THE LATE AUGUST STORMS took everyone by surprise. It had been an unusually blustery, moody summer on the lonely shores of the west coast. For months, the Pacific had been restless, with winds and waves so strong they could hear them as far inland as the quad. Many said it was the coolest summer in memory. But Professor of Electrical Engineering Dr. Montgomery, affectionately nicknamed Monty, never seemed to mind. Even in the unseasonable rain, he could still be seen trundling across campus on his Vespa, waving to students and members of the HAM radio club.
The small public college was perched on the California coast, just inland from the coastal highway, which was just inland from sharp cliffs. It was too far north for a warm winter, but far enough south to catch the AM rock radio from the Bay Area. The school had a robust liberal arts department, a well-known teaching program, and a sciences department small enough to fit in one cement building. Because of the science program’s small size, its funding was scarce, but subject to little oversight. The founding of the HAM radio club, the requisitioning of the required equipment, all of it went relatively unnoticed by the admin—or by the Science Department Chair, Professor Roger “Sleepy” Steele—until it was too late. Only Kate Irwin, the lone female student in the engineering program, saw the warning signs.
Sullenly quiet but whip-smart, Kate Irwin disliked citrus fruits and eye contact. At a young age, she had skipped several grades, and been accepted to Caltech at 15. She'd been the best student in the math department there, a distinction that earned her nothing but contempt from the mostly male cohort. Her mother had left when she was small. Her father was an inattentive man, proud of the fixed image of his daughter had crystallized when she was about 8, and in letters and long-distance calls did not recognize the warning signs of her isolation and despair until it was—almost—too late. At age 17, in narrow avoidance of something more permanent, Kate dropped out. Once she received medical clearance, she ended up here, at the low-ranked college three freeway exits from her father's house.
Kate Irwin encountered Dr. Monty in her first transfer semester. Her advisor, on the advice of her psychiatrist, gave her a light courseload: one sophomore-level physics lecture, and one junior-level engineering course with labs. So it was that the spring semester EENG 311: Signals, Systems and Inference, in the tiny, all-male engineering department was joined by one silent, unstylish, permanently hunched-over 18-year-old girl.
Dr. Monty's class was instantly Kate's favorite, because of both his unconventionality and the way he treated her. He was energetic and non-judgmental, and ceaselessly enthusiastic about his field. He also blocked all her male classmates' attempts to haze her, and gave her ample opportunity to out-calculate them until they started ignoring her or clamoring to be her lab partner. His endorsement secured her intellectual safety, and his protection secured her unspoken, unswerving loyalty until the day she died.
As the weather grew hotter and the spring semester wrapped up, Kate Irwin dreaded a summer recess with nothing to occupy her destructively overactive mind, and a fall without an excuse to visit Monty's office hours. When he announced, in their penultimate Signals class, that he was starting a HAM radio club next fall, Kate didn't pick up a flier. She was not the kind of person who joined extracurricular clubs.
As usual, she lingered in the lecture hall at the end of class, and this time, to her gratification, he called her name.
"Irwin!" Monty said. "You get one of these?" He waved his green fliers for the HAM radio club. Kate shook her head. "Here," he said, holding one out to her.
Kate stumped down the stairs, conscious of the silent and now empty hall around them. She had visited Monty's office hours several times, and was prepared to follow him to the ends of the Earth, but being alone with him still felt dangerous.
Hesitantly, she took the flier.
Monty considered her with rare stillness through his thick spectacles. "Not your thing?"
Kate shrugged. "I've never tried," she said, her voice coming out more hoarse than she would have liked.
"Well? You got anything better to do?" He gave her a half-grin, attempting to tease.
But his question was ill-timed. The frank and truthful answer was no. Kate Irwin did not have anything better to do, and she was beginning to well and truly fear that she never would again. As a child, her purpose in life had been to study, learn, and excel; and at 17, she had failed. Her reintroduction into society and academia was doing little to change her belief that her life, if it was to be worth continuing, needed to change profoundly. In fact, Kate would have been interested in every single aspect of her current life being deleted and replaced with something radically different—everything, except for Monty's Signals course. And that was coming to an end in less than a week. The future beyond stretched out, sun-bleached and featureless.
To Kate's horror, she couldn't seem to formulate a reply to his question, and instead she felt a pain in her throat. Monty must have sensed some small corner of this snag, because he turned around and clacked the stack of green fliers on his podium, noisily realigning it. "But that's a stupid question. Of course you do. I just mean to say—if you can spare some time from solving the rest of Hilbert's problems..." He glanced back at her and winked. "If you can, we could use your help. You would be an asset."
His back was still turned, so Kate had time to hastily wipe her eyes. "I'll consider it. Thanks, Professor."
"No sweat, Irwin," he said. "Really, I'm the one who should be thanking you."
Kate left the lecture hall with a sense that there was—however vague, however short-term—some sort of future ahead of her. That summer she spent hours at the library reading deep into the archives of Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics, and took out subscriptions to both magazines in her father's name, so that in September, she was prepared to make herself indispensable to the nascent organization, and to Monty.
So it was that in her second year, Kate found herself spending Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the engineering lab next to Monty's office, squinting at circuit boards with Scott from the water polo team. She liked circuitry—she liked the difficult sets of rules, and the endless possibilities they generated. She liked that Monty called her "Irwin," like she was a man or a soldier. She liked that she was the best at it, of everyone in the club, and she liked it when they praised her, and asked for her help, and when Monty referred to her as "the expert." But her favorite part was the Thursday post-meeting, when the dozen-odd students piled into a handful of cars and drove to the burger joint near the cliffs. Later, when the members of the HAM radio club were interviewed, they would all attest that it was Kate Irwin who determined the trajectory of the club.
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In the tiny, tight-knit sciences program, Professor Monty was well-liked. He was forgetful about returning assignments, but he made up for this by being a forgiving grader, holding helpful tutorial sessions, and making appearances at almost every student demonstration. The science students tolerated his frequent tangents, and teased him for his flamboyant, dorkily outdated fashion choices. Overall, they found him engagingly eccentric. For instance, despite apparent ease on his motor scooter, whenever he walked, he seemed to list a little to the left. He was also hard of hearing in his left ear. And he talked so much that you could walk away from a long conversation without noticing that he had told you nothing of substance about himself.
Monty could be seen eating lunch and occasionally carpooling with Dr. Conrad, a stuffy professor from the math department. Dr. Conrad’s tests were difficult and harshly curved, but he reused the same ones each year, so his answer sheets went for a premium in the dorms. He walked with a cane, wore his glasses on a chain around his neck, and was never observed smiling or making a joke of any kind. He seemed to be an old friend of Monty’s, but the students didn't waste time speculating on someone so boring. Not even Dr. Conrad’s British accent could make him intriguing.
Dr. Montgomery, by contrast, only grew more interesting as the members of HAM radio club spent more unstructured time with him. Throughout the fall, they inventoried his unusual private habits—like how he always kept the radio on at a low volume in his office, and how he never used landlines, only payphones. His larboard skew was more noticeable later in the day, and occasionally he appeared to suffer from dizzy spells; his treatment for this was to sit down on the nearest chair or table and vigorously smack himself on the left ear. Dr. Conrad, who sometimes helped convey the HAM radio club to the burger joint, was once observed actually seizing Monty's wrist to stop him from hitting himself in the head.
Another incident of interest involved Radio-Electronics magazine. In late fall, having exhausted exploration of the extremities of the AM band, the HAM radio club was seeking ideas for what to do next. Jim, a tall, harmless geek, brought in an old issue of Radio-Electronics featuring the MITS Altair 8080 computer kit, and proposed this as their second semester project. Everyone was immediately taken with this idea, and they ran it next door, to Monty's office. He was standing on top of his desk when they entered, doing something with one of his ceiling tiles. (This did not strike his students as odd.) Excitedly, they held the magazine up to him and started jabbering about the project. Oddly, he did not respond with his trademark enthusiasm, and flipped through the magazine slowly before closing it. They stopped clamoring, and Jim asked him what he thought. "The kit's expensive. I'd have to talk to Dr. Steele." (That in itself was unusual, since they all exclusively referred to the Science Department Chair as "Dr. Sleepy," including Monty.) With the Intel chip, the whole kit was less than $800, which was decidedly within their budget. "Now get out of here and go do some work." He shooed them out with the magazine. They inquired about the Altair later, and he gave vague answers until they stopped asking.
Even though they soon set their hearts on the infamous antenna, Monty's hedging about the Altair struck them because he actually seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about computers. Computer science wasn't part of his curriculum, or the Sciences Program at all, because the course catalog hadn't been updated since roughly the time of the GI bill. But Monty seemed well-versed in the topic, and in his rambling explanations he would sometimes begin to compare the task at hand to a particular computer engineering protocol, before trailing off with an uncharacteristic "...Well, anyway. Nevermind." As the year went on, some of the boys in the HAM radio club began to prod the question of Monty's unclear computer science background. They didn't get any real information, because he always blithely diverted the conversation, just the way he deftly deflected any talk of his personal history. But this void of information was, as any good intelligence officer knows, data in and of itself.
A mythos of conjecture began to grow around Monty's 'mysterious' past. Kate Irwin first learned of these theories in the winter of her second year, in Scott’s friend Lucas’s car, en route to burgers. Water Polo Scott enumerated the evidence because he relished the rare opportunity to tell Kate Irwin something she didn't already know.
"Most public sector people don't know about computer stuff," he explained, twisted around in the passenger seat with the white sun behind him. "The real computer research goes down in the defense industry. He’s probably ex-military, or even NASA.”
"Hm," said Kate. He was right, and she disliked that someone else had noticed something about Monty that she had not.
“He’s probably deaf in one ear because of the accident,” Scott went on, tapping his left ear.
"What accident?" Kate asked.
"Well, I dunno," said Scott. “Like, an accident. Like an experiment gone wrong or something.”
“And that’s why he can’t talk about his past,” Lucas, driving, added.
"Do you notice that? He never talks about it." Scott said, turning back to Kate.
"I suppose," said Kate, hedging less convincingly than she thought she was. Monty was always vague about himself, including where he'd studied. That, Kate had noticed, and unfortunately, she was extremely curious about it too. As a female dropout from a prestigious institution, Kate had a powerful but shame-ridden interest in where people got their degrees; as her intellectual idol, Monty and his CV held a particular glowing-hot-metal fascination that she did not touch. In her internal struggle to restrain her curiosity, she told herself that if his life could be happy regardless of where he was educated, then perhaps so could hers. "Maybe his alma mater or his old jobs aren't secret-secret. Maybe he's just embarrassed about them," she offered.
"Maybe his credentials are fake," Lucas said to Scott, raising his eyebrows. "Did we consider that theory?"
"They're not fake," Kate said hotly, at the same time as Scott said doubtfully, "No way." He glanced at Kate and chose not to follow up on her tone; she was kind of psycho. "He's not a fraud. He's like, a genius," he said. "I bet he was designing super top-secret satellite shit, and then the government wiped his memory."
Lucas laughed, but Scott insisted he was serious, and then they got into a semi-real argument about the CIA's brainwashing capabilities. It wasn't the last time Kate heard this type of speculation about Monty, but she resisted participating after that—and it wasn't like anyone had any real evidence anyway.
Kate simply didn't accept the premise that Dr. Montgomery's autobiographical diffidence must, necessarily, be concealing something. She was "Katie the maven," the wunderkind of the HAM radio club and its de facto operations director; as such, she spent more time in Monty's office than any other student; therefore, she knew him better than anyone else in the club, and therefore any other student on campus. (She did not presume authority over the other faculty, Monty's peers—though Kate usually presumed herself smarter than most adults, in matters of emotional intimacy, she considered herself developmentally delayed, if not actually defective.) In their relationship, it didn't matter that he didn't really talk about himself, and that she didn't really talk about herself. For Kate, working on a project together was synonymous with intimacy. A meeting of the minds at a single external point was more meaningful, more genuine than any banal discussion of the self could ever be—discussions which could only ever approximate her true feelings in imprecise and insufficient language. And she felt that in that regard, she and Monty were the same.
But as time passed, she did develop a theory of her own; not about Monty, but about Dr. Conrad. That winter, she obtained special permission to take Conrad's 400-level abstract algebra course. Much as she adored Monty, Conrad’s static, impersonal teaching style was more familiar and comfortable. He had a foreigner's discomfited air, like an alien on a small planet, that she identified with. And she could tell he was smart. Far too smart for their backwater school. He sometimes mentioned his education at Cambridge, and his old research in group theory and geometric topology. Once they discussed recent advances in proving the Poincaré conjecture, and Kate wondered why he wasn’t one of the people making those discoveries, why he was here instead. Perhaps projecting her own sadness, she felt a kinship with that missed opportunity. She wondered if something had happened that kept him in obscurity. But what, she had no idea—Kate Irwin didn't yet know of anything that could be more important than your vocation.
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Later, after the exosphere antenna debacle, it would be said that it was the students’ idea. A discussion of cosmic microwave background radiation, most of them attested, led to a discussion of the Holmdel Horn Antenna, which led to the idea of recreating it at a smaller scale, perhaps using updated techniques. Nobody in the club could pinpoint where that idea came from: a few of them thought it was Ned who came up with it, and several of them agreed that it was Kate Irwin who was ultimately responsible for making it a success; none of them would attribute the idea to Monty.
Wherever the idea began, it was Professor Monty who made it the top priority for the HAM radio club's second semester, and Kate who led the effort. Under her direction, they spent months perfecting it. A corrugated horn and a retro horn-reflector antenna design were both considered and discarded before Kate proposed a more modern shrouded parabolic antenna. Jim proposed using chicken wire for a reflector, making him the antenna genius for a while; Kate seethed privately and sought another innovation to reassert her authority. Her academic regimen was not the only one that suffered that term. Monty's radio acolytes spent every scrap of spare time on the roof of the Sciences Building, testing, and modifying, and listening, and getting sunburnt as the spring turned into summer. In June, they declared it functional, lashed it to the roof of an old Dodge Travco, piled in, and drove across the desert to a UFO-watching festival in Nevada. Monty navigated, staunchly refusing to consult any maps, and Conrad drove, knuckles white on the steering wheel the entire trip.
Kate didn't realize that this trip had occupied her every waking thought until it was finally here, and she was sitting in the RV's back booth as Ned and Lucas played Rummy 500 while Jim and Scott earnestly discussed whether the Apollo 11 mission had been faked, and if so, whether Monty had been involved, and the desert rolled by outside the window. But it was here now. In fact, it was already 5% over. And she didn't know what her expectations for this trip actually were. It seemed that her expectation was everything. This trip was going to mark the end of this wretched period of her young life and the beginning of her adult life, of her rise to America's pioneering female engineer and the Ada Lovelace of the 20th century. How, precisely, her antenna was going to furnish this inciting event, she wasn't sure yet. As she gazed at the desert, wondering how she was meant to seize this moment and become the fully realized person she was meant to be, Ned asked her if she wanted to be dealt into Rummy 500, so for the moment, she settled for playing cards.
In the blue, dusty desert night, among the hippies and the tin-hats and their telescopes, the HAM radio club set up their huge, homemade antenna. And as the moon rose, they listened to the static, searching for a solid signal among the noise from the stars.
Kate and Monty were the last to give up. It was past midnight and she was cold and tired beyond linear thinking, but too excited to sleep, and unwilling to end the night without results. She hadn't really expected to hear anything unforeseen with the exosphere antenna, like military stealth plane tests or a deep space radio signal, but she was waiting for something that affirmed the importance of the project—a discovery would have been nice, but so too would have been excitement or an expression of pride from Dr. Monty. Or a meteor shower. Or someone offering her pot. But everyone else was asleep by the time Dr. Conrad said stiffly, "I think that's enough for tonight." While she and Monty unplugged and re-coiled everything, and stacked up the heavy crates of equipment, Conrad stood by with his arms folded, almost shivering; as always, he seemed unhappy to be in the place he found himself. She bade the two professors good night and climbed inside the Travco. While the boys camped in tents on the hard desert ground, Kate, the only girl, got the privilege of sleeping inside. She lay on the hard, flat bunk inside her borrowed sleeping bag, and stared up through the louver shutter at the stars, trying to settle down enough to sleep. She was lying there when she heard the conversation outside:
"...of this is smart or prudent."
"...Because the kids might—?" Monty. His voice was hushed, but not quite whispering.
"No, not because of the kids! They don't know any better!" Conrad. Actually whispering, and harder to hear, but his intonation was unmistakable.
"Then what?"
"You! You should know better! You are intentionally prodding at something that should be left alone!"
Monty made a familiar scoffing sound. "Science isn't like that, dude. The question is there. I have to know."
"Don't 'dude' me," Conrad hissed back. "You don't have to. You want to!"
"I have to! You don't get to ignore a question because it's risky or some other bullshit like that."
"Yes, you do!" Conrad was almost speaking aloud now.
"Do you? Because I don't! And you know that about me!"
"...I do."
"...And?"
A cautious pause. More carefully: "And it worries me... that you're being... imprudent. This... life... is tenuous. And hard-won. We threw away every—"
Monty interrupted, barely trying to stay quiet anymore: "Oh, so I'm supposed to just do what you say forever, all because you—"
"Because I what? Because I what?" Conrad hissed, angry again.
"...That's not fair, Hermann."
"Yes. Exactly."
Monty made a noise of disgust. His footsteps crunched away across the rocky ground, followed by Conrad's tripled footsteps. "Imagine you do get a signal," he went on, following Monty into the inaudible distance. "What will..."
Kate couldn't make much sense of their argument. As she considered the possibilities, and wondered why Monty had called Conrad by a name she'd never heard before, she finally drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep. In the morning, she couldn't remember any details of the conversation, just the way they'd talked to each other.
Thus ended Kate's first full, successful year of school since age 15—an A or A- in every class, a successful extracurricular project—and that summer, after she returned from the desert trip, her mood plunged catastrophically. Her success frightened her because it felt so tenuous, and she had no confidence she could recreate it in September. It was a fluke, and most of it—her temporarily improved self-esteem, her reason for dragging herself to campus even when she didn't feel able—was due to Monty. The overheard conversation in the desert night had awakened a paranoia. What if he didn't come back in the fall? What if he caught a terminal disease? What if he got hit by a bus and died? A worry stubbornly lodged in her throat, unwilling to be coughed up. Who could she explain it to? Her father, who spent all his time in his bedroom building model planes? Her aunt, who visited for a week to mend all their fraying linens? Kate saw him disappearing—not getting disappeared by some shadowy organization, like Scott and his moon landing paranoia—but getting swallowed up by the ocean or getting in a car and flying away down the coast; if his friend Conrad thought he didn't belong here, at a quiet coastal college, then she couldn't imagine where he did belong; she feared that Monty was like her, a perennial misfit with no place among people, unable to conform and never able to understand why. She had tried to make the antenna, but it had failed to change anything; she had wanted to make herself indispensable to him, so that he would never leave. But it was only the HAM radio club, after all.
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At last, the fall semester arrived, in a gust of rain and unseasonable flooding. The blue skies gave over to stormclouds foreshadowing the distant but oncoming winter, and the surf pounded the seacliffs like a tolling church bell. When the first day of classes arrived, Kate flew down the half-flooded freeway in her father's Ford.
She parked in the student lot and splashed across the quad, soaking her tights and slipping in her ill-fitting kitten heels. The campus was drenched, with ankle-deep puddles covering the parking lots and storm drains gargling joyfully. She approached the Sciences Building from behind, scanning the faculty-staff parking lot. Then she spotted it. The white Vespa, parked in its customary spot.
When her classes finally ended at 6 PM, Kate sloshed back across the river delta that campus had become and climbed the concrete steps of the Sciences Building—past the white Vespa (still parked), past the departing students (who ignored her) and the professors with their bags (who greeted her), kicked off her stupid, slippery shoes, and ran up the stairwell to the top floor.
Outside, the storm had brought the evening on prematurely, and the early darkness gave the Engineering wing a tired, late-semester air—the light of after-hours studying in the exam period. All was quiet and dark—except the distant murmur of AM rock radio, and the light on at the end of the hallway. Though his door was open, the errant electrical engineer was not in his office. Shoes still in hand, Kate peered into the engineering lab next door, where she had built her glorious, useless antenna. Deserted—clean—awaiting her return. Then she heard wet, irregular footsteps—
"Katie!" It was Professor Monty, equally soaked and equally happy to see her. He beamed at her from behind fogged and rain-flecked glasses. "What are you doing here?"
Some time in the spring, he had dropped "Irwin" and started calling her "Katie" instead. She didn't mind, but no one had called her that since grade school.
"I could ask you the same thing," she said, hugging her heels to her chest.
"Well wouldn't you like to know, huh?" he said, folding his arms. He was holding a bright yellow wire cutter and a roll of dental floss. After an appropriately dramatic pause, he jerked his head back in the direction he'd come from. "I have a surprise for you guys. But you can get a sneak peek, since you're the boss. Wanna see?" Happily, Kate followed him to the end of the hall, abandoned her shoes and her bag at the base of the ladder, and climbed up onto the roof, where he showed her his summer project.
The Sciences Department knew that Kate Irwin was exceptional, perhaps even a genius in the making. They were lucky to have her there at all, they agreed, even if she was a girl, and somewhat unstable. Truthfully, she should have been at Caltech or Stanford, getting head-hunted by the DOD to revolutionize satellite technology. Monty knew it; Conrad knew it; even Dr. Sleepy knew it. But what they did not know—what Dr. Montgomery had successfully kept quiet for months now—was that her homemade exosphere antenna had already started a revolution on the roof of the Sciences Building.
Late that night, the flooding began in earnest. It was the first of its kind, in that part of California, but not the last. At the Irwin home, Kate watched late-night vintage horror on KTXL with her father. A few miles away, Dr. Conrad sat at home with their cat; he was trying to read a book, but kept looking anxiously at the telephone. On the roof of the Sciences Building in the rain, there stood no fewer than twenty new exosphere antennas, growing like a colony of mushrooms, each identical to Kate Irwin's and tenderly calibrated by Dr. Montgomery—still unnoticed by the authorities, although not for much longer. Passers-by on that rainy September night might have noticed the white Vespa still parked outside, or the light still on in the top corner office. They might have wondered what Monty was working on, so late.
Only he knew what he was listening for.
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