The roads dipped and turned irrationally, even exuberantly, as they hugged the lake and gently combed their way through the trees. Somebody had given these roads a free pass to behave however they pleased, for these were not ordinary collections of asphalt and rock — these were the paths of academia. These were the silly highways driven by deans and professors, by alums and industry bigshots, by businessmen attending seminars, by state politicians and by researchers with their Big Ideas.

At times, students traveled these roads, on their way to class, or various drinking and sporting engagements.

The roads went everywhere worth going. They went from the boathouse up to the library overlooking the lake. They went from the medical campus through the engineering campus to the humanities quad. They went from the town up to the strip, bedecked with bars, clothing stores and restaurants serving cuisine that was washed out and Americanized in a way that made the students feel comfortable.

The roads were the veins and arteries of the university, and they were hard not to love, particularly in autumn.

Kendra Sundrawati sat on a very large reddish rock overlooking the curviest road, the road that hugged the lake's shore. The lake's chilled wind blew through her hair, tussling a few dark stray strands and making her involuntarily retreat into her fleece windbreaker. In her arms, she cradled an engineering textbook, and a clipboard with an agenda.

At her feet were a pile of letters from Indonesian relatives congratulating her on her upcoming graduation and her new job with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They were carefully weighed down by a small rock so they'd stay put. For some reason, it didn't occur to her that she should put the letters on the clipboard.

The agenda was pristine. It had been laid out by a program normally reserved for computer-assisted design.

At the top of the agenda was a name: Ralph D. Michaelson.

As Michaelson drove up the interstate leading into town, Kendra became increasingly worried about how the presentation was going to go. She gathered her belongings, and walked toward the speaker's podium.

Michaelson had been invited. She knew Michaelson was prepared.

The university had filled it with water, and now it worked.

Kendra smiled at the pitcher for a moment, imagining it in context: speaker, lectern, lake, audience, chairs, sound system, water.

Good.

She looked up and down at the rows of folding chairs — they were twenty by ten, stretching back over the mostly flat grassy field, looking toward the podium, looking out over the crisply rippling blue expanse of the lake, looking away from the School of Enginering.

She tidied up her hair, which was dark and flowing, and perfectly suited to her buttery brown complexion. She wore a Palm Pilot, stuffed with information. She carried two pens and a technical pencil.

It was, according to the Pilot, 12:30pm, Friday.

Kendra's palms were sweating. She loved Ralph Michaelson for what he had done.

A week before, Kendra had seen two students doing exactly that, on the relatively fresh grave of engineering Professor David Younkle, a man she had never met. She had stared with horror through the whole process, fascinated and sickened. The woman on the grave was tall and thin, with delicate oval-rimmed glasses, tightly cropped blond hair and long black skirt. The man was a bit shorter, and stocky, and he moved with what seemed like effortless grace. Kendra gasped, involuntarily, but a unmuffled car drove by blocks away, and the sound of her breath was swallowed by the night. Kendra was shocked. Kendra had been shocked two weeks earlier when she'd spied another couple doing pretty much the same thing. The graveyard was convenient that way.

Lying approximately six feet under, Professor David Younkle's body rested comfortably, decomposing at its own leisurely pace, rather enjoying the opportunity to slowly return to its constituent elements in a place where no one would hassle it to "move" or "think" or "talk" or "publish research papers." The body was happy there, and it didn't even particularly mind the tramping around of the bloody stupid undergrads who so often disturbed the peace of the dead.

The grass over the grave had been recently cut. Dew formed in the evening.

It was 12:45pm when Michaelson's car pulled into the lot, which radiated invisible waves of heat off its black asphalt despite the cool of the autumn air. Kendra ran to the car, and got the door, her hand shaking.

"Mr. Michaelson, hi, welcome. Thanks so much for coming today." Kendra smiled up at the man. He was tall, ramrod straight, and at least 6'2," if not taller. His black goatee was neatly trimmed, and he wore the kind of rumpled blue suit that immediately put people at ease. His sunken brown eyes seemed to burn like coals, though, and that caught Kendra off-guard.

He shook her hand, and thanked her for the kind invitation, and wondered, will we be in a classroom on a day as beautiful as this?

"Uh, well," said Kendra, "I kind of took the initiative on that one, and had it moved out to Lake Observatory Park. Do you remember the old stone lectern?"

Michaelson smiled a thin-lipped smile. He remembered it, he said.

"Yes, well, I thought it was such a nice day... can I take your things? Can I hold on to anything for you until the speech? Do you need anything to eat, or drink?"

No, thanks, I'm all set, said Michaelson. I'll just walk over to the lectern and gather my thoughts by myself for a moment, if that's okay.

"Of course!" said Kendra. "I'll be over there to greet people as they show up. We should be on track for 1pm, I think."

Great, said Michealson. That's great.

"Hi, everyone. Please settle in. Mr. Michaelson has come a long way today to share some of his wisdom with us." She gave Michaelson a smile, but was immediately chilled to see his flat, affectless reaction. "At any rate, my name is Kendra Sundrawati, and I'm the president of the Undergraduate Society of Engineers. As most of you probably know, we're the nation's seventh oldest student engineering society, and we meet every Wednesday at Cloth Hall, 7pm-9pm. Everyone is welcome."

"Mr. Michaelson is a legend," Kendra said, her voice inadvertently pitching itself to a higher level, "and it's hard for me to describe how exciting it was to receive his email confirming he'd be able to make it today. His accomplishments in the world of engineering speak for themselves, so I won't bore you with stories you've already heard a dozen times — I'll leave that to him."

Polite laughter from the audience. No reaction from Michaelson. Kendra's voice wavered as she finished the introduction.

"At any rate, here's Ralph Michaelson, one of our most distinguished alums. Please give him a warm welcome!"

Michaelson rose, his dark form stretching out over the lake. He shook Kendra's hand, thanked her perfuntorily, and positioned himself behind the lectern. The applause from the audience continued in gentle lapping waves. He looked out and saw the constituent elements of the engineering school.

He basked for a moment, before catching himself. Their eyes were warm, their applause sincere.

Kendra stood at his side for a moment before remembering where she was. She sat down quickly, and almost fell off her chair.

Michaelson cleared his throat. The portable sound system — oh, God damn and curse the wretched things known as "portable sound systems!" — actually worked. The noise of his clearing throat richocheted through the assembled group and muffled it with a buttery layer of anticipation.

"I'm here today to tell you a very special story," said Michaelson, discarding the padded formalities he'd originally planned to open with. He was a bird, soaring — he was free to improvise and riff. Practice had set him free.

"I'm here to tell you a story you might be able to relate to. Imagine, if you can, a helpless little engineering undergrad, running madly from class to class, weighed down by a graphing calculator, laptop computer and one or two hundred pounds of books. Probably not that hard, eh?"

Members of the audience grinned in recognition.

"At any rate, that was me. It was an interesting few years. But, somehow, when I wasn't in class, I managed to tinker — I managed to build something in my freetime, based on my own research. And when I built it, I did what I knew I should do: I took it to this school. To went to my professor at the time, Dr. David Younkle."

A respectful murmur of memory went through the crowd."

"So it was with all my crudely done illustrations and calculations that I dashed into Younkle's office. I caught him on a lunch break, but he took the time to hear me out. And as most of you know, what I had built was the somewhat crude forerunner of the tri-stage Naomi fuel processor that helped us finally get a manned mission to Mars."

Everyone knew this. The faculty and all the serious students knew about how Michaelson had cobbled together the first working model in his spare time, how it had revolutionized solid-fuel propulsion units, how he had named it for his first, tragically drowned girlfriend, and how its development and production had eventualy elevated him from a junior mechanical engineer in a small firm to the chief engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"It took Professor Younkle only a few minutes to pore through my drawings and models before he reached his historic conclusion." Michaelson paused, and cleared his throat. He reached for the pitcher of water — hesistated, halfway there, and retracted his hand, allowing it to rest on his speech once again. Though his fingers now blocked the text, it was of little concern — he'd had this particular passage memorized for twenty years.

"'Mr. Michaelson,'" said Michaelson, in a raspy, high-pitched voice that almost perfectly mimicked that of the dead professor, "'I don't see anything here that we haven't already got models for at the graduate labs. If you apply yourself a bit more dilligently to your assigned work, perhaps you could one day join the team, and make a meaningful contribution.'"

Wind whipped through the hair of all those assembled by the lake. Someone's old-fashioned hat blew off, and bounced across the grass. No one ran after it.

Michaelson cleared his throat, and continued. "Of course, some of you probably remember the the accident that burned three graduate students about a year later. As near as I can tell, that was that high-hatted moron Younkle trying to recreate my work without actually understanding it. All he would have needed to have done was asked me about it."

"Of course," continued Michaelson, "that might have been difficult, as I'd temporarily dropped out of the university, and moved out to Memphis, where I began a heroin habit that nearly killed me, twice. I was hard to reach at that point. For all I know, he'd been calling me throughout the development process, reaching a series of stinking, roach-infested drug houses just moments after I'd already cleared out, on my way to somewhere even more horrible."

The lake reflected sunlight, and a gull plunged toward the water, aiming for something beneath the waves.

"I managed to re-enroll in school, and I even finished my studies here. That's why I'm a graduate. When I got out into industry, they put me on tasks as dull and repetitive as you could possibly imagine. I loathed every moment of it, and there were times when I wish I really had died, down in Memphis, a needle in my arm and my phone not ringing. I think Younkle probably felt the same way, because I can guarantee he would've sued me for libel if I'd tried to claim the Naomi-104 for my own after he'd managed to make it work."

"But he never did. He never did manage to make it work, because he was largely a theoretical professor, as most of you know. He couldn't repair a sundial."

Kendra sat up straight, but slowly became aware of the fact that her hands were trembling, incredibly fast. She put them behind her chair, and this, combined with the pure horror pasted across her face, gave her the appearance of a prisoner strapped down in anticipation of a final punishment and release.

"When I finally — by sheer accident, really — found the right person to tell about my fuel cell, it was private industry that saved me, and told me that I'd been on the right track the whole time. It was private industry that brought me up, and set me on my feet, and eventually led me to NASA. This school — this collection of buildings, and grass, and grant proposals — this school never did anything but send me requests for money. This school never did anything but grind my ideas back into my face. This school almost killed me. If I had advice for the undergrads in attendance today, it would be this: don't trust anyone but yourself."

"Thank you."

Michaelson walked away from the lectern, quickly, heading back toward the parking lot. No one in the audience moved. Some — a few — looked up at Kendra, wondering what she would say. She said nothing. Eventually, a senior lecturer in the chemical engineering department got to his feet, and stepped behind the lectern. He'd come to the lecture by mistake. Now, he had the presence of mind to put it out of its misery.

"Thanks for coming, everyone. You can go now."

Kendra turned her chair toward the lake as the crowd slowly got up and went back to their offices and classrooms. When she looked at her hands again, they were not yet still.