by Pepper White
"Tomorrow. I've been up all night for the past three nights and it still doesn't work."
How I know how you feel, I thought. "I know what you're going through. If it's not possible to make the whole thing work, why don't you set some personal goals for the next few hours; say, try to get one or two subsystems to work."
"I've already gotten all I want to out of this stupid course."
Wimp.
Cindy was downstairs, outside the store, working next to a guy from the Aeronautical Engineering department.
"I can't believe how friendly people are in this department," she said.
"Maybe it's because we have wider career options than you aero guys," I said.
"Yeah, like making toasters instead of killer satellites," Cindy added. "Or toys. Wouldn't it be fun to work for Mattel Toys?"
For the first time in my life I thought I could work for Mattel Toys if I wanted to.
Friday, November 19
Rest day, and time to catch up on neglected details, e.g., paying bills.
11:00 P.M. Finished skating. The plaque in the athletic center rang true: "Not the quarry but the chase; not the laurel but the race" (Burgess, 1885).
'Round midnight. I spray-painted the ladder rungs silver. It would look good if nothing else.
November 20
This was supposed to be my day for cycling because my device was supposed to work, but Bligh suggested I change the design to a ladder with a hinge at the back and a wheelbarrow wheel on the front. That might solve the falling-under-its-own-weight problem.
So that means: 1. Break epoxy bonds on the beautiful base I built last weekend. 2. Build a wheel assembly for the ladder's front. It was a lot of work but my only chance. Professor Blanco once said that he spent seven years developing a product only to have it stolen by a German company. "You have to be able to change," he said. "You put in so much work and you think as you whine, 'But it will take so long to change ... I did so much already ... I don't want to change it.' But you have to be flexible, willing to forget about all the time you spent going one way, and then turn around and go another way. Otherwise, you will not survive."
4:00 P.M. Cindy's machine was a grappling hook launcher with a quality of construction second to none, even mine. "Are you going to make it?" I asked her.
"I hope so, but I'll be here almost all night tonight and tomorrow night," she said.
"It's a beautiful machine. You should really sprint to make it work. You've got forty-eight hours and then you can sleep," I said.
9:00 P.M. I had to figure out how to make the stupid wheel for the front of the stupid ladder, so I had to go upstairs. The guy who'd pulled up eight pounds the Sunday before was there with his grappling hook. He was talking to a Course Six geek.
"I think design is one of my strong points," he said.
Shut up, you nerd.
"Yours didn't work Thursday, did it? It looks good but it didn't work," he said as he watched me experiment with the heights of my ladder supports.
"It'll work," I said, and his chiding made it more imperative. This kind of thing is a good way to tell whether you're a Type A.
He continued his conversation with his friend. "My dad went to Harvard. I got in there but I didn't want to go there. I figured I'd be more of an engineer if I went to MIT. He was disappointed."
"My dad's MIT cubed," the other one said. "He works at Draper now. And you'll never guess where my mom went."
"Simmons?" the eight-pound guy said.
"You got it."
"Are you dating a Simmons woman now?" Mr. Grappling Hook asked.
"No, but I go to a lot of parties there."
"Not to change the subject, but this class makes you become like family with all the people you stay up all night with. It's kind of fun," G.H. said as I left the room.
1:00 A.M. Sunday morning. I've got to glue this wheel but I don't know how to make it. It's taking forever just to decide just how to just cut just one piece of wood. Besides, all the drills are unmarked and all the rulers and micrometers have been swiped so I'll have to eyeball everything. Besides, I want to go to sleep.
Fight it. Stay with it. Just make the thing work. Don't worry about how well. Just make it work. Just cut the pieces of wood and glue them together. Make the wheel on the belt sander. So what if it looks like something from "The Flintstones"; it's still better than nothing.
4:00 A.M. The epoxy was setting and the wheel looked good. The design had become me, and I had become the design.
November 21
2:00 P.m. Twenty-nine hours left before the contest in 26-100. Cindy said, "Did you hear about what happened at Harvard yesterday? At the football game, right after one of the touchdowns, a small pipe sprang out of the field. Then a balloon started inflating. It was black, and it had MIT written all over it. Finally it blew up and yellow smoke came out of it. It was on the front page of every newspaper in the country. It's got to be the hack of the century. Some of the people in two-seventy were in on it."
Score one for MIT.
7:00 P.M. Cindy looked at her grappling hook launcher. "I'm so depressed," she said. "It's not going to work. This thing keeps splitting and the bearings fall out."
"Why don't you try turning the wood 90 degrees so the bearing won't be trying to break it apart?" I suggested.
"That's a good idea. But I also need a rubber band for my drive system and there aren't any left like the one I had and I have to go work at the Pritchett snack bar and I'm exhausted."
"Look, you can't give up now. You'll never forgive yourself if you do," I said.
"I'll think about it."
10:30 P.M. I chatted with Ari about pay policy at MIT. I opened my desk drawer and found ten rubber bands of all sizes and shapes. I went to Pritchett to give them to Cindy but she was already off work. She was in her dorm room.
"I found these and thought they might help," I said. She looked through them and found one that was perfect.
"Oh wow. These are great. Thanks a lot."
1:10 A.M. Eighteen hours to launch. Don't quit! I wrote it in my lab book to keep me going. Two students wore Walkmen while they worked. I wondered how they could concentrate.
3:00 A.M. Started testing. Ten other people were testing their machines. Mine almost sprang up; the Flintstone wheel worked nicely, but there was too much friction in the rope and the motor stalled.
4:30 A.M. Cindy was at the test track.
5:00 A.M. Try different combinations of springs and string; I screwed up the threading of the string for the winch twice. Mr. eight-pound G.H. walked in.
"I thought there'd be nobody here," he said.
"Admit it; you just came here to gloat," I sneered.
6:30 A.M. Trials proceeded but the machine still didn't work. On the last trial I misloaded the springs. I had to hit something after that trial failed, and a box of computer cards was the closest thing. I tried to put them back in the box in order, and told myself to leave a note on the box some time after the contest. I left eight people in the testing room at 7:00 and gave the machine a coat of red spray paint.
November 22
Nineteen years ago John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.
10:30 A.M. The phone rang. It was Tom Bligh. "Is your machine working?" he asked. "I have to make the list for tonight, and if it doesn't work by 2:00 you won't be in the finals."
"If you hadn't called, it surely wouldn't have worked because I would have slept all day. I think I can make it work by 2:00." I went back to the track and forty people were there, making lastminute adjustments, testing, and making more last-minute adjustments. "Oh s-," "Oh f-," emanated at a frequency of about twenty times per minute.
I reran the aborted trial of the night before. It almost, almost reached the scale and Professor Blanco was impressed. Tom Bligh walked in, and another light bulb lit over my head. "How about I be one of the placebos?" I asked. "Let me have one more spring and my machine will work perfectly."
Since the contest wa
s a one-on-one elimination like in a tennis tournament, some rounds would have an odd number of contestants, or some no-shows. Instead of letting anyone luck into the next round by a "bye," two-seventy tradition was to have a "placebo," an entry that would oppose the opponentless player. Like a sugar pill, the placebo was not an official contestant, but it could be effective.
"That's a good idea," Tom said. "Let's go for it."
4:00 P.M. "I talked with a lieutenant with an Irish last name about borrowing a fireman's helmet and raincoat for a contest at MIT. Can you think of who that would be?" I asked the fire chief.
"We're all Irishmen," he answered. "But come on up to the firehouse and we'll see what we can do for you."
6:45 P.M. Room 26-100 was already full to capacity, but I found one of the last aisle seats. I held my machine like a mother holds her baby. There were a lot of paper airplanes being thrown.
7:00 P.M. Professor Wilson quieted the crowd. "Before we start, I would like to squash an ugly rumor that has been circulating. There will not, I repeat, there will not be a large crimson balloon inflating on our stage tonight." A chill-breaking roar went about the crowd of six hundred. "We'll go one-on-one for as many rounds as it takes to get a winner. The first round will have forty contests, the second will have twenty, etc."
The first contest was between a miniature football player that kicked the weight onto the scale and a miniature truck that went under the cactus.
"Punt, punt, punt, punt," the audience shouted, and boom! the little football player kicked a film canister football for a field goal through the arms of the cactus and beat his opponent.
Eight contests later the opponent of the grappling hook guy didn't show. "We need the placebo," Professor Wilson said. I walked to the stage with my red and silver "fire truck" and my fireman's helmet and raincoat.
"Pla-cee-boh, pla-cee-boh, pla-cee-boh," the crowd chanted.
I walked to the starting ramp. I put my device down. I hooked up the power wire. Professor Wilson flipped on the power.
"Thawockkk!" My spring- loaded-Flintstone-wheel- fireengine-ladder put a 1-ounce deflection on the scale in a tenth of a second. The grappling hook shot off to the side, missed the backboard, and Mr. G.H.'s truck was dead in the water.
I looked at Professor Wilson. Professor Wilson looked at me.
"That was great, Pepper."
C H A P T E R
13
Is Suicide Painless?
November 21
I helped Griffith and Bligh and Wilson lift the pieces of the contest out of 26-100 after it was over and went back to my tutor apartment at 11:00. Boy, am I glad that's over, I thought. Now I can coast for a bit, maybe until Christmas. Ah, now I can sleep. Yes, a nice restful sleep for the next four weeks.
I walked past the Monopoly game on the third floor landing and they said, "Great ladder, Pepper. Wicked awesome."
Aw shucks, it was nothing.
The engineering director of Campagnolo cycling components was in the audience. He's a buddy of Wilson," Dianne said. "Maybe you can hit him up for a job."
"Yeah, that'd be great. Maybe I'll try that."
Kvel, kvel, kvel.
I congratulated Cindy on her performance; her grappling hook made it to the semifinals.
"Oh, by the way," she said, "John Dorsey left a note under your door. He said it was important."
It's always something, isn't it. If it's not one thing it's another thing. Just like Gilda Radner's grandmother Nanna Rosanne Rosanna Danna always used to say.
"Please see me. Come by my apartment if you're in by 11:30."
Oh, no. Maybe they want me out and I'll have to start buying groceries and paying rent again. I walked over to the Dorseys' apartment in Crafts.
"Hi, John. What's up?"
"It's Steve Watson," John said. "He's having serious emotional troubles. He's depressed and lonely and already worried about finals. The psychiatrist's office and one of the religious counselors have both talked to him, and they think he's close to rounding the bend. He's almost finished his undergraduate work in three and a half years and he's not even nineteen yet. I think he's in the process of realizing he doesn't have a life."
At nineteen, he was born some time between the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination.
"Gee, that's terrible," I said. "Who's Steve Watson?"
"He's one of the students on your entry. Haven't you gotten to know every one of them? That's part of your tutor job, you know. Anyway, we'd like you to keep an eye on him, maybe recruit some of the students in the entry on his hall to do the same, have them be friendly to him, you be friendly to him, try to make him feel that his last three and a half years were not a total emotional vacuum."
"I'll do what I can, John. And hey, I've done my best to get to know everyone. Well, maybe not by name, but by face anyway. I mean before every study break, I put the signs up and then go and knock on every door. Can I help it if this kid is always at his lab?"
"No, you can't, and I'm sure you're doing your best. The main thing to do is to take care of Steve. I've been housemaster here for three years and there hasn't been a suicide yet, and if I can help it there won't be any for as long as I'm here."
"Ditto for me, John. Do you have any suggestions for how I should talk to him?"
"Just try to be natural; don't let on that you're keeping an eye on him. Try taking an interest in things that are interesting to him. I heard he likes to play chess. Maybe you can have a game with him or encourage the other students to do the same."
It's really too bad that I, a paid staffer, have to be paid to be nice to this kid, I thought. Nobody else has the time or the inclination. There are loners at every school but MIT is a magnet for them. And what do you get when you put eight loners on a dormitory floor? Eight very lonely people.
December 11
After a restful Thanksgiving, and after several attempts at finding him during the week and a half following the vacation, I met Steve. There was a noteboard on his door that said, "Should I kill myself?" and beneath it there was a Yes column and a No column. There were seven hash marks under No and two under Yes. Somebody'd written, "Jump, jump" to the side of one of the Yes marks. On the bottom someone else's hand had written, "Life's a bitch, and then you die." It must have made Steve happy to know that people cared.
Steve had pale skin, a receding case of acne, a little brown beard on his chin, and a mustache. He was slim, tall, and quiet. Of course he was quiet; that's why he didn't know anyone.
"Hi," I said when he opened the door. "I'm Pepper White, the tutor. I haven't had a chance to meet everyone yet, but I'm trying to make sure I meet everyone and let you all know that there will be a study break every night during exam week. And if you ever want to come by and chat, feel free to knock on my door."
"They put you up to this, didn't they?" he said.
"Up to what? Say, is that a chess set there? I like to play chess, too. Maybe we can have a match sometime."
The depression must have weakened his resistance, the cynicism that he'd absorbed from the environment. "Sure, that would be nice," he said. He cracked a smile, apparently thankful for any offer of friendship.
"How about tomorrow at 1:30 in the afternoon?" I asked.
"OK."
Dianne started bowling with a real bowling ball and empty two-liter ginger ale bottles as the pins. Thunk! The ball hit the heavy oak door next to Steve's. Three of the ten pins went down.
"Hey, can you keep it down there?" I said.
Dianne retorted, "How am I going to get any better at this if I don't practice?"
"Say, Dianne, do you know Steve? He's a math and physics major. You've taken some physics classes, haven't you?"
"Oh, yeah, sure, OK," Dianne said, quickly figuring out what I was hinting. "Aren't you in my relativity class, Steve? That Professor French, he can really lecture, can't he? I'm having a little trouble with the material on the Schwarzschild radius for black holes. Could you help me conceptualize i
t?"
"It's a pretty easy concept," Steve said, his confidence growing at the chance to explain something to someone. "The mathematics is a little hairy-I mean, it's a singular point solution for a differential equation-but the idea is that as you approach a black hole, and you come within a certain distance of it in the space-time continuum, there's no turning back."
"You mean you sort of get sucked into it, like in a sci-fi movie?" Dianne asked.
"Yeah, that's it," Steve said. "Did you understand the problem about the twins, one of whom leaves earth and travels at close to the speed of light and he comes back sixty years later, and his brother has aged sixty years but he hasn't?"
"Sure," Dianne said, "that's special relativity, and I think I've got a handle on that."
Dianne started to explain the problem, and I figured she had Steve covered for the time being so I excused myself and said, "I'll see you at 1:30 tomorrow for that chess game, OK, Steve?"
December 12
Sunday. Steve was still asleep at 1:30 in the afternoon. When you're depressed, all you want to do is sleep, and when you're at MIT, you have very little time to sleep, and therefore all you want to do is sleep and your body feels the same as when you're depressed and it's hard to tell whether you're depressed or just tired from all the work. I knocked repeatedly and waited outside. Come on, Steve, answer the door.
He finally answered after about five minutes. He was groggyeyed, and said, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about our chess game. Can we do it some other time? I'm going to play a guy in Runkle at 2:00. Thanks for waking me up, though. I might have missed my match otherwise."
"Sure, there's no hurry for our match. Have a good match with your partner," I answered, glad that he had a friend.
December 13
Monday evening at Lobdell's cafeteria Steve sat down by himself at the table next to me, then saw me, and picked up his tray and brought it over to my table. "How's the studying going?" I asked.
"Oh, pretty good. Thursday and Friday are going to be rough, though. I have a final on Thursday morning, a final on Thursday afternoon, and a final on Friday morning."