Vectors

The Dance of the Electrons Dr. Jonathan Briggs's train from Toronto was stopped and boarded by armed men twice before it reached Ann Arbor. It was almost enough to give him second thoughts about his journey. In Windsor, the VIA New International was halted on the main line, in a right-of-way corridor flanked by walls of green trees. Customs & Revenue agents swept the train with bomb-sniffing dogs and chemical-sniffing wands. The agents were polite and quietly professional, and their sidearms remained invisibly holstered. In less than thirty minutes, they had satisfied themselves that it was safe to send the train on through the tunnel below the Detroit River. In Detroit, what had become the Amtrak New International was diverted to the edge of a deteriorating concrete sprawl in front of a towering ruin of a train station. Looking out his window, Jonathan could hardly believe it was the same season--everything was a depressing bombed-out brown. But it was clearly not the same country. Homeland Security officers carrying unslung automatic weapons herded the passengers off the train and into the shabby structure for processing. More men with assault rifles looked on from the rooftops, and a three-meter-high fence topped with razor wire steered them in the right direction. After two hours, their keepers had still not satisfied themselves that it was safe to allow the passengers into the country. "Is it always like this?" he asked a fellow passenger as they waited together in a plywood-walled cubicle to be called to their interviews. "Since the trouble at the Ambassador Bridge," the man said with a bob of his head. "But it's worse trying to cross the border in a car. You Canadian?" "Mostly." The stranger grunted. "Aren't you headed the wrong way, then?" It wasn't the first time he'd been asked that question. His mentor at the University of Toronto, Dr. Bernard Hoffman, had tried to talk him out of applying for the neuroscience post at the University of Michigan. "You should be catching an elevator going up, Jonathan--not an elevator going down," Hoffman had said. "I can think of ten schools where you'd be better off, and at least half of them would be happy to have you. Hell, there're probably a half dozen research labs that'd be interested, and you'd get paid twice as much and not have to teach." But Jonathan had his reasons, and he had prepared for his interview with Dr. Elizabeth Froelich as diligently as a presidential candidate preparing for a debate he could not afford to lose. The train finally reached Ann Arbor in late afternoon, giving him time to walk through the campus and spot some of the blemishes that the official tour would bypass. The obvious blemish was hard to miss: the red brick and wrought-iron "castle wall" going up all around the main campus, turning it into an island fortress in the middle of the city. Though he was curious to see it, the wall was not a surprise. The Observer and the Michigan Daily had thoroughly documented the violent year on campus, the worst in a decade-long deterioration of the atmosphere on and near campus. There had been shootings on the Diag and in the Law Quad, two dozen rapes in the dorms, and four murders. The perpetrators were nearly all outsiders, many from Ypsilanti and points east. But the victims were nearly all students. Even so, it had taken a student strike, a donor revolt, the exodus of several key professors, and--finally--the glare of national publicity to break through the denial and force the decision to create a closed campus. It was clear to Jonathan that the "Harvard of the Midwest" reputation of the university and the cosmopolitan cachet Ann Arbor had once enjoyed were both on the wane--victims of the general economic blight and the violence that had crept westwardKube-McDowell, Michael P. is the author of 'Vectors', published 2002 under ISBN 9780553298246 and ISBN 0553298240.