Critical Mass (49 page)

The men talk freely with Martina, not because she has an easy camaraderie about her: she doesn’t. She talks to them formally, but she respects the work they do. Unlike a number of other scientists, she consults them on equipment design. They respected her at first for her work ethic, but after fifteen months of seeing her close up, they’ve come to a grudging admiration: she’s a woman, she’s a foreigner, but she’s a born problem solver.
One smart cookie,
they say to each other. It’s most unlike her to want to gossip, but the crew are happy to oblige.

“The Memler dame was here for a couple years, but when Breen went back to Chicago to work on computing machines, he took her with him. Good riddance, too. Damned Kraut—pardon my French—always acted like we were too dumb to know which end of a soldering iron to pick up.”

“She’s not on the University of Chicago faculty, is she?” Martina asks.

“As for that, I couldn’t tell you. I just know she’s attached to the project that’s working on computations for the Super.
¶
You want to see the inside of Breen’s machine, we can show you after Memler and her ass-lickers take off—they’re heading back to Chicago after lunch.”

Martina smiles her thanks, doesn’t tell them she already looked. While her department head is seeing Memler and her sycophants onto their waiting C-47, the work crew unscrew the panels and Martina once again sees the magnetic lattice board inside. This time she inspects the wiring more closely. Not perhaps the most efficient design—she would have used a finer wire and coiled it around the armature—but probably a serviceable enough way to organize the counters.

Martina thanks the men, returns to her lab, but at the end of the
afternoon, she drops into her department head’s office. She tells him that the Memler was her student in Vienna.

“She was a secret Nazi during the thirties while the Party was outlawed in Austria, but after the Anschluss, she became quite public and boastful about her Party connections. During the war, they put her in charge of the part of Uranverein Seven that was working on fission bomb design.”

“We know Miss Memler’s wartime history, Miss Saginor. Many people felt compelled to become Nazis to protect their jobs, and that was true for Miss Memler, as well.”

“Uranverein Seven ran on slave labor and I was one of the slaves,” Martina says. “The Memler woman took great pleasure in overseeing our torture and punishments. When the Germans ran out of money and interest in building a nuclear weapon, I was among the expendable: the Memler sent me east to the concentration camps.”

Martina makes no effort to smile, to be the good girl asking for a favor. This isn’t because of the war, the deprivations and tortures at Uranverein 7, or the march from Terezín to Sobibor. For ten years in Vienna she was a research leader, the acknowledged equal of her male colleagues, her opinions valued by the Institute director.

Martina expects respect, but her American department head isn’t used to women scientists. Unlike the machinists and electricians on the base, who may not understand her physics, but see her mind at work, the department head can only see her as a technician sent to Nevada from Chicago.

“Miss Memler’s past has been thoroughly investigated,” he tells Martina. “She has a high security clearance and is a valuable member of our project. People like you need to overcome your grievances and get over the past.”

“Watching people die in nitrogen chambers is not a grievance, but it was a peculiar hobby of the Memler,” Martina says.

“She told me that you yourself were a Communist, and that you
might come to me to defame her,” the head says. “It seems you spent four years in the Soviet Union at the end of the war.”

“I was trapped behind Soviet lines at the war’s end, like other people in my situation. They put me in a gulag; I escaped with difficulty and walked west. You can’t investigate my past, because all my documents were destroyed in the war, but I have never belonged to any ideological party. However, the Memler’s Nazi affiliation, and the power she exercised at Uranverein Seven, are easy to find out.”

The department head stares at her. “If she is correct about your Communism, your own status here may be in jeopardy. I’d be careful about the mud I threw around.”

The warning means not just that the conversation is over. It means she can be deported. Without a hearing of any kind.

Martina returns to the barracks where she’s been given two rooms, a bedroom and a living-dining-kitchenette. There’s a phone, although of course all calls are placed by operators. She asks the operator to put her through to Chicago, but the woman tells her that her outgoing calls are temporarily restricted.

She goes to the small garden outside her barracks where she watches the sun set behind the mountain. A guard is now patrolling the front of her building. She smiles sourly. The land of the free, the home of the brave.

Back in her rooms she changes into corduroy trousers, laces up her hiking boots, dons a jacket, and fills two canteens with water. Food. She should carry something to eat, although she still—despite years of near starvation—often forgets meals. Raisins, an apple, a slab of something the Americans call cheese, that will do. She has a hat for when the desert sun comes up.

These mountains are rugged, but she crossed the Carpathians on frostbitten feet after she escaped from the Moldova gulag. She waits until full dark, then slips out the window in her bedroom. She crouches on the ground, but the sentry in front hasn’t heard her land in the
gravel underneath. Nor do the two soldiers patrolling the road notice her when she reaches it.

The Army relies on the terrain, steep, inhospitable, on the barbed wire that rings the base, on the signs warning of nuclear explosions, to keep out trespassers. They rely on the fences, on fear of wild animals or rocks falling from the outcroppings to keep the inhabitants inside. The patrols are just an extra.

In the starlight, Martina finds a gully that she’s used before. She climbs to where the wire fence is camouflaged by the brush. She knows where a boulder has raised the fence enough that a thin woman can slide beneath.

She has no compass, but the stars are the same she learned with her father, the same that she saw from the Wildspitze in the Austrian Alps.

She looks up at Pegasus, blinking back tears. She’s spent her whole life in love with light and that point in the infinite where beauty is so unbearable that it feels like pain. Is it so much to ask of the Universe to let her return to that point? I don’t need a lab, I don’t need publications, only the harmonies, she pleads. The stars give her no answer, no mercy, but their light will at least guide her up the mountain, away from the barbed wire and barbed words of a weapons factory.

47

WHERE THERE’S A WILL

W
E WERE ON
the road before the sun was up, Alison driving my Mustang. I’d taken the tracking magnets from the exhaust and the trunk—still held shut with a bungee cord. Alison recognized the magnets: they were Metargon products. She tried to suggest someone had stolen them, but stopped herself mid-sentence, flushing with shame. Her education into her father’s activities was rocking her world.

At the entrance to the Kennedy Expressway, I told Alison to pull over. I stood on the curb until an eighteen-wheeler showed up at the entrance to the northbound lanes. I quickly stuck the magnets under his rear axle.

“Hope you’re going all the way to Seattle, buddy,” I muttered, jumping back into the Mustang.

The drug Lotty had given me knocked me out for over ten hours. I’d finally forced myself out of bed, bullied my sore muscles into bending, stretching and lifting. Even with a second espresso, I was still dopey when Alison and I got under way, nowhere near ready to fling myself in front of a herd of raging elephants.

Once we’d off-loaded the trackers, we headed for the westbound interstate. I should do all my driving errands at the crack of dawn. Traffic was starting to build, but we were all going well above the speed limit. Alison covered the fifty miles to the far reaches of the suburbs in under an hour.

As soon as we were clear of Chicago, the traffic thinned and we could check for tails. When I saw we were clean, I leaned back in the passenger seat and slept until Alison slowed for the Tinney exits some three hours later.

“Which exit?” she asked.

“Let’s start with the college,” I said. “But first, food and more caffeine.”

A billboard at the entrance to the town gave us Tinney’s population: twelve thousand and counting; told us it was home of the Alexandrine Explorers Division III hockey champs in 2003 and 2010; gave us meeting times for the local Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions clubs; listed a number of houses of worship; and extolled the beauty of nearby state parks. The sign didn’t mention Ada Byron.

Tinney lay like a long snake on a high ridge over the Illinois River. Alexandrine College, where Byron had been a library clerk, was a bulge about halfway along the snake’s middle. It was built from limestone, with the campus laid out around a square, New England style.

Alison followed signs to “Visitor Parking.” One hour for fifty cents. If the company that gouges Chicago over street parking saw this, they’d have massive coronaries when they learned that someone somewhere could park without getting fleeced.

As Alison stretched out the muscles in her neck, I watched the students—couples walking hand in hand along the edge of the bluffs, others playing Ultimate Frisbee in a nearby field. I even saw one who was reading. With the buildings glowing soft gold in the autumn sun, the place looked like a Hollywood set for a college.

I stopped a Frisbee player to get directions to the campus library. We couldn’t miss it, he assured us; it and Admin were the two oldest buildings on campus and they faced each other across the main quad. The youth gestured vaguely to the highest spot on the bluff, so we walked along the path above the river to the entrance to the quads.

The drought had turned the river into a sluggish stream. Sandbars
stretched long fingers down the middle. Tree branches that had started upriver had halted in the shallows here. The banks on either side were filled with brown grass and dying bushes.

The path divided at the edge of campus, one fork following the river behind the school, the other leading into the quadrangles. Inside the quads, the grass was green. Parents pay a lot of money to send their kids to schools like this; it takes a lot of water to create a good impression.

As the Frisbee player had said, the library was easy to find. That was the first and last easy part of the day. No one in the library had heard of Ada Byron, which I ought to have realized—even if she’d worked until she was ninety she would have retired decades ago.

If I could find her home address, maybe the current owners would know something—we all leave detritus in our passing. New owners might have found diaries or a cache of nuclear secrets. The college didn’t keep old phone books, but the reference librarian said the town library might. She also said the college’s benefits office might have Byron’s address in their pension payment records.

To summarize the fruitless hour we spent being shunted from one clerk to another: as far as Alexandrine College was concerned, Ada Byron had never existed.

I pulled out Martin Binder’s photo and showed it to everyone we talked to. Had he been here, asking questions about Ms. Byron? The reaction was instructive: an imperceptible drawing back, a withholding of reaction. Martin had been here. They were protecting him.

On our way to the town library, we finally stopped for food. Alison had been too tense to eat before we left Chicago, but the long drive and the dispiriting search had given her an appetite. We found an indie coffee bar that served sandwiches and continued our quest.

It didn’t surprise me to learn that the town library had gotten rid of all their old phone books. When? Oh, the librarian said vaguely,
recently, when they were debating their storage needs, what needed to go into remote storage, what needed to be kept.

“After Martin Binder came here asking for them?” I suggested, holding out his photo.

The librarian flushed and looked away, but she wouldn’t budge: she’d never seen Martin, all libraries were making difficult decisions these days.

At the
Huron County Gazette
on the far side of town
,
a staff member agreed that they’d run an obituary for Ada Byron seven years ago, but couldn’t dig up anything else in their morgue on her. What about the schools where the obituary said she’d volunteered? The staffer couldn’t say—they’d just printed what the funeral parlor had given them.

Back in the car, Alison and I tried to figure out any other way to find Ada Byron’s home, or anyone who would admit to having known her. If she’d been born in Tinney, her birth certificate would be on file in the county building. If she had left a will, a copy would be filed with the county probate court.

LaSalle, the Huron County seat, lay about fifteen miles farther south. It was after three; I took over the wheel and drove to LaSalle as fast as I could. We got to the courthouse forty-five minutes before they closed.

This far from Cook County, I’d been imagining spry and helpful court officers, but the Huron County clerks were just as sullen and overweight as those at home. The two women behind the counter in the records room were arguing over the best way to make lasagna. It took them several minutes to acknowledge us.

The woman who finally came over sighed as if we’d asked her to go through the county’s landfills personally looking for a document, but she gave me a form to fill out, sighed again loudly with a pointed look at the clock when I handed her the form, and shuffled into a back room, massaging her gunstock for comfort.

She returned with the news that there was no birth certificate on file for Ada Byron, but for ten dollars, we could get a copy of Byron’s will. Finding a will at all had seemed like such a long shot that I stared blankly for a moment.