Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  She took me to the door of her father’s office. It was the room of a modern technocrat, with a flat-screen TV on one wall tuned to world market reports and a battery of equally flat computer monitors on the glass-topped desk in front of him. The room faced the lake, but the windows were so thoroughly soundproofed that we couldn’t hear the water.

  Breen didn’t bother to get to his feet or even to look up from his monitor. I guess being kept waiting was supposed to make me feel nervous.

  “Good to see you too, Mr. Breen,” I said. “If that’s all, let’s get Durdon to drive me back to Chicago.”

  As I turned to leave, I saw Alison’s eyes widen—admiration or alarm, hard to know. I gave her a reassuring smile.

  Breen said, “You came up here to see me. You’ll wait until I’m ready.”

  I paused in the doorway. “It’s true, I would like to see Edward Breen’s workshop. Alison, why don’t you take me up there while your dad plays games with his computer.”

  “Neither Alison nor anyone else will take you to the workshop. The last time I let her take strangers up there, a valuable picture disappeared.”

  “Dad, don’t start that again tonight, please,” Alison cried. “Martin did not steal the drawing. It was there at the end of the evening.”

  “What’s gone?” I asked. “Your pet Picasso?”

  “More valuable than that,” Breen snapped, “at least to us. Edward’s rough sketch of what became the BREENIAC, the Metargon-I, has vanished. Apparently angels or vampires made off with it, since Alison claims it was still here at the end of her irresponsible party with one of our employees. Who definitely should not have been in this house.”

  “Dad, please!” Alison said. “We’ve gone round on this all day. Jari Liu has told you himself that Martin could dance rings around all the summer fellows, so why do you need to keep insulting him? Besides, he did not steal Granddad’s BREENIAC sketch.”

  “Oh,” I said slowly. “Is that what Martin was looking at when he said something didn’t add up?”

  Alison held up her hands, a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know. It’s true that it’s vanished, but I’m sure it was here when the party was over. Besides, Martin was wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs to the barbecue; you can’t stick a framed drawing inside a T-shirt without it showing. One of the other fellows would have said something. Especially Tad: he goes to MIT. He couldn’t stand that a guy taking night classes at an urban campus could out-program him.”

  “It’s why I don’t trust young Binder.” Breen smacked his desktop with his palm. It must have stung, heavy glass against skin, but he didn’t flinch. “He has a chip on his shoulder, he was taking over chunks of Fitora from other programmers. Maybe, as Jari says, he was only trying to improve the program, but maybe he was getting a handle on more of its components.”

  “What does the sketch show?” I interrupted. “I thought it was just the outline for a computer that is completely obsolete these days. Is there something else on it that makes it worth taking?”

  For some reason, the question took Breen off-guard. He didn’t answer immediately. “It’s valuable to collectors,” he said, but he sounded like a kid in a classroom making a wild guess at the answer.

  Alison said, “Even if I could believe Martin stole it, it wouldn’t mean anything to him, I mean it doesn’t contain unusual electronics. It’s a very rough sketch of the central grid, with arrows pointing to input and output paths. Granddad did include equations for a hysteresis curve.”

  “Hysteresis?” I repeated. “I can see how computers make you hysterical, but is that how they’re built?”

  Alison smiled involuntarily. “That’s what everyone says in their first computer engineering class. Hysteresis is hard to explain, but it has to do with the way you can lag output behind input and use the same site both to read and write memory. One of the biggest problems with early vacuum tube memory was the way tubes amplified distortion in the electronic signal. Granddad’s big breakthrough was understanding that if you used a magnetic core instead of a tube, you could rely on hysteresis to control the distortion. The sketch had equations in the top corner for electronic Fermi surfaces and for hysteresis. They seem to be how Granddad’s thinking led him to a ferromagnetic core.”

  “That’s what makes it valuable to a collector,” Breen cut in. “It’s drawn on fragile paper, an old piece of newsprint that Edward had—he probably tore it out of Stars and Stripes when he was in the last big push of the war. He always said he created it under battlefield conditions.

  “This Binder jerk wouldn’t know to protect it, which proves the point I’ve been making all day to Alison—she wants to trot around the globe on her own, hobnobbing with the poor and undereducated, but she doesn’t have horse sense. If I’d had somebody keeping an eye on you here at the house while your mother and I were in Bar Harbor, Binder could never have walked away with the sketch.”

  “Dad, he didn’t!” Tears were spilling out of the corners of Alison’s amber eyes.

  “Oh, Sunny!” Breen got up from his desk and went to put an arm around her. “I’m sorry to make you cry. I’m going nuts, worrying about you and Binder and the Fitora software, and to find Edward’s drawing missing has tipped me over the edge.”

  “That’s very touching,” I said, “but it doesn’t help me understand why I needed to be out here.”

  Breen looked at me over his daughter’s head. “I wanted to talk to you in person, not over the phone, because I wanted to see your face and how you react. Have you found Binder?”

  I shook my head. “Not a whiff of him. How about you?”

  He made an impatient gesture. “I told you when I met you last week that I didn’t think you had the skills for this search, and your failure confirms it.”

  I smiled. “Unless you’ve shoveled him into a hole in the ground someplace that no one knows about, you’re clueless yourself right now. I gather Homeland Security and the FBI are as well, or they wouldn’t be messing with my home and Alison’s Mexico City program.”

  Again, something I’d said unsettled him. It was impossible to know what, but he paused almost imperceptibly, as if power had been switched off in him briefly.

  He recovered quickly and added, “Beyond the question of Martin Binder, you need to understand that you must not interfere with my daughter. You crossed a line last night when you took her to that dead woman’s home. You are fortunate that she survived unharmed, but it was irresponsible at best, criminally negligent at worst.”

  “Dad!” Alison shook his shoulder. “I went to Vic. I sought her out, she did not try to find me. She was protecting my privacy because I was being a chicken. I should have been brave enough to come out here right away to talk to you, instead of involving her in my problems.”

  One of the computers on Breen’s desk pinged. Breen kissed his daughter’s forehead and trotted back to his desk. “Okay, Sunny, okay, we’re all rattled right now. At least you’re showing the spine you’re going to need to run a company.”

  His last remarks were offhand; his real attention was on the computer. It was as if that “ping” was what he’d been waiting for all throughout our conversation.

  I moved around the desk to see what was so absorbing. At first, I couldn’t make it out, but after a bit I thought I was watching traffic on Chicago’s expressways. There were thousands of streaks of light on the monitor. The Ryan was dense-packed, especially through the Loop, but I-55 was moving fast, as were the outlying toll roads. When the computer dinged, one of the streaks would pulse red.

  “Just another of our programs that I’m testing here at home,” Breen said. “No wonder Alison wanders off on her own: I’m not attentive enough, even when I’m angry about her recklessness.”

  He closed the tab and switched his attention to another monitor, one that was scrolling lines of code that meant nothing to me.

  34
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  GADGET MUSEUM

  BREEN’S SUDDENLY MELLOWER mood led him to tell Alison she could show me her grandfather’s workshop, after all. We collected Mr. Contreras from Constance Breen’s studio, a large, glass-enclosed room at the end of the north wing. Constance said she’d pass; she’d already seen the workshop more times than she wanted.

  One of the large windows facing the water was open; Ms. Breen was standing there, her back to us, a wineglass in hand. Alison started to say something to her mother about how much she’d had to drink, but her mother simply walked through the open window toward the lake. Alison looked after her irresolutely, but finally squared her shoulders and told Mr. Contreras and me to follow her up the stairs. When we reached the third floor, Alison clapped her hands and lights in old-fashioned sconces came on.

  Mr. Contreras and I both stopped in amazement. We were at the entrance to a small museum, one where all the objects were out in the open for anyone to play with. There were models of magnetic memory, which looked like iron Tinkertoys, cylinders that had deep grooves cut into them. A scale model of the BREENIAC, or Metargon-I, was set in the middle of the room; you could take off the panels and see the famous ferromagnetic core. Along the wall closest to the stairs were the actual Metargon computers, from the BREENIAC to 1970s mainframes.

  Mr. Contreras was fascinated by the display of Edward Breen’s old machines, the bandsaws, drill presses and so on for creating his prototypes. He played with the flywheels, told Alison one of them was out of balance and that he could fix it for her, but she said that her father really would kill her if she let someone tamper with Edward’s machines.

  The framed letters Alison had mentioned, from Hans Bethe and other physicists, from a raft of presidents starting with Truman, were on the walls in between the computers and the machines.

  An old-fashioned pigeonhole desk had open notebooks on it—another museum touch; these were Edward Breen’s notebooks, showing his drawings and the steps he went through to engineer and test his early machines.

  “Where was the BREENIAC sketch?” I asked Alison.

  She waved at an empty place on the wall above the desk. “It was the star attraction, so Granddad had it over his head when he sat. As I said, I don’t remember him, but from everything I hear about him, he had an ego the size of Mount McKinley, so I imagine he liked to think of it as the halo above his head.”

  “How sure are you, really, now that your dad is out of earshot, that Martin didn’t take the drawing?”

  Alison gave a wry smile. “Physically, I suppose he could have tucked it into the back of his cutoffs, but he was so upset, I don’t think stealing was on his mind. I was over there”—she pointed at a table holding a model of a data cylinder—“and Martin came over. I told you that part last night, how he got so agitated and took off. Anyway, I really think I would have noticed if the drawing was gone when I got the rest of the kids out of here.”

  “Any hunches on who else might have taken it?” I asked.

  “It can’t be anyone who works here,” she said. “We’ve known all of them for years. A lot of businesspeople come here; Dad thinks it’s a better atmosphere for getting people to agree to work on projects with him than the corporate offices. He’s getting into solar, which means wooing investors, and they like seeing Granddad’s shop. It’s all I can think of, that someone couldn’t resist taking the sketch.”

  She pulled out her iPhone and typed in a URL. “Look—this is the photograph of it they use in electronics texts.”

  I bent over the tiny screen. The web page showed the Metargon-I’s interior, which didn’t appear much different from what we could see in the scale model.

  “Looks like a deep-fat fryer,” Mr. Contreras said. “Like what my pa used to make French fries—he was a fry cook at the Woolworth’s in McKinley Park.”

  I thought it looked more like the potholders we used to make for our mothers in grade school art. “Where were the equations you mentioned?”

  Alison slid the image to the right and pointed to the top left corner. “He wrote them in this tiny hand, not like his usual writing—I guess in a battlefield he had to conserve paper. And then there was a name next to the grid, someone called Speicher. He was probably one of Granddad’s buddies, Dad says. I always picture him talking over the design with his buddy, and then his buddy dying, so Granddad included his name when he drew up the schematic.”

  She tapped the screen again and moved to the lower right side of the image. “In this corner there was a circle with a design in it. Interlocking triangles and maybe a sunburst; it was kind of hard to make out. Dad couldn’t tell me what it meant, so I thought it was part of his tribute to his dead friend. I mean, ‘Speicher’ could be a Jewish name, and the design could be a deconstructed Star of David.”

  “A little circle with triangles inside?”

  My voice came out queerly, even to my own ears. Alison and Mr. Contreras stared at me.

  I took the iPhone from her and went to the Virtual-Bidder site, to King Derrick’s effort to sell the details of the Innsbruck reactor.

  “Was it like that?” I pointed to the small circle at the bottom of the FOI document that I’d noticed yesterday.

  “It might be.” Alison peered at the screen. “This is so grainy I can’t be sure.”

  She went to her grandfather’s desk and fished a magnifying glass from one of the cubbyholes. When she held it over her phone, we could see jagged lines like a child’s drawing of the corona of the sun.

  We heard Cordell Breen on the stairs just then. Alison went to the door of the workshop to meet him. “Look, Dad.” She held out the phone. “Isn’t this queer? This is the same logo that is on the BREENIAC sketch.”

  Breen snatched the phone from her and stared at it. “What the—what is this? Where did you find it?”

  I told him about “King Derrick’s” auction, now shut down. “Just part of my ineffectual search for Martin Binder. Until he was murdered two weeks ago, Derrick Schlafly was his mother’s landlord.”

  Breen used his thumbs on the screen with the speed of a teenager. “I don’t get it. This is an FOI document about the Nazi nuclear weapons program. This makes no sense at all for the same image to be on it and on the Metargon-I sketch.”

  He used his thumbs some more. “I’m e-mailing the URL to our research department, see if they can get a handle on it. I owe you an apology, Ms. Warshawski—you were ahead of my whole team on this one. Thanks for sharing. If we turn up anything, I’ll let you know.”

  A buzzer sounded. Mr. Contreras and I both were startled, which made Alison and her father laugh.

  “We have computer monitors for the house up here,” Alison explained. “Dad and I both like to work up here when we’ve got a tough problem to solve, but we’re so remote that we don’t hear anything in the house. Mother insisted that we install them.”

  I hadn’t noticed the monitors, but I saw now that there was a modern worktable against the far wall, behind the row of Metargon machines. I walked over and saw the gates we had come through. A car was on the far side. We couldn’t see the face behind the steering wheel, but the license plate was being photographed.

  Someone inside the house was speaking through an intercom, which garbled her voice. We heard the driver say that he would wait for Breen, either outside the gates or inside the house, but that he wasn’t going to leave without seeing him.

  “You listening in on one of your fancy gadgets, Cordell?” The electronics flattened the voice into a quack. “I’m tired of you hiding behind the wall of secretaries and pit bulls you built out of Edward’s little machine.”

  “Dad, who is it?” Alison cried.

  Breen made a shushing motion and spoke into an invisible mike. “We don’t have anything to talk about. You turned a trivial event into the crime of the century and you want to drag me down into a pit with you, but I’m not going there,
my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend, Breen, not for one second. Someone using my name was digging around in the university archives. If that was you—”

  Breen pressed another button, cutting off the man in the car, and switching to a room in the house where a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt was standing. “Imelda, let him in. Tell Durdon to take him around the back; I’ll meet him there in a minute.”

  He turned to his daughter. “Sunny, you up to driving Ms. Warshawski and her friend home? I need Durdon here. This is a crackpot who’s been threatening me over patent infringements. It’s outrageous that he’s stalked me here at home and I need Durdon’s big shoulders to make it clear this is the last time he does that.”

  Alison demanded that he call the family’s lawyer. Breen laughed easily. “Sweetheart, the legal beagles know all about this guy. I want to make it clear to him personally that he can’t charge into our home as if we’re a public meeting. In a business like ours, there are always going to be people who think you took their ideas and this jerk is one of them. You get our guests back to the city, okay?”

  Alison agreed, reluctantly. She sent Mr. Contreras and me down a third staircase that led to an underground garage; she wanted to stop to tell her mother where she was going.

  My neighbor and I went through a room the size of an auditorium that held a golf practice range, a full-sized pool table, and a small basketball court. On the other side was the garage, which was as immaculate as the rest of the house. The cars ranged from the Maybach sedan to two convertibles, a Miata and a Lotus, which I figured as Breen’s testosterone car. A Land Rover and a 1939 Hudson completed the collection.

  When Alison rejoined us, her face was still troubled. “Mother doesn’t know anything about this man, although Dad isn’t very good at letting her in on company business. Now that I’ve been away from home for a few years, I’m beginning to see how hard it is on her.”