Critical Mass (17 page)

“An old student reads French to me sometimes but no one who knows English comes to visit.”

“An Englishman named Turing wrote a paper last year on computable numbers and how they relate to the
Entscheidungsproblem
. He’s contradicting Professor Hilbert’s paradigm, which seemed like heresy. Recently, though, I’ve been wondering how to determine the structure of an atom when you can see electron scattering but have no idea what atom is scattering them. The computations can be done, in theory, but
in practice—” Martina spread her hands, an expression of exhaustion that of course Herr Papp couldn’t see.

“In practice the work might take you years,” he finished for her. “And why did this make you think of Leibniz, and of me?”

“You told us one day in class how deep his works were.”

This was actually a diplomatic recollection of Herr Papp at his most biting:
My dear young ladies, I know that the word “philosophy” makes your lovely eyes turn to glass, where you reflect back to me what I’m saying without absorbing more than a glancing ray of light. Therefore, when you hear the name Leibniz, I know that I am not even throwing pebbles into a bottomless well, just shying them off a glass wall. But his was the deepest mind of the German Renaissance.

“You told us that besides inventing the calculus, Leibniz thought on many mathematical problems, including how to express all computations in binary numbers. And you showed us a photograph of a medallion he made with a design for a computation machine engraved in it.”

Herr Papp’s wandering blind eyes focused on her face. He turned abruptly to Frau Werfel, demanding that she lead him to a bookcase by the window.

Frau Werfel spoke for the first time. “Herr Papp, you are too tired; this woman, she is importuning you for her own gain.”

Martina was about to protest, but Herr Papp forestalled her by telling Frau Werfel she was speaking nonsense. “If a young lady who cares about electron scattering remembers a lecture of mine from fifteen years ago, I am almost immortal. Take me over to the bookcase, the mahogany one.”

The housekeeper, shooting Martina a venomous look, led the professor to the case. He wouldn’t let Frau Werfel touch the papers, but felt among them, shelf by shelf. In the end, he brought back a document whose title was in the elaborate script of the seventeenth century:
De progressione dyadica
.
On binary progression
.

“Return it to me when you’ve read it, Fräulein Saginor. It’s a facsimile copy, of course. A high school mathematics professor cannot afford an original of Leibniz.”

She had curtsied again on leaving, a gesture that Herr Papp sensed, since he gave her an ironic half-bow in return. Martina had rushed back to the Institute, completely forgetting that she had promised to retrieve Käthe from the Herschel apartment at six.

She stayed at the Institute library until past midnight, making slow going of the old Latin. It took her over a week of late nights to translate the most significant passages into usable German: she had won no prizes for languages in high school. In the end, she had made a good enough effort to share the excerpts with her students.

When she returned to the Prater to give the manuscript back to Herr Papp, Frau Werfel told her the professor was resting and had no need to talk to her further.

“The old cow is jealous of you,” her student Gertrud Memler crowed when Martina told her team about the incident.

“Don’t be vulgar, Fräulein Memler,” Martina said, although she wondered if Memler’s comment might be true. Was this another instance of what her mother and Benjamin both accused her of? Blindness to ordinary human emotions?

The students on her team couldn’t find a way to make Leibniz’s theoretical computing machine a reality. Martina had them experiment with different tubes that could store a charge, to see if they could use the signals to replicate the mechanical gates and registers Leibniz had imagined, but the war came before their research amounted to anything. Martina drew a number of careful charts of her own, showing the way in which she imagined electron capture could be used to make an automated computing machine.

Fräulein Memler had been a hardworking scientist, lacking in imagination but willing to stay long hours testing vacuum tube signals with Martina. After the Anschluss, though, it turned out she had been
a secret member of the Nazi Party since 1935. It had been outlawed in Austria until the German annexation, but once the Nazis were in power, Memler refused to take orders from a Jew.

By that time, Martina had abandoned vacuum tubes as a way to store computation results. A study of Onsager’s work on oscillation in magnetic fields took her in a different direction: she saw that, among other things, Onsager’s studies meant a ferromagnetic surface might be used for data storage. Martina couldn’t get materials to build anything, but she was able to do imaginary experiments. She continued these until the day she was forced to leave Vienna for Innsbruck.

Martina thought she had seen the last of Fräulein Memler the day in 1939 when Memler ordered her out of the Institut für Radiumforschung. A month after Martina was sent to Uranverein 7, though, the Memler arrived, assigned to head the fissile materials unit.

The Memler has forgotten none of Martina’s criticisms of her vulgar manners. The Memler delights in tormenting Martina, and in addressing her with the familiar
du.
You thought you were something important, you thought a Jew could critique my methods. Well, see where that has brought you, Jewess Martina.

Martina has suggested that an automated computing machine could aid in the calculations their group is making. Fräulein Memler bristles: Martina was brought here to see whether carbon could be made pure enough to substitute for heavy water as a fissile material, not to question the methodologies of the high command. Martina argues, once only, in exchange for a beating and twenty-four hours with no rations.

Martina knows that any success she helps Uranverein 7 achieve will support Germany’s war effort, but she can’t help it: the problem of whether you can harness the energy released in the fission of an atom is so absorbing that she can’t help studying it. It’s her weakness, her strength, to burrow so deep into the understanding of nature’s secrets that she forgets the world around her.

14

EYE ON THE PRIZE

Y
OUR BROTHER SAID
you were the person who knew the most about your family’s history.”

Herta Dzornen Colonna eyed me warily in her doorway. I’d sent the doorman up with one of my cards and a note that said I was investigating a matter that involved her father. That simple message got her to agree to let me in, but the doorman lingered in the entryway, making sure I wasn’t going to assault her or smash any of the highly polished statues that dotted the apartment.

Herta was at least ten years older than her brother. Her white hair stood out from her head like a medieval wimple, showing the same high forehead as her brother, the same round pale eyes. Her khaki dress was cut in a boxy, bush-jacket style, but the fabric was soft, the kind that drapes nicely and sets you back a couple of grand at the nearby Oak Street boutiques.

“I’ll be all right, Gordon,” she said to the doorman. He left reluctantly, telling her he wouldn’t shut the outer door so he could hear her if she needed help.

Limping slightly, Herta led me through an archway into her sitting room, the one with the view of the lake. It was dusk now; you could see running lights on the boats out on the water. Herta seated herself on a nubby white couch. Only a very clean and tidy person could sit on furniture like that.

She darted a glance at me, uneasy, almost fearful, then looked away, at a glass étagère whose shelves were filled with photographs. It was an involuntary sideways look, as if she was afraid for the safety of the pictures. Of course, that made me stop to inspect them before I sat down.

Most were contemporary, children, grandchildren—a daughter with three children who’d all inherited the family’s high-domed forehead. A son who looked like the sandy-haired man in Herta’s wedding photo. There were a number of older pictures as well, several showing two little girls in the short, cap-sleeved dresses popular in the 1920s and 1930s, the little girls sitting on ponies, the little girls and a giant hound following their mother. Both girls and the mother were carrying rifles. I glanced at Herta: she might be lame and elderly now, but she knew how to shoot.

A photograph of Dzornen in white tie bowing to the King of Sweden caught my eye. His actual Nobel medal, mounted on navy velvet in a shallow box, stood next to it. I bent to stare at it. There’s an aura to that prize, not because of the gold, although it glowed in the darkening room. I supposed this was the shrine that Julius had mentioned.

Herta coughed loudly behind me. “You said you had been talking to Julius about our family.”

I straightened up and joined her near the window. There was a tubular chair, black leather, chrome arms, in one corner. I pulled it over near her—I didn’t want to leave mud or sweat or something human on the white upholstery.

“Yes, I went to see him about Martin Binder. Martin’s grandmother has hired me to find him, and I know you knew her in Vienna. Back when she was Käthe Saginor.”

She sucked in a breath. “Why did she tell you to come to me? To us, I mean?”

“She didn’t,” I said. “But your families’ histories intersect; her mother was your dad’s student. Ms. Binder thinks he was her father.”

“Has she been telling you that lie?” Herta knotted her fingers in a
way that reminded me of Kitty twisting the cabling in her heavy sweater.

“Is it a lie?” I asked.

“Of course it is. Käthe was a horrible child. She would do anything to gain attention, and as an adult she turned out to be much the same. It’s true her mother was one of Papa’s students; he thought very highly of her work, at least he did at first. But Käthe—Kitty, I guess she calls herself now. My sister Bettina and I couldn’t stand her. We had to play with her sometimes, when families from the Institut für Radiumforschung got together for outings or the New Year’s party. Käthe was younger than us, so we wouldn’t have wanted to play with her, anyway, but she was such an angry girl, so prone to temper tantrums that we ran off into the park whenever we saw her coming.”

She stared at me with fierce eyes. “Before the war, when we were living in Vienna, Papa troubled himself sometimes over Fräulein Saginor’s sad fate. I think he tried to look after Käthe because he worried about her mother, not having much of a stipend and being a single mother. And Käthe twisted that into thinking he was her father!”

“I was told that Ms. Binder came to Chicago to see your father, that Ms. Binder thought he knew where her mother was.”

“Fräulein Saginor did not survive the war,” Herta said stiffly. “If Julius told you otherwise, it’s because he enjoys mocking people.”

“Julius didn’t mention Fräulein Saginor at all,” I said. “He did say you’ve always been upset by Ms. Binder’s presence in your life.”

“The war had been over for ten years,” Herta whispered. “We were sure Käthe was dead. When she suddenly appeared here in Chicago—Papa was away, of course. He always was, going off to Washington or Berkeley, even though his health was not good.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“I remember it like yesterday. Probably when I am finally dying, that day will be my last thought, not my wedding or my grandchildren, but Mama phoning me, telling me that Käthe had arrived and
was creating the most alarming scene all over the neighborhood. Julius lived at home, but he was in class over at the university—University of Chicago. It was before he dropped out, although he probably would have been thrown out because he was failing everything.”

“So it wasn’t Kitty Binder’s sudden arrival that made Julius fall apart?” I said.

“He never minded her,” Herta said bitterly. “He’d been
falling apart
for a number of years before she showed up to ruin our lives. He’s always made fun of Bettina and me for what he calls overreacting to Käthe. If he’d been home that morning, he might see my point.”

“What did she do?” I asked.

“Mama was home alone. By then Bettina and I were both married, but Bettina was living in Los Angeles, so it was up to me; Mama called me and I took a taxi down to the house.”

Herta shook her head, still upset by a scene half a century old. “I knew Käthe at once, even though I hadn’t seen her since we left Vienna in 1936. She was looking for Papa, of course, because—well, of her strange ideas about him and her mother. Käthe was going around the neighborhood, ringing doorbells, telling people that Papa—it was sickening! Even though everyone told us they didn’t believe her, you could tell from the pitying glances they gave Mama that they thought, ‘No smoke without fire.’”

“How long did this go on?” I asked. “I was told she even made a scene at the university’s physics department.”

“Papa made her go away,” Herta said.

“How?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, but when he got back from wherever he’d been that time, he said he’d take care of it. For one week she showed up every day, at the house, or the university. She made a scene at the physics department. She even drove out to the national lab in Argonne, where they’d built the new pile, and tried to fight her way past the guards. I moved back down to the house on Greenwood
Avenue, so that Mama didn’t have to be alone during the day. I was pregnant with my first child; except for worrying about Käthe, it was lovely to be back in Hyde Park, with Mama looking after me, instead of having to keep house myself.” Her face softened, her youth in front of her eyes.

She looked up at me. “Anyway, whatever it was that Papa did, Käthe stopped coming around, and after another week, I felt it was okay to leave Mama on her own. For years, Käthe kept quiet, she didn’t bother us, but we always felt she was a, oh, an unexploded grenade. Sure enough, her horrible daughter arrived out of the blue one day, disgustingly drunk, or drugged, that’s what Stuart—my husband—said it was. And now here you are.”