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Chapter 24 - College Interview

Two surprises awaited Tamara on the Friday of her interview; the first surprise occurred in the morning just after she entered the hotel conference room suite after having breakfast with the two other Clarke finalists who were there this weekend. The other surprise would come later in the day.

Tamara looked around the conference room foyer and saw that there were light refreshments set out on a buffet table and about a dozen people were standing in groups and chatting. As she walked through the entrance, she noticed someone familiar and stopped suddenly, and the two kids, who were following closely behind her, almost bumped into her.

“Jeez, Tamara, why’d y’all stop?” Terence hissed at her.

“Ohmygod,” Tamara exclaimed, “It’s Dr Tarmson—I didn’t even think about who’d be on the committee...”

“Y’all know her?” Terence asked.

“Met her once and worked with her for a few days. She’s a scientist with DARPA.” She explained what the agency was. “They’re licensing one or two of my patents.”

“Patents? Shit, you must be hot stuff, then,” Charlene muttered. “At dinner, you mentioned that you wanted Hopkins and I’ll bet you get the full ride too.”

“I hope I do,” Tamara told her. “At least, to be admitted. I want to work at their APL, actually.”

Then Tarmson noticed Tamara, and with a big smile, walked over to greet her.

“Hello, Tamara. Did you decide about taking the job I offered you yet?” she asked and laughed.

“Hi, Dr Tarmson. I was really surprised to see you here—and I told you last year that I wanted to get some real school in before starting a real job.” They both chuckled. “Let me introduce you to these other finalists here. We’ve been getting acquainted with each other. Dr Helene Tarmson, this is Terence Dryer from Texas and Charlene Russo from Ohio. My fellow finalists,” she finished introducing them.

They began to talk when a man announced, “We need to start now, so everyone, please go into the conference room. Bring your coffee if you want.”

Tamara whispered to Tarmson as they walked into the room, “I made some improvements on the design of my... project. I was planning to send you the writeup soon, but since you’re here, can we meet?”

Tarmson looked at her. “I’d love to see what you’ve done, my dear. We might get a few minutes after this meeting.”

The meeting turned out to be primarily a meet-and-greet. The chairman of the Clarke Scholars Foundation ran the meeting and had the committee members introduce themselves and then asked the three finalists to introduce themselves, talk about their backgrounds, and tell the group about their education expectations and anticipated career plans. A few minutes later, three college-aged kids were shown into the room.

“Let me introduce you finalists to your student guides for the weekend,” the chairman told them. “We’ve paired each of you with one of our current Clarke Scholars based on your backgrounds. They will take you to your interviews, to a special lunch, and give you a tour of the campus. This evening we’ll have dinner with some potential faculty mentors and after dinner, you’ll have a chance to informally chat with them. Now, I’ll let our current Clarke Scholars introduce themselves...”

Each gave a quick summary of their studies and projects and then Jill Benavides, a junior majoring in math, introduced herself to Tamara. Jill would be her guide.

The meeting ended and Jill asked Tamara, “Would you like to see part of the campus now? I’m supposed to tell you a little about campus life, but we’ll be having an informal gathering later and we can talk then with the others. The regular tour will be a formal one. We have about an hour or so now before lunch and then you go to your interview.”

“Give me a few minutes first, Jill, okay? I need to talk to Dr Tarmson, okay? It’s kinda confidential.”

“Sure. I’ll wait out there,” she pointed at a sitting area outside the conference suite.

Tarmson was talking to one of the committee members and noticed Tamara waiting. She excused herself and came over to her, looking around.

“Okay, Tamara. We can sit right here; everyone’s leaving. What’s up?”

“So I had an idea to miniaturize the RF generator and came up with something unexpected,” Tamara began, and went on to explain how she had built a smaller, yet more powerful maser.

She went on, “But it’s still limited by the power supply. I still need to use a 24-volt lithium battery, minimum, and the one I use weighs over a pound.”

“Tamara, what you’ve done is just amazing. We haven’t even begun to look at the problem of focusing an RF beam yet but you approached the problem in a totally unexpected way. Yes, please send me your writeup. And consult with your patent guy too. This is definitely a new idea. Thanks for telling me about this, dear. Okay, gotta go; I need to get back to Arlington.”

Tamara rejoined Jill and Jill asked, “How do you know Dr Tarmson? She’s a manager or something at DARPA, right? And Hopkins has all kinds of DARPA projects.”

“Yeah, she’s the program manager of their Defense Sciences Office. I have some patents that they license from me.”

“Ooo, cool! You’re what? Eighteen and you have patents? I think only one of us current Clarke students has a patent.”

Tamara grinned. “Not eighteen, I’m fifteen.”

“Wow, fifteen. You must have jumped a lot of grades then.”

Tamara nodded, “Yep. I was home-schooled and went at my own pace. That was way too fast in math and science and too slow in humanities,” she giggled. “So when I began public high school, I concentrated on humanities and continued the science stuff in a college near me. According to the admissions office here, I have more than twelve college credits that can be transferred and another twelve that can be waived, so effectively I’ll have sophomore class status. If the Physics department approves, that is.”

“Skipping grades. No wonder you’re so young. So you’re from Florida,” Jill said as they were walking out of the hotel, “I’m from Atlanta and I remember all the stories about the stripped kids in Florida.”

“Stupid, isn’t that program? But you must have had the Naked in School Program in Atlanta, when you were there, right? That NiS law was passed maybe eight years ago. They just started it in Florida last year.”

“But it won’t last long there, right?” Jill said, grinning. “You must have heard about what that one school in Atlanta did—that school newspaper article that went viral?”

Tamara chuckled. “I sure did hear about it. Was that school where you went?”

“No, not even close. I live in Forest Park, in the south Atlanta area. That school where they had that article was in the northeast Atlanta area. But my folks told me that the school still kept up doing the Program even after other area schools had been dropping it. Kids at that school just started to rebel.”

They were walking onto the campus as they were speaking, and Jill pointed out some of the features.

“This is the athletics area,” she said. “We’re passing the football stadium and baseball field, obviously.”

“Did you ever have to be in the Program?” Tamara asked.

“Fortunately, no. Actually, the Program was running when I was in high school and I hated it; so did lots of kids, but sometimes a kid couldn’t avoid it, like if a parent made him. Some of the things I saw in it were gross. It was an open secret that kids could get out of it if they strongly refused to participate. Everyone knew that they couldn’t be forced to strip; there was something in the assault laws about that. So a lot of kids did refuse to do it. I refused too—but all that all happened before those child-sex-slavers took it over and made the Program almost impossible to get out of. I graduated right around then, so I escaped. What about you?”

“They tried to start it, but ran into some problems,” Tamara said, trying to hide a smirk.

“Uh, okay... oh, so this is the Freshman Quad. All of the dorms here are where most of the freshmen live. This is probably where you’ll live, too. Um, tomorrow will be the campus life tour and you’ll see the insides of some dorms then. So what kind of problems would stop the Program?” Jill asked.

“Weird stuff, like everyone getting locked out of the auditorium for most of the day when the very first stripping assembly was supposed to happen. Also the school P.A. system stopped working when they tried to call the selected students. They also had problems getting random lists of kids printed—one list even had teachers’ names instead of students...”

Jill laughed, “Sweet! Were they made to strip too?” she giggled.

“As if,” Tamara giggled back. “No, somehow they figured out that list was wrong.”

They both laughed again and Tamara continued, “Oh, and the fed’s Program guy had a heart attack. Then, when they finally tried to start it, after they got all the problems fixed, the replacement Program person and some teachers went all mental or something and stripped themselves on the school stage before they could call up any kids and that got it stopped again. That happened again to a school district guy when he tried starting it all on his own. Weird stuff like that.”

Jill looked at her wide-eyed. “No shit. Stripped teachers too. All that stuff is totally weird. Okay, we’ll walk down here; this building we’re passing is the main building for the Arts and Sciences school. The library is ahead on the left but we’ll go to the right, to Kayser Quad, and straight ahead, those stairs, that’s the Breezeway. It’s considered to be the center of the campus.”

While they were walking through Kayser Quad, Jill stopped to speak with a few students she knew and introduced Tamara to them. They chatted for a bit but then they had to get to class.

“I’ll bet with Florida’s stripped-kids program, the Naked in School Program wasn’t such a big deal for kids to be naked, right?” Jill asked as they walked from the Breezeway onto Wyman Quad. “Oh, there’s the Shriver Concert Hall, straight ahead.”

“No, not hardly. The only thing similar was the nudity,” Tamara explained. “In the Stripped in Florida program, the parents made the kids get naked but if anyone tried to molest the kid, they’d get the book thrown at them. In the NiS Program, molestation was a Program requirement.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely true. I did see some nasty stuff happen bunches of times. Okay, now we’ll circle around to Decker Quad; that’s the Biomedical Engineering department on the left.” Jill looked at her watch. “Hey, we need to get to the Johns Hopkins Club—that’s where the Clarke Scholars Board is treating us to lunch. The club just reopened after a major renovation. You’ll meet your interviewer there and also the rest of the other Hopkins and Maryland scholars. Damn! I was supposed to tell you all about student life here and we wind up talking about stupid nudity programs.”

Tamara laughed. “Well, those things are in the news, so you could say we were discussing current events.”

“Good idea. Don’t say what we really discussed or else they’ll dock my pay,” Jill giggled.

“Which is...?”

“Zero. We volunteer for this,” Jill smiled. “I like meeting the new scholars.”

They entered the JH Club and were shown to a private dining room. Tamara recognized several of the committee members from the morning’s meeting, but there were a number of new people there too, and several more students were coming in. While she was looking around, she noticed that one person in the room stood out in particular. She appeared to be an older student, perhaps a grad student, and had a radiant smile as she spoke to several older people who clearly had that “college professor” look. But this woman had a “glow,” a magnetic personality, and to Tamara, she could sense a taste that somehow reminded her of her mother. A pure, good, trustworthy taste.

And something else, Tamara realized. The woman is a charisma powerhouse! The attraction is just flowing from her. I wonder who that angel could be.

She would find out very soon as she was roused from her thoughts by Jill, who was tugging on her arm.

“Tamara, you in there? I want you to meet your interviewer. Come with me.”

Jill led her over to the angel who, sensing the approaching two students, turned with an even brighter smile.

Tamara’s second major surprise of the day came as Jill introduced her. “Dr Emma Clarke, let me introduce you to Tamara Alexandre. Tamara, this is Dr Clarke, who specifically asked that she do your interview.”

Tamara was speechless. In all of her preparations, she never connected the idea that there was a real Clarke person behind the Clarke Scholars—she had lumped the scholarship program into the same category as the Fulbright or Rhodes scholarships. The guy behind the Fulbright, she recalled, was a Senator Fulbright, who had sponsored a law that created those awards just after World War Two. And the Rhodes program was fifty years older than that. Cecil Rhodes was a Brit who had set up the program for graduate study at Oxford.

But here’s a Dr Clarke and she looks like a college senior! Tamara thought. How can that be?

Clarke chuckled as she reached for Tamara’s hand. “Your expression says everything, doesn’t it, Tamara,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed; most people who meet me have a similar reaction.”

Clarke’s marked British accent was the final blow to Tamara, who began giggling. “I’m sorry, Dr Clarke, everything today has been quite overwhelming. And then meeting you and...”

“...and finding out that I’m not only a real person, I’m almost a kid too, innit?” Clarke grinned broadly.

Tamara could only nod her agreement.

“So, Tamara, as Jill said, I’m to be your interviewer, but to put you at ease, let me say that you have an impressive school and professional record and, as well, an equally impressive Clarke exam score, don’t you. Our ‘interview’ is just a formality.” She made finger-quotes. “I was keen to meet with you and get to know you as a person. Now let’s circulate; Jill, you come along too, and we’ll greet some people.”

Clarke led Tamara around the room, introducing her to so many new faces that soon her mind was numb. She also met the rest of the current Clarke Scholars and after about ten minutes, a bell chimed.

Jill excused herself to join the other scholars. “I’ll see you later, Tamara,” she said. “Dr Clarke wants some time with you now. They’ll call me to come get you later.”

A voice called out, “Please take your seats, ladies and gentlemen.”

Clarke led Tamara to a table with six seats and four were already occupied.

Clarke again smiled that amazing smile. “Tamara, you met them before but probably won’t recall their names, so again, to your right is Dr Chester Montern. He’s the chair of Physics and Astronomy here at Hopkins. On his right is Dr Nora Silverberg, chair of Physics at Maryland. And on my right, it’s Dr Wilfred Zucker, the director of the APL, and next to him is Dr Stephanie Burger, the Hopkins Physics/Astronomy undergraduate advisor. As you know, my friends, this is Tamara Alexandre, our new Clarke Scholar.”

Tamara didn’t know. She sat down with a thud.

Clarke smiled at her. “No one told you? Bloody arses. They want to keep the charade going as long as possible. Yes, my dear, you did take the prize. Your math and physics tests got top marks, but your essays? Gobsmacked the readers, they did. Heh, one reader was ready to take your literature one and call it a master’s thesis, wasn’t she. Not quite, but you certainly impressed us. Now let’s talk about what you see us doing for you here at Hopkins. After lunch, we’ll have our private chat.”

When lunch was over, Tamara had already gotten a number of her questions settled. She would have all of her UMiami courses approved for JHU, including the special research courses from the medical school. Those, together with her high school AP classes, would give her a second-year standing and allow her to fill the resulting open time with research. There were research opportunities at the APL and others here at the Homewood campus. And if her faculty mentor, still to be decided, approved, she might be able to arrange to do her own independent research.

After lunch, Clarke brought Tamara to her office in the Physics/Astronomy Building.

“Tamara, I was keen to talk to you about a few things alone, things which struck me personally about how your background is like mine in so many ways. Please don’t think I’m being forward here, but when your application came in showing that you have patented inventions, I was alerted. That’s one of my rules; I want to know when a high-school student with patents becomes a candidate.

“Then I read your essays. Your current-events essay was presented almost like both sides of a Lincoln-Douglas debate, where you argued the practical, moral, and ethical components of both leading sides of the issue and showed, through a very well-reasoned approach, why the side you took was preferable. We’ve never had anyone take that approach before and you showed an amazing depth of knowledge in the topic. Tell me, do you have debating experience that you didn’t mention in your application?”

Tamara laughed. “I lucked out there. Yes, I had a debate with my parents about that very issue maybe a month before the exam and had looked up everything I could find to bolster my arguments. I decided to write the essay as if a debate was going on—it made it more compelling, Not like a dry recitation of facts.”

“It was brilliant. Now, much closer to my heart was your lit essay. However did you think of broadening the scope of your response to cover a number of books on our list?”

Tamara nodded. “I took some writing courses to prepare...”

Clarke looked amazed.

“...yes, I wanted to do well, so I signed up for two college courses over the summer. I got friendly with my recitation instructor, a grad student, and I asked her, if she wouldn’t mind to help me, to critique some essay samples. She said what I wrote was good, but I wanted ‘great.’ I asked her if possibly including other works to support my argument would improve the essay. She liked the idea and said it would be a good improvement; she told me that she would make that a suggestion to students in her own classes.”

“You are so very much like me...” Clarke mused. “As well, what caught my eye was your use of Austen’s Emma.” She chuckled. “In high school, I too used Emma Woodhouse as an example, not of Austen’s superimposing her own personality on her character, but on my own identification with Emma because of the way I tried to organize everyone’s lives around me. After all, she was my namesake. And my grandpa came from the Chawton area, near London—that’s where Austen lived her last years. So I wrote an essay where I became Emma Woodhouse.”

“That’s so cool,” Tamara said.

“So let’s talk a bit about you now,” Clarke said. “We haven’t had many Florida applicants and I’m guessing that’s because of the unusual social upheavals from the nudity laws there. Your dumb state got a double dose of dumb, one self-imposed and the other from the feds. The Clarke Scholar staff checked your high school and found that Edison is the only one in the state not running the Naked in School Program.”

“Right, we didn’t have it. I don’t know about the rest of the state.”

“We have a very thorough staff, don’t we. They do full checks on all candidates’ backgrounds, looking for anything that could affect the reputation of the Clarke program. This is something I learned to do early on in my career. So tell me, why is Miami Edison High School said to be haunted? Besides the disembodied voices, there were other strange things reported in the press and in social media. Inexplicable heat. Fiery floors. Destruction of RFID chips. And a girl genius who invents a new kind of maser—yes, Helene Tarmson is on the Clarke Scholars Board and told me what you’ve done. I can add numbers higher than two plus two and I have a good idea what I think you’ve done. When the Program came to my high school in Fairbanks Alaska—yes, don’t laugh; they actually tried the nudity Program up there—I stopped it. I had help from others, but we stopped it cold. And that pun is intended. So, Tamara, did you ‘help’ to stop it at Edison?”

Tamara could taste the “trust me” emotions flowing from Clarke. Only two others inspired a closely similar feeling in her. One was her mom and the other, surprisingly, wasn’t her father; it was Erzulie Mansur. What she felt from her father was like a protective blanket—just as Ogorin felt when he was “near.”

“I guess I need to tell you this, Dr Clarke...”

“Please call me ‘Emma,’ Tamara.”

“I sense emotions, Emma. I was born with this ability. My family—my ancestors—they all were followers of Vodou, the ancient African folk religion which became overlaid with Catholicism in Haiti back in the 1700s to 1800s. So I know with certainty that I can trust you, and to prove that I can sense people’s emotions strongly enough to know who I can trust, let me tell you about some of the people I met today.”

She gave Clarke a description of four of the faculty members to whom she had been introduced, and then described how she thought their surface emotions shaped their personalities.

When Tamara finished, Clarke stared at her. “Tamara, I’m astonished. You described them perfectly, didn’t you. Okay, you convinced me; that’s a handy ability. No one could possibly cheat you,” she chuckled. “Do you know how you do that? Can you see their ‘auras’?” She made finger quotes.

“Not in any way I can describe. To my senses, it feels like a ‘taste.’”

Clarke nodded. “So how’d you stop the Program?”

“This is all secret, right? Only my parents know.”

Clarke smiled, “A secret, certainly.”

“Good. Ever since I was little, I always wanted to help others, especially kids, but other people too. When I was in the temple with my mom when she was doing her priestess rites, I found that I could help her by ‘pushing’ the right mood to the serviteurs, the worshipers. I call my ability to send an emotion to someone ‘pushing.’ Can I show you what I can do?”

Clarke nodded, “Okay, but this won’t do any damage, right?”

“Absolutely not,” Tamara reassured her, and a few seconds later, “How do you feel?”

Clarke exclaimed, “Oh! So thirsty! Did you do that?” she asked as she took a drink from the water bottle next to her.

“Yeah. I have to be careful ‘cause the spirits who allow me to do things like that are very judgmental and won’t abide having that ability used for evil. Don’t ask me to justify my belief in spirits—vodouisants believe that there’s a spirit world and, even though science refuses to acknowledge the possibility, it is a reality. I used that reality to help me stop the Program—and the Florida stripping kids program too, in my community at least.”

“This is incredible, what you’re telling me.”

“Here’s what I did, the executive summary anyway. I can ‘suggest’ people to do things. My biggest fear is that people will learn that I have that ability and I know I can trust you not to tell it to anyone. I will never use it for personal gain—I can’t—I think it won’t work if I try and I have the deep feeling that if I try to use it for evil, I will lose the ability. When I use it, I feel the spirits’ power come to me and I just channel it. When I ‘suggest’ something, it has to be something the person usually does, or close to it. That’s because if the person thinks it’s wrong, he can’t be ‘suggested.’

“You know about the maser I invented—I’ll tell you about that in a few minutes. It was based on an EMF pulse generator I built to destroy the RFID chips and scanners used in Florida’s stripping kids program. When I saw those poor stripped kids in school—they really didn’t want to be naked—I had to help them, so I figured out a way to overload the chips’ circuits to fry them. I have an innate grasp of electronics, it seems.”

“That’s what Helene said of you, too. Go on.”

“The things I did to stop the Program were a combination of suggestions to the right people and technology. Everything I ‘suggested’ that people were to do was well within their normal activities or else nothing would have worked. That set the scene for some stagecraft to make it seem like the events were supernaturally caused. People called what happened ‘locked-room mysteries.’ And I was happy to encourage those ideas. So I played on people’s doubts and superstitions and managed to keep a step ahead of my school’s plans. I have a spirit mentor who guides me. That’s Ayizan Velekete. We believe her to be the protector of the young, the disadvantaged, the weak and the downtrodden, and she’s selected me as her human agent. And my very distant ancestor, maybe going back six thousand years or more, is Granne Erzulie. She now resides in the spirit world and has become the spirit of grandmotherly kindness and love. My people have very long memories.

“But a lot of my success came from the electronics I used. And that brings up my research interests—they are twofold: to use the technology I can invent to learn more about my abilities—which all seem to be mentally powered—and to use my inventions to help people, especially those who are disadvantaged in some way.”

“Tamara, I am well and truly gobsmacked by what you told me. In your application, you spoke about your MRI work and how you were attempting to achieve a better resolution in the fMRI studies you were enrolled in. Is that part of your goals?”

“Absolutely. You do know that the MRI unit we’re using was developed at the APL?”

“Yes. I worked with them over getting the superconducting magnet windings designed.”

“So its upright subject position and electrical and magnetic characteristics make it ideal for fMRI studies. The fMRI scanner is able to detect the differences between oxygenated and unoxygenated blood from iron’s magnetic properties—the iron in the hemoglobin in the blood cells. We can visualize areas of the brain that are using large amounts of oxygen; we believe that increased levels of oxygenated blood in a brain region correspond to increased neural activity in that region. We can link that increased activity with whatever task the subject performs when the image was taken.

“In my case, my own scans show an increase in blood flow to an unexpected area of my brain when I’m using my abilities. But the resolution isn’t high enough to visualize exactly what’s happening, and my need for secrecy about my ability is limiting my work. I’ve been looking for better ways to generate a more focused RF signal to use in the patient coil—by trying to develop a generator with many tiny signal sources. That’s why I was working on the device that resulted in the maser.”

“What have you learned so far?” Clarke asked.

“Sorry for this, but for me to tell you, you need to sign an NDA, my lawyer told me.”

Clarke laughed. “Usually I’m the person asking for a non-disclosure agreement. Do you have one?”

“Sure.”

She pulled a folder out of her backpack and took two forms out, handing them to Clarke. She read it.

“Standard boilerplate. Looks good. I keep one, right?”

Tamara nodded. Clarke passed the signed form back and Tamara put it away.

Tamara went on. “So when I tried to develop a generator, it was based on my RFID zapper. I had found that the windings I used to generate the pulse behaved differently if I kept power going to them after the capacitor discharged. That initial discharge both started the ionization of the air molecules and produced an RF pulse. But the fly-back transformer—whose purpose in the electronic flash is to ionize the xenon gas in the flash tube so that the main charge will fire it—letting that transformer continue to run in my circuit pumps the air ions to the critical energy state after which they discharge, producing the microwaves. And as long as I kept the circuit energized, it maintained the gas ionization, since there was virtually no resistance in the superconducting coil. There was no ‘beam,’ just a microwave signal projecting out of the source. The frequency was close to an ammonia maser. I think that was because air is mostly nitrogen and the water vapor in the air provided the hydrogen ions. That microwave beam overloaded close-by electronics.

“Then I got the idea to use windings similar to what MRI magnets use: discontinuous windings to even out and linearize the static magnetic field. I made some toroidal superconducting windings with spacings between them and it appears that by doing that, the coil array constrains the air molecules very efficiently when their ions are being energized. I found also that the geometry of the toroidal coils allows the beam to be more or less directed; at zero degrees and 180—the opposite direction—without a lot of spread. At thirty feet, the cone has about a ten-foot diameter. I use a microwave-impenetrable material to block the 180 degree beam but some of the beam is reflected back forward. I’m sending a copy of that work to Dr Tarmson; she says it’s a breakthrough.”

“Tamara, words fail. I’m a theoretical physicist—a solid state specialist, and I’ve met plenty of other specialists. Theoretical physicists, experimental physicists, even electrical engineers. But you’ve combined the fields in a different way. It’s called engineering physics. You thought of doing those things just as a gut feeling, right?”

Tamara nodded.

“Well, I like to quote Einstein about insights like that, ‘A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,’ he said.”

“That’s how my ideas come. But I want to learn more theoretical stuff so I can describe mathematically what I find,” Tamara agreed.

“I’d love to help you learn, then. Would you accept me as your faculty mentor? I’m sure I’ll be learning stuff from you soon.”

Tamara had a tear in her eye as she stood up to shake Clarke’s hand, but the shake turned into a hug.

“It’s uncanny just how much we seem to have in common,” Clarke commented as they both sat down again. “We both advanced academically at an early age. I, too, know that I’m sensitive to other people’s emotions—but nothing like you, obviously. We both invented something major while quite young. And we both have a strong desire to help others, don’t we. Am I right?”

Tamara nodded.

“Then there was that Program rubbish. You covertly opposed it whilst I had a lot of help from my mates and the community too. When it was supposed to start in my school, one of the kids’ relatives owned a sign shop with a big lift bucket truck—on the weekend before the starting assembly, they secretly removed all the windows in the gym and made the school too parky for nudity. Ah, you’re puzzled... yes ... ‘parky’ means cold. Too cold.”

Tamara giggled. “That’s not something I could do in Miami, even with the help of spirits.”

Clarke laughed. “Quite. Then with some help, I got control of the heating plant and made the school too cold... Tamara, did you...?”

Tamara had gotten a broad grin at hearing that.

“Yep, did that too. Not cold though; I made a room really hot, where the officials were trying to plan how to run the Program with all the roadblocks I had made. Scared them, especially the teachers. They stopped the meeting.”

“And you did that all alone...” Clarke mused. “I worked with cold to stop the Program; you used heat and fire. Amazing. You worked alone while I had lots of help; even the police department helped us kill the Program in Fairbanks.”

“I wasn’t really alone, Dr Cl... Emma,” Tamara said. “I had my lwa... that’s the Kreyòl word for spirit. A big help was that many of the teachers—and of course the whole community—had at least a little Haitian background. I used their cultural backgrounds and superstitions to enhance what I did. And my friends in the school organized a backup resistance plan, but that was never needed. We used ideas from a site we found—it’s a forum where kids could post Program news from their schools.”

Clarke grinned at her. “I think we’ll work well together, Tamara. Let me tell you what I’m currently working on. Last year I was on sabbatical at Cambridge University in East Anglia, England, and I was working on some Josephson junction applications—specifically the single electron transistor, or SET. Are you familiar with that device?”

“Ah, yes I am. That’s the device that uses a superconducting source and sink; the insulator coupling at its gate is also superconducting. I’m interested in that too ‘cause I read about it on the APL website when I found out about the Clarke Scholars Program. My interest in Josephson junctions is because the current flows continuously without any voltage applied. I wanted to see if using the SET as part of the MRI coils I was developing would improve resolution and efficiency. But the UMiami med school and my professor’s grant there couldn’t afford the expense for that kind of work. That’s why I wanted to come to Hopkins.”

Clarke sat back with a sigh. “Bloody amazing, you are. You’re thinking of applications in mesoscopic physics even before starting college. Anyway, I was in Cambridge to work with a group on developing new battery technologies. We’ve developed a new battery design whose energy density exceeds current lithium-ion cells by about 8 percent. And I’m hoping that using the theory that underlies the operation of the SET will give us more improvement. The spin-off is a new battery industry, a research and development arm and a commercial arm for which I’m providing the start-up funding. Oh, as well, I endowed Cambridge for two Clarke Scholars each year to study there.”

“Um, I heard the term ‘mesoscopic physics’ but never looked into it in detail. I kinda assumed it was physics between the micro and macro scales. Am I wrong?” Tamara asked.

“No, you’re mostly right. That term refers to the electron transport properties of small systems. The mesoscopic spatial dimensions are between 100 nanometers to perhaps one micrometer, and the way I use the term, it applies to superconducting systems. The substrate interfaces in the SET are examples of mesoscopic system dimensions. As the physical dimensions of a system are reduced, the electron activity begins to display quantum mechanical characteristics instead of obeying classical electrodynamics. Why this matters to engineers is because as circuits and devices are miniaturized far enough, their performance no longer corresponds to the expected classical behavior, and the systems must be modeled using quantum mechanics.

“I’m interested in this area because I want to try to develop highly miniaturized batteries that would have high energy densities and be long-lasting, for applications like smart watches or even hearing aids. My other interest in miniaturization dovetails with yours; it’s to build very high resolution MRIs that can image down to the cellular level, and your current work on the external coils looks like it can be crucial for that project. But the battery work is a priority. Are you interested in collaborating in those projects?”

Tamara had been getting so excited at Clarke’s description of her work that she was almost jumping in her seat.

“Oh, yes! Yes! This means I can do some of the stuff I only dreamed about. Where do the funds come from? That work doesn’t come cheap.”

“Oh, I know. I have a few grants—the NIH, you know, National Institutes of Health—funds some parts of the MRI work. The SET work is supported by DARPA and the NSF—National Science Foundation. And I have private funds available too. I have a sixteen-member research team at the APL; that’s where the MRI you were using at UMiami was designed. Oh, look at the time. I need to take you down to see Dr Burger. You met her at lunch; she’s our undergraduate advisor. She’ll go over your recommended courses and you’ll plan your schedule for when you start here.”

They left for Burger’s office.

An hour later, Tamara had her fall schedule all arranged and had sketched out a tentative one for the spring semester.

“Okay, Tamara, we’re done here,” Berger told her. “I suppose your head is spinning now with everything going on.”

Tamara nodded.

“I’ll call Jill and she’ll take you to a more social setting next. You can unwind and talk to the other scholars and some regular Hopkins students too. I’m so pleased you’ll be joining us. You’ll have a wonderful time here at Hopkins.”

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