He was pushing. He knew it. Time was of the essence, now. The moment couldn’t slip away. No. He wouldn’t let it slip away. The man across from him took another look at the pages, letting each one fall to the desk after a cursory glance. Twenty pages. Twenty pages of drawings, diagrams, studies, explanations, claims…

Tony tried again.

“You see, don’t you? Speedometers are just so… old-fashioned! Rate-based perceptions of potential accident lethality, and of greater traffic safety issues is outmoded!”

The man cleared his throat. The last page fell to the desk. He looked down at it with expression Tony couldn’t read. Was it that he was impressed? Or bemused?

The man cleared his throat again and looked at Tony for a moment, then down again as he spoke.

“If I understand the concept correctly, you want to do away with miles-per-hour speedometers in cars…”

“Not just cars!” Tony couldn’t help but interject.

“Yes, yes,” The man poked through a few pages until he found one in particular, probably the brief study Tony had written on the possibility of using energy potentiometers in heavier road vehicles, and even, why not, sea-borne cargo vessels. The man looked at it again, glanced, really, before continuing.

“Yes, I see it here. The point is, you want to do away with speedometers in… vehicles… and instead have this… potentiometer.”

Tony suddenly saw the light. He saw the problem. “Well, I know, I know, it’s a terrible name, and in engineering terms not unique, so there’s lots of opportunity for confusion. Really, it should be called something else, the point is, though, that instead of measuring rate-based speed it measures the potential energy of that particular vehicle at that particular weight and velocity, which means it’s much more accurate at predicting potential accident damage. Think of a three-ton SUV going 80, versus a small hatchback going the same speed. ” He leaned back in triumph. He’d used his winning card, the SUV versus hatchback example that had finally gotten Mary to understand. And if he could get Mary to understand his brilliant idea, then surely he could get this man, this fellow engineer, of sorts, kind of, then surely he could get him to understand. Tony tried to smile a winsome, eager and friendly smile. His face cracked into a gargoyle’s grimace at the unfamiliar effort. “It’s just that, well, since it’s the potential for an accident that it measures, so I call it a potentiometer, but that’s not what it has to be called, I mean, if…”

The man was holding the page in his hand, staring at it as Tony trailed off. With growing horror, Tony realized that it wasn’t interest on the man’s face. It wasn’t even bemusement. It was… scorn. He felt sick inside. The man finally looked up.

“So I understand that, for the sake of someone sitting in a vehicle, who’s worried about what damage would be caused by him having an accident…”

“Or her!” Tony interjected. Maybe the man, being a bureaucrat, was particularly sensitive to gender issues. They were always going on about government leading the cause for equality. He’d read about it once in a magazine article. Tony had never had a problem with the opposite gender, of course, if you don’t count being understood.

The man lifted his eyebrows and continued, “Or… her! Yes. In any case, you want to… what, exactly?”

The walls of the office dissolved, and Tony was suddenly in school. Sixth grade. That small desk, tucked into the corner. And the teacher pointing to him, then pointing to the blackboard. And Tony had no idea. No. Idea. What the teacher had just asked.

He shook his head. He was back in the office. The man behind the desk looked quizzically at him. “Are you okay? Do you feel alright or…”

Tony nodded vigorously, immediately. “Oh yeah. Yes, I mean. Fine. Never better. Just, um, could you just, uh, could you repeat that?” He looked up in what he hoped was an eager, helpful manner. The man almost recoiled instinctively, but gathered himself and said, with a pure, studied casualness, “What, exactly, do you want me to do?”

Tony felt words fill up in his brain, in his lungs, dancing behind his eyes, whispering in his ears. What did he want the man sitting there to do? What. Did. He. Want. The. Man. To. Do?

Why, he wanted… that is… this idea was just so wonderful, he couldn’t believe no-one had thought of it before but him. Him. Tony Bunkern. But he had come up with it, this idea that would save lives on the roads, people slowing down when they saw the accident potential of their speed, thought of the consequences. All because of his brilliant idea. He was a hero!

The man continued looking at him from across the desk. The man looked tired. Some kind of greyness behind the eyes, fatigue.

The man spoke again, “I appreciate you coming in here with this idea of yours Mr. … Bunkern, but I don’t see how myself or anyone else at the Department can just suddenly make all the cars that exist today, how we can re-equip them with a … well… this potentiometer. And then we’d have to retrain every single driver on the roads to understand your device as well. I don’t mind saying, Mr. Bunkern, it’d be a heck of an undertaking. In fact, I’m sorry to say, it seems unrealistic.”

The roar filling Tony’s ears was a thunder. It was a timpani. A symphony of rage. But he said nothing. He sat, and, after a moment, reached across the desk. The man stuck out his hand, thinking that’s what Tony was offering, but Tony ignored him and scooped up the pages from the desk. He stood, and the man stood too. Somewhat nervously, Tony thought obliquely to himself. The roar wasn’t abating, but he pushed the papers into some semblance of order, stuck them back in his old briefcase, the duct tape on the side slowly unraveling, and managed to bend his head towards the man and croak out, “I appreciate your time.”

He strode out the door. The sun was blinding the sidewalks bright, the sky a burnished blue. He fumbled for the car key as he stepped off the sidewalk towards the parking structure on the other side. His ears roared still, but for a split-second, he thought he heard another, different kind of roar.

The bus was going 35 miles per hour. With a weight of nearly 8,000 pounds its potential energy was quite high, and transferred to kinetic energy quite fast.

In any case, Tony died quite quickly.