Critical Mass (7 page)

“V. I. Warshawski, is it?”

I jumped and turned around. Jari Liu had come up behind me on such soft crepe soles that I hadn’t heard him. He was a stocky man in his thirties with lank black hair falling over high cheekbones. In the
old days engineers wore white shirts and ties, but Liu had on jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed “In God We Trust, All Others Show Data.”

He shook my hand and propelled me toward the doors that led to the interior. “I’m Martin Binder’s boss, assuming he ever resurfaces and that we take him back. Normally we prefer people to phone in advance for appointments, but I happen to be free right now, so let’s go into the back and talk. I need to take your cell phone and your iPad—we don’t like anyone surreptitiously taking pictures while they’re pretending to talk about AWOL employees.”

I took my cell phone out of my pocket, but removed the battery pack before I gave it to him. “I don’t like anyone copying my files while they’re pretending to answer my questions.” For the iPad, I’d have to hope my encrypted lock would keep snoopers at bay, although it probably wouldn’t hold off anyone as sophisticated as the Metargon team.

Liu led me quickly to the inner doors. The two people who’d been in the holding pen when I arrived looked at me sourly as we sailed past: they’d been here longer, why did I get priority?

Liu bent to press the security card he wore around his neck against a control panel and the doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. We were in a long, high room filled with machine tools and banks of computer consoles. Liu zipped me along too fast for me to have more than a confused impression of a giant magnet lifting a piece of metal that looked like an outsized Frisbee, of men in safety glasses bent over a lathe, a woman in a lab coat and hard hat checking the dials on something that looked like a vat of witches’ brew.

We passed a room labeled “Decontamination,” another with the familiar inverted triangles announcing radiation, and moved through a corridor to the second section of the building. Everything in here was quieter.

Liu took me to the corner of a room that held several dozen computer monitors, some with the traditional screen most of us know,
others with the transparent glass that wowed me in the Bond movies with Judi Dench.

Liu looked me up on the Internet, using one of the glass screens so I could see exactly what he was doing. My website came up. Liu pressed a switch on the rim of the screen. There was a tiny flash, and my face suddenly appeared on the monitor next to my website profile. He dragged the image onto the photo I use on my home page.

He grinned as he saw my eyes widen. “Yep: you’re the same person. Whether you’re really who your website claims, that I can’t tell. Now you tell me why you’re here asking about Martin Binder.”

“He’s vanished,” I said bluntly. “The last time anyone saw him was ten days ago, which you must know: someone from your office called his home last week, looking for him. He lives with his grandmother, but he didn’t say anything to her about where he was going. He’s not answering e-mails or his cell phone. I know he went out with some college kids who were summer interns here. I’d like to get their names so I can see if he told any of them what was in his head, why he took off.”

Liu leaned back in his chair, pursing his lips into a gargoyle frown. “I don’t think I can give you names. I was the mentor for the summer fellows—they aren’t interns, by the way, they’re too grand for that. It would be an invasion of the privacy of the kids in the group. What I can do is send an e-mail to them and ask them to get in touch with you if they feel like talking.”

I pushed on him, stressing the urgency of asking questions now, before the trail got any colder.

“How about Martin’s phone number and e-mail?” I asked when it was clear he wasn’t going to budge. “I didn’t get those from his grandmother.”

Liu finally decided he could give me those in good conscience. He put them into an e-mail that I’d be able to read as soon as I got my cell
phone and iPad back from him, but he also sent an e-mail to Martin explaining what he’d done. He didn’t stop my looking over his shoulder while he typed. He finished with “If you’re reading these, Martin, give me a shout. Jari.”

I returned to my chair. “Did Martin talk to you about anything that bothered him during his last week here?”

Liu shook his head, slowly. “He was a very focused guy. One of the most creative we’ve worked with. But he was also very private. The kids we take on for summer projects were his age. That’s why Martin was put in my group—there’s a theory around here that I connect with Millennials, but it wasn’t a good fit this time. Martin’s been here almost two years. He was a full-time employee, with a different background and mind-set. The fellows looked down on him for going to night school, so they couldn’t cope with his being better at logic and math than they were. He resented them for—I don’t know—the sense of entitlement they exuded.

“Frankly, I’m surprised that he got asked to their end-of-summer barbecue. Might have been one of the women in the group—once or twice I thought they might have had something going on.”

I pounced on that, but Liu wouldn’t give me her name.

I asked what Martin was working on. “For that matter, what do you do here that involves big lathes and gantries and radiation and a gazillion computers?”

Liu gave a mock-wounded look. “It’s the same old story: everyone knows about Bell Labs, but no one’s ever heard of Metargon. We’re as big or bigger, we’ve won almost as many prizes, and we’re turning energy on its head in the way that Bell turned communications upside down with the transistor. That’s what Metargon means: beyond energy. Watch my face and watch the screen at the same time.”

He turned the glass monitor around so I could see his face and the screen together. He blinked four times and my face and website disappeared. He blinked twice and the screen filled with icons. He looked
at an icon with a sword on it and the application opened—a video game that began with a movie of a woman in shimmering turquoise armor. She was locked in combat with five large men. Liu moved his eyes around, and the woman’s arm changed directions, changed movements.

“It’s clumsy; Princess Fitora still dies in five minutes, although Martin could keep her going for eight. He designed some of the software that runs her, but it’s set up as a computer game because that makes it more fun, more engaging if you’re working on it. Ultimately, when we have it refined, a person who’s completely paralyzed will be able to use those eye blinks to tell a computer to bring him or her a drink, or move their wheelchair to the bed, or change a catheter bag.”

“Sounds quite wonderful,” I said honestly. “When I looked at the plaques in the lobby I thought you were involved in nuclear power.”

“We have a nuclear design section, but old Mr. Breen started in computers; it’s where he made his money after World War Two. Metargon also works in energy; we’re ahead of the game in solar, but this location is focused on electronics.”

Princess Fitora was lying on the ground, her sword-arm moving feebly as her attackers converged on her.

“That’s what Martin worked on for us: how to use voice, or even tongue clicks, to mimic using a mouse or touching the screen. Anyway, Martin was focused, he was creative, he moved this project along well, but if he had a personal life, he didn’t talk about it. I didn’t know until you said it that he lived with his grandmother, for instance.”

I asked Liu if he had gone to the fellows’ barbecue, but he said it was something that the group had organized themselves. “They were done for the summer; it wasn’t a place for management to butt in.” A bell chiming on his computer drew his attention back to the screen. “My next meeting’s in five minutes; I’ve got to take you back to the lobby.”

As I got to my feet, I looked back at the glass screen. Princess Fitora was lying on the ground with five swords through her chest. The men
around her were giving each other high fives. The image was profoundly disturbing: as Liu escorted me back to the main lobby, I found myself pressing my hand against my heart.

When we passed the machine shop, three men were positioning the Frisbee over something that looked like a wellhead, but Liu hustled me along too fast to stare. At the exit, he handed me back my phone and my iPad. I walked down the drive to the gates, where I stood until the receptionist saw me on her monitor and rolled them open.

AUSTRIA, 1943

The Mother’s Heart

I
T’S COLD ON
the train platform. The station signs have been taken down because of the war, but Martina thinks she must be in Vienna. Somehow you feel a big city, even when all you can see are the necks of the hundreds of other people pushed into a tight herd around you.

Of course, when she left the mountain lab they told her nothing, just the kick in her side to wake her.

“Get up, you’re leaving, we’ve no further use for you.” The insolent “
Du
” delivered by a pock-faced guard who would be butchering hogs if the war hadn’t given him a uniform and a boot.

How fortunate that I travel light.
She kept the ironic thought to herself. Nothing to pack, the grimy dress she sleeps in the same that she wears in daytime. With the rest of the slave laborers she was prodded at riflepoint out of the cave onto a small train along the siding.

There had been rumors for weeks that the lab would shut down. They hadn’t produced results, which wasn’t surprising, given the sloppy quality of the work. Several times the scientist in her had rebelled; she tried to suggest a different experimental design, but that earned her a beating twice, a kicking once, a day without rations all three times. After that she shrugged every time she saw another waste of hard-to-find minerals.

The train was a small one, two freight cars. The guards made sure the prisoners watched as the cars were filled with fruit and meat from the
local farms, extra torture for people close to death from privation. After standing for several hours, while the peasants joked with the guards, the prisoners were shoved into a carriage whose seats had been removed. Boards had been nailed across the windows so they couldn’t see out.

For the limbo of time that the journey lasted they stood, unspeaking, like sheep knowing they are bound for the abattoir. Now and then the train stopped, flinging the sheep against each other and into the car walls, and then some timepiece clicked and they lurched forward again. Einstein’s clock, Zeno’s paradox, the train departs Innsbruck for Vienna, and for the inmates the journey lasts both forever and the blink of an eye.

When she’d made the reverse journey fourteen years earlier, leaving Vienna for her glorious year at Göttingen, she hadn’t slept the night before out of excitement, not this near-dead state she inhabits now.
As if you were going to a lover,
her mother commented sourly all those years ago, even more sour on Martina’s return because her passion was reserved for matrix algebra and quantum mechanics, not the father of the child she was carrying.

At first, realizing she was pregnant, Mama had thought she understood Martina’s excitement at going to Göttingen: physics had been an excuse for meeting a lover. But when she realized that the child was an afterthought, something that happened when a shared passion for particle decay spilled over into bed, Mama became even angrier. Papa was dying, who was going to look after him and a baby, if Martina was going to work at the Radium Institute?

When she returned to their tiny flat on the Novaragasse, Martina had been shocked at how frail Papa had become during her year away. His eyes still were filled with life, though, and he annoyed Mama by demanding all the news of the elusive atom. When the baby came, he kept her next to him in bed, showing little Käthe the play of light on the ceiling through the prisms he had brought home for Martina after she’d first seen the rainbow in Sophie Herschel’s nursery.

Locked now in this dark train, Martina finds her one source of thankfulness a deep irony: Papa’s tubercular lungs, weakened by gas attacks in the trenches of the Great War, allowed him to die at home in bed, with Martina holding his frail hand.
Spectral lines.
Mama incensed that those were his last words.

Her tired, fevered mind is still a jumble of Papa’s death, Heisenberg’s matrix, when the train lurches to a halt once more. This time the doors are unlocked. Guards and dogs order them onto the platform where they are pushed into the midst of a pack of people as worn down as themselves.

No one bothers to ask a neighbor where they are going, how long they have to stand in the cold. As long as they are standing here, they aren’t being shot or shoved headfirst into lime pits or gas chambers. No need to think further ahead than this.

Next to Martina, an old woman keeps grabbing her arm, scrabbling at the sleeve of Martina’s threadbare coat so that it falls back, revealing how thin her arms have become. Those little bony twigs that used to be round, muscled, now end in thinner twigs covered with radiation burns.

The old woman is distressed. “Where is Joachim? He said he was going out, just for a moment, but he hasn’t come back. Have you seen him? He’s never late.” Joachim could be a husband or son or brother, it’s impossible to know.

Most of the crowd is silent. Too many years, too many humiliations, too many losses have taken away their voices. Martina has had her losses, too. Her mother and her aunts, for instance: they stood on a platform like this a year ago, disappeared into a train like the one she and her fellow sheep are waiting for. The thought of those three women twists her diaphragm with a sharper pang than hunger.

She has a panacea for pain and starvation, and she turns to it now, imagining differential equations for electric fields. From there it’s not much of a jump to quantum mechanics. For a time she doesn’t hear the
whimpers and barks around her, doesn’t feel the anxiety of the woman next to her still fretting for Joachim, doesn’t feel the painful throbbing in her feet, which are swollen from cold and ill-fitting shoes. She puts a hand absently into her pocket, feeling for a pencil—Maxwell’s equations for free space are eluding her—and then remembers that all her papers and pencils were confiscated—stolen—when she was put on the train outside Innsbruck.