Memoir From Antproof Case (43 page)

The machines and processes that Smedjebakken loved so much were almost alive themselves, and had not crossed the sterile barrier of immortal precision that separates man and God. Nor had anyone crossed over with them in vain pursuit of perfection. So, you see, Smedjebakken was not arrogant. Even were he mistaken, the mistake had not yet made itself known, and all his accomplishments were concluded with a spiritual innocence that, dare I say it, does not anymore exist.

Our greatest problem was driving a shaft up through the bedrock so that it would exit exactly where we wanted it in Cage 47, not only in view of passing the gold through it without being observed from outside, but, far more critically, with the object of placing the opening between alarm wires cast into the concrete floor at one-foot intervals. This was an exceedingly difficult task, and in overcoming one difficulty, another, and yet another, were created, with seemingly no end. But that, Smedjebakken told me, is engineering. And the engineer's faith is not only that all difficulties can be overcome, but that they are finite in number.

First, we had to make a three-dimensional map of unprecedented accuracy. As our benchmarks were separated by half a mile and half a dozen turns—the benchmarks being one in the cornerstone of the Stillman and Chase building, and another (a surveyor's pin) in the street near the nearest subway entrance—and as the vertical distance was 250 feet, our diagram was a jagged, twisting path of approximately 5,780 feet. We had to start at a point that we could define only indirectly and surreptitiously, and, after 5,780 feet and more than a hundred angular measurements, return, blind, to that very same point. To
accommodate the vinyl lining that would swallow the gold, and, more importantly, to accommodate the thickness of the telescoping bits for the long run we were obliged to drill, the shaft had to be eight inches in diameter.

This left two inches of clearance between the alarm wires in the floor. Just in linear measure, this was one part in 34,680, a rather exacting tolerance. But if you included the hundred angular measurements it was a task of such precision as to seem almost impossible.

Add to that the fact that we did not know where the alarm wires were embedded in the floor, and you may understand why, once apprised of these things by Smedjebakken, I wanted to give up.

"Don't," he said. "When you told me the plan I knew immediately the inherent difficulties. I knew as well that they would be surmountable. All we have to do is take it one step at a time."

"What's the first step?" I asked.

"Where do you get your shoes?"

"I
used to
buy them at Paul Stewart," I said, wistfully.

"Let's go get you a couple of pairs of new shoes in a very large size so I can fit them with magnetometers."

Smedjebakken had been working mysteriously in the well equipped machine shop that once had been his home, and, unbeknownst to me, had reconstructed five laboratory magnetometers so that they could be mounted within a pair of shoes, one at a time, and give their readings on a gauge disguised as a watch.

Why five magnetometers from three different manufacturers? It was simple, he told me, and then introduced me to a cardinal principle that I knew in my bones, and that is part of many techniques in engineering.

By their very nature as magnetometers, the magnetometers were accurate only to within twenty percent of their readings.
By my very nature as a human, I would be able to read the gauge and place the contact points with an accuracy of only about ten percent. We had to contend, therefore, with a 72% accuracy rate when every measurement had to be 99.99712% dead-on to meet the one part in 34,680 requirement.

What this demanded, Smedjebakken explained, was, though tedious, very simple. After taking a hundred readings apiece with each of the five magnetometers, we would have a scatter diagram that looked like Pinocchio's hat. The value on the horizontal axis at the apex of the hat would be the closest we could come to the exact measurement.

We would carry out the procedure five times, weighting the later attempts to reflect an assumed increase in competence on my part after so much practice.

I almost swooned at the prospect of taking 2,500 magnetometer readings, but was pulled into line when Smedjebakken reminded me that stealing an immense amount of money required an immense amount of work.

"All right," I said, "how do we map the location of the wires so we can record the measurements?"

"We calibrate the floor."

"How do you calibrate a floor?"

"With a rule and a five-point-diamond-tipped punch, both of which you'll carry in your shoes or in your pockets. They won't notice anything as long as you weigh out according to expectations. You'll also have to bring in a camera, a camera stand, and a micrometer gauge."

"Why?"

"You'll photograph each mark you make on the floor. If you use the camera stand, the scale will be uniform. When I blow up the points—if I lock the enlarger in place—I'll get good measurements that I can check against the gauge in the photograph.
Of course, we'll go through the process several times."

"I'll photograph each mark on the floor," I ventured, "so that you can measure it, so that when I measure the distance I can move from edge to edge, and you'll add in the width of the marks."

"Correct. You'll use a loupe when measuring."

"How many times do I have to measure?"

"Several hundred."

"Do you think we'll be able to get all of this done before we die?"

"We'll work hard," he said.

Before the weeks of calibration that then led to months of magnetometer readings I asked Smedjebakken why we could not assume that the alarm wires would have no current running through them when the vault was open. After all, we had only to punch through them once.

"What if that's true," he asked, "and we have to close up because the Transit Authority makes an unplanned inspection in the tunnel, or because Mr. Edgar brings John Foster Dulles to see the gold in the vault? Then what? They turn on the alarm at night, and we're through."

"You're right."

"Not only that, but who says that everything's on the same circuit? I imagine that many different circuits come into the alarm room, and that only those that must be broken are broken, with the rest kept closed."

The precision with which we approached the tunneling came not only from Smedjebakken's engineering background but also from my more mundane experience with navigation. By combining the techniques of surveying with those of solar and celestial navigation, we made our tolerances closer. After all, locating a point on the earth's surface to within five hundred feet of its actual position—which a good navigator can do with just a sextant and a chronometer—represents an accuracy of one part in seven billion: i.e., the ratio of the area of a circle with a 500-foot radius to the total area of the earth's surface, which, as any schoolchild knows, is 197 million square miles.

And this could be accomplished on a ship moving across the waves, shooting the sun with judgments dependent upon eye and nerve. Our measurements, with benchmarks etched into marble by diamond, were far more accurate. We had hope.

To do the surveying we started a subway project nearby. When I say we I mean mainly Smedjebakken, who was held in so much respect by the Transit Authority that when he told them he thought the bedrock under Wall Street was pressured by continental drift and might suddenly shift, causing an earthquake, they believed him. They funded his study of bedrock movement and gave him leave to enter under color of authority all areas of the Stillman and Chase megalith, including the basement, including the vault.

I was there, of course, when he came with his team. When they were in the vault itself half a dozen guards—armed with shotguns—shadowed them. Seeing the gold for the first time, in immense city-like piles, Smedjebakken wore an angelic smile. He had not understood emotionally when I told him that it was stacked in ramparts, walls, and cubes the size of small buildings.

The first time I stood in the presence of what today would be 150 billion dollars, I felt a rapacious electricity, and I thought to myself, this is here, I can touch it, I can pick it up ... I can steal it. The sight of the gold made Smedjebakken work like Pushkin at Boldino or Handel in his great two weeks. Money means nothing and brings not happiness, but it can be translated so quickly into such interesting things—cashmere coats, Duesenbergs, levitation, perfectly white and straight teeth, English
shotguns, ski chalets, flowers, clothes and contentment of sorts for needy orphans, chocolate bars, tutors in Japanese, surfing in Australia, string quartets, cedar groves, first editions, smoked salmon, single shells. I could go on and on, but these are just some of the things I like.

And for Smedjebakken it meant a crystal-clear swimming pool and a glass conservatory in a pine grove with a view of Lake Leman (which is not to say that he ended up there). It meant that his daughter might find companionship and command attention despite her affliction. It meant that she might even find love. And it meant that she would have the heartfelt pleasure of donating her vast wealth to those who shared the same fate, and perhaps seeing her own child, or children, float from the prison that had closed in on her from the moment of birth, and from which she herself could never escape.

Smedjebakken's surveyors came a dozen times and worked so carefully that, when it was done, it was done. Their great trouble in etching benchmarks and points, their repetitions, their heavy transits—five of them—all made perfect sense in the context of detecting a shift, in a large plane of rock, of only thousandths of a centimeter. No one suspected a thing, and yet when it was finished we had one of the most exact sets of measurements and one of the most perfect maps in the history of the world.

Three problems remained: mechanics, logistics, and timing.

We had to have the vinyl liner prefabricated in a swimming pool plant in New Jersey. They were intensely curious about us, wanting to know what we were going to do with a vinyl tube 6
⁷
/
₁₆
inches in diameter and 128 feet long. We couldn't very well tell them that the distance from the floor of the Stillman and Chase vault to a point two feet above the platform of a gondola car in a siding below was 128 feet, and that by reconstructing a gold brick after a day of careful measurement, the purchase of a vast amount of gold jewelry (at that time, individuals were not allowed to hold gold except in jewelry, gold fillings, or antiques), fooling around with beeswax to make a mold, and burning ourselves in the refiner's fire, we had determined after many experiments that the lining had to be of precisely that diameter to rock the gold bar down 128 feet without either jamming it into the world's most expensive obstruction or delivering it with the speed of a gravity bomb.

When they asked us to explain the purpose of the thing in the blueprint—which, admittedly, looked exceedingly strange—we said, "We don't know."

Then we had to get an engine and 128 feet of bit into the subway, and position it in the right place. Fortunately, the siding from which we would drill was part of a 150-foot spur into which we could tuck everything we needed. Smedjebakken built a wall at the entrance and put a double iron door in it with a lightning-bolt encrusted
DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE
sign. This immense compartment was for storing our equipment, and rock tailings from the bore hole. The doors were sealed with two Sheriff of Nottingham-style locks that were most forbidding.

The engine itself was a Swiss mining machine that made Smedjebakken flush with excitement. He had persuaded the Transit Authority to purchase it, and felt no guilt whatsoever about using taxpayers' money, because he told me that it would finally enable the city to take precision corings that would save immense amounts of engineering capital and, probably, lives. "Machines that do heavy work," he said, "are seldom precise, because they are put out of alignment upon initial contact with the medium for which they were designed. Also, the very mass of their components makes for extremely wide tolerances. If you want precision in a heavy machine you have two options—you can
overengineer it, making it so huge and heavy that the medium doesn't knock it out of alignment, or you can design it to self-correct. That is, when it goes out of alignment, it readjusts.

"The former type of machine is too big for a subway tunnel. The latter is wickedly expensive, but that's what we've got. Because the components are not massive, they have to be unusually strong. It's incredibly expensive just to make the alloys, and triply so for the casting and machinery. Once that's done, however, it's magnificent. The shaft on the Tinhoff engine is supported and directed by twelve cam assemblies—one every thirty degrees. Each cam has two teeth per minute of arc, both of which rest in a heavy molybdenum collar gear. When perfectly seated, they complete an electrical circuit. The contact is calibrated to represent one-thirtieth of a minute of movement. If one of the cams rocks enough to break the circuit, the machine knows that it's going out of alignment, and pressure is exerted to reseat the cam tooth.

"It may be hard to visualize, but what it means is that the shaft is accurately supported to a second of arc, and that, when it goes out, it's immediately corrected. The Swiss invented this for drilling through mountain ranges in the construction of railway tunnels."

We started drilling early, before many other parts of the plan were in place. Smedjebakken hung a black velvet curtain under the rock before he aligned the shaft, explaining that he did not want to be subconsciously influenced by the angle of the ceiling. "You make allowances even without knowing it," he said, "Which is why justice must be blind."

As the drill bit pierced the black velvet and attacked the schist I thought of my former colleagues high above, smugly practicing their golf swings on antique carpets, yearning for the start of yachting season, and—if they ever thought of me—imagining that I was safely entombed hundreds of feet below them in the rock, laboring like a zombie.