Critical Mass by Sara Paretsky
For Courtenay,
who taught me to
seek the beauty
of Nature’s secrets
THANKS
Many people helped me create this novel. My biggest debt goes to my personal physics adviser, S. C. Wright, from the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics. He directed my reading and answered the questions of a physics novice with great kindness and thoroughness.
Dr. Johann Marton, director of the Stefan-Meyer-Institut in Vienna, was generous with both his time and his insights in stepping me through the history of physics in Vienna in the twentieth century.
Thanks to Dr. Marton, I received advice from Dr. Stefan Sienell, MAS, director of the Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, as well as from Dr. Thomas Maisel, director of the Archives for the University of Vienna.
Michael Geoffrey, Chicago patent lawyer, was a most helpful resource for the part of the novel that deals with patent law, with whether patents held by foreign nationals were recognized in U.S. courts, and other critical plot issues.
Leah Richardson, librarian at the University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections, advised me on library policy for digging up names of people consulting library materials.
Margaret Elliot of Scotland discussed the education high school girls received in chemistry and physics in the 1930s.
Vicki Hill assisted with the German used by Kitty Binder and Lotty Herschel in this novel.
Jonathan Paretsky, who has reviewed trial records for drug cases, helped describe the drug-manufacturing subculture, especially meth production. He also researched federal warrantless searches and the action of chapter 26 for me.
I’m indebted to the late Stan Ovshinsky for the motto “In God We trust, all others show data.”
Karen Pendleton was my inspiration for the offerings at Wenger’s Prairie Market.
The technical description of the Innsbruck reactor is copied loosely from Giacomo Grasso et al., “Neutronics Study of the 1945 Haigerlich B-VIII Nuclear Reactor,” Physics in Perspective, September 2009.
All mistakes in this novel are completely the creation of the author, as are all the fictional events. Although some historic figures are mentioned in passing, such as Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, the main players on my stage are complete fabrications whose strutting and fretting are due to me alone.
VIENNA, 1913
And There Was Light
OH.” The syllable is a soft cry of ecstasy. She has never seen colors like those on the floor, red running into orange, yellow, green. The purple is so rich, like grape juice, she wants to jump into it. When she runs over to look, the colors disappear. Her mouth rounds with bafflement: she thought Frau Herschel had painted the rainbow on the floor. Then she sees it reappear on her arm. Against the starched white of her sailor shirt, she can see the purple, which the wooden floor had swallowed. She strokes it and watches the color ripple on her hand.
“Martina!” her mother whispers harshly. “Your manners.”
She turns reluctantly and bobs a curtsy to Frau Herschel. Her black boots hold her ankles so stiffly that she can’t move well and she almost falls. Her mother frowns, desperate for her awkward child to make a good impression on her employer.
Birgit, the Kinderm?dchen, doesn’t bother to hide a smirk. Little Sophie Herschel doesn’t laugh, just pirouettes in her white slippers and sinks into a deep curtsy in front of Martina’s mother.
“I believe the child hasn’t even noticed the rocking horse,” Frau Herschel says, laughter barely covering her annoyance. “But Sophie will help her. You may leave her here in the nursery, Frau Saginor. You can go down to the sewing room to begin the white work. Birgit will feed Martina when she brings Sophie her lunch.”
The six-year-olds are left to stare at each other. Sophie’s hair is the color of flax and is arranged in sausage curls tied away from her face with a rose ribbon. Martina’s black hair is plaited, pulled so hard from her face that you can see white half-moons of skin behind her ears. Sophie is in a dress beautifully embroidered and smocked by Martina’s mother, but Martina herself wears a sailor top and dark skirt. Even if there were money at home for the fine thread and fabric in Sophie’s dresses—which there isn’t—it wouldn’t do for Frau Saginor’s daughter to be seen in such delicate clothes.
Later, the little girls will spend so much time together that they won’t remember this first meeting, not the meanness of Sophie, flaunting one expensive toy after another, nor of the nursery maid Birgit, giving Martina a piece of bread with goose fat for lunch while Sophie has thick soup and an orange, nor of Martina upstaging Sophie with Signor Caperelli, the Italian who was teaching music to many of Vienna’s bourgeois children.