Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  The legal process seemed likely to make my ex-husband, whose firm represented Breen, even richer than he already was. The only positive out of it was that Breen’s wife decided she’d had enough; Constance wasn’t going to stand by her man. She rented studio space not far from Alison’s apartment and began painting seriously again. How well that would work was anyone’s guess, since she still seemed to find answers to many of life’s questions in a Sancerre bottle.

  The other plus, one that delighted Max and Lotty as much as it did me, was Martin’s acceptance at Caltech. When he decided to apply, Max and Darraugh both worked their networks to get the college to consider him.

  Like Alison, Martin dropped by my apartment and office a number of times in the weeks after we returned from Vienna. We had a lot of conversations about his life, his family history, his legacy from Martina. Should he go to Caltech, or find a job with a computer start-up company?

  “If you want to become an Internet billionaire, you have the skills and the smarts to turn computer apps into money,” I said to him. “But if you want to follow Martina, then you should work with the people who can help you understand her work. That patent, that was a throwaway idea for her, don’t you think? Her real passion was for those things you say she wrote down, supersymmetry, how to understand dark matter, all those places where light bends and mortals like me drop our jaws in amazement.”

  The January day was cold and bright when Martin stopped by my office to tell me Caltech was letting him start in the middle of the year. He was driving the Subaru out to Pasadena, but he traveled light: his modest wardrobe, his computers, his poster of Feynman and his set of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics.

  “You’ve been great, Vic, really great. I know my grandmother hired you—I found your contract when I was packing up her things to put the house on the market. I can’t pay your bill right now, and even if I could it wouldn’t come close to what I owe you for finding Martina’s patent and coming to Tinney to save me and all those things. But if the book makes any money—”

  “Stop,” I said. “If the book makes any money you’ll do something in Martina’s memory. Anyway, Dr. Herschel is taking care of my professional fee.”

  We’d hired Arthur Harriman, the young German-speaking librarian at the University of Chicago, to translate Martina’s journals. They seemed interesting enough that the Gaudy Press had given Harriman and Martin a contract to write a memoir, threading her story together with the history of nuclear weapons.

  One afternoon, I went with Martin to the Special Collections room at the University of Chicago Library. We returned the second page of Ada Byron’s letter to Benjamin Dzornen, which Martin had lifted back in August. We talked to the librarian, Rachel Turley, about the BREENIAC sketch, which I’d sent her. Alison came with us: we had a kind of formal ceremony, in which Alison relinquished any claim to the sketch on Metargon’s part and Ms. Turley thanked us for the bequest, and said she would overlook Martin’s removing a library document.

  “Anyway, thank you, Vic,” Martin said the afternoon he stopped at my office. “I’m going to head west now. I’m spending the night in Tinney. Dorothy’s forgiven me for all that mess back in September. She knows it wasn’t my fault or yours, so I’m stopping there on my way to California. Will you visit my mother sometimes? I mean, not take her on, she’s not easy to be with, but just so she’s not completely on her own?”

  I promised.

  “And Alison. She’s kind of in a difficult place right now. Hard to believe a billionaire could be in a difficult place, but, you know, her father’s been arrested, her mother is still drinking, and she’s kind of on her own. Can you let her know you haven’t forgotten her?”

  I promised him that as well. He and Alison had decided that their lives were on such separate tracks these days that a romantic relationship wasn’t possible, but they were remaining friends, as their generation was able to do.

  I sympathized with Kitty, angry with a mother whose mind searched the outer reaches of time and space but had little room to spare for a human daughter. Perhaps Martin, inheriting his great-grandmother’s powerful gifts, would forge a life that held more balance.

  I waved good-bye to Martin. At the end of the evening, I drove over to Lotty’s apartment. Angel, the doorman, warned me that she had an early surgery call in the morning.

  “I have a package for her,” I said, “Something I know she’ll want to see.”

  While the librarian, Rachel Turley, had been meeting with Alison and Martin, I had requested a file from the Dzornen papers. I’d performed a little sleight of hand at the photocopy machine. I was preserving, I was confiscating, I was restoring.

  When I got off the elevator at her floor, Lotty was waiting for me in her red dragon dressing gown, her face anxious, wondering what new crisis I was bringing to her.

  I handed her the packet. When she opened it and saw the letter from her grandfather to Dzornen, written in pencil on the title page of the Radetzkymarsch, she stared at it for a long moment. “Oh, Vic, oh, daughter of my heart. For this—oh, thank you.”

  TINNEY, ILLINOIS

  Finding the Harmonies

  SHE KNOWS THE JANUARY AIR is cold, but her bulky coat gets in her way when she’s making adjustments to the lenses. She doesn’t shiver as she unwraps her telescope. It’s as if she were eighteen again on the Wildspitze, embracing the glacier water.

  The heavens lie open above her and her heart, that aged frail muscle, stirs as it always has at the purity of light.

  Benjamin said to her on their last night in Göttingen, “You are not human, Martina. One does not lie with a lover to talk about spectral lines, one seeks the comfort afforded by our human bodies. It’s as if you have no feelings in you.”

  “I was never a cold person, Benjamin,” she says tonight: like many old people who live alone, she doesn’t realize that she’s thinking out loud. “But my passions were too intense for you. I thought you shared my longing for the harmonies. I thought with you I might find the place where the music is so pure that the sound itself could ravage you, if it didn’t first shatter your mind. These bodies, yes, we live inside these bodies and must tend to them, but I wanted to be inside the numbers, inside the function where it approaches the limit. I long for the stars. I know their red shift and their spectral lines, but I don’t want to describe them: I want to be inside the light.”

  She’s weeping now, her tears turning to ice crystals on her lashes. And then, because it seems the most natural thing in the world, she unbuttons her jacket and her shirt and lies on the deck, opening her arms to the heavens.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Some years ago, while thumbing through my husband’s copies of Physics Today, I came on an article I actually could understand: a tribute to the Austrian physicist Marietta Blau. I had never heard of her, but she did groundbreaking research in cosmic ray physics in the 1930s. She was a member of the Institut für Radiumforschung (IRF) in Vienna.

  The IRF, which still exists in the original building under the name Stefan-Meyer-Institut, was unique in the era between the world wars for its aggressive hiring and support of women scientists. It was the first research facility in the world to hire a janitorial staff, instead of demanding that women researchers also clean the labs. They were also the first, and perhaps remain the only institute to require the same number of toilets for women as for men. Before the Anschluss, thirty-eight percent of the research staff were women. With Nazis in power, the Jewish staff and the women were fired within relatively short order, and the IRF lost its cutting edge in research. Blau’s work was so highly regarded by Erwin Schrödinger (Nobel Prize, 1933) that he kept nominating her for the prize, which she never won. As war closed in on Europe, Einstein tried to get an American university to find a place for Blau. He was unsuccessful, but at the last possible second, he found her a position in a high school in Mexico City. Her enforced exile from the heart of ph
ysics meant that at war’s end, Blau had lost her edge as a researcher. She worked briefly at the Brookings Institution in Long Island, and died in obscurity in Austria.

  Blau’s story haunted me for years. Critical Mass has its origins in Blau’s life, but the physicist I created, Martina Saginor, is a work of fiction. None of Martina’s biography is based on Blau, except for her position as a researcher at the Institut für Radiumforschung. It’s also true that one of Blau’s students, Hertha Wambacher, was a secret member of the Nazi Party when the party was outlawed in Austria. However, Wambacher was not involved in weapons work or in torturing prisoners.

  The Technische Hochschule für Mädchen, which Martina attends as a student and where she later works as a teacher, is my own invention. Despite the IRF’s welcoming policy toward women, the University of Vienna did not pay them a stipend. The IRF director, Dr. Stefan Meyer, paid women out of his own pocket, but many had to augment that stipend with other paying jobs.

  The German effort to release enough energy from the atom to create a weapon of mass destruction took place through an institution called the Uranverein, or Uranium Club. There were a number of sites in Germany where scientists and technicians tried to create reactors that could produce a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. I created a fictitious site near Innsbruck, Austria, Uranverein 7, but to the best of my knowledge, there were no actual reactor installations in Austria.

  At the end of World War II, when U.S. policy concerns shifted from Fascism to Communism, the American government brought in many Nazi weapons and rocket researchers. Under the name “Operation Paperclip,” the United States did a perfunctory investigation, or none at all, into the background of Nazis it brought into U.S. weapons labs. Some of the people had engaged personally in horrific acts of torture.

  For the background and history of the IRF, I used Maria Rentetzi’s Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, as well as Brigitte Strohmaier and Robert Rosner, Marietta Blau, Stars of Disintegration, Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 2006.

  Dr. Johann Marton, deputy director of the Stefan-Meyer-Institut, took a day from a busy schedule to show me through the Institute building on Boltzmannstrasse, and to give me a personal history of the Institute, and the way in which it was affected by the Nazi era.

  For details about Operation Paperclip, I read Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945–1990, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

  For background on physics and on the race for the atomic bomb, I read Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986; Steven Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, New York: Scientific American Press, 1983; and Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

  For the history of computers and the development of the hydrogen bomb, I used George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, New York: Pantheon Books, 2012; and Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, New York: Scribner’s, 1976.

  Although the physics in Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine’s Longing for the Harmonies was beyond me, they express so perfectly my own longing for the harmonies that the book helped guide me as I created the character of Martina Saginor.

  *Nikita Khrushchev.

  †But you are dead!

  ‡What are you doing here?

  §I congratulate you.

  ¶The hydrogen bomb.