Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2) (3 page)

***

On Monday Ell got in Jake’s car with him to go down to his office for his “surprise.” She continued to be wary about what the surprise might be, but tried to relax. He’d been very upbeat since she came home and they had mended fences to the point that Ell was even staying at Jake and Kristen’s house rather than at her grandmother’s like usual. His attitude certainly had changed in that he no longer implied that she was ignorant, stupid, incapable or weak like he had so often intimated back in high school. He was upbeat on the trip to downtown Morehead City where his law practice dealt with real estate, fishery negotiations and other small commercial business enterprises. As they neared his office he turned to her and said, “You are really going to love the deal I have set up for you, Ell. I have worked out something better than you could ever have dreamed of!”

Ell’s blood ran cold. That had sounded too much like the Jake of old, the man who always knew what was best for Ell, no matter what Ell herself wanted. “Deal?” Her voice was low and toneless and she felt bad for sounding angry before she’d even heard what was involved.

Jake, as she might have expected, didn’t even notice her tone. “Oh yeah! I’m not gonna say anything more. Except that you are going to be blown away!”

Ell took a deep breath and forced herself to relax as they pulled into his parking space and walked into the building. She noticed that it had been remodeled since she left so he must be doing pretty well. Jake’s long time receptionist, Susan, leapt out of her chair and came around to give Ell a big hug, patting her on the shoulders and welcoming her back to town. “Mr. Radford, the gentlemen are in the conference room.”

Ell looked questioningly at Jake and he motioned to the little hall where his conference room was located. When Ell entered she found two Asian men, one apparently in his 60s and the other in his 20s seated at the table already. Jake thumped down into the seat across from them and said, “Sit, Ell, sit.” Ell slowly slid into the seat two down from Jake and looked back and forth between Jake and the men. Jake said, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve brought you here?” then chuckled at his own joke.

The men looked puzzled and Ell just stared at him. “So.” Jake said, “Ell your worries are over. These men have come down here from Lenovo, in the Research Triangle Park, to offer you a job. They are very interested in that paper you published in Nature. They don’t feel that it is
at all
necessary for you to go to grad school. They want you to start work now and I’ve negotiated you a starting salary of, get this, $200,000 a year!”

Ell stared at Jake, then at the two Asian men who had focused all their attention on her. She turned back to Jake and said in a flat tone, “Not interested.” She started to stand.

Jake flushed. “What!” he said in a dangerous tone.

“I’m not interested in a job now. I fully intend to go to grad school, no matter how good a job is offered to me at present. If you had bothered to ask
me
, I could have told you this at any time and saved you the trouble of setting this meeting up.”

The elder of the Asian men turned to Jake and, in a heavy accent icily said, “I thought you said your daughter was respectful and obedient?”

Ell snorted on hearing that.

Jake’s face was red and he looked like he was about to explode, but he kept his temper and ground out, “Ell, think of your mother. If you took this job you’d be able to help her out financially.”

“In the first place, you’re her husband. You and my mother are the ones who should depend on one another financially, not she and I. In the second, even if I were to forego grad school, I would still owe two and a half years active duty to the Air Force before I took a job.”

The Asian man turned back to Jake. “Your promises were of no substance! We expect our money back.”

Ell turned her icy gaze back to Jake. “How much money did you take on the promise that I would take this job?”

Jake opened his mouth and waved his hands defensively but had said nothing before the Asian man said, “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

Ell’s ice green eyes bored into Jake again, “You owe the man his money back.” She stood and opened the door.

Jake rose, “Now look here young lady!” Ell didn’t hear whatever else he had to say. She had closed the door by then.

She walked out front and turned brightly to Jake’s receptionist. “Hey Susan, could you give me a ride home? Jake’s going to be meeting with those guys for a while longer.”

“Sure Honey, just let me get my purse.”

Ell stopped at home just long enough to pack her duffle again, slung it over her shoulder and walked to her grandmother’s house. It was quite a walk, but the weather was nice. “Gram!” she said when the door opened.

Her grandmother narrowed her eyes and looked at her a moment, then opened the door wide. “That S.O.B. Jake causing more trouble?”

Ell shrugged, “Yep.” She said brightly. “Jake being Jake. He knows what’s best for everyone.”

“Damn that man. I don’t know why Kristen stays with him! She constantly lets him bully her. I would have thought my daughter would have the spine to stand up to that jackass.” Gram shrugged, “Let’s get you back into your old room.”

Ell unpacked pensively, “Gram? I’ve heard of ‘controlling husbands’ but never thought about it as regards Mom and Jake. I think I was oblivious to any of the signs when I lived at home. I just worried about
my
relationship with him. Do you think they’ve got that kind of problem?”

“Oh yeah, they’ve got most of the signs. I’ve talked to your Mom about it but she either doesn’t recognize the problem or is too afraid to deal with it.”

Ell and her grandmother talked about Kristen and Jake while they prepared and ate dinner. They had some ideas but, of course, none of their ideas would bear fruit without Kristen’s initiative. Then the door creaked open and Kristen stepped in. “Ell? I thought you must be here! Why were you so rude to Jake? He said that you just walked out in the middle of the proposal he’d worked so hard to arrange for you!”

Gram pursed her lips and Ell stared at her mother a moment. “Mom… Why do you think I walked out on Jake?”

Kristen looked startled, then a considering look crossed her face and she slowly sat down while looking Ell in the eye. Her face crumpled and tears ran down her cheeks, “His proposal was something he worked out completely on his own without taking your feelings into consideration at all?”

Ell slowly nodded.

“Then he
told
you that you should be grateful?” she sniffed.

Ell nodded again.

“And there was something in it for him too?”

Ell leaned forward and took her hands, “Something big. You do know he’s a controlling bully?”

Kristen looked at the floor, wiped her nose on the back of her hand and nodded fractionally.

“Do you want our help?”

Long sobs wracked her then she nodded. Ell and Gram both put their arms around her and rocked her. “Do you want out? Or do you want to try to repair what you’ve got?”

“Out,” she whispered.

Chapter Two

Randy idly watched the people riding down the escalator, waiting for Ell Donsaii to arrive. His eye caught on a gorgeous young woman riding the escalator and tracked her downward. Suddenly he realized that the beautiful young lady was actually the person he had come to pick up.

Ell rode down the escalator to the baggage area at Boston’s Logan Airport and was startled when a young man standing near the bottom approached her. At first she thought he wanted an autograph but he excitedly said, “Ms. Donsaii, I’m from MIT. Professor Golroy sent me ‘round to pick you up. It’s right this way to get your luggage and then we can be on our way.”

Ell broke into her trademark crooked smile and held out her hand, “Ell Donsaii.”

The young man seemed practically ecstatic to be shaking her hand, though he looked about twenty four and would therefore be six or seven years older than Ell. “I’m  Randy Dunsbaugh, one of Professor Golroy’s grad students.”

Randy led her to the baggage slide where she picked up her duffel herself despite the young man’s attempt to get it for her. He kept up a line of chatter. “The professor is determined to have you on his theoretical team and sent me to make sure no one else horned in — He has you set up to give a talk tomorrow at three, most of the department will be there — I’m to warn you about Professor Smythe, one of the experimentalists. Smythe apparently thinks that you want to join an
experimental
team!” This last about Smythe was uttered with a tone of utter incredulity. Apparently Randy had no idea that Ell had in fact requested to work in experimental physics. She was full of theories; she wanted to learn how to test them.

Randy took Ell to a nice hotel and when she protested that she couldn’t afford it, assured her that the Department had covered the cost! Ell was greatly relieved but could hardly believe that they were going to this extent to woo a grad student, no matter what paper she had written. She had been pleased enough that they waived their requirements that she take the GRE exam and that her application be submitted back last December. And giving a talk! “Randy, I can’t give a talk! I don’t have anything prepared. I’ve never even heard a talk at a physics department. I don’t know what they would expect.”

“Oh, believe me, you don’t have to have anything prepared. All you have to do is walk into the room and let them blast you with questions!”

“My God Randy! That’s hardly reassuring!”

“Come on! You wrote the paper. Surely you can answer questions about it.
No
one could know more about your new math than you do!”

***

The next day passed in a whirlwind. Randy picked her up at the hotel and took her to breakfast with Professor Golroy who was disappointed to learn of her desire for an experimental track in physics. However he helped arrange appointments with Smythe and Olson, two of the faculty who did do experimental work with quantum phenomena. At three they indeed had a conference where, in fact, Ell didn’t have to give a talk as threatened, but sat with several of the professors at the front of the room. The professors on the panel asked her a series of perceptive questions first, then opened it to the room. At first Ell felt good responding to the questions, even though some were quite pointed. After all she’d worked with her math endlessly over the past couple years. She whispered to her AI, Allan, and he interfaced with computational power on the University’s servers to demonstrate on the big screen at the front of the room how her 5th dimensional solution fit with known experimental data.

Golroy called on “Dr. Josephson” who’d had his hand up for a bit.

Josephson was a thin younger man with frizzy hair. He stood up and said, “It seems to me that all you’ve done is develop your own equations that, because you made up the math you’re using, happen to fit existing data? I don’t see that you’ve predicted
anything
as yet?”

Ell’s heart sunk. That was
exactly
what she’d been doing. She’d thought it was pretty exciting that the equations she’d come up with did fit with many known results, but put that way it, sounded like she’d just fudged them together. She considered mentioning that the equations had also fit with the results of experiments that she hadn’t used when she was shaping the equations in the first place, but that felt sneaky. She hadn’t actually predicted the results of any new experiments. Heart in her mouth she cast about for something to say but nothing came to mind. She opened her mouth, then brilliantly said, “Uhhh…”

Suddenly, Dr. Smythe cleared his throat, “Josephson, you do remember that Ms. Donsaii is only seventeen years old don’t you?”

Ell looked at the balding Smythe. She’d been very impressed with his understanding of her paper when they interviewed earlier. Simultaneously, she felt glad that he was defending her and embarrassed that he was using her age to do it.

Josephson stiffened, “Are you suggesting that we ignore weaknesses in her theories because of her age?”

“You haven’t found a ‘weakness in her theory’ you’ve only pointed out that it hasn’t successfully predicted the result of a new experiment. Yet… Albert Einstein predicted phenomena that others had to test for him. Some of those predictions weren’t actually successfully tested for many, many decades, some not until decades after his death. So yes, she might be wrong when her equations are tested. But she might also be right and this is
yet to be determined
. Her equations are a much better fit with existing knowledge than anything that’s come along for quite some while. So, we should be
eager
to test predictions based on them. I would suggest that even if her equations fail to predict future results, you should respect the intellect that came up with equations and a new math better than anything we’ve had in decades and further, that you should respect her tender years by not jumping in her face as if she were already a grad student here and had learned to defend herself. Finally, I would suggest that we begin testing her math with the apparent prediction that if we entangle macromolecules such as “buckyballs,” we could separate them and then repeatedly perturb the distant one through her proposed 5th dimension by her predicted “spin bumping” of the outer shell electrons of the near member of the pair.”

Smythe’s proposal led to excited bickering and Ell quickly forgot Josephson’s attack on her. Her excitement over some of the experimental testing models that were proposed had her pulse pounding and she had to do some slow deep breathing to stay out of the “zone.”

Ell was still ecstatic about the possible experimental methods that had been proposed, and was daydreaming about them when she returned to her hotel. As she walked across the lobby a man with an accent called her name, “Ms. Donsaii, Ms. Donsaii.”

Ell turned and saw a small Asian man wearing a dark suit trotting across the lobby toward her. “Yes?”

“Would you have a few minutes to discuss a possible scholarship for your time in graduate school here at MIT.”