Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  “Was he still on track for that when the factory blew up?” Sophie asked, trying to listen for what Nobel was omitting and ask the right questions to bring it out.

  “He was not,” Nobel said. “On my second and final visit, which took place about two months before the explosion, I found a singularly different environment. A series of small but troublesome acts of industrial sabotage had time and again halted the production line. This in itself would not have been catastrophic, but it had a sort of cascade effect. The factory workers—untutored peasants!—had become convinced the project was cursed. Their superstition and ignorance were such that this was no metaphor. A number of men had left already, and the village priest was agitating against the project in a way that it made it difficult for your father to recruit new workers. The worries heaped on his shoulders had pushed him dangerously close to the brink of absolute exhaustion.”

  “What about Elsa Blix?” Sophie asked. “Was she still there? Tabitha said in her letter that she left a month or so before it all came to an end, but she could not tell me how or why the rift came about.”

  “She was still there when I visited,” Nobel said, “although the professional relationship was in the final stages of its decay. It had become clear, over the life of the project, that the superficial alignment of goals between your father and Elsa Blix was just that—a matter of surfaces only. Alan shared the dream that has united me and Niels Bohr and Tabitha Hunter over these many years—a dream of universal peace. Elsa had quite another idea, and I think your father had almost come to see her as a demonic force: she hoped to persuade him to break his contract with me, in defiance of the requirements both of honor and of his deepest ideals.”

  “Why would she want him to break the contract?” Sophie asked.

  “So that they could sell the weapon—the atom bomb, as they called it amongst themselves—to the highest bidder. Elsa had a vision of her own, and it was not a vision of perpetual peace. . . .”

  “My father wouldn’t have broken his word to you, would he?” Sophie asked anxiously, aware of the unlikelihood of getting an unbiased answer and yet quite unable to stop herself from asking.

  “He refused to break the contract,” Nobel answered, “and he recoiled in horror at the notion of the weapon’s being put on the open market. The force of the weapon was literally inconceivable—the devastation it was projected to wreak was beyond the capabilities of the human imagination to grasp.”

  “What did Elsa Blix do, then, once she realized my father really meant it when he said no?”

  “On the face of it,” said Nobel, “the answer is simple. She resigned her position and took a new job working for a massive German munitions company, though her tenure there was brief. Certain instabilities in her personality made it difficult, I think, for her to work well with others, especially with administrative superiors of whose intelligence she had a low opinion. The original psychometric testing we did before we hired her had shown as much, but I chose to overlook those results—subsequent events proved the error of my decision.”

  “On the face of it, yes, I see,” Sophie said slowly. “But what do you think really happened?”

  “At the time, I thought nothing more than that I had made a poor hire,” Nobel said.

  Arne had remained silent, but was following the conversation’s revelations with a bewildered intentness that made Sophie suddenly feel, with her heart rather than her head, that Arne might be even more worried about Mikael than Sophie was.

  “Elsa Blix was a failed experiment, a former employee who’d left on rancorous terms,” Nobel continued, “but little more than that. For many years, I believed that the mystery of your parents’ death would never be solved. The initial investigation went nowhere. The disaffected worker whom the other employees suspected of having committed the earlier acts of sabotage, and who may well have detonated the charge that blew the factory up, was found dead a week later at the bottom of a nearby quarry, having gone over the edge after a bout of solitary drinking, but it is also possible the accident’s real instigator decided to tie up the last remaining loose end by getting rid of him.”

  “So?” Sophie said impatiently. Arne put out his hand as if to restrain her, then drew it back without actually touching her. “What happened to make you question that version of events?”

  “Arne may speak to this more directly than I,” said Nobel.

  Sophie looked at Arne, who shrugged.

  “Part of it you know already,” he said. “You remember the day I practically dropped dead of shock at the sight of that page that appeared in the pantelegraph machine at your old school. . . .”

  “Of course,” said Sophie.

  “When I saw you last in København, I told you that those images represented work we thought had perished with your father,” Arne continued. “I sent them immediately to Nobel—they represented only a small fraction of the full plans, of course, but their very existence gave us reason to believe that the rest of the plans might have survived as well.”

  “Who sent them, though?” Sophie asked urgently. “Where did they come from?”

  “It is truly an unsolved mystery how that page turned up in my classroom,” Arne said. “Why, the machines were connected only to each other—there was no line to the outside world! I suspected an illusion or a piece of trickery of some sort, but could not work out how such a thing would have been pulled off; for a while, I even came to suspect that occult forces might have been at work.”

  This did not seem entirely far-fetched to Sophie. It had been a summer of paranormal manifestations in all aspects of her life—it seemed as likely to her that the plans had been transmitted by someone dead as by someone alive, though she was not sure who that person could have been.

  “I set out to inquire, on my employer’s behalf, of course, as to where the rest of the plans might be,” Arne continued. “The path led straight to Elsa Blix.”

  “What do you mean?” Sophie asked.

  Arne looked at his watch.

  “In about ten minutes,” he said, “we will have a conversation with the woman herself. We can hope that some of these matters will be clarified then. In the meantime, I will just say that as we put the message out that we’d be interested in purchasing more pages, should any such thing exist, the word Spitsbergen first came to be mentioned. Not long afterward, Mr. Nobel received a direct communication from Blix herself. She had the plans, she said; they were missing certain crucial elements to do with the actual fuel the device would require, elements she had tried in vain to reconstruct, and partly as a result of this she would consider selling the plans to Nobel Enterprises, if the price was right.”

  “Would you buy them from her?” Sophie asked anxiously.

  “I meant to,” Nobel said. “She has been in Stockholm this past week meeting with my people and trying to hammer out a deal. But Bohr’s latest work has changed the terms of the conversation. With the recent discovery made by Frisch and Meitner, this problem of the fuel has to a great extent been solved, which means that the weapon teeters on the edge of becoming a reality—the plans are infinitely more valuable than they would have been mere months ago. Infinitely more valuable—and infinitely more dangerous!”

  “But why would she have waited so many years to try to sell the plans to you?” Sophie asked, quite confused.

  “That, Sophie, is the question,” Nobel said, the voice sounding heavier, wearier than before. “I have often felt, over the years, as though some shadowy adversary were thwarting me.”

  “An adversary?”

  “One wonders, of course, whether it might not be a paranoid fantasy,” Nobel continued. “A factory closure in Libya, a lost convoy of merchandise in the Great Lakes, a valued employee poached, or a contract lost to a competitor—why should any one of these things be connected to another? Might it not be a flaw of the human meaning-generating system to find patterns in events that may really and truly be unrelated?”

  “You think it wasn’
t just a fantasy, though,” Sophie said.

  “I became increasingly convinced that a single person’s diabolical scheming could be seen operating against me,” Nobel answered, “and that it could only be an individual whose ambition saw no limits—someone who imagined that the era of Nobel was passing, and that a vacancy would be created thereby for a new master of life and death.”

  The voice fell silent. It had become weaker and threadier, and the nurse seemed to know that something was needed, for she opened the dome again—Sophie had a sudden comic-grotesque revelation that it worked exactly like the sliding cover on a hot dish at a catered dinner—pulled back Nobel’s lips with her fingers, and sponged off the inside of his mouth with a carbohydrate solution, then adjusted several settings on the machine regulating the flow of nutrients into his body.

  “This person clearly intended,” continued Nobel, sounding stronger again now, though Arne was looking worried, “to capture an even larger share of the market for munitions than I had—and this person did not share my way of thinking about weapons as deterrents to violence, but instead gloried in their use.”

  “Why do you think this person must be Elsa Blix, though?” Sophie persisted.

  “Here is Elsa Blix with the plans seemingly in her possession—she certainly showed my representatives enough pages to convince me the claim was true—and an offer on the table. She would give me the missing bits, she said, in return for my concession of a massive tranche of shares in various companies I control. My companies are structured in a relatively unusual fashion, beyond most people’s understanding or knowledge, but this offer showed an exceptional grasp of the corporate governance structures—in other words, of exactly which holdings would give their possessor the most control throughout my empire.”

  “Do you think she took the plans with her long ago when she left the factory?” Sophie asked.

  “I think something much worse than that. I have come to believe it may have been Blix herself who instigated the explosion. I suspect that she was behind the sabotage at the factory. I believe that after she had gone, she continued to maneuver behind the scenes to pressure your father into changing his mind about selling the weapon to another purchaser, one who had actual intentions of using it. And I believe that when it finally dawned on her that your father was not going to budge, she took more drastic measures. If the weapon could not be possessed by those she thought deserved it, neither would it come into my ownership—and she resolved to blow the factory to kingdom come.”

  “But what basis do you have for saying this?” Sophie cried out. In some ways, she wanted it very badly to be true—it was awful, but it would at least make sense of her parents’ deaths. “Have you any evidence? It could perfectly well be pure speculation!”

  “The matter cannot be resolved on the basis of the information currently in my possession,” Nobel admitted. “To return to the developments of recent days, it became clear that negotiations would not reach a successful conclusion. Blix was frustrated that I was not there myself—she made my presence a new condition of continuing to treat with me. I was unwilling to invite a hostile stranger to contemplate my present condition of physical weakness, so that was not an option, but though I insisted that the group of executives in Stockholm was empowered to negotiate on my behalf, the conversation broke down on the third day. At the time she encountered you and Mikael, Sophie, she had already announced the cancellation of any intention to hand over the plans.”

  “But why has she taken Mikael?” Sophie exclaimed. This elaborate account did not offer any enlightenment. “What can she want with him?”

  “This, we will ask the lady herself,” Arne said, tapping his watch and going over to make a few adjustments on a machine Sophie hadn’t especially singled out, full as the room was with all sorts of medical equipment. She now saw the typewriter-like apparatus of an old-fashioned teletype, and a moment later the humming began that signaled transmission of a message over the lines.

  The words appeared letter by letter on a screen that was large enough for Sophie to read, and that seemed to feed directly into Nobel’s sensory equipment, because he spoke in response to the sentences that appeared, and the machine itself transcribed his words.

  NOBEL, ARE YOU READY TO MEET ME FACE-TO-FACE?

  IMPOSSIBLE.

  THEN THERE IS NO TREATING WITH YOU.

  ON THE CONTRARY. I HAVE FOUND AN EMISSARY TO SEND ON MY BEHALF, ONE ON WHOM I BESTOW ALL OF MY OWN AUTHORITY TO NEGOTIATE.

  I ALREADY MET WITH YOUR MINIONS IN STOCKHOLM. I HAVE NO INTEREST IN PROXIES.

  THIS IS DIFFERENT.

  HOW?

  I AM SENDING YOU MY GRANDDAUGHTER.

  The pause that followed was long enough that Sophie started to wonder whether the machine was still working. After almost a minute, the letters began appearing again.

  YOU DO NOT HAVE A GRANDDAUGHTER.

  I HAVE A GRANDDAUGHTER. HER NAME IS SOPHIE HUNTER. SHE WAS THE ONLY SURVIVOR OF THE RUSSIAN ACCIDENT THAT KILLED ALAN AND ROSE HUNTER; SHE IS THEIR ONLY CHILD.

  SOPHIE HUNTER—BUT ALAN HUNTER . . . DOES THAT MEAN HE WAS YOUR SON?

  I AM NO LIAR.

  Another pause ensued, and then the words began again.

  SEND HER TO ME.

  WILL YOU PROMISE TO KEEP HER SAFE?

  I WILL NOT HARM HER.

  SHE WILL DISCUSS THE MATTER OF HER FATHER’S WORK WITH YOU, BUT THERE IS ANOTHER THING THAT CONCERNS US: THE BOY YOU TOOK FROM STOCKHOLM.

  THE BOY?

  THE BOY IS SOPHIE’S FRIEND, AND THE BROTHER OF MY CLOSE ASSOCIATE ARNE PETERSEN.

  HOW AMUSING! WAS THAT SOPHIE, THEN, THAT SLIM LITTLE DARK-HAIRED THING IN THE MUSEUM LOBBY? I WILL NOT PREVENT HER FROM SEEING THE BOY, BUT IT WILL BE UP TO HIM WHETHER HE WANTS TO GO AWAY WITH HER AGAIN.

  ARNE WILL ACCOMPANY SOPHIE ON HER TRAVELS.

  NO! I WILL RECEIVE SOPHIE, AND SOPHIE ALONE. ASSUMING SHE CAN GET AS FAR AS LONGYEARBYEN, I WILL SEND SOMEONE TO GUIDE HER THE REST OF THE WAY.

  IT IS TOO DANGEROUS! YOU CANNOT EXPECT SUCH A YOUNG GIRL TO TRAVEL ALONE.

  SHE WILL DO PERFECTLY WELL; YOU MAY RETAIN SOME LOCAL AGENT TO ACCOMPANY HER FOR SOME PART OF THE WAY, BUT DO NOT DARE SEND ONE OF YOUR CLOSE ASSOCIATES WITH HER, NOBEL! WE DO NOT LIKE OUTSIDERS IN THIS PART OF THE WORLD. I WILL AWAIT HER ARRIVAL WITH INTEREST.

  And that was that—Nobel essayed several more remarks, but they met with no response, and at last Arne turned off the machine and said that they would get no more from Elsa Blix today.

  “Of course you won’t let Sophie go,” he added.

  “Of course I must go,” Sophie said, “even if it is dangerous!”

  “Sophie must go,” said Nobel. “Arne, you will find someone local who can travel with her for part of the way; I leave the arrangements solely in your hands.”

  “Mr. Nobel,” Sophie said tentatively, “are you really willing to have me negotiate on your behalf? How will I know what to say?”

  “I believe I have no choice,” said Nobel. “Arne, I must rest. Will you escort Sophie back to her room, and ensure she is provided with all the creature comforts? Sophie, you will forgive me if I do not see you again before you leave. I must marshal my resources very carefully, and I have tapped into them more deeply already than is advisable. Your train leaves late tonight.”

  “My train?”

  “The first leg of your journey involves a train from here to Kiruna,” Arne said, standing up and offering Sophie his arm, which he would never usually have done but which seemed a function of the strangely courtly atmosphere created by Nobel’s manner of speaking.

  “One thing more,” the voice said.

  Arne and Sophie halted.

  “This is no time for me to make you a serious offer. The question of Mikael’s safety will weigh heavily on your mind. But, Sophie, you must know that I consider you my heir. I have long since been prepared for death; only the snares of worldly ambition tied me to life in this body. Most of all, the atom bomb has seemed to me a
piece of unfinished business. If I can close the books on that, I will be ready at long last to depart from this earth. I cannot do it without you. And in exchange for this assistance, and in recognition of the relationship between us, I have written you into my will as sole—”

  “Stop!” Sophie said, covering her ears and shrinking away from the voice. “It’s too much! I don’t want it!”

  “I knew it was the wrong time,” Nobel said, the voice little more than a whisper now. “Safe travels, Sophie. It is impossible to say whether we will meet again, but please believe me when I say you will be very much in my thoughts.”

  As they traveled back the way they’d come, Arne stayed far enough ahead of Sophie that she had to struggle to keep up with him.

  “Go slower!” she said, panting. They were practically running down the hall. He slowed down and turned to look at her.

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked.

  Arne did not deny it.

  “It’s stupid, I know,” he said, sounding almost hopeless. “You will do everything you can to find Mikael and bring him back. But I thought I would be the one to go—how will I stand waiting to know the outcome?”