Critical Mass (48 page)

“First he threw the reporter out, then he started shouting at Mother, how could she be so stupid as to have let him inside to begin with. And Mother said, she said—” Alison’s eyes got bigger and her voice wavered.

“What?” Mr. Contreras demanded.

“She said Tuesday night she’d heard Durdon banging away in the garage; it’s beneath her studio. She’d gone down and seen him under Mr. Dzornen’s car! Dad was so furious he almost hit her! Then Dad
said he’d better not find out that Warshawski—Vic, I mean—had taken the BREENIAC sketch and I said how could she, because it was already gone when she was up at the house on Tuesday! And he said he was sending Durdon down to Hyde Park to make sure she hadn’t taken it from the coach house, and the whole thing was so insane I couldn’t bear to be around them. I couldn’t go to any of my friends’ houses, even if they were home, I can’t tell anyone what’s going on, so I drove down here.”

Her voice petered out. Mr. Contreras patted her hand comfortingly. Lotty rang the bell about then. When the old man went to buzz her in, I asked if he’d bring my iPad back with him: I wasn’t up to talking to the police, but I needed to alert them to the skeleton I’d uncovered in the coach house—especially before Alison’s father had another brainstorm and sent Durdon down to dig it up and dispose of it.

I wrote an e-mail to Conrad Rawlings in the Fourth District, putting Murray Ryerson in the blind copy line.

I’m leaving police business to the police, but this morning I stumbled on a body buried in the cellar of a Hyde Park coach house. I would have written you sooner, but two goons, one named Rory Durdon who works for Cordell Breen, the other a Palfry County sheriff’s deputy named Glenn Davilats, Tasered me and locked me in the cellar. It’s a long story, but you might want to dig up the body before Cordell Breen comes down himself to haul it away.

Ciao, Vic

Lotty came in as I was hitting the send key. She’d spent six hours in the operating room and was tired herself. She forbore from any barbed words, just inspected the wound sites with gentle fingers. I’d gotten the whole dart out of my thigh, but the point of the other one had broken
off in my shoulder. Lotty injected me with a topical anesthetic and pulled it out, covered both wounds with an antibiotic salve and gave me a course of antibiotics to take.

“I will say this is a first in our acquaintance, Victoria,” she announced when she’d finished. “No drownings, shootings, stabbings or acid, but a poison dart. Worthy of Sherlock Holmes, no?”

“Something like that,” I mumbled. “My shoulders—I’ve torn up those muscles from digging up part of a skeleton, and then whacking the side out of my prison.”

“Yes, you’ll feel that for some weeks, I’m afraid.”

“Can you do something for me? I can’t afford to lie in bed for weeks, or even days.”

“Even if I could implant new muscles in you, it would take months for them to take hold,” Lotty said. “Let Nature take her course for once in your obstinate life.”

I shook my head. There was something I needed to do, something urgent, and I couldn’t remember what it was.

“I need to be able to act. I need to drive, I need to hold my own if I’m attacked again. I can’t do anything right now but sit like a squawking bird! Can’t you give me something, whatever modern miracle steroid they inject into football players to get them back into the lineup?”

“What, so your joints can rot like a football player’s in another decade?” Lotty’s eyes turned darker with anger.

I looked at her gravely. “If Martin is still alive and I can save him, I need to risk my joints. It’s not as though I take cortisone every week.”

She frowned. “Even if I wanted to let you get this kind of injection, it must be done in a hospital with an X-ray machine guiding the anesthesiologist’s hand. Even so, it would take several days before you’d be strong enough to be up and about. I can give you a muscle relaxant, but it will knock you out very quickly. You’ll sleep a long time. If you’re worried about your safety, you may not wake up easily.”

“Will I be better in the morning?”

“Oh, even if you aren’t, you will be rested enough to throw yourself in front of a herd of raging elephants, or jump from a plane without a parachute, or some other action that will prove to you that you’re outside the usual laws of human mortality,” Lotty said crossly.

“I’ll stay with her,” Alison told Lotty. “After all, it’s because of my dad that she went through all this.”

She turned her earnest young face to mine. “I hate to bother you when you’re so tired, but was the BREENIAC sketch in the coach house?”

The BREENIAC sketch. Was that the urgent action I had to take? No, I’d shipped the drawing to the Special Collections librarian this morning. Durdon and Davilats had taken the copy from my pocket. Along with the obituary of Ada Byron.

The two goons didn’t know enough of the story to connect the dots, but if Cordell Breen saw the obituary, he’d be off to Tinney, Illinois, like one of his father’s rockets. And if there was any evidence about Martina Saginor or Gertrud Memler, or even why the BREENIAC sketch mattered so much, Breen would destroy it before I could get there.

NEVADA, 1953

The Lost Lover

T
HE MOUNTAIN AIR
at night bites her skin. She used to love that sharp high-altitude cold. Back when she climbed the Wildspitze, she slept on the mountainside so she could start her cosmic ray experiments at first sun. Stepping out of her sleeping bag, jumping into a glacier lake, leaping out and running naked around the meadow to dry herself, she would feel braced, embraced by the air. She thought she could taste the air; it was tingly, like sekt wine, but lighter, crisper.

In those days, she encountered the physical world like a lover. Photons and gamma rays, cold air, steep climbs, all exhilarated her. She lies now on foreign ground, watching the stars. The constellations are the same that her papa showed her when she was a little girl, but they don’t pulse with the life she once found in them.

She crumbles the soil underneath her fingers. There is no point to the work she is doing here; it’s the same mind-numbing drudgery she performed at Uranverein 7. There is more food, her shoes fit, the body is properly housed, but the same high fences, the same guards surround her every morning when she walks from her room to her lab. Her mind is turning to a desert as arid as the one at the bottom of this mountain.

Once men discovered they could use the atom to make bombs, they lost the excitement of the hunt for its secrets. Even her own work has been degraded by the quest for a bomb. The array she had designed,
why had she put it on paper to begin with? Tempting the gods, who will always laugh in your face.

“I know you, Fräulein Martina,” the woman Memler had snarled the morning she was sent from Innsbruck to the east. “You can’t stop drawing and scribbling and imagining equations and machines. I want them now. You will have no use for them, after all, when you reach your journey’s end.”

She had stared unflinching at the younger woman. Why had she not noticed the coarseness of her expression when Memler applied for a place in her lab at the Radium Institute in 1934? Why had she assumed that this young woman shared her passion for unfolding Nature’s heart?

Benjamin was right, after all, when he said Martina lacked something essential for human relations. He had meant love, perhaps he’d meant she should adore him, but what she was really lacking was judgment.

She had shaken her head a little in the cave at Innsbruck, sad at her own blindness, but the Memler interpreted that as insolence. Her guards stripped the dress from Martina and easily found her papers, sewn into the hem. The sight of her own coarse stitches made Martina think of her mother.
Even in a slave labor camp you don’t have to sew as if you had donkey’s hooves instead of human fingers,
she heard Mama saying, and smiled, careful this time to keep her expression to herself. Still, that interior smile allowed her to watch impassively as the Memler put her papers inside a notebook.

The guard flung Martina’s dress at her feet. After she put it on, and put on the threadbare joke of a coat, she said, “My last words to you as your professor, Fräulein Memler: you cannot think clearly or do meaningful research if you are consumed by rage or spite.”

Memler struck her hard across the cheekbone with her ring-crusted fingers, and Martina felt the blood lace down her face. So her poor body still had some blood in it. Her monthly flow dried up long ago
and she wondered sometimes if her whole body had turned to something inanimate, a piece of skin filled with sawdust.

“I should lock you in the pit,” Memler growled, but the guard reminded her that the transport to Vienna was waiting: they’d already given the escort the number of prisoners who were in transit. Locking up one prisoner meant redoing all the paperwork.

It was Martina’s last sight of Memler, rubbing her rings, as if the blow to her professor’s face had also cut her own fingers. Her last sight until six days ago.

The Memler’s thick flaxen hair has darkened; she’s cut her obscenely fat Hitler-Jugend braid into a fashionable Debbie Reynolds perm, but her posture—the obsequious bob of the head to the senior man in the group, the arrogant gesture to the work crew—Martina would have known her anywhere.

The Memler is even more astounded by the sight of Martina. She stops what she’s saying to the men in mid-sentence.

“Du bist aber tod!”
†
she gasps at Martina, her skin turning an unhealthy white.

“You are not the queen of the uranium torture field, now, Fräulein Memler,” Martina says, also in German, in a voice of ice. “If you must address me, you will do so politely, or not at all.”

Red blotches appear in Memler’s face.
“Was machst du—was machen Sie hier?”
‡

“The better question is, what are
you
doing here? Do your new masters know what you did in the caves beneath Innsbruck? It will be most instructive for them to find out.”

The Memler smiles unpleasantly. “I’m helping defeat Communism. The past is of no interest to them.”

She turns to the men, who are looking at her curiously. “A lab
technician I used to know in Austria. Forgive us for speaking German; we haven’t seen each other for many years.”

Her English is heavily accented, but grammatically correct. Memler was always a hard worker, that was the good thing one could say.

“Ah, the concussion you suffered in the Nazi weapons plant has affected your memory.” Martina smiles at the men around Memler. “You came to the Institut für Radiumforschung as my student. I remember how eager you were then to learn from me. And now you are here, perhaps you may learn again.”

Martina asks one of the work crew what it is they’re installing. A computing machine, something built in Chicago to help Professor Dzornen’s team with their neutron scattering computations. Martina starts to walk past them, then sees the little smirk lingering at the corner of Memler’s mouth, the mouth that shouted “Heil, Hitler” not so long ago. She stops to stare at the computing machine, walks around it, inspects the side panels as the men watch her uneasily. The Memler is shifting her feet, unable to hide that Martina’s behavior is making her nervous.

“I would gladly see the interior,” Martina says to an electrician, one of the crew who has often worked with her. “The design would be most interesting.”

The electrician looks cautiously at his own boss. Memler says sharply that it would be a serious error to tamper with the machine, that he is most strenuously forbidden to unscrew the side panels.

Martina smiles tightly at Memler. “You have just shown it to me, Miss Memler.
Ich gratuliere dir.”
§

Martina goes to her own lab, really, to her own two meters on a bench, where she is working out what she’s seen in the bubble chambers.

Her first months in Nevada were spent gulping down papers and books, learning Feynman diagrams, the Lamb shift, quantum
electrodynamics, tracing the new particles. At first the physics came back to her slowly, like the return of her flute playing, like the English she studied in Gymnasium, but has forgotten. After seven months, though, she’s suddenly confident in all those arenas—although her English has acquired the southwestern twang of the machinists and electricians around her.

She pines to be at Cornell, where Bethe is developing his theories of the meson, or at Columbia, where the most exciting new experiments are unfolding. She is not a shirker, though. Despite the fact that her project could be done by a beginning graduate student, she works through her equations meticulously, passes them to her lab partner to recheck, just as she will, tomorrow, recheck his results.

Today, she stays until everyone except the guards has left the lab. She returns to the computing machine and calmly unscrews the panels herself. This is not the interior of the computer put together at Princeton by von Neumann and his team. Even though the Princeton work is highly classified, she’s managed to see photographs and sketches. This Chicago machine is two-thirds the size of von Neumann’s and there are no vacuum tubes. Instead, there are a series of plates with wires extending from them; it looks like a loom for making copper tablecloths.

Martina screws the panels back into place. After dark, she goes to the mountain to think. A soldier patrolling the perimeter of the camp reminds her that she can’t climb any higher than this. Martina nods at him, acknowledging the order. She doesn’t speak; the sight of barbed wire and guards turns her stomach into knots.

In the morning, she watches as the Memler is given a tour of the lab, of the base. Martina chats with the work crew in a way that’s alien to her. The men tell her Memler used to be here in Nevada, but she’s been assigned to the Chicago project in order to work for the man who sponsored her immigration. Edward Breen is an electrical engineer, they tell Martina; he served with the U.S. Army in Europe; at war’s
end, he found the Memler in a weapons lab near Innsbruck and brought her back to help with rocket and weapons research for the United States.