Critical Mass

ALSO BY SARA PARETSKY

Breakdown

Body Work

Hardball

Bleeding Kansas

Fire Sale

Blacklist

Total Recall

Hard Time

Ghost Country

Windy City Blues

Tunnel Vision

Guardian Angel

Burn Marks

Blood Shot

Bitter Medicine

Killing Orders

Deadlock

Indemnity Only

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Publishers since 1838

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

Copyright © 2013 by Sara Paretsky

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paretsky, Sara.

Critical mass / Sara Paretsky.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-63650-3

1. Warshawski, V. I. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. 3. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3566.A647C75 2013 2013025097

813'.54—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Courtenay,
who taught me to
seek the beauty
of Nature’s secrets

CONTENTS

Also by Sara Paretsky

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Thanks

Vienna, 1913: And There Was Light

1.
Hell’s Kitchen

2.
Dog-Tired

3.
Family Portraits

4.
Martin’s Cave

5.
Computer Games

Austria, 1943: The Mother’s Heart

6.
Arithmetic Problems

7.
Rocket Science

8.
Dinner with the King of Sweden

9.
Shadow of the Thin Man

10.
Impulse Control

11.
Chemistry Shop

12.
Don’t Do Me Any Favors Anymore

13.
The Dzornen Effect

Innsbruck, 1942: Pebbles in a Bottomless Well

14.
Eye on the Prize

15.
The Doctor’s Dilemma

16.
Source Code

17.
V.I. Can’t Turn Tricks

18.
Diary of a Cold Warrior

19.
Bleeding Out

20.
What Did It All Mean?

Vienna, 1938: Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around

21.
Down on the Farm

22.
The Pits

23.
Trunk Show

24.
Past Due

25.
High Sheriff and Police, Riding After Me

26.
Midnight Ride

27.
Derrick, King of the Damned

28.
Duck and Cover

29.
Night Caller

30.
Playing Dress-Up

31.
Muscle Car

32.
Chop Shop

33.
Lap of Electronics

34.
Gadget Museum

35.
Phishing

36.
A Childhood Outing

37.
Nuclear Umbrella

38.
Neighborhood Gossip

39.
Byronic Odes

40.
The Radetzky March

41.
Bird Man of Hyde Park

42.
Crash Landing

43.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Touch the Ground

44.
Hyperlink

45.
Subterranean Homesick Blues

46.
The Pit and the Skeleton

Nevada, 1953: The Lost Lover

47.
Where There’s a Will

48.
Ali Baba’s Cave

Chicago, 1953: In the Workshop

49.
Isaac Newton’s
Opticks

50.
Malware

51.
Power Down

52.
Virtual Reality

Vienna, November 1941: Letter from America

53.
Killer App

Chicago, 1953: Sacrificial Lamb

54.
Late Mail

Tinney, Illinois: Finding the Harmonies

Historical Note

THANKS

Many people helped me create this novel. My biggest debt goes to my personal physics adviser, S. C. Wright, from the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics. He directed my reading and answered the questions of a physics novice with great kindness and thoroughness.

Dr. Johann Marton, director of the Stefan-Meyer-Institut in Vienna, was generous with both his time and his insights in stepping me through the history of physics in Vienna in the twentieth century.

Thanks to Dr. Marton, I received advice from Dr. Stefan Sienell, MAS, director of the Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, as well as from Dr. Thomas Maisel, director of the Archives for the University of Vienna.

Michael Geoffrey, Chicago patent lawyer, was a most helpful resource for the part of the novel that deals with patent law, with whether patents held by foreign nationals were recognized in U.S. courts, and other critical plot issues.

Leah Richardson, librarian at the University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections, advised me on library policy for digging up names of people consulting library materials.