. And a big hug.

The beginning of the press conference was almost a repeat of the first one. Anston emceed and Uncle George gave a brief introduction. My comments were a bit more than brief. Once I start talking, I tend to keep going. After greeting the standing-room-only crowd, I noticed several writers who had been at my news conference back in June, so I welcomed them by name and that caused a minor sensation all on its own. Then I addressed two questions which certainly would come up, my age and the speed of receiving the award.

“You can tell I’m quite unlike the typical Nobel laureate,” I said, pausing for effect. “I’m shorter than any of them ... well, for the last hundred years...”

They had been expecting anything but that. After a second’s silence, the place erupted with laughter.

“...yes, Marie Curie was only five feet tall. She won her second prize in 1911; that’s over a hundred years ago. I’ve got her beat by a whole inch and a half.”

More laughter.

“Hey, don’t laugh! Those half inches count too.” I continued over the audience’s laughter. “A little more seriously, yes, I’m terribly young to have been recognized with this honor—for those who might not know, I’m fourteen now...” There were some gasps. “... so that’s an atypical Nobel statistic too. All I can say about how I made my discovery at my tender age is that I understood advanced maths innately when I was younger and found that I could easily apply my maths knowledge to learn about the physical systems I got interested in. And all physical systems follow the rules of mathematics.

“And if anyone asks how I got it so quickly, I guess the Academy likes superconductivity, ‘cause there were awards in 1972, 1987, 2003, and 2016 that were all related to this research area. And the 1987 award, to Bednorz and Müller, came about two years after their own discovery. Mine was about two years as well. Perhaps the Academy awarded it because I produced a working physical device immediately after I did the theoretical work. I got incredibly lucky with coming up with a working device and really owe all that success to my excellent research team at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Okay, Anston, questions?”

There was applause and then the questions came. The most interesting ones were these:

Question: “Every Nobel winner gets this question. What were you doing when you heard you had won it?”

Answer: “Easy. Sleeping. I’m too young to live alone so I live with a family—they’re close friends and I kinda adopted them as family ‘cause I’m an orphan—so the dad was up at that hour and my mobile was near him. I heard him saying ‘Stockholm? In Sweden?’ and nearly fainted.”

More laughter at that.

Question: “This is usually the second question asked. Can you describe your reaction when you realized that this was the Nobel Prize phone call?”

Answer: “Of course, total and absolute shock. The award always goes to scientists who have had years of research and have established international credentials and generally have tenured academic positions. I’m a kid who got really curious about what looked like an anomaly in electron flow in Josephson junctions and just had begun to explore that.”

Question: “The Nobel has come so very early in your life—you have your entire professional career ahead of you. This is trite, but what will you do for an encore?”

Laughter.

Answer: “I’m thinking I won’t be another Madam Curie—and erm... John Bardeen who had two physics awards... someone else won two science Nobels too—and win a second one myself, but I do have a whole slew of ideas related to this work to extend it—I’m working on one of those ideas at the APL right now, in fact. As well, there are a couple of problems I have working notes on. Physics has loads of interesting problems. For sure I won’t run out of things to do.”

More laughter.

Question: “When you first had your idea—about the Josephson junctions you mentioned—and you realized what you had discovered and its potential, did it occur to you that it might win a Nobel?”

Answer: I chuckled. “Actually it wasn’t me. One of my housemates, a grad student in physics, saw what I was working on and she made the prediction. I think I kinda blew her off. The calculations I had done just looked so obvious. And the path from theory to practice is loaded with pitfalls. I said I was lucky; I made a few educated guesses.”

Question: “What do you see are some potential applications of your work?”

Answer: “In the short term, it appears that we now can build chips which use so little power that they can run forever. So maybe watches that never need a new battery? If we can scale this up, then maybe smart phones you rarely have to charge. Longer term, there are pie-in-the-sky ideas like trains that run on magnetic levitation and supercomputers which don’t need refrigeration to work at full speed. There are possibilities in power transmission, motors that run cool... many things. I let the engineers think about those kinds of applications.”

More applause.

Question: “How would you explain what superconductivity is to a layperson?”

Answer: “Hmm. I think a good way to visualize it is by imagining a pipe with water flowing through it. Fill the pipe with a length of screen, like from a window screen, rolled into a loose cylinder and put it in the pipe. Run water through the pipe and the water runs just fine, but you need to up the pressure to overcome the resistance of the screen filling the pipe. The water pressure is the power needed to run the system, the water molecules represent the energy flow mediated by the electrons, and the screen is the atoms of the conductor itself, which resist the water flow. Superconductivity would be kind of like taking the screen out of the pipe, reducing the flow resistance way down, possibly to close to zero. Very, very roughly, that’s an analogous system. Would that help your readers?”

Applause again.

There were quite a few additional questions including several which were personal—like whether I had a boyfriend—come on, has any previous Nobel laureate gotten a question like that?—or how do your colleagues treat you; like a granddaughter? Bloomin’ idiot, asking that one. And I got some questions about my growing up years and the kind of education I had gotten in England. I tried to be kind to those questioners, but still. Then another one: What was it like to be in high school, in an undergrad program, and a doctoral candidate all at the same time? That answer was easy. “Busy.” And another: What will I talk about for my Nobel lecture? “I’m considering ideas.”

Soon the press conference ended and the media left. Uncle George and Anston told me that I had done well; this time no one had shown even a hint of hostility—it had looked to them like every person there was happy for me and impressed at my achievements. But I couldn’t concentrate on what they were telling me—all I could think of was “Oh no! The Nobel lecture!”

Damn; I’m glad that reporter reminded me.

~~~~

I shouldn’t have worried about any reminders. On the Friday I received an express post containing all kinds of information about what would happen right up to the awards ceremony day, including the details of the things I needed to do. One of those pages contained the instructions for the lecture and it quoted from the Foundation’s statutes, “It shall be incumbent on a prizewinner ... to give a lecture on a subject relevant to the work for which the prize has been awarded.”

Well, that rule took care of my using the lecture as a sounding board for my ideas about proper teaching in high schools, didn’t it. And why certain idiotic social “programs” being imposed on high school students are so bad for education in general.

So I decided to open the lecture by talking about ballroom dancing. That’s right, ballroom dancing at the quantum scale. You see, when kids are taught about atoms, they’re told that atoms are just like tiny solar systems, with the atom’s nucleus in the middle and the electrons orbiting around them like little planets. But that’s not at all a correct visualization of the atom—electrons don’t work that way, and how they perform their highly organized dance steps is essential to how superconductivity works.

You see, electrons aren’t really tiny balls flying around—they collectively exist as a probability field enveloping the atom’s nucleus, each electron occupying its own unique region and each doing its unique dance, kind of like a swarm of locusts—you can’t see the individuals but you can see—that is, detect—where the whole mass of them are located. None of the insects in a swarm moves in a predictable pattern but unlike locusts, electrons do; each discrete electron (or wave forming the electron) dances in its own, unique choreographical pattern, and the dance steps which each electron follows can be described by that mathematical equation I had used when I set off on my journey to the Nobel Prize, the Schrödinger equation.

That equation tells us where the electrons (probably) are and (probably) how they will interact with other nearby electrons in their own clouds. The idea in superconductivity is to find the right molecular components which will allow the free electrons in your material to “flow”—sort of—with minimal interaction with other nearby electrons (which would interfere with that “flow”). And even though water flow is frequently used as an analogue to visualize electrical flow, they really aren’t the same. Each individual water molecule travels in the pipe, starting at the source, and eventually exits at the end, whilst each single electron doesn’t really “flow” along its conductor, it transmits the electric force in the direction of the decreasing potential—thus the electricity “comes out” where the force is to be applied but the electron which was at the “beginning” is still roughly where it “started” from. Electrons do drift in the current’s direction—but quite slowly, actually—whilst the force they transmit moves close to light-speed.

It works sort of like this: Imagine a pipe filled with marbles. Push one in at one end; one pops out at the other. If the pipe is a mile long, the effect seems virtually instantaneous at that remote distance. But each individual marble only moves a bit. Finally, remember that electrons can behave like either particles or waves—how it does depends on how you observe its interactions with its surroundings.

Another analogy: Think of a using a poker to push a log in a fireplace. You push—apply force—on the molecules of the poker’s handle. Those poker molecules don’t travel down the shaft of the poker to the log and push on the log—they transmit the force you applied on the handle to each successive molecule of the shaft until the molecules touching the log apply your push to the log. This is a highly efficient system—all your force goes into pushing the poker and virtually none is lost in trying to also move the surrounding air to push on the log too. If we could collapse that kind of efficiency to the quantum scale and apply it to transmitting electric forces, this would be very roughly analogous to achieving superconductivity.

Good, I think I have the basis for the intro to my Nobel Lecture. This is sooo inaccurate; trying to describe quantum events in everyday language is way more difficult than simply showing the maths. For the main part of the lecture, I’ll adapt the seminar I gave at the University of Maryland on Cooper pair propagation; after all, that describes my work very concisely.

~~~~

Sigh. Home at last. Stockholm—the whole event—was exhausting. There were some highlights, like meeting the king; the banquet was ace and so was meeting the other winners. The best part was their reaction to seeing me, assuming I was a laureate’s daughter, and then learning the truth. Even funnier was when I found out that some media blokes had assumed that my age was 41 because, naturally, the age in my bio could not possibly be 14; someone had made a transpositional typo. As a result, some of the articles mentioning me came out with my age wrong. I got copies.

I also learnt a bit about how my Nobel came so quickly. At the banquet, I was introduced to a Swedish bloke who’s on the board of directors of my grandpa’s company; he’s a big-shot financier and is also on my trust committee. It was he who brought me to the Academy’s attention. When I had sent my original request for funding for my project to my trustee, he consulted with the trust committee members. That bloke contacted some scientists he knew in Stockholm for their advice, and that’s how some members of the Nobel Academy got a copy of my proposal and they followed me closely as I developed the discovery.

Oh, by the way, I’m $1.2 million richer, too. I have some really good ideas about how to use that money since it looks like it will be pocket change compared to the money which should be coming in from patent licensing arrangements and royalties. I’ll be able to fund not only my own research, but also an engineering applications lab too.

Oh yes... who was my “designated adult” for my Stockholm trip? I suppose I could have gone alone, but I never even considered doing that. Isabella’s daughter had given birth so she and Uncle George were in London and Stuart was very occupied at the embassy. So I organized Gerry to be my “adult” of choice and I twisted her arm to allow her to take her kids too. They were ecstatic when she agreed and they had a fabulous time, even getting to meet the other winners and speaking informally with them. As a maturing experience for the girls, I couldn’t have scripted anything better, ‘cause after that trip, their whole attitude toward schoolwork went from a tolerable chore to an “isn’t there anything else to work on?” work ethic. Andrew didn’t need the push; he was already motivated.

Now that the excitement is over; I can settle into a regular life. Some interesting things happened over the next several years, though.

Epilogue

Several years have passed. Soon after winning the Nobel, I had used some of my trust income to buy two houses right next to each other in the same vicinity to where the Marshalls lived—both houses had pools and were larger than the Marshalls’ old house. I convinced them to sell their old one as payment for the one next to mine so now I had my own home; the Marshalls theirs, and the kids had their bedrooms in both houses. The yards were adjacent so it was almost like living in one huge house. Our dual-home living arrangement was brilliant and so much fun too. The Marshall kids stayed in my house on weekends. I even put a dome over one of the pools so we could swim in the winter. No cozzies allowed, of course, and the privacy fence around our yards allows us to make the area into our own little nudist park.

The rest of my personal life? Andrew was the one, of course. We married after he was graduated from high school; I was 16 years old. He went to JHU and majored in economics; he loved the idea of going into econometrics and how he could use his maths to work with probabilities and trends in dealing with the political effects of wholesale price fluctuations... or the other way around and... ghaaa... give me nice hard numbers to work with. Not messy ones which fluctuate when a political leader makes a flub in his speech.

Oh, and I grew another few inches, making me, at 18 years old, all of five foot four inches tall ... and that’s the average height for adult females too. Yay. And I don’t need to measure those half-inches anymore, either—but they’re still important!

I got the courses I wanted to teach—I get to teach a basic physics class each year. With my appointment to the regular uni faculty, I got a normal teaching load. Within a year, though, my introductory physics course was one of the most popular classes in the uni; even non-science majors try to get into that class. I love teaching and the students love me, I guess. And as a result, the physics and maths programs at the uni have increased their enrollment of declared majors by almost 10 percent.

With some of the Nobel money and some royalty money, I created four endowed scholarships, one each for a boy and girl to attend JHU and one each to go to Maryland. I have a joint appointment on their faculty as well. I’m not being conceited about the scholarship name, however. True, the scholarships’ recipients are called Clarke Scholars (like Rhodes Scholars), but the trustees I appointed to administer the scholarship awards insisted on that name or they wouldn’t serve on the scholarship board.

Applying for the scholarships is tough; I wanted students who excelled in maths but who were also well-rounded, so the exam has fairly difficult physics and maths sections plus the requirement to write two essays, one on a social problem in the world and a second one on a question drawn from one of twenty-five influential works of English literature (the list was on our website). Applicants sit for the four-hour exam at designated sites each year and the essay topics are revealed at that time.

One kind-of memorable incident occurred at the press conference where my scholarship program was announced. Sigh. In the future I might take written questions only.

At one point, a questioner began with, “Dr Clarke, I understand that you’re a frequent visitor at a nudist resort near Annapolis...” and waited expectantly.

The whole room hushed. I stared at the questioner.

“And your question is...?” I asked mildly.

“Er, well... Um. I...” he stuttered. “That’s all.”

I looked out at the group. “Next question?”

There was an audible sigh as everyone let go the breath that they were holding. Bloody git, trying to bait me, I guess. Wonder why? Couldn’t be those Program berks; they quit bothering me years ago. My non-answer stopped him cold. Okay, it’s a bad pun. So what?

Oh, almost forgot. I was awarded the Fields Medal two years after the Nobel Prize. That’s the top prize in mathematics and it’s awarded every four years. It was for my developing new mathematical techniques for solving problems like Fourier transforms.

My extended family is doing very well; Uncle George and Isabella retired back to the U.K. and Stuart is now a top diplomat at the embassy. Gerry is teaching and the girls are both in college—yep, JHU. Looks like Sam is destined for law school and Abi wants medicine. Scott and Mary are doing very well except that Scott is chafing that he can’t get his pilot’s license restored.

My professional life is wonderful. My old research group at UAF has pretty much scattered; a few joined my research team here but others got top jobs elsewhere based on their work with my project up there. And I have a twelve-person experimental research and engineering team which I keep quite busy, thank you.

~~~~

Since I started my story by talking about what happened when they tried to start the Naked in School Program in my Fairbanks, Alaska high school and we got it frozen out, I suppose I should end it by saying something about what eventually happened to it here in the D.C. area—right in the heart of where the stupid thing began.

The bureaucrats at the Office of Social Awareness were like bulldogs; it seems that they were able to get some political traction and they somehow coerced a few state legislatures to pass laws to allow forcible stripping of reluctant kids without incurring assault or battery charges. So some schools were able to go ahead and force kids; other schools, it seemed, didn’t. The key appeared to be in the wording of those statutes: that although coercion and forced stripping would not be considered to be a felonious assault, the “use of ‘excessive’ force” was not permitted, so some schools were reluctant to legally test how much force would be considered “excessive.” The Supreme Court wound up upholding the Program as not being a violation of the right of privacy afforded by the Fifth Amendment; they held that minors didn’t have that right; it was limited to adults.

Thus the Program continued to run in the Maryland schools; for Andrew’s last two years in high school, he had told me, few juniors and seniors were cooperating by participating and the issue of “not graduating” was being dealt with by most schools by not allowing the nonparticipating students to attend the graduation ceremony and withholding a diploma certificate. This of course had no effect on their admission to a university. It had also become doctrine that all diplomats’ children—all foreign children, in fact—were exempt.

But by the time Sam had reached her senior year, she told me that she had noticed that more kids were agreeing to participate. It seems that the middle schools had added “Program orientation” modules to their health ed classes and these were taught in an upbeat, non-threatening way, whilst the Program rules in the high schools were changed; they were “softened” to try to minimize any participant humiliation and limited a lot of objectionable sexual contact, so many more kids were willing to participate.

By the time that Abi had reached her high-school junior year, a significant number of kids were participating. Those who had been through the Program were asked to encourage their classmates and help those in the Program to be able to tolerate, if not enjoy, their experience. It also helped that public nudity had become more commonplace in society, especially in films and other media, but also in parks and beaches like in Europe. Seeing groups of people riding bikes whilst naked was common too. I had assumed that the kids’ acceptance of the Program was partly because of how common public nudity had become, but even more likely, it was because they had gotten more used to the nudity and sex that they constantly saw in the schools. There continued to be kids who resisted but they were now a minority of the students; they were quiet about their objections and were left alone.

However, at the end of her junior year, Abi learnt that major changes would be coming to the Program in her senior school year. A revised Program brochure had come out and there were some changes in it which had gotten her classmates very nervous, she told me. Apparently there had been some major leadership changes in the Office of Social Awareness and they had revamped their policies. Some had to do with changing the Program rules, others had to do with new confidentiality requirements. Suddenly, news about Program happenings in high schools began disappearing from newspapers and other news media.

The media was now reporting that the Office of Social Awareness had begun to effectively and totally block all press coverage and social media mention of school Program affairs, citing student privacy rules, and as a result, public knowledge of all high school Program activities quickly ceased. Abi told me that she couldn’t believe how everything had changed in how the Program was run. The Program manager at her school was rigid and militant, so Gerry warned Abi to keep quiet and enjoy her exemption.

Because until now, so few high school kids had been quietly refusing to participate, when the Program rules changed to make it far more onerous than it had been for the past several years, most high school students now didn’t realize that in their school district, they could simply choose not to participate. And because information about what happened in other schools was no longer readily available except through personal contacts between individual students, no widespread resistance information was available because of the Program news blackout.

The Naked in School Program once again had become a dreaded part of high school life.

I only learnt about the country’s changing high school Program situation from my incoming physics students. These kids represented a good cross-section of the country since they came to the uni from high schools from all over the U.S. From my incoming students, I got a pretty good description of how things were going in their individual schools, and from the national overview that I could visualize, it was not looking good at all.

As the Program continued to become adopted in more and more schools, my colleagues and I had begun to notice a marked degradation in how well our entering students were prepared for college—it was as if they had begun taking stupid pills, actually. We did notice that the students who attended private schools (and charter schools in some states) were significantly better prepared for uni and then I learnt that those schools were not required to have the Program. Was this lack of student preparation a cause-effect relationship? There were far too little data to decide. But suddenly, on one autumn day two years later, everything changed again. On that day all hell broke loose involving the leadership and management personnel of the Office of Social Awareness—the incredible news was that a major scandal had been detected in that agency and the situation had been discovered and exposed by—this was unreal—a high school student. [Details? see NiS: Kevin and Denise.]

Following this revelation, everything Program-related was affected. The Office of Social Awareness was abolished and its functions absorbed by a different federal department which then basically defunded it. Whether or not to run the Program in the schools had now became a decision of the states. (Also during this period, several journal papers were published which detailed the negative academic effects of the Program on student grades. Well, that explained things. I had seen the result of the Program on student preparation first-hand.) And within a year of the news of that scandal breaking, all kinds of additional anti-Program publicity had brought the Program to a crashing halt everywhere.

The Naked in School Program was now history.

That was very satisfying to see. But I still preferred the way we froze it out; that was cool. Okay, ignore the dumb pun. Of course, freezing it out wouldn’t have worked in Florida. Or Arizona. Or even Maryland. Oh well.

I like it far better here, where I’m not frozen all the time; Emma’s definitely come in from the cold. And now, when I want, I can be... textile-free!

The End

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