The Technologists (5 page)

As the elegant older man was crossing the shop floor, Marcus kept working. Maybe his intense concentration was what caught the eye of William Barton Rogers, who paused at their station. Outsiders usually appeared to be in visible pain with the deafening noise of the shop ringing in their ears, the sharp metallic clicks and buzzing of the giant machines. But not this man. More unexpected, after he introduced himself, he began talking about a college he was organizing.

“Would this school of yours be dreadful expensive?” Frank asked. “You say Institute of …?”

“Technology, my son.”

Frank mouthed the word back to himself with an intrigued smile, showing teeth that were small and round.

“We are developing plans for students to be able to work for the college, if necessary,” continued the scientist.

“Well! I was not cursed with a fortune,” Frank said, sucking his teeth. “Four years without an income surrounded by collegey aristocrat dolts and dandies wouldn’t much help, would it, sir? Ha!”

Marcus laughed along with Frank.

The serene visitor turned next to Marcus. “What are you about, young fellow? Have you thought about college?”

Chauncy Hammond, Sr., the president of the locomotive works, joined them.

“Rest your hands for a moment, man,” Hammond said to Marcus. “Mr. Mansfield is one of our best machine men on the floor, Professor Rogers. There is no problem his hands seem unable to solve. Boston is growing out of its skin, men; there is talk of the city swallowing Brookline and Cambridge into our borders after we finish chewing over Roxbury. There will be a great need for new machines and railroads to be built and the engineers to do it. You know, Mansfield, that my own Junior is going to attend the professor’s institution as part of the first class.”

Frank chanced a smirk at Marcus. Chauncy Hammond, Jr.—Hammie—would of course have a place. Earned or not.

Hammie had spent the previous summer as a draftsman at the locomotive
works, and during that period had avoided the hard-pressed machinists. His air of aloofness and off-putting mannerisms—even when he smiled or laughed, he was unsocial—made him seem a relic of an older Boston. Hammie might as well have strutted about in a three-cornered hat and stockings.

“Don’t mind my friend’s
reticence
,” Frank said, the latter word spoken with the eager emphasis of one who read a page of Webster’s each night. “His tongue takes a holiday sometimes. I don’t s’pose he’s more ashamed of being uneducated than the lot of us. He could be a foreman of one of the departments here—both of us will one day, I wager.”

“I suppose I hadn’t ever thought anything about college,” Marcus finally answered for himself, shaking out the numbness from his right hand.

“
Would
you?” the visitor asked, his quick eyes scanning Marcus’s hand before returning upward.

“Sir, I have only a common school education, and my family hasn’t any money. Besides, I don’t know any Latin.” He looked across the bench to see if he had said the right thing. Frank shrugged: Facts were facts.

But Rogers flashed his unusual, magnetic smile. “Latin? Think nothing of such things, my son. The old system of education is passing. We are doing something very different. Something new. There are those who fear it, of course, among my colleagues. I need the right young men who will show them how wrong they are.”

*   *   *

W
ITH THE FIRST LIGHT
Friday morning Marcus resumed picking up broken glass and other debris from the field outside the Institute building. Under a light rain and dim sky, it was slow work to find the small, razor-sharp shards and avoid cutting himself.

The previous night, after the union agitators had scattered, a reporter who had come to witness the lighting demonstration accosted Rogers as he was being conducted up the steps into his carriage. “President Rogers, is it true what we have heard about the incident at the harbor? That such a strange phenomenon was no mere accident, and if not produced
by wizard’s work, must be the result of some kind of scientific manipulation?”

“Is that what the newspapers will print,” asked Rogers warily.

“Already have today, sir.”

A dark shadow passed over Rogers’s face. “I understand no more about what happened than you do,” he said, brushing off tomato remnants from his suit. “If you’ll kindly pardon me.”

The driver closed the door, sealing Rogers in and leaving the frustrated reporter below.

With the commotion subsided, Bob, flustered and frustrated, also left to return to his lodging house. Only Albert Hall remained with Marcus. Hall, his fat cheeks still flush from excitement, planted himself expectantly at Marcus’s elbow. He hooked his thumbs in the armholes of his green-and-black-speckled vest, which was an imitation of a fashion that had been the very latest a year and a half ago.

“Hall, what do you want?”

“Aren’t you going to clean this all up?” he replied impatiently. “It’s your duty, you know, as a charity scholar.”

“You’re a charity scholar.”

Albert blinked, tossed the cowlick from his forehead, and omitted a pitying sigh. His sigh was superfluous. Every syllable he spoke sounded like it was carried on an exhale. “Look here, Mansfield, for reasons I thought would be obvious to you by now, you’re given tasks as part of your financial arrangement suited toward, shall we say, physical exertion. In contrast, it is my duty to see that the students at the Institute follow the rules and fulfill their individual responsibilities, pay their overdue bills and breakage fees and preserve perfect order in and around the building. Trust me, you don’t want that degree of reliance on you. We may seem the same, you and me, Mansfield, because of our humble standings, but the difference between us is that I freely accept the restrictions on me without shame. Now, the rules in this case would dictate that you tidy up without any help from me.”

“You’re right. We aren’t the same,” Marcus said sarcastically, though his confidence had strained a little under Albert’s words.

“Excellent.” Albert smiled, shaking his hand and gathering his belongings.
“I thought we’d understand each other sooner or later. Good night, Mansfield!”

But even with the benefit of the gaslight, the evening had grown too dark for Marcus to finish cleaning up, so he decided to take the train back to Newburyport. He returned to Boston on the earliest train.

As he crawled and crouched with the bag of glass, he heard the gravel crunching and looked up to find he was not alone. Bryant Tilden. He’d even prefer Albert to Tilden. Marcus pretended not to notice him.

“Bootlicking the professors again, Mr. Toady?” Tilden said, snapping his fingers as he spoke. He was short but muscular with a square chin.

“I’m not in the right spirits for sparring, Tilden.”

When he first enrolled at the Institute, Marcus expected that his fellow college students would be sophisticated gentlemen who swore only in Latin. Exemplars of Boston manners and New England sobriety—or, as his friend Frank Brewer would put it, aristocrat dolts. That was exactly how they appeared the first day freshman year. But after a week or so, they seemed to change before his eyes into fast and silly boys who preferred sport and pranks over pretense. Looking back, he was relieved to abandon the mythological collegey of his imagination.

Still, Marcus could not help but marvel now that Tilden had lasted to their fourth year. When they were freshmen, he caught him writing out plane-trigonometry formulas on his shirt cuffs. Though Marcus had never said a word to Tilden or anyone else, Tilden never forgave him for knowing the shaky ground he walked on. Tilden prodded him so much when they were freshmen that one day Marcus took him by the collar. It was in the middle of a lecture, and Tilden’s allies joined in, instantly locking the entire freshman class of twenty-five—the entire enrollment of the college, before ten gradually dropped out—in a melee. Rogers did not try to pry the young men apart, which would have been fruitless. Instead, he removed a gyroscope he had just bought for the Institute and set it in motion. The boys one by one stopped their fighting. Fixing neckties and tucking in shirt flaps, they passed around the awkwardly spinning object; it was the first time they had ever laid eyes on a device like it and, they suspected, the first time any college freshmen in the country ever had. Nobody was punished for the fight—it had not gotten
very far, and it would have been messy to sort out. Marcus was lucky; the college could not cook their golden geese such as Tilden, whose father was a steel magnate, but as a charity scholar Marcus was there by the grace of the faculty. It was the first and last time he had let anger get the better of him as a Tech student.

There were still almost two hours before morning courses would begin. What in the land was Tilden doing? Maybe he came for extra study time, in a desperate attempt to pass all his courses.

“That lighting demonstration went a bit out of control last night,” he mused.

Marcus started back toward the Institute building as though the matter were no concern to him. “You want to clean, Tilden?”

“Probably you’re wondering why I’m here.”

“Not really.”

“Looked to my eyes like Rogers lost control over what was happening,” Tilden went on, following at his heels. “Then ran away like a coward! That cross old devil must step down before we’re seen to have a cripple for a president, and I’ve come to write a petition to that effect and circulate it around the college. He’s going to die, and when he does the whole place will die with him.”

Marcus felt his stomach clench. He tried his best to master his anger.

“Come now, Mansfield,” Tilden went on. “You know the truth more than any of us. We will be the first graduates, the men of ’68, who will represent the Institute to the rest of the country. Rogers is holding the Institute back from where it must go, but so are you. You never belonged here. You were one of the old goat’s mistakes. You were never entitled to be here with the rest of us. You were an experiment, a shipwreck, a flummux, just like that wicked witch they’ve put in the freshman class.”

Marcus stopped walking. He placed the bag of glass on the ground and buttoned up his coat. “Rainy morning. You should go inside.”

“Don’t twist the subject!” Tilden tapped his finger on the button just under Marcus’s raggedy cravat. “Oh, Mansfield,” he said, catching the fury in his eyes, “you’d like to strike me ever so much, wouldn’t you? That would impress old Miss Swallow, wouldn’t it? I hear she’s religious, though—no use trying anything with her. I’ve thought about it, believe me, with her down there in her basement laboratory, alone.”

“Keep a civil tongue in your head, Tilden.”

Tilden snapped his finger and thumb together two inches from Marcus’s face. He had the habit of snapping, indiscriminately, to express every kind of emotion or to signify emphasis. Sometimes, he snapped finger and thumb on both hands simultaneously, sometimes one, then the other. “Do you threaten me?” he asked Marcus.

“With fair warning.”

“We both know that you can’t do a thing to me, Mansfield. If you strike me while on college property, by strict rule you will be immediately hauled up before the faculty and shipped off. No excuses, no exceptions. A charity scholar walks on such a razor’s edge I almost feel sorry for you. A man without a father to his name.”

He might have said “a man without a farthing to his name.” Either way, Marcus’s fists clenched.

“Have you taken good notes this term on Professor Henck’s lectures on survey, location, and construction, Tilden?”

“Now there’s a course that’s a soft snap,” Tilden guffawed. “I use it as my nap hour. Why?”

“Because,” Marcus said, gesturing with a flick of his chin, “the college property ends at the well.”

Tilden turned to look and suddenly paled. He turned back in time to catch Marcus’s fist full in the face. He flew flat on his back into a pool of mud.

Marcus’s knuckles were stained with blood and his body pulsated with release.

Tilden blotted his bloody nose and glared at him as if he were a wild beast let out of his cage. “Scoundrel! Scrubby scoundrel! I’ll serve you, Mansfield, you miserable insect! I see what you are now!”

“What is that?”

“You’re not one of us.”

“A factory boy. I know. I’ve heard it from you for four long years.”

“That’s not all, Mansfield! Your knot is not screwed on right. There are shadows in your eyes …” Tilden rolled onto his stomach, grabbed a big rock, and threw it with all his strength.

Marcus easily dodged the missile, then, when Tilden pushed himself up and tried to run, Marcus tripped him back down and this time
pressed the heel of his boot onto Tilden’s wrist and jammed his knee into his back. “You leave Miss Swallow alone. Do you hear me, Tilden? Do you?”

“Yes! Get off me! I will!”

“Good. One more thing: Bother Rogers at your peril.”

“What’s the old man to you, anyway?”

“He’s the only person who never tried to tell me I was not entitled to something better. And if you dare make a move against him, I’ll rip your guts out.” He did not let his boot up until Tilden cried out his agreement. A second more and the wrist bone would have snapped against the stone beneath it.

“Thank you, Tilden. You have a good morning.”