Critical Mass (52 page)

“Oh,
your
equations,
your
designs, as if Fermi wrote equations for you alone that no one else in the world was clever enough to understand.”

Martina gives a tight smile and says to Breen in English, “Tell me how you realized the electronic Fermi surfaces were the key to using hysteresis in constructing a ferromagnetic core.”

Breen shakes his head. “My designs and my formulas are patented; I don’t share them with strangers.”

“Forgive me.” Martina bows slightly. “I am Martina Saginor, doctor of philosophy from Göttingen, 1931, working on ferromagnetic properties in crystalline lattices. Professor Dzornen supervised my research. The Memler woman became my own student three years later. She then became my warden when I was a slave labor physicist near Innsbruck. The designs she stole while I was her prisoner are perhaps what you used to build your Metargon-I. I will know as soon as I see your blueprints.”

“So you can claim them for your own?” Breen says, contemptuous.
“I wasn’t born yesterday. Anyone can pretend to have made a design once an engineer produces a working model. That’s why we have patent laws in this country.”

He turns to Memler. “Is this the woman you said would come here to blackmail me?”

“The patent laws in your country, yes, I know about them,” Martina says. “That is why I applied for American patents to my initial lattice designs in 1939. When the patent office produces my application, we can compare my drawing to the sketch the Memler stole from me, and to the sketches you made of your own work. We can watch the thief try to wriggle out of this little spiderweb she wove for herself.”

“Dr. Memler has been most helpful in supplying suggestions for my design,” Breen says, “but all the initial ideas and work were my own.”

“Edward!” Memler’s eyes flash. “That is not—that isn’t—you know I only gave them to you because I couldn’t get funding myself.”

“You have American citizenship,” Breen says calmly. “You were well rewarded. The patents are in my name.”

There is a moment’s silence in the coach house. Memler suddenly picks up a chisel and lunges at Martina.

“I should have had the guards kill you in 1942,” she screams. “I wanted to see you hang over a furnace, watch you roast, but they put you on the train instead.”

Benjamin, who’s been standing silent, grabs at Memler but can’t stop her. Martina darts behind a bench and Memler follows her, knocking over vacuum tubes, retorts, burners. Benjamin tries to wrestle with Memler, Breen tries to protect his equipment. Wires and chisels and arms and legs all tangle together.

Breen’s old sidearm, the Colt he carried as an officer in Europe, is on a shelf. They all see it at the same time.

49

ISAAC NEWTON’S
OPTICKS

Y
OU SAW THE BREENIAC SKETCH
at Alison’s barbecue,” I said. “We know that, but we don’t know what you did between that and going to your mother’s house three weeks ago.”

We were sitting at the worktable, trying to put the different pieces of the story together. Dorothy was with us: she’d come down the stairs when she realized we’d unlocked the secret entrance.

She nodded sourly when she saw Martin standing a few feet from Alison. The two had run to meet each other, and then stopped, as if both realized the size of the obstacles between them.

Dorothy shouted upstairs to Meg that Martin was okay, and would Meg bring down tea. Meg carried down a pot of hot water, mugs and a bowl with teabags in it, but stomped back up the stairs. She was not going to fraternize with a person who disarmed her, no matter what her aunt chose to do.

“I was doing research,” Martin answered me. “I knew I’d seen the design, you know, the triangles at the bottom of the drawing, before. They’re Newton’s prisms, of course, but besides that.”

“Of course,” I said dryly. “What fool doesn’t recognize Newton’s prisms?”

“Me,” Alison said. “I saw those my whole life and never thought of Newton. Why did you, Martin?”

“His experiment with prisms is the first thing you look at when you
start thinking about light.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if the whole world thought about light the way he did. “I knew I’d seen them drawn like that someplace else. As the party went on and this one guy, Tad, got drunker and more annoying, it came back to me, that they were on some of the papers my mother had, uh, well, stolen from my grandmother. It didn’t add up for me. I knew there had to be a connection between the BREENIAC and my family, but I couldn’t figure out what.”

“Is that when you went to see Benjamin Dzornen’s children?” I asked.

“Yes, but they wouldn’t talk to me.” His mouth bunched in remembered annoyance. “See, I was wondering if it was Benjamin Dzornen who had drawn the prisms on the BREENIAC document. I knew he’d worked with Edward Breen on the hydrogen bomb, and it was possible that he’d given the sketch to Edward.

“My gramma always claimed she was Benjamin Dzornen’s daughter, so I wondered if Dzornen had left her some of his papers in his will, you know, as a kind of proof that he was her father. But when I tried to explain this to Julius Dzornen and his sister, they both slammed the door on me.”

His tone of bewildered indignation made him seem younger and more accessible than he’d appeared at first.

“They thought you wanted money,” I said.

“Money?” He was indignant.

“Sorry, but your mom had put the bite on them more than once.”

He closed his eyes, an involuntary reflex to pain. “Of course,” he said, his voice bitter. “Of course, she would have. She always claimed that Herta Dzornen had stolen money from her. I should have put those twos together.”

I cocked my head, thinking I heard footsteps. It was only Lily, the little girl, looking for her aunt Dorothy. She climbed up in the older woman’s lap, clutching the stuffed lion Alison had picked up from the front steps.

I looked at a monitor on the workbench, which was also connected to Martin’s door cams. I worried about lingering here: I worried that someone from Metargon or Homeland Security had seen our location when Alison turned on her iPhone. I wondered, too, whether Breen’s goons had shown him Ada Byron’s obituary.

“Did you talk to my dad before you disappeared?” Alison asked in a small voice.

“I talked to Jari Liu, and he told your dad, I guess, because your dad called me from Stockholm. I was trying to get more information on the history of the Metargon-I. You probably know this, but after the war, your granddad was part of this thing called Operation Paperclip. They brought Nazi rocket and bomb experts over to the U.S., even some who’d committed terrible torture. One of the people Edward kind of whitewashed was this Nazi named Gertrud Memler, who’d been a student of Martina’s.

“I was trying to find what the connection was between, well, your family and mine, through Memler’s history. I got her file through the Freedom of Information Act, but there wasn’t much in it, and she’d completely dropped out of sight after 1953, except for these letters to different magazines she’d sometimes fire off. Memler worked with your grandfather on setting up Metargon-I at the Nevada Proving Grounds when they were just starting to test hydrogen bombs.”

“My grandfather was not a Nazi collaborator!” Alison cried.

“I’m not saying he was,” Martin said quickly. “It was the Cold War; everyone was cutting corners. Anyway, I did a patent search to see what patents had been issued to Dzornen, and none of them connected to the BREENIAC, at least not to that first model they used in Nevada. I looked for Memler and Saginor, and here’s where it got weird. The index said that a patent had been issued to Martina Saginor in 1941, but the database didn’t show it. I wrote the patent office, but when they digitized all the pre-1970 patents, they threw out all the paper
files, so they didn’t have any way of locating a file. If it’s not online, it’s like it didn’t exist.”

“So you don’t know what the patent was for?”

He shook his head. “But I keep thinking it must be something like that drawing that’s on Alison’s dad’s wall.”

“If that’s Martina’s work, how did Edward Breen get hold of it?” I asked.

Martin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“My grandfather didn’t steal the design,” Alison said, her voice quivering on the brink of tears. “He was a brilliant engineer! The BREENIAC was a masterpiece; every history of computers describes it as more elegant than von Neumann’s machine, and ahead of its time. Don’t talk about my family as if we were a group of crooks!”

Martin glanced at her stormy face and turned his attention to his tea, turning the cup round and round in his hands.

“I’m sorry, Alison,” he mumbled. “It’s not a crime to collaborate with someone on a project as big as a new computer design. Steve Jobs didn’t think up the Macintosh all by himself, either.”

“Why did you go dark?” I asked, when Alison didn’t say anything.

“That was after I talked to Mr. Breen. I guess Jari talked to Mr. Breen and Mr. Breen called me. He was in Stockholm, at Metargon’s Swedish plant, and he made me kind of, well, nervous.”

“Did he threaten you?” I asked.

“Not in so many words.” His glance flickered at Alison, sitting very still; he turned back to the tea as if it held the secret of dark matter. “He told me I didn’t know how big a mistake I could be making if I didn’t leave these matters strictly alone. ‘That patent expired in 1970,’ he said, ‘so don’t go imagining there’s money to be made from it.’ Then he went on about national security, nuclear secrets and staying the hell away from Alison, from his daughter.

“I couldn’t tell if he thought I was hoping to get Alison to support
me, or if he thought I was going to uncover something shameful from the U.S. bomb program, but he said if I meddled in things that were none of my business he’d know and he’d take appropriate action. He reminded me how easy it was for Metargon to track people. I worked on some of those programs, so I knew he could find me anywhere I left an electronic—not even footprint—toenail fragment.”

“I can’t listen to you talk like this,” Alison burst out, getting up from her chair.

“I’m not saying this to hurt you,” Martin cried.

Alison made a gesture of frustration and ran up the stairs.

“You’re talking about her father,” I tried to explain. “Girls hold their daddies sacred. She doesn’t want to believe you, even though she knows it’s true.”

Martin looked toward the stairs again, but said, “When Mr. Breen hung up, I knew I had to figure out some way of proving that all I cared about was where the first idea for the BREENIAC came from. I mean, nobody could build a computer from that sketch on his workshop wall—it was the central concept, but miles away from workable memory. I knew, though, if I was going to do research, I couldn’t do it online. Even if I created a separate online identity, Metargon could tell if I was mining data that was relevant to the BREENIAC or Edward Breen or any of the people involved in the hydrogen bomb.

“I went down to my mom’s place. I was hoping she still had these papers she’d taken from my gramma’s dresser, and I found them. One of them was this letter from Ada Byron, saying that Martina Saginor had applied for a U.S. patent for ferromagnetic memory back before America entered the war, and the person who found the patent could prove that Martina had created the design for the Metargon-I.

“As soon as I saw Ada Byron’s name, I knew I had this huge clue, because of who she was, in computer history, I mean. So I figured it was a cover name. I went back to Chicago and looked her up in the
public library. One of the reference librarians did some work for me; she found Byron’s name listed in the catalog of Dzornen papers.”

“So you went to the University of Chicago and stole the second page of the letter she wrote Benjamin Dzornen when he was dying?” I said.

He flushed. “I’ll give it back. I thought if someone, I don’t know, like Jari Liu, followed the same trail I did, he’d get to the letter—the second page had this address here in Tinney on it. So I came here and passed the tests that Martina left. Then, when Dorothy let me into the workshop, well, then I realized that Ada was really Martina. At first I couldn’t believe it, but the more time I spent down here, the more real it became.”

“How did you figure it out?” I asked.

He grinned suddenly. “It wasn’t hard: she wrote her name in all her workbooks. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, that it was really Gertrud Memler pretending to be Martina, or—I didn’t know. But Martina made a list of all the publications she’d produced back in the 1930s, when she was in Vienna. She wrote out the steps she went through in solving some of the problems, and she said—”

He broke off to pick up an old notebook and flipped through the pages. “See, she wrote it in German and in English: ‘I am putting down all these steps so that anyone can see that it is I, Martina Saginor, who made these discoveries.’ And then, she had the prisms at the beginning and end of all her workbooks. Plus, she had copies of the letters she’d written under Gertrud Memler’s name.”

“So those letters really came from Martina,” I said. “Not a Nazi getting a conscience after seeing the horrors of nuclear weapons. But why did she keep quiet all those years? Why not be in touch with Kitty—with your grandmother—and your mother? Did she come over before the war? Were all the records of her having been in Terezín and Sobibor false?”

Martin shook his head, his thin face troubled. “I don’t know any of that. If she left a personal journal, it’s one of these German notebooks.”

He picked up another old school exercise book and showed us the faded German script. “Her notebooks in English were only about physics. Even at the end of her life, she stayed current with physics; she was thinking about problems in dark matter and supersymmetry. She had a telescope, she kept a star journal; she tried to work on gamma ray bursts.”

Dorothy nodded and spoke for the first time since we’d found the hidden workshop. “She used to invite me out here to look through her telescope—she kept it on that platform outside. She never told me she was really an Austrian scientist, although I could tell she had a bit of an accent.