When You and I Collide

by Kate Norris

  Oh. What made Mama want to dredge all that up now? Winnie was startled by this sudden confession, but deeply curious too.

  “Why did you?”

  Mama sighed heavily. She seemed to hesitate, then finally she nodded to herself, and began to speak.

  “When I was young, all I wanted was to be a scientist. And I was doing it! I was at the University of Zurich—the only girl in the physics department. I was studying, hard. But no one—no one—took me seriously. They just saw, well, this.” Mama fingered a lock of her blonde hair, which had slipped loose of the curls she’d pinned it in for bed. “They just saw a silly girl. But then I was given an opportunity. A famous scientist approached me, and, well, because of my—of our—ability, I could really see what that choice meant.”

  Winnie had thought she wanted to hear Mama’s reasoning, but not if it meant learning more about what had happened between her and Schrödinger. Winnie felt the same urge she’d had when she met Schrödinger himself—the desire to throw her hands over her ears. Because really, at its heart, the story of how Winnie was conceived was the story of how she’d ruined her mother’s life, wasn’t it?

  But this woman seemed compelled to talk about it now, for god knew what reason, and considering what Winnie had done to her—in her own world, and here—the least she could do was listen.

  “This professor invited me on a trip. I knew his reputation. I didn’t trust him. I thought about saying no, but then I saw a split. A peek at what awaited me if I said yes. If I went away with him, I would be the inspiration for an incredible scientific discovery. Winnie, we haven’t even seen everything that results yet, all from that one paper! It’s—it’s world-changing.” She smiled and shook her head. “I’m proud of it, still, all these years later. Maybe that’s wrong of me, but there it is. But being part of that work, it meant sacrifice, in all sorts of different ways.”

  It meant having her, Winnie knew. It meant leaving school. It meant being the only one to know that “Schrödinger’s Equation” should have carried her own name too.

  It meant marrying a man who loved her, but who never fully let her forget that severing ties with his mentor, marrying her, and raising that man’s child had complicated his own career—at least in those early years. Winnie hadn’t realized it at the time, but that was one of the things Mama and Father had argued about so much, wasn’t it?

  “Why are you—”

  “I saw it, Winnie. I saw a split at the dinner table. The same one, I think, that you saw. I saw you telling us what happened to our daughter.”

  Oh god. Oh no. As soon as Winnie met this Mama, she understood she couldn’t keep her—but she had never expected this.

  “You must hate me.”

  Mama looked at her, brow furrowed, still crying. She gave a helpless shrug.

  “How could I? It’s Hawthorn’s fault. And mine. I made her think she could never talk about seeing splits. If I hadn’t, she could have called me and told me what was going on. She could have told her father. She wouldn’t have had to try to solve it all herself.” Mama gave a heavy sigh. “I just thought things would be easier if she could train herself to ignore them. At least until she was older. They just . . . they make the world so big.”

  “And you wanted her life to be—smaller?”

  “Not smaller, exactly. Simpler. A simpler life, but a happier one. Because here’s the thing. We don’t get to see it all. We feel like we can see everything, because we can see more. But we don’t get to see it all. I didn’t see this.”

  Winnie understood what Mama meant. That splinter Winnie saw, when she saw herself meeting James . . . that put her on a path, one she didn’t really understand. It had led her—it had led all of them—here.

  “I wasn’t able to keep her safe,” Mama continued. “But I will protect you. I’ll figure out what to do about Hawthorn. We can’t say anything to Heinrich yet—you saw, he’ll go off half-cocked—but I’ll come up with a solution. We can talk more tomorrow, okay? Now you should rest.”

  “I don’t understand why you aren’t angry with me. Why you don’t despise me.”

  “It was an accident, right? And I’m your mother. There have been some forks in the road since then, but I gave birth to you.”

  Mama pulled the covers snug around Winnie’s shoulders. She hesitated a moment, then kissed Winnie gently on the cheek.

  Mama was so forgiving. How could she be so forgiving?

  But it didn’t make Winnie feel absolved. If anything, it made her feel even guiltier.

  Mama wanted to protect her from Hawthorn. It made Winnie feel even more resolved to take him on herself, so Mama wouldn’t have to.

  No matter what Mama thought, Winnie understood that this was her mess. She would fix it.

  Tonight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Columbia’s campus was completely empty, and more still than things ever got in the city. The night had the sort of bright, hard chill to it that seemed to amplify sound, and Winnie’s and Scott’s footsteps on the brick walkways echoed loudly across the quad.

  “Should we be on the lookout for campus security?” Winnie asked nervously.

  Scott shook his head. “We aren’t doing anything wrong—yet.”

  Winnie wasn’t as familiar with campus as Scott was, but she thought they were heading in the direction of Amsterdam Avenue, which was on the opposite side of campus from Pupin Hall.

  “Isn’t the physics building back that way?” she said, pointing toward 120th Street.

  “It is—I’ll explain in a minute.”

  Scott led her through an open wrought-iron gate toward a smaller brick building, less institutional than its surroundings, its peaked roof and dormer windows making it look almost like a large, stately home.

  “Before Columbia was Columbia,” Scott said, “it was Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. This is all that’s left of it—aboveground. Underground, there’s this labyrinth of tunnels. And that’s how we’re going to get into Pupin Hall.”

  These underground tunnels originally linked the various asylum buildings, he explained, and over the years these tunnels had been added to with infrastructure for all the new construction: steam tunnels, conduits for electricity, small underground rail tracks for transporting the coal that was used to heat the buildings.

  This complex underground web now rivaled the centuries-old system of tunnels under the Kremlin, supposedly, and the passageways—some officially charted, some not—were a territory ripe for students’ exploration. The administration frowned on it, but turned a blind eye so long as no one got too badly hurt or destroyed school property.

  “Probably I should have asked earlier,” he added, “but you aren’t claustrophobic, are you?”

  “Not that I know of,” Winnie said.

  The idea of prowling through some dark tunnels at night didn’t thrill her, but what choice did they have?

  Scott led Winnie around to the back of the old asylum building. There was an entrance to a storm cellar, its wide metal doors covered in ivy and secured with a padlock.

  “Damn!” Winnie cursed. “We’re going to need bolt cutters.”

  “It isn’t really locked,” Scott assured her, and true enough, the padlock’s shackle hadn’t been clicked down into the body of the lock.

  Scott took a furtive glance around, but there was no one in sight. He opened the cellar door, and they descended into the dark.

  * * *

  • • •

  They turned on their flashlights, which sent long shadows up the stone walls of the underground room.

  “Do students really like to come down here?” Winnie asked, glancing around doubtfully. “It’s kind of spooky.” She put an exploratory hand against the brick wall. It was cold and thoroughly damp.

  Scott laughed. “People come here because it’s spooky. It’s a whole thing—fraternity init
iations, dares. You aren’t really a Columbian until you’ve explored the tunnels.”

  “Ah, then you’ve been down here before,” Winnie said, relieved. “You know the way?”

  Scott scratched at his head in a failed show of nonchalance. “Oh, well, not exactly. But I’ve talked to students who have. And I borrowed a map.”

  He held up a crumpled, hand-scrawled piece of paper.

  Winnie tried to remind herself that a wasp’s nest of shoddily documented tunnels was certainly better than turning herself over to Hawthorn, which was the only alternative she’d been able to come up with, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were in over their heads. This had been her idea; if it went wrong, it was her fault.

  “You should stay here,” Winnie said. He could give her the tunnel map and tell her how to get into Fermi’s office. She would be able to tell which documents were important enough to use to frame Hawthorn.

  “What? Absolutely not!”

  “But what if there is night security posted in Pupin Hall these days? They wouldn’t necessarily advertise that, would they? Why should we both get caught?”

  “Whatever happens now,” Scott said firmly, “it happens to both of us, together.”

  His words weren’t some magic spell. The stakes were still high, the outcome uncertain, and Winnie was quite scared. But at least she wasn’t in it alone.

  * * *

  • • •

  They descended a ladder whose thin metal steps and rails were slick with damp. Scott chivalrously went ahead of her, and at the bottom pressed a hand into the small of her back as he helped her off the slippery thing. Winnie’s heart skipped a little at his touch. She felt her cheeks get hot. She was glad for the dark of the tunnels.

  As soon as she had both feet on the ground, Scott quickly pulled his hand away, as if she were incendiary. She wondered if it was because he didn’t want to touch her, or because he wanted to touch her too much.

  Everything was all tangled up.

  They had been frantically scrambling away from threat after threat these past few days. Winnie knew her double’s death hadn’t fully registered yet, not for her, and especially not for Scott. Not because it was so fresh, but because Winnie was still there, in front of him. Winnie knew this because she had experienced it herself. She had seen her Scott die, but here he was, breathing, moving, smiling at her. It softened her suffering.

  Winnie shook off the thoughts and tried to focus on their mission.

  Scott paused to double-check his makeshift map. “This way,” he said, gesturing to a tunnel that branched off to the right.

  Scott had told her the oldest tunnels were constructed in the 1880s, but Winnie would have easily believed them older still. The tunnel floor was made of crumbling brick, forcing Winnie to focus on each step or risk tripping—a welcome distraction from the danger ahead.

  The tunnel quickly grew too narrow for them to walk abreast of each other. “Would you like to walk in front or behind?” Scott asked.

  “Um, you can go ahead.”

  Winnie could feel the dark yawning behind her, the complete blackness a void at her back, urging her forward.

  “We need to be careful not to rush, and watch out for the pipes,” Scott said, motioning toward the fat metal pipes running over the tunnel walls on both sides. “They’re quite hot. Marcus told me he got a nasty burn on his elbow bumping into one, and that was through his shirt.”

  They traveled in silence for a few more minutes, until the path narrowed even further. Winnie estimated that the span of walkable space between the boiling hot pipes was perhaps no more than three feet wide.

  “Careful, now—but this should be the worst of it,” Scott said. “The tunnels are oldest here. Closer to Pupin, they’ll open up a bit.”

  After a few hundred feet, they took a sharp left turn, ducked through a squat opening meant for the coal carts, and emerged into a much wider tunnel whose floor was threaded down the center with a slender line of railroad track. They followed Scott’s map, and aside from some muck, a few rats, and a stomach-clenching moment when Winnie’s flashlight flickered, died, and required a few slaps before it would light again, the rest of the way to Pupin was hardly more uncomfortable underground than it was above.

  But even with the extra room, Winnie found it hard to take a full breath. The closer they got to Fermi’s office, the greater the danger—and the more empty space around them, the easier it would be for some guards to hide in wait.

  * * *

  • • •

  They entered Pupin Hall through a cavernous room in the basement. A massive machine filled about one quarter of the space, the U shape of it a magnet large enough to hoist a car and curved around two giant metal disks. Winnie recognized that it must be the cyclotron John R. Dunning had constructed a few years earlier.

  “I’ve never actually laid eyes on the atom smasher before,” Scott said, voiced tinged with awe. “Funny seeing it down here, casual as a washing machine in a basement.”

  Winnie nodded, but really, she had no attention to spare. At any other time, she would be just as enthralled with the contraption—the most powerful particle accelerator on the East Coast, vital to the department’s nuclear experimentation—but all her focus was attuned to the sounds in the building around them, anxiously awaiting the creak of a chair or a beat of footfall even though Scott had been certain there would be no guards.

  “Where’s Fermi’s office?” she asked.

  “Fourth floor,” Scott answered, a bit distractedly. He went up to the cyclotron and laid his hand gently on the curved metal of its side as if he were steadying a skittish horse.

  “Then let’s go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Scott and Winnie crept up the stairs to Fermi’s office. Winnie made them pause and listen for guards at the top of each flight. By the time they made it up to the fourth floor, Winnie was convinced that no one was lying in wait, not even a lazy university security guard half-asleep at his post. She and Scott were the only ones in the building.

  Scott led the way to a plain wooden door with a placard that read:

  ENRICO FERMI

  451

  Winnie was struck by the banality of its appearance—just an ordinary door, nearly identical to countless others in the dusty hallways of academia everywhere. But behind this door lay state secrets, pieces to the quantum puzzle at the heart of the world, and—perhaps—the key to their freedom from Hawthorn.

  By entering, they were committing espionage. To frame Hawthorn for treason, they had to actually commit it. She glanced up at Scott’s face. She’d put him in so much danger that now this was their safest option.

  He reached into his satchel and pulled out a screwdriver and the smallest claw hammer she’d ever seen.

  “You’re going to break the lock?”

  He shook his head. “I’m going to remove the doorknob—we can reinstall it after. It will probably show some damage, but not so much that it won’t be believable that Fermi didn’t notice it.”

  Scott started to pop the metal collar around the knob.

  “Wait!” Winnie said. She felt so sick to her stomach that she thought maybe she was about to see a splinter.

  Winnie put her hand to the door and paused a moment, waiting for the splinter to strike, hoping it might give her some sort of insight into what this choice held for them.

  There was nothing. The awful clenching in her stomach was just nerves.

  In no world did they leave this door unopened. She should have expected as much.

  * * *

  • • •

  The office had a cozy, lived-in feel. There was a half-empty coffee cup on the desk, and next to the black Bakelite rotary phone was a day planner covered in squiggly abstract doodles and sloppy sketches of cats, mice, and hats. This, of all things, seemed deeply personal.
For the first time, Winnie felt as though they were really trespassing.

  Scott began searching through one of the five-drawer standing metal file cabinets, while Winnie scanned the papers on Fermi’s cluttered desk.

  Scott pulled out a green file folder, opened it up, and regarded the papers inside with a frown. “I can’t figure out how his files are organized . . . if they’re organized at all. Here are copies of his published papers on isotopes—filed under ‘F.’”

  “Hmm, ‘F’ for Fermi, do you think—filed under author name?”

  “Perhaps. But there’s an article by Heisenberg stuffed in here too.”

  Winnie opened a large, unlined notebook. Unlike his desk, Fermi’s handwriting was tidy, his neat print running margin to margin, interrupted only by experiment diagrams.

  When Winnie had imagined exploring Fermi’s office, she stupidly thought she would be able to sift through all the notebooks and data as easily as she did her own father’s research, but that was work she was directly involved with. Some of Fermi’s notes might as well have been in Italian, for all the sense they made to her.

  “How are we going to get through all of this?” Winnie asked.

  Scott shrugged. “One page at a time,” he said, and continued flipping through Fermi’s files. “In a way, it’s an advantage, not knowing what we’re looking for—we don’t need anything in particular, just something important.”

  That was true. If Hawthorn was found in possession of any of his rival’s top secret files, things would look very bad for him. The content didn’t matter—any sort of vital information about the Manhattan Project would do.

  Winnie opened the top shelf of the filing cabinet next to the one Scott was searching. “Is it too much to hope there’ll be a file marked ‘Manhattan Project—Top Secret’?” she asked lightly.

  Scott gave her a tired smile. “Probably.”