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.”