The Technologists Read Free Page B

if the usual reasons for accidents do not fit, perhaps they could advise us where to turn.”
    Kurtz pulled him away from the patrolmen who were milling around them. “Have you gone mad, Carlton?”
    “Sir?”
    “Don’t rile me! The Institute of Technology? You know the reputation of that place. Their sciences are seen as practically pagan. Just speaking to them will draw fire against us. Try the harbormaster if you need more help! Try the city engineer!”
    “I have! All baffled! We need to find someone capable of understanding how this could happen, or we shall not advance one whit!”
    “The single place with the finest intellects in the nation sits just across the river. What about that?”
    “Harvard.”
    “Yes! Go there and find
someone
smarter than you, and without delay! We are here to protect this city. I will not suffer another embarrassment like this!”
    “Right away, Chief Kurtz. Chief, wait! You’re still …” But there he went without a look back, stomping all the way to his waiting carriage, the chief of police of the city Carlton loved, hatless for all Boston to see.

IV

Circuits
    A LMOST ANYWHERE M ARCUS LOOKED as he stood outside the splendid Boylston Street building was unused land of the Back Bay, or the “new land,” as it was known. Only a few years before it had been marshland and was still so a few streets west, where rows of steam shovels fed by freight cars of gravel and sand continued the filling. Besides the Institute, there were a few other places—including the asylum for aged blacks and the Catholic academy for girls—that preferred distance from the rest of the city. The area was a perfect setting for the improbable college.
    Scholars should be surrounded by quiet, but President Rogers had always said technological scholars should be surrounded by the progress of man. The Back Bay presented surroundings that were grandly artificial, where the pupils would observe the way in which civil engineering could turn malodorous swamp—what had been a bubbling caldron of noxious filth poured out from the city, though they were too young to have seen it at its worst—into a landscape of wide streets that would alleviate the crowding of an old Boston, now flooded with so many new residents from rural towns and foreign nations that one could hardly move. It would be the latest example of modern architecture and commercial and industrial progress—at least, that was the hope for the still young, mostly still uninhabitable Back Bay.
    “Come on already,” Bob was saying, “at this rate, we’ll be graduated before we finish the preparations.”
    If you’re to be graduated
.
    Marcus was carrying equipment outside with Bob. “Two steps behind you, Bob.”
    In the five days since, the Harvard stroke oar’s taunt out on the Charles River had slowly wormed its way into Marcus Mansfield’s thoughts with parasitic tenacity. On the one hand, a sort of childish superstition rose inside Marcus, without any particular legs to its logic, that he would not be graduated. Even after he had swapped the machine shop floor for the classrooms and laboratories of the Institute, he had feared deep down that a man like him had no right to be a college man and would, through the last-minute intervention of fate, be deprived of the title.
    On the other hand, Marcus’s more practical cause for concern was that he and the other members of ’68 were to be the first to be graduated from the Institute of Technology, and until a thing had happened it could not rightly be proven that it could happen. They had been taught that from the first hour at Tech.
    No doubt Bob Richards would have laughed away his worries, which was why Marcus did not bring them up with him as they finished preparing the equipment for the evening’s public demonstration. Bob seemed to have been born with the ability to sleep off any problem in the way other men sleep off beer. But Marcus’s thoughts swirled around and around the stroke