Cloverleaf One
by Sean M. Murphy

Jason gritted his teeth, crossed the fading double yellow lines, and levered his foot slowly down on the gas.  The needle on his dashboard measured blood pressure, too, he thought, not just speed.  He turned onto the first off ramp going twenty, then twenty-five, nervous that he couldn’t see around the corner, ready to pull off the road at the first sign of an oncoming vehicle.  Nothing so far.  He edged up to thirty, feelinghis pulse pounding in his neck and head.  As he finished the first leaf, entering U.S. 1, a car whizzed past just in front of him, honking that he was going the wrong way.  Really? he thought sarcastically, his knuckles white on the wheel.  I thought I was driving Miss Daisy.

***

Suicide.  Jason stared at the note, incredulous.  If he hadn’t been so familiar with Dr. MacDougal’s handwriting, he wouldn’t have believed it came from her, but Cathleen been his dissertation advisor for three years and this was definitely her handwriting.  Either she’d cracked, or she’d secretly hated him all this time.  There was no explaining the note, otherwise.  Three days before his defense, and his advisor was asking him to commit suicide.  Not in those words, but that was what it amounted to. 

“Before Thursday morning, you need to drive Delano’s cloverleaf backwards.  We’ll know if you haven’t.   --C. M.  P.S.  The whole thing, Jason.”  

Assuming that she didn’t want him dead or mangled, what was she getting at?  Obviously she felt he needed to see something at that particular interchange, something he would need for his defense.  But, after five years of Civil Engineering graduate work and innumerable hours pitted against his monster of a dissertation, what could he possibly get out of this craziness?  And “We’ll know if you haven’t” sounded ominous.  Damn it!  The person holding the key to his degree and his future was telling him to pick up and drive from UMass down to New Jersey to pull some crazy stunt on the first cloverleaf built in the U.S.

He cut across the grass to the Student Union building, fishing out the $2.50 for a large coffee as he went.  What the hell did this have to do with his dissertation?  He didn’t have time for his advisor to flake out on him, and he still had a Granular Dynamics final to take this afternoon.
The coffee was hot and fresh, and soon tempered his mood.  He pushed the note farther down into his pocket and strolled over to Hasbrouck, and his final.  He could sit and review his notes for a few hours now in the same room before taking the exam.  At least, Jason thought, climbing the steps to the second floor, this should get me away from my “monster” and my whacked advisor for a while.

Six hours later, Jason stretched out on one of the stone benches outside on the second story of the Campus Center, soaking in the sun and feeling nostalgic.  He was so close to the end of his time here.  How often had he stopped in this spot, just like this, for a nap in the sun?  How many times had he walked past the pond and nodded to Rosie, the last remaining swan?

How long could he afford to spend lying here when his defense still loomed ahead--that and this insane New Jersey cloverleaf thing?

God damn Cathleen!  Why hadn’t she talked to him earlier about this?

He couldn’t go to New Jersey.  He had enough to prepare for without being sent off on some crazy assignment that couldn’t possibly impact his dissertation.  He just needed to talk to Cathleen.  She'd have to agree.  She’d always been reasonable in the past, a great advisor.  Until this note.
He stood up and headed for Marston, home to the Civil Engineering program and Cathleen’s office.  The undergrad who was her office assistant informed him that Cathleen was in a meeting and wouldn’t be available for an hour.  Jason smiled, then walked past him and opened the door to her office, knocking as it swung in.

Four professors looked up at him, Cathleen among them.  “I need to interrupt you for a moment,” Jason said.

Cathleen stood.  “Jason Murray, everyone, my advisee who is defending this week.”  She turned to him.  “Didn’t you get my note?”

He raised an eyebrow.  “Yes.  It’s about that.”  He paused, looking around the room.  “Could I speak with you for just a moment?  In the hall?

Cathleen looked around at the other professors for their consent, motioning with her hands as if apologizing.  “Excuse me for a moment, if you would.  I’ll be right back.”  She turned and escorted Jason out of her office, closing the door behind her and leading the way out into the hall.
He was about to speak when Cathleen preempted him.  “What do you mean, interrupting my meeting like that?

Jason was stunned.  The tone was so unlike her that he wasn’t sure what to say.  “I just... I couldn’t wait, to talk to you.”  He held up her note.  “What’s this all about?”  He tried to put as much force into his voice as he could.  “Three days before my defense?  How could this possibly be worth doing?”

Cathleen narrowed her eyes.  “It’s simple.  You are not prepared for your dissertation defense, Jason.  Unless you do this,” she said, jabbing the note with a finger, “you’ll fail.” She held up her hand, forestalling his arguments.  “Either follow the instructions on that note, or don’t bother showing up Thursday.”  She turned and walked back into her office, closing the door sharply behind her.

Jason left, slamming the outer office door as he went.  He steamed over Cathleen’s demand as he walked back to the grad dorm. Was there some flaw in his dissertation that he didn't know about?  What was going on?  Work through it, he thought.  He’d titled his dissertation “Form, Function, and Flattery: The Emulation of Natural Geometric Forms in 1920s Transportation Systems,” and argued that many of the design aspects of 1920s road and rail systems mimicked nature more to please the eye and make people feel comfortable with them than to maximize efficiency.  He quoted extensively from the 1999 Virginia Department of Transportation study that showed cloverleaf interchanges tended to bog down once they had to handle more than a thousand vehicles per hour, as well as other studies showing similar statistics about the rotary design.  Far more efficient interchange options were available, he argued, but the social climate of the early 1900s was focused on design emulating nature.  Briefly, for the cultural context, he alluded to Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School of design, another engineer whose designs, albeit architectural, were constructed around emulating the environmental surroundings. 

When Arthur Hale had designed and patented the cloverleaf interchange in 1916, there had been huge social pressures among the intelligentsia to reject the growth of industrialism and reintroduce more natural forms into everyday life, though not everyone agreed on how or why.  But by 1929, when Edward Delano completed the first cloverleaf in Woodbridge, New Jersey, the idea was gaining more popularity, and soon the interchanges were being used all across the U.S.

It was a good argument, and he’d worked hard on it.  And now, three days before he defended, and with no time to make any changes, the advisor who had guided him through his research and multiple revisions of his text had introduced a roadblock into the pathway to his future.
Pouring himself a bowl of cereal for dinner, he spread his books on the table to review his dissertation again. 

He had trouble focusing on the research.  Cathleen’s final statement kept echoing in his mind.  “Don’t show up Thursday.”  How could she say that?  He’d worked so hard, so long.  She always helped him before.  Maybe it was some weird test, a way of seeing if he’d really earned his degree.  Only a complete idiot would go charging off like that.  So he had to prove that he wasn’t a complete idiot by not following her instructions.  Right?

All day Tuesday he worked madly through his notes, checking and rechecking references and quotations, trying to push back the doubt that Cathleen’s words had aroused.  It was late when he finally crashed, and he slept poorly, though that was nothing new; he hadn’t slept particularly well anytime in the last month, or even the last year, for that matter, with this monster of a dissertation hanging over his head. 

The light slanting through the shades was clearly designed too brightly, thought Jason when he woke.  It was going right through his eyelids and his brain and coming out the back of his head.  He turned over and stuck his face under the pillow, shutting out the light, only to be confronted with his dissertation, his perpetual bedfellow of late.  Usually, though, it was not in the form of a pile of books and research notes poking him in the cheek.

Cathleen’s sharp warning came to mind unbidden.  Only one day left.  He was instantly nervous, on edge.  What if she was being straightforward?  She’d seemed pretty serious on Monday when she’d told him point-blank to go.  But what the hell did she want him to do this for?

As he showered, he realized that there was no way for him to know what she wanted him to see unless he actually went through with it.  Besides, if he was going to fail his defense anyway, he might as well have tried absolutely everything.

Insane! he thought, driving to the local diner for breakfast.  He wasn’t going to drive to New Jersey on some last minute whim.  She’d had plenty of time to tell him about this before this point--he could always redirect any lack in his research onto her for waiting so long to tell him about it.
Yeah, he thought, downing his third coffee and wiping up the last of his eggs with the toast, that'll work.  I'll tell my committee that my failure is all my advisor's fault and they'll take my side over a full professor's.  Right.

Damn it! he thought again, arriving back at the dorm.  It amounted to a dare.  He kicked at the ground, scuffing a divot in the grass.  Did he go, or not?  How to decide?  Already this morning he’d said he would go, wouldn’t go, half a dozen times each, and there was no one to ask.  Fuck it, he thought, pulling a penny out of his pocket. 

Really?  Just finishing grad school and with my future riding in the balance, and I’m going to decide this by flipping a coin?

Yup, he replied to himself.  Why not?  The whole idea of grad school was insane on some level.  What was one more crazy decision?  Got a better idea?

The other voice was unnervingly silent.

Didn’t think so.  He flipped the penny up into the air, lost sight of it in the still-too-bright sun, and heard it land in the grass at his feet with a soft thud.  He crouched down, looking at the ground where his boot had dug a hole, then laughed, staring at the mark.  Weird.  At the tip of his toe, right where his foot had stopped, was a clump of clover.  The entire campus was dotted with them.  This clump, though, was all four-leaf clovers.  Great, he thought, shaking his head.  Omens, now.  “Anything else you’d like to tell me?” he asked the empty sky.  A group of freshman girls laughed nervously and veered away from him, moving more quickly to get inside their dorm. Nothing to do but go, he conceded.  The penny, on the ground among the clover, agreed. 

Now that he’d decided to go, there was very little else to do.  How did one prepare for a trip like this?  He’d used the word “quest” earlier when thinking about this trip, so treat it like one.  The whole thing was crazy anyway.  It had been years since he’d read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” or “Le Morte D’Arthur,” but he felt there should be some formal preparation. 

Right.  Okay, what the hell do you pack for a quest?  He tossed a box of cookies into his backpack, a change of clothes, a roll of quarters for tolls.  A flashlight.  Bottle of water.  Hmm.  A copy of the monster.  What else?  His journal, in case he ended up sitting for a while somewhere; he’d have to write about this crazy stunt, if only to laugh at himself later with his own advisees--see, kids, I was nuts too when I was a grad student.  Pulling on his jacket, he zipped up the backpack and slung it over his shoulder, locking his dorm door behind him. 

As he left the building, he noticed the grass across the court from the front of the dorm again, and crossed to it.  That was what he needed to take with him.  Bending down, he picked one from the cluster of four-leaf clovers, tracing the outline of its leaves before placing it between two pages of his journal.

The drive wasn’t too bad, about 200 miles; 196.1 according to MapQuest, but then, he figured he’d avoid New York, which meant the long way around.  His little Dodge Neon purred along, his mind turning his dissertation over and over in his head.  What was wrong with it?  Or wrong with him?  What did Cathleen need him to see?

And why the hell did he have to drive it backward?
That was the part the bothered him the most.  He’d heard of other students having to do last-minute, hands-on research when they were preparing their defenses, but this was beyond the pale into Nutsville.  Maybe there was something about the construction, he thought.  Something that can only be seen going the other way.  It had been the first U.S. cloverleaf, the quintessential period piece of his basic hypothesis--maybe something about its design made it unique.  Maybe Cathleen was giving him the linchpin for his argument.

Or pulling the linchpin out.

Maybe, he thought, I’ll have to wait and see when I get there.

Getting there took somewhat longer than he expected, Woodbridge being just off the crowded major highways, and when he did arrive late in the evening, he found that while these weren’t exactly superhighways intersecting, the roads bound together by the cloverleaf were still quite busy--in the twenties, U.S. 1 and N.J. 35 would have been the biggest roads around.  It would be a while before could follow Cathleen’s instructions.  For the hell of it, he drove the cloverleaf through the right way a couple of times, getting the feel of it.  This winding path had changed civil engineering in the U.S., and driving it felt sort of like walking through a museum.  Well constructed, though he could certainly see what the Virginia DOT paper was describing; New Jersey had always had the highest number of residents--and cars--per square foot.

He gassed up, then drove a little way around town, stopping at Rug and Riffy’s Bar & Grill, a brewpub that looked more local than the Applebee’s, Johnny Rocket’s, and Perkins restaurants he’d passed driving around town.  He took his dissertation in with him, paging through it again while he ate, trying to see if any passages referred to this interchange in particular, but excepting a mention of Edward Delano building it, nothing jumped out at him.

After dinner he drove back to the cloverleaf, turning into a nearby parking lot with a sign about the interchange.  The lot attendant wasn’t in the booth and the gate was up, so he pulled in.  He stood and read the sign marking the cloverleaf as a national engineering landmark, and laughed at the part where they claimed this was “the first such intersection built in the U.S. or the world;” the U.S. part was right, but Jason knew how Delano had come up with the idea to use that design here: he’d seen a picture on the cover of an engineering magazine of a cloverleaf in Argentina built to Hale’s design, and copied the concept.

Maybe if he just walked the loops backward, Jason thought, looking out over the intertwining roadways, he could see what Cathleen had sent him here to find out.  He started out, following the loops around, looking for anything that stood out, anything uncommon or particularly 1920s, but other than the few remaining bits of paving, nothing seemed related to his dissertation.  He would have to drive it.  That’s what she’d said in the note.  The whole thing.

He spent the next couple of hours wandering around the roadway with his flashlight, observing the structure and design, amazed by the simplicity of the idea and how it had changed the flow of traffic.  He couldn’t argue that it hadn’t improved traffic flow, though he still thought other, more efficient options had been available at the time.

It was past midnight when the traffic finally dissipated, with only the occasional car coming through.  Plus, he’d worked out how often the police drove by on patrol.  That was the last thing he wanted to worry about right now.

God, he was nervous.  He started his Neon and took a deep breath, his heart trip-hammering in his chest.  Even with the lighter traffic, he’d need luck to pull this off.  

Smiling and shaking his head, he pulled out his journal, flipping it open to the page where he’d put the clover he’d picked earlier.  Right, he thought, that’ll help.  I’ll just use it to deflect the Mack truck coming the other way.  Or maybe to buy off the cop who stops me.  “Oh, officer, here’s my get out of jail free card, see?”  Shrugging, he traced its outline again, then put it on his dashboard.  Can’t hurt, either, he thought.
He wondered how he was going to have time to look at the engineering while he was worried about not getting into an accident.  He wondered what he was going to see driving that he hadn’t walking.

He wondered why the hell he was doing this.  The monster on the passenger’s seat grinned at him.  Dissertation psychosis, he told himself.  Everyone gets it--why not me?.

Jason gritted his teeth, crossed the fading double yellow lines, and levered his foot slowly down on the gas.  The needle on his dashboard measured blood pressure, too, he thought, not just speed.  He turned onto the first off ramp going twenty, then twenty-five....

The second petal took him back down to Route 35 and he accelerated a little more as he entered the lower roadway, staying as far left as possible.  A car came out of the ramp ahead of him, horn blaring, and he braked and swerved farther left, missing it by inches.  The driver flipped him off and kept going.

His hands were shaking as he entered the third leaf.  What the fuck?  Why did Cathleen put this test in front of him?  He couldn’t see anything special about this roadway, and so what if it was the first of its kind in the U.S.?  He didn’t want to die, especially not like this, swimming upstream with two-thousand-pound steel bears waiting for him around each corner.

He was a salmon, he thought, taking the curve as fast as the tires would handle it.  This was a threshold test, and if you didn’t make it upstream, despite the dangers and the difficulties, you didn’t pass. 

One petal left.  “The whole thing, Jason,” Cathleen had written.  He revved the engine and hit the ramp at sixty miles per hour, braking judiciously as he came around the final corner, keeping the tires nearly screeching.  The highway appeared before him, disappearing under the overpass, and the first edge of the path leading onto it. 

Then, just as he was about to gun it through the open space, an eighteen-wheeler came out from the roadway and entered the ramp, filling the road in front of him.  Jason jerked his wheel over hard and skidded to the right edge of the ramp, letting his tire drift up onto the curb.  The truck driver yanked her wheel the other way and drove halfway off the ramp, nailing her horn loudly and braking as Jason’s tires screamed along the pavement.

It wasn’t going to be enough.  Jason’s engineer’s mind kept estimating and re-estimating distances and friction ratios as the oncoming vehicle approached.  There was a good forty centimeters where the two speeding vehicles were going to meet head on and way too fast; the semi would smash into the front of the driver’s side and punch the steering column right through him.  The huge chromed grill filled his windshield, rushing at him in high-speed slow-motion.  At the last instant he threw up his arms and covered his face, pure instinct, waiting for the collision. 

It didn’t come.  He felt the car shudder slightly and bounce against the curb, tires screeching as the vehicle spun out into the open roadway.  He grabbed the wheel, opening his eyes and swerving madly as he tried to regain control, braking hard and turning into the spin. 
He ended up stalled across both lanes of the lower roadway. Shaking, he started the engine and pulled a U-turn, driving onto the right shoulder of the road before getting out to look for the truck he’d somehow missed. 

He couldn’t see it from where he was.  She must’ve pulled over farther up the ramp, he thought, but as he walked around the curve and up the ramp, he still didn’t find the truck.  It was gone.

He felt a rush of relief.  At least he wouldn’t have to deal with reckless driving charges or anything like that.  He headed back to his own car, looking over the damage--only a tire that was likely to blow sometime soon and a superficial scrape along the lower passenger’s side where he’d hit the curb.  Three hundred, maybe five hundred bucks at most, when he could have--and probably should have--died.  Shaking his head in amazement, he slid back into the driver’s seat and started up the engine.  His eyes flicked over to the clover on his dashboard.  No kidding, he thought.

Shaky and driving slowly, he pulled a little way up the road and turned into the parking lot again, stopping as he came to the attendant’s booth and the gate, which was now lowered.  A booth attendant was there now, an old man shaking his head at Jason.  “Crazy stunt, kid.  Coulda gotten yourself killed.”  Then he grinned.  “Good job.”

“What?” Jason asked, still shaking.  Was this guy nuts?  He’d almost died!

The old man eyed him carefully before speaking.  “No, I ain’t nuts.  You’re Jason Murray.”

Jason’s eyebrow went up and his grip on the steering wheel tightened.  “How do you know that?  Who are you?”
The old man grinned.  “Relax, son.  I was expectin’ you, that’s all.  Cathleen told me you’d be comin’.  Said you’d put together quite the dissertation.  I didn’t believe her.  We get so few these days, you know?  So I said ‘Send me this thing and we’ll see.’”  He lifted a copy of Jason’s dissertation.  “Know what?  This ain’t half bad.  Wrong as hell about the reason for using the cloverleafs and circles, but perceptive about us having an agenda other than efficiency.  And no one’ll hold the former against you.  You couldn’ta known.”

How did this guy get a copy of his dissertation?  Jason glanced down at his passenger’s seat, but the copy he’d brought with him was still there.  The old guy had mentioned Cathleen.  But why would she know a parking lot attendant in Nowhere, New Jersey?  And how could he know enough to understand anything about Jason’s arguments?  “What’s going on?”  Jason asked, eyeing the road and moving his foot over to the gas pedal in case the old man got even crazier.

“Jason,” said the old man, his voice calming and commanding at once, “relax.  I’m not some random crazy, though I can see by your eyes that you think so.  My name is Arthur Hale.  That mean anything to you?”

It did.  “The guy who patented the cloverleaf design?” he asked, gesturing to the cloverleaf just up the road.  “That’s not possible.  He’s dead.”

The old man scoffed.  “I look dead to you?”

“No, but that doesn’t make you Arthur Hale.  I don’t know what he looked like, anyway.”

“Tell you what, look me up when you get back.  Born 1859, married Camilla Conner in 1899, worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and the American Railway Association, an’ had a little girl named Sybil.  I’m even supposed to have died in 1939.  There’s a gravestone.  It’s a nice one, though it’s kinda funny to visit it, being as I’m on the wrong side of the dirt an’ all.”  He paused, looking Jason over, then waved his hand at him.  “Look, son, I know this may be hard for you to understand, but you’re not exactly in Kansas anymore.”

“I thought we were in New Jersey,” replied Jason.

“God, you young folks never get any cultural references these days.  Don’t you even recognize-”

“The Wizard of Oz?  Yeah.  Was that already out when you died?”

“Last movie I saw before I ‘died’,” said the old man, his fingers adding the quotes.

“So, then, I am dead?”

“Do you know what listening is?  You’re plenty alive.  Where you are at the moment, though, is somewhat more difficult to explain.”

Jason turned off the car, got out and shut the door, leaning against the driver’s side.  “Okay, you’ve got a copy of my dissertation and you know Cathleen, though she’s certainly never mentioned you, and you’re claiming to be the engineer who patented the cloverleaf interchange, which would make you about a hundred and fifty years old.  You’re completely off your rocker, but I think you’ve officially got my attention.”
The old man clenched his jaw as if biting back a reply, then nodded and leaned forward, apparently satisfied.  “What do you know about Quantum Mechanics?”

“Mostly just the jargon.  We didn’t exactly need it for Civil Engineering.”

“Well, trust me, you’ll want to read up after this.  Right now you’re in a sort of central hub of quantum tunnels.  Heisenberg was trying to explain what this place was when he illustrated his uncertainty principle, but most folks didn’t really understand what he was talking about.”

“Okay,” interrupted Jason “this is me holding up a speed limit sign.  You’ve lost me.  Where am I?”

Hale rubbed his brow and sighed.  “More like a ‘Go Children Slow’ sign.  Listen for a minute and let me see if I can explain this.

“Humans have always studied the natural world to try and unlock it.  We may scoff now at astrology and alchemy, but the truth is that they informed our earliest understandings of astronomy, physics, and chemistry and shaped the sciences as we know them today.  And they learned some things that we wouldn’t have found otherwise.”

Jason nodded.  That much, at least, he was familiar with.  “What does that have to do with Quantum Physics?”

Hale glared at him, and Jason shut up.

“Okay.  One of the things that people discovered long ago is that there are natural points and paths of energy distributed all over the surface of the earth.  They mistakenly attributed that energy to deities, but they knew enough to try to harness it.  In Europe, the Gaels traced the lines, and found that wherever they intersected there was an energy center.  Every time they found one, they built a circle of stones around it to mark it off.  The Romans built their roads following those paths, using that energy to ‘protect’ their travelers; their dowsers predicted that the roads would act as a sort of energy aqueduct, allowing the natural energy to flow into Rome, the center of the world, in their view.

“The basis for Rome’s ideas was accurate, even though the implementation was somewhat faulty.  The Gaels were closer to understanding what they’d found, but implementation was tricky at best.”

“I’m sorry--implementation?”

“Using the energy points.  To travel.  Just let me continue--you’ll understand.”

“I hope so,” Jason muttered.

“You’ve obviously got a short attention span, so I’ll jump forward a bit.  You’ve read Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, I hope?”

“Nope.”

“And Cathleen’s actually going to give you a degree?  Whatever happened to education?”

“Couldn’t tell you.  Relativity?”

Hale grimaced. “I wasn’t put here as an elementary theory teacher, you know.  This job was a reward, they told me.” He snorted.  “Bastards.  Look, let me try to make this really simple.  Let’s say you wanted to get to Japan.  What would be the fastest way?”

“Traveling along the Earth’s surface or not?”

Hale’s eyes sparkled.  “That’s it exactly!  The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, of course, not following the surface all the way around.  Those straight paths, when they occur anywhere in space, are called ‘wormholes.’  That’s what the Gaels discovered.

“Opening the door to one of them takes a hell of a lot of energy, though.  The natural reservoirs of energy at the places they’d identified made the job easier, but by no means reliable.  They didn’t have a good way of controlling where they would come out either.  On the whole, not a great system.”

“And Einstein discovered them again.”

“Ha.  No, they’d never been lost, but while his theory has room for them, he didn’t propose them.  No, that was Quantum Theory.  It deals with them differently, talks about quantum-tunneling instead of wormholes.  The math and the hand-waving is different, but the effect is the same, going from point A to point Z without passing through any of the points in between. It’s really an energy state thing, a way of accomplishing something for nothing, or next to nothing anyway.

“The problem, really, was that using them was so uncertain--you could end up in the middle of a rock on the bottom of the Aegean Sea as easily as in Asia. That stumped people for a long time, until finally someone came up with a solution. 

“Heisenberg,” said Jason, his eyes wide.

“Excellent!” exclaimed Hale, pointing at Jason.  “Cathleen was right about you!  Yes, when Heisenberg proposed his Uncertainty Principle, it suggested an intriguing solution to our problem.  It wasn’t what he was thinking about precisely, but it sure helped us out.  Heisenberg said that the more precisely you determine the velocity of an object, the less certain you can be about the object’s location.  What we needed was a way to calculate velocity with such precision that it made it impossible to determine location.  That uncertainty of position allows us to take advantage of the universe’s shortcut system: quantum tunneling.  The only thing missing was a practical application, some way to harness the system to the real world.

“And that, my boy, is where I came in.”  Hale pointed back at the cloverleaf.  “That’s the reason for building those.  Sure, there are more efficient ways of moving cars around an intersection.  But none of them have the side effect of taking four consecutive measurements of an object’s velocity while simultaneously building up energy sufficient to punch a temporary hole in space-time.  The cloverleaf does that by focusing the measurement effects on the central point where the paths cross and recross.” 

“Wait a minute,” said Jason.  “You patented the cloverleaf design in 1916.  Heisenberg didn’t put forward his principle until 1927.  That doesn’t add up.  How could you have planned to use a concept that hadn’t come out yet?

Hale stood up straighter, looking out over the interchange, then leaned in conspiratorially.  “I’ll tell you the secret, son.  I didn’t do that on purpose.  I was mostly trying to crack the problem of building up the energy to open a tunnel.  I just happened to get lucky on the Heisenberg front.”

“I patented the design in 1916, but until Heisenberg gave us his principle, no one in the U.S. was willing to build one--it just wasn’t important enough, they figured, to be worth all the extra effort and materials, especially when the outcome was so dicey.  But after Heisenberg?  It took Eddie Delano less than two years to build this,” he said, gesturing to the interchange.  “Practically a world record in transportation engineering.  There was a lot of excitement in the scientific community, though most didn’t understand exactly what Heisenberg was really talking about.
“When we went through it the first time, we weren’t sure what was going to happen.  Well, most of us weren’t.  Heisenberg knew exactly what he was expecting, and he found it.”  Hale went quiet.

Jason waited, but clearly Hale wanted to be asked.  “Well, what did he find?”

“This,” Hale said, pointing down.

“The parking attendant’s booth?”

“You can be dense, can’t you?  No.  The nowhere that you’re standing in.  Your velocity is perfectly calculated; you could be anywhere.”

“So... where am I?”

“Where do you want to be?” asked Hale, grinning.

“What do you mean?”

“Where do you want to go?”

Jason shrugged.  “I don’t know.  Back to UMass?”

“Easy enough.  There happens to be a doorway down near the loop around the stadium.  We only found it in 2002, and out of respect for the Gaels, we built a stone circle around it.”

“So, how do I get there?”

“You just drive through this gateway.”

“But I’m in New Jersey!”

Hale shook his head.  “Haven’t you been listening?  You aren’t in New Jersey.  You aren’t anywhere--anywhere specific, that is.  This place is just a way station, as it were, but it connects to everywhere else that there’s a gateway.”

Jason slumped back against the car.  “So... so I drove the cloverleaf backward, and came here... and now I can go anywhere that has one of these gates?”

Hale nodded, smiling.

“Like teleporting?”

“Another science we’ve chosen to mock.  Yes, sort of like teleporting.”

Jason bent down and leaned his head against the cool metal of his wristwatch.  “Wow.  That’s... damn.”

“I’ll take that for appreciation.  So, any other questions?

Jason looked up.  “Way, way too many.  I’ll ask Cathleen when I get back, though.  You’ve already given me enough time.”  He got back in the car, then looked out the window.  “Just one.”

“Yeah?”

“Why do we have to drive it backward?”

Hale chuckled.  “Everybody asks that question.  Everybody.  Its pretty simple, really.  All of the cars drive the other way, and the energy gets flowing that way and keeps going.  If everyone drove counterclockwise, you’d have to drive clockwise; it didn’t matter which way we built it.  Activation energy comes from damming the energy, making it backflow by moving against the cascade until you hit the critical point and pop through to here.”

Jason nodded.  “And the truck I almost hit...” 

“...was pushing a whole hell of a lot of energy right in front of it.  You hit the activation threshold right before you would have hit the truck,” Hale replied.  “When I was designing the interchange, I found it took four loops to do it--without a huge truck to help things along, of course.  I tried three loops, but the calculations just wouldn’t come out right.  There was just something special about four.”

Jason looked at the clover on his dashboard and nodded again.  “Hey,” he said, looking back at Hale, “thanks.  For explaining.  And everything.”

Hale waved his thanks away.  “It’s why I’m here.  That, and staying alive indefinitely.”  He smiled, and lifted the gate.  “UMass?” he asked.

Jason nodded, starting the car.

“Get goin’ then, kid.  And say ‘Hi’ to Cathleen for me at your defense.”  He grinned.  “That should be a show, huh?”

Jason grimaced and shrugged.  “I’ll just have to explain what I’ve learned and see what they say.  I’d guess Cathleen didn’t have me waste the last four years doing a dissertation they won’t accept.”

“Probably a safe guess” said Hale.  “See you soon!” he added, winking and waving Jason through the gate.   Jason pulled away, lifting a hand as he passed.  Empty fog stretched out in front of him, and after a moment his eyes flicked up to the rear view mirror, in time to see the booth and the old man disappear into the white mist.

He slammed on the brakes and looked around, squinting his eyes, trying to pierce the whiteness.  After a moment a spot in the fog thinned, and he could see a road nearby, and that he was parked on grass.  Getting out, he found a stone sticking out of the ground not ten feet from his car door.  And another about eight feet to the right of it.  And a third.

And then, through the wavering sheets of fog, he caught a glimpse of the UMass stadium across the field in the early morning light, and shook his head. 

Returning to his car, he pulled out his dissertation, and sat staring at it for a long, long time.

He was still there when Cathleen knocked on his car window an hour or so later.

“Welcome back,” she said, smiling.  “Almost time.”

“I’m ready,” he replied.  “Need a ride to Marston?

“Cup of coffee first?” she replied, getting in the passenger’s side.

“Where?” he replied, and handed her the four-leaf clover from the dashboard.

“Starbucks,” she replied.  “In Tokyo.”

He started the engine.