King of All I Survey
Chapter 70: Being a Smart-ass

Chapter 70: Being a Smart-ass

There was so much going on throughout Guatemala and the locations we were monitoring in Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and our private Island in the Bahamas that it was hard to decide where to turn my attention. I noticed that Dad was spending less time watching Maribel and Rafael. He checked in on them a lot, but after a few seconds, he seemed to get upset, or sad, or something and he’d minimize that view and push it off to a corner of his wall display, only to check in again in a few minutes.

I could see that it was torturing him to see Mom as Maribel, completely unaware in her assumed persona that she was married and had a child. It had been several days since she had been back as her true self. I decided that we needed to get Mom home for a visit, a long visit, as soon as possible.

First, though, I had to go to my admissions interview at UMass Amherst. I had promised Mom to finish High School by the end of the week. It turns out that you can’t get a GED until you’re like 17 or 18. So, instead, I figured that admission to college would satisfy her request while also meeting my goal of beginning to integrate alien tech into human society through a University Research program.

Joe picked a spot near the Natural Sciences Building which was not covered by any security cameras and where no one would see me suddenly appearing as I stepped out of a LITV booth. I wore dress shoes, dress pants and a white button-up shirt. My hair was neatly combed. I had a blank sketch pad and a couple of pens.

I walked into the Natural Sciences Building and made my way to the Dean’s office. The meeting was to be held in a meeting room adjacent to the office, but I was supposed to check in with his secretary. I paused in front of the door. I opened it and entered the reception area.

"Hello," I said to the woman behind the counter facing the door. "I am Tim Bailey, I have an appointment with Dean Michaels."

She looked at me over the top of her glasses, tilting her head forward to do so. "OK, let me check the schedule." She replied and used a wireless mouse to access the day’s calendar. She peered at the screen through her glasses. Her brow furrowed and she looked back to me. "Yes, I see the appointment here. Unfortunately, Dean Michaels has an urgent matter to attend to, so you will be meeting with Professor Donaldson who is the Undergraduate Program Director for the Physics Department."

Dean Michaels is currently playing solitaire in his office through that door to the left. Professor Donaldson specializes in Condensed Matter Physics, so this may work to your advantage, Joe’s voice in my head informed me.

"Yes, that will be fine. Where should I meet him?" I asked aloud.

She smiled politely, "If you will have a seat," she gestured to a couple of chairs at the right side of the reception area, "I will inform Professor Donaldson that you are here."

I went over and sat down in one of the chairs. My feet dangled in the air because my legs were too short to reach the floor. I took out my sketch pad and began writing. A few moments later, the woman behind the counter informed me that I could go to the conference room across the hall, Professor Donaldson would be there in just a minute.

"Thank you. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name..." I said.

"Kathy Sullivan," she said, "or just Mrs. Sullivan."

"Thank you very much for your help, Mrs. Sullivan. When Dean Michaels finishes his game of solitaire, would you be so kind as to let him know that I’m sorry I missed him today?"

The look on her face was priceless. At first, surprised and indignant, then amused. She was, it seemed, aware of her boss’s habits. I winked and turned to go to the meeting room.

I opened the door and walked in. There was a dark wooden meeting table, with six swiveling office chairs. On the wall on the side of the room was a whiteboard with a couple of dry erase markers in the tray. I smiled, I walked over to the board and wrote an equation describing the effect of molecular distancing on the efficiency at which nanotubes with a specific functional group can carry and propagate electromagnetic fields. It took almost all of the whiteboard space even though I wrote fairly small. I put the marker back in the tray and sat down with the equation behind my back so that when the professor sat facing me, he would see it behind me.

Twelve minutes later, the door opened, and a man walked in. He was, I would guess, about fifty or fifty-five years old. His hair was mostly gray, but not all the way. He had an impatient look about him as though he was in a hurry to get this over with and go back to whatever he was doing. He looked at me sitting at the table and shook his head. He sat down across from me. "Hello, Timothy. I understand that you’d like to attend UMass Amherst someday."

"Yes, Professor. In fact, I’d like to attend this fall under an independent study program and I’d like a position as a research associate." I told him.

His gaze had wandered to the equation behind me but snapped back to me with an amused smile as I spoke. "Oh, really?"

"Yes, I’d like to focus on the practical application of field propagation in nanotube constructions," I said.

His eyebrows rose, wrinkling his forehead. His condescending smile grew a little bigger. "I see," he said, "what does that mean exactly?"

I tilted my head and frowned, "I sorry, I thought your specialty was condensed matter physics and you’d understand my terminology. Maybe there’s someone else here who is better equipped to talk on this subject?"

His smile disappeared. "I know what it means, I just doubt that you do," he said, the playful tone was gone from his voice.

I smiled, "Oh, I see," I said. "I get it. I don’t look like a physicist, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about this. In essence, I think that carbon nanotubes with functional molecular groups attached to the outer surface can be used to conduct and propagate electromagnetic fields of various types with great efficiency. By precisely controlling the distance between molecular surfaces, we can affect the strength of the weak attractive force, for example, tailoring its response to the presence or absence of specific molecules. This could be used to create highly sensitive and specific sensors, as well as exclusion or attraction fields that repel or attract specific elements for either catalytic or separation purposes."

"And where did you read that?" Donaldson asked.

"Well, a large part of the specific research I’d like to undertake here is based on an original interpretation and theoretical analysis. However, you may be familiar with the paper on Nanoscale Evolution of Charge Transport from the November issue of The Journal of the American Chemical Society? That represents a very basic introduction to the principles which I would be working on."

He glanced at the equation behind me on the whiteboard for a moment, then looked back at me. "I read it. Are you saying that you could advance upon the work the Chinese scientists presented in that paper?"

"Yes, obviously," I replied. "Listen professor, I understand your time is valuable. You and I both have, I think, better things to do than to have an eight-year-old try to convince you he would be a valuable addition to your university. I doubt there’s anything I could say here today that would convince you. However, I notice that you keep glancing at the equation I wrote on the board behind me. That’s original work, not taken from any source on this planet." I opened my sketch pad, "and here are some diagrams illustrating some of the permutations that it describes." I slid the sketchpad across the table toward him. "Why don’t you take a couple of days to think about the implications of what I have written. Then do whatever you must to satisfy yourself that no one else in the field has advanced this far, so I could not have copied someone else’s work. Once you’ve done that, send me an official acceptance to the email at the top of the first page in the sketch book.’ I grinned at the dumb-struck professor, "If I don’t hear from you by Saturday, I’ll make the same offer to MIT. It’s a little bit more of a daily commute than Amherst, but I’ll just have to manage."

I stood up and leaned forward to shake his hand. It was too far for an eight-year-old’s arms to reach across the table, so I withdrew my hand and walked around to the other side and offered my hand again. He pulled his eyes away from the whiteboard to look at me. He reached out slowly and shook my hand.

"I look forward to hearing from you, professor," I said, as politely as I could. I turned to open the door and leave. The doorknob was worn and slick. This combined with the mechanism putting up too much resistance forced me to use both hands awkwardly to turn the brass knob and open the door.

I walked across the hall to the Dean’s reception area. "Kathy," I said, "Would you mind letting Dean Michaels know that Professor Donaldson would like to see him in the conference room," I indicated the hallway with a nod of my head, "as soon as he’s free? Thank you... and it was a pleasure to meet you." I smiled my best friendly smile and left.

I walked back to the spot where Joe had parked the invisible LITV booth to drop me off. I reached out and opened it, walked in, and stepped out back in the Status Room at the treehouse.

Dad turned to face me, a view of the meeting room I had just left showed Dean Michaels and Professor Donaldson in an animated conversation standing in front of the whiteboard.

"I thought I said ’Don’t be a smartass?’" Dad demanded with a big smile.

I shrugged, "Sometimes a little smartassing is the best way to get things done."

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