by Mendy Sobol
“Listen, Toby. Those ROTC lieutenants aren’t in ‘Nam so they can make things easier on the troops. They’re over there to kill people until they get killed—or until they come home like Ian. With ROTC, Nixon’s trading tuitions for lives, and as long as ROTC’s on campus we’re helping him do it. No one’s talking about blowing anything up or burning anything down,” I said, looking sideways at Meg, “but after what happened to Ian, we’ve got to do something.”
Toby’s expression was unusual for him. His face, so young and alive, sagged like that of an old man, and there was the same sadness around his eyes I’d seen on the mornings after his dreams of military school. His voice was unusual too, breaking between words as he struggled to control it. “I know exactly what you’re talkin’ about,” he said, “and you can count me out.”
Perhaps because of his military school experience, Toby typically hid behind humor, avoiding commitment to anything. For the same reason, his one unalterable commitment was to nonviolence. I respected and loved him for his gentleness. Because of the history I grew up with, because of the war that began in the shadows when I was in elementary school, growing by my senior year in college into a conflagration that seemed about to consume everyone, because of Ian, I was no longer sure about my commitment to nonviolence. I thought about the night in high school when I heard a TV news anchor saying the death toll of United States soldiers in Vietnam had reached one hundred. What was the body count now? Forty thousand? Fifty thousand? Did anyone even know? Well I knew one thing—I didn’t want to be another good German.
And then there was Meg. Toby’s feelings were bruised, but he’d bounce back. Meg’s hurt was much deeper. I wasn’t sure which of my two best friends I agreed with, and unlike them my thoughts about violence were vague, unformed. But in the end I chose Meg, perhaps because I thought she needed me more, or perhaps because I was in love with her.
I still had to give it one more try, though I realized later that I should have waited until Toby and I were alone in the Physics Lab or the back room at the Beef ‘n’ Bun, waited until everyone cooled off.
“C’mon, Toby,” I said, “no one’s gonna do anything crazy. Besides, Meg’s always backed us. We’ve gotta back her.”
Toby stared at me as though Meg wasn’t there. “This isn’t about friendship. It’s not about who backs who. And I can’t do this. Not for you, not for anyone.” And turning away from us, he walked out of the kitchen, out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
Meg and I spent the next month visiting dormitories and apartments, teachers and administrators, arguing passionately to anyone who would listen, that ROTC should be banned from the Wellston campus. We talked and talked, through days and nights with little sleep. Students and professors listened patiently and with sympathy, but when it came to taking action against ROTC there was little consensus and less commitment.
For the first time since the day we met on the first day of our freshman year, Toby and I hardly saw each other. We continued our projects on Bruin, but working with Meg made any schedule impossible for me. At the apartment, the Physics Lab, and our home-away-from-home, the Beef ‘n’ Bun, our paths rarely crossed. After awhile we began leaving each other messages on Bruin, updating and summarizing our newly separate work on computer linking, advising each other about meetings, or simply saying when we’d be having lunch.
Tesla— Review my last entries. I really think I made some progress on the data compression program. Meet me 1700 hours at Beef ‘n’ Bun for dinner and discussion? Toby
Toby— Data compression program looks good. Ad Hoc ROTC Action Coalition meeting 1730 hours. Can’t make dinner. Can you walk Broadway when you get home? Beat the machines for me. Paul
Tesla— Crushed by Joker’s Wild. Machines have gained the upper hand. Bruin in open rebellion. Not sure it will leave you this message! Need rescue immed….
Toby— Meg and I meeting with rep from Wellston Trustees tonight. No time to review latest program changes. Sorry. Be home late. Stay up and have pizza with us? Paul
Our lives soon fell into this new routine. But no routine could hold for long when events kept overtaking us and all our plans.
At a time when everyone thought the Paris peace talks were making progress and perhaps the war’s end was at hand, President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, supported a coup in Cambodia. Lon Nol, the general who replaced Prince Sihanouk, the leader of Cambodia’s monarchy, immediately played his American-assigned role. On April 30, at Lon Nol’s invitation, U.S. and South Vietnamese troops invaded neighboring Cambodia for the stated purpose of cutting off Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army supply lines. The invasion massively expanded the war, the involvement of American soldiers, and the bloodshed.
Angry, often violent, demonstrations erupted across the country and on college campuses in every state. On May 4, Meg and I watched on television as Ohio National Guardsmen shot thirteen students during a demonstration at Kent State University. Some were protesters; some were just walking from one class to the next. Nine were wounded. Four were dead. On television we heard the names. Allison Krause. Jeffrey Miller. Sandy Scheuer. Bill Schroeder. The last, a member of the campus ROTC battalion. We believed the killings were intentional, a message from Nixon: Behave, children. Children, behave.
One after another, colleges called strikes, suspending classes, exams, graduations, in outraged protest of the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State killings. Strikers believed all their efforts should focus on ending the war. Completing courses in chemistry and anthropology, philosophy and English literature seemed pointless, irrelevant in the face of mass murder in Southeast Asia and Ohio.
Wellston students voted to strike on the night of May 4. Earlier that evening in a speech at Franklin Hall, New York Senator Jacob Javits called for “…an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the one issue which has done more to divide this country than anything since the Civil War!” After Javits’s speech, 3,000 students massed outside Franklin Hall on The Green, a grassy quadrangle surrounded by buildings dating as far back as the first American Revolution. Two lines formed, one yes, one no. The line favoring the strike stretched the length of The Green; the line opposed, half as long.
Meg, no longer a student and no longer entitled to vote, stood with me, holding my hand while I voted “Yes,” showing my Wellston I.D. card to the student government representatives in charge. Then we climbed to the roof of Robertson House, watching the eerie lamp-lit election continuing below throughout the night. By a count of 1,895 to 884, the strike was on. On May 5, the Wellston faculty joined its students, voting 247 to 47 in favor of the strike. Final exams were declared optional, freeing most of the Wellston community so we could begin working full-time to end the war. By the morning of May 6, Meg had a newly receptive and galvanized audience of striking students ready to take action against ROTC.
Toby— I typed on one of Bruin’s IBM keyboards— Couldn’t find you at home or Beef ‘n’ Bun. ROTC Action meeting tonight. Meet me at Franklin Hall 2100 hours. THIS IS THE BIG ONE. Paul
To this day I can’t explain why I left that final message. Maybe I hoped Toby would stop us. Maybe I hoped Toby would change his mind and join us. Mostly, I wanted him to be there. If I hadn’t sent the message, Toby would have spent a quiet evening with Bruin. Toby wouldn’t have come to Franklin Hall, wouldn’t have crossed Taylor Street afterward.
Toby would still be alive.
Chapter Nine: Paul
After Toby’s death, Meg returned to the SMC, whose members
unanimously asked her to represent them on the Strike Steering Committee. She was now a general in an army that had largely deserted. Because of the strike there was no real graduation, just a small subdued ceremony, and by June, most students had left for summer jobs and vacation. Those who remained continued working against the war, but soon Wellston’s campus felt like a ghost town.
Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State. The Strike. The May 9 March on Washing
ton where 120,000 gathered peacefully, protesting the war. At the time, these events and the demonstrations of unity and strength that followed seemed to galvanize student opposition to the war. In fact, they signaled its zenith. Perhaps if those tragedies had taken place in the fall, giving Meg and other activists nationwide three full seasons with a captive audience of students, the movement might have endured. As it turned out, summer’s lure was too strong for all except the most committed. By the following fall, troop withdrawals, the prospect of a volunteer army, exhaustion, drugs, and the simple passage of time drained much of the energy from the antiwar movement.
The highest number Selective Service called in 1970 was 195. Toby and I, at 197 and 198, would never have been drafted. The wealthy and well connected, regardless of their lottery numbers, still managed to avoid military service. Nixon, disgraced and driven from office by his orchestration of the Watergate break-in cover-up, would eventually repay a small part of his karmic debt, but that was four years away. Incredibly, the war wouldn’t end for another five.
The College of Science held a memorial for Toby in Prospect Park, a small green space at the rundown end of Benevolent Street. On the first warm evening of June, Meg and I, together with a dozen or so of Toby’s friends and classmates, stood close by the park’s giant statue of Thomas Paine looking south over Butler. The polluted skyline framed the city in fiery sunset, dramatically backlighting our small circle. Dogs growled and tussled at the other end of the park, but Broadway Joe sat obediently by my side. As the evening breeze freshened, carrying with it the smell of fresh-mown clover, a Wellston chaplain led the gathering in the Lord’s Prayer, remembered from a time when each grammar school day began with its recitation. Meg and I stood together, faces tight, eyes dry, words unspoken.
The stability of our relationship had been based on the odd-numbered geometry of three. With only two of us remaining, our friendship fell apart. At the summer solstice, Meg moved out of her Bowen Street bedroom and back into the house at number 5 Hope. I left Wellston a week after Meg left Bowen Street, never returning to Butler, Bruin, or the Beef ‘n’ Bun. I went home to New Jersey with Broadway Joe, but within a few days knew I couldn’t remain in the east. Before the turning of the leaves, dog and master made their way to California.
Meg and I stay in touch, exchanging cards each May, from east coast to west, west coast to east. Last year she sent me a photo of herself leaning against the rail at Belmont Park, wavy hair cropped short, a silky mix of spun silver with strands of dark onyx. Neither of us has married. In 1985, a very old Broadway Joe passed quietly in his sleep.
In time I came back to the dream I’d shared with Toby, enrolling at Stanford, earning a graduate degree in a newly minted discipline, Computer Science. IPI, Integrated Processing International, hired me straight out of graduate school. Two years in, I quit, sick of the long hours and sure I could make my living at the racetrack with Thoroughbred, my programming skills, and the best computers the era had to offer. Six months later, I was broke and begging IPI for my old job. I guess we just got lucky that day at Narragansett.
Today, I find myself the soon-to-be-retired head of IPI’s Internet Innovation Division. My colleagues threw me a surprise goodbye party yesterday and gave me a gold-plated smartphone as a farewell token. I’ve enjoyed my collaborators and enjoyed my work, year-by-year advancing humanity’s digital progress. But the best part of my job has been the time I spend pursuing my own research project without coworkers or supervision. It got two lines in one of IPI’s Annual Reports:
Paul Simmons’s research into historical data retrieval through Internet electron analysis (HYDRA) is in its infancy, but offers unlimited potential. Commercial applications of HYDRA technology include lost data retrieval, law enforcement computer forensics, and historical research.
I wrote my PhD dissertation on the theory that every entry made on a computer remains fixed in the subatomic matrix of the machine itself. I theorized that, on the quantum level, programming makes changes in the electronic structure of computer hardware, generating a quantum hologram that could be viewed using software I dubbed HYDRA. HYDRA would, theoretically, make any information created on a computer retrievable despite deletions, disc removal, and all other means of data wiping.
The idea wasn’t new. Since the early 1950s, psychic researchers speculated that objects in the vicinity of dramatic events make magnetic recordings. Given the proper stimuli, the objects periodically “replay” the events in a manner partially detectable to the senses of observers. This explanation seemed plausible in cases where spectral forms of the ungrateful dead haunted scenes of horrific crimes. Simply put, objects, especially those with magnetic fields, are tape recorders. I argued that this type of electromagnetic taping was more accessible in the case of computers, since the initial events (entries) were already electrical in nature. In my thesis, The Ghost in the Machine, I hypothesized that via the Internet, accessing the embedded memories of every computer currently online should be possible.
Of the three professors on my doctoral review committee, one loved my thesis, and one, calling it “fraudulent, facetious, and personally repugnant,” threatened to have me expelled. The third had her graduate assistant sign off on it because she was busy writing a grant. On the strength of this shaky two-to-one majority, I barely earned my PhD.
At the party my friends in the Computer Science Department threw for me that night, when they all got a little drunk on rum and Cokes and asked me to stand up and say a few words, I knew who I wanted to thank—
“You’ve all been great, and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me—the help with research and typing, the encouragement and support, the No-Doz and coffee. I also want to thank someone you’ve never met, someone who can’t be here tonight. When I was in college a guy named Toby Jessup was my best friend. He deserves this degree as much as I do. Because way back in 1970, he gave me the inspiration for my thesis. In our moment of greatest desperation, when all seemed lost, Toby said, ‘If we could get into the atoms of this machine, we’d find everything!’”
Now, at the end of my career, my starry-eyed grad-school thesis is almost a reality. And as I get closer, the dream of that cold, May, New England night comes more often. In the lab HYDRA is a success, retrieving newly erased data from the very atoms of a PC. All that remains is turning the same trick with long-lost entries from a remote computer somewhere on the Net. And for that electronic journey, I know where I’ll be going. Back to Butler, back to Wellston, back to Bruin. Back to visit Toby the only way I can.
I log on, beginning my search. I’d read an article in the Wellston Alumni Journal about two undergrads who’d discovered Bruin stored in the Physics Department basement, resurrected it, and added internet connections so curiosity seekers could check out the ancient machine. Finding that old colossus doesn’t take long. Altered almost beyond recognition, but still there, still Bruin. I initiate HYDRA, and wait.
Program running. Enter date and time of search: September 23, 1966, 1600 hours.
Enter password: Fireball.
And there we are, Toby and Tesla, typing our first halting entries in COBOL and FORTRAN.
Quickly I scroll through the years. It’s all there. The programs. The experiments. The ridiculous course projects. The Engineering Department blackout. The messages: Tesla— Meet me at the Beef ‘n’ Bun. Fireball dies today! Toby. I hardly notice the sunrise over the Sierras through my office window. I see instead lead gray skies filled with sleet. As I used to do so long ago, I spend the night with Bruin and Toby.
Oh man—there’s Thoroughbred! All of our past performances data for our big day at Narragansett, too! And that’s where it disappeared! What were those horses’ names? The only one I remember is Tony Anthony. Let’s see… the data should reappear in a few seconds. I might be able to figure out why it vanished and how we retrieved it.
Huh. The next entry is from later that day—some grad student running numbers for his physics thesis. Everythi
ng else is where it’s supposed to be. Weird! Is the real glitch in my memory? Did we print the winners’ names before the data disappeared? Well, y’know what—HYDRA’s a time machine! I’ll scroll back, copy the data, scroll forward, and paste it in after the glitch where I think it’s supposed to be. I may be messing with the historical record, but who else gives a damn except me. Besides, it’s a way better story that way.
Okay… fixed it! A little gift to myself, to Toby, and to my less-than-perfect memory of a perfect day!
I move on. And too quickly, I’m at the end. May 6, 1970. My last entry: Toby— Couldn’t find you at home or Beef ‘n’ Bun. ROTC Action meeting tonight. Meet me at Franklin Hall 2100 hours. THIS IS THE BIG ONE. Paul. And Toby’s final work, a few more lines on computer linking before he reluctantly logged out, heading for Franklin Hall.
My throat is tight, my eyes damp. A tear slides off my cheek, disappearing somewhere inside my keyboard.
On impulse I type: Toby— I miss you. Paul
And instantly a new line appears on my screen: Tesla— If you miss me so much why don’t you get your ass down here and help me with this program? Toby
