I shook my head. There was something I needed to do, something urgent, and I couldn’t remember what it was.
“I need to be able to act. I need to drive, I need to hold my own if I’m attacked again. I can’t do anything right now but sit like a squawking bird! Can’t you give me something, whatever modern miracle steroid they inject into football players to get them back into the lineup?”
“What, so your joints can rot like a football player’s in another decade?” Lotty’s eyes turned darker with anger.
I looked at her gravely. “If Martin is still alive and I can save him, I need to risk my joints. It’s not as though I take cortisone every week.”
She frowned. “Even if I wanted to let you get this kind of injection, it must be done in a hospital with an X-ray machine guiding the anesthesiologist’s hand. Even so, it would take several days before you’d be strong enough to be up and about. I can give you a muscle relaxant, but it will knock you out very quickly. You’ll sleep a long time. If you’re worried about your safety, you may not wake up easily.”
“Will I be better in the morning?”
“Oh, even if you aren’t, you will be rested enough to throw yourself in front of a herd of raging elephants, or jump from a plane without a parachute, or some other action that will prove to you that you’re outside the usual laws of human mortality,” Lotty said crossly.
“I’ll stay with her,” Alison told Lotty. “After all, it’s because of my dad that she went through all this.”
She turned her earnest young face to mine. “I hate to bother you when you’re so tired, but was the BREENIAC sketch in the coach house?”
The BREENIAC sketch. Was that the urgent action I had to take? No, I’d shipped the drawing to the Special Collections librarian this morning. Durdon and Davilats had taken the copy from my pocket. Along with the obituary of Ada Byron.
The two goons didn’t know enough of the story to connect the dots, but if Cordell Breen saw the obituary, he’d be off to Tinney, Illinois, like one of his father’s rockets. And if there was any evidence about Martina Saginor or Gertrud Memler, or even why the BREENIAC sketch mattered so much, Breen would destroy it before I could get there.
NEVADA, 1953
The Lost Lover
THE MOUNTAIN AIR at night bites her skin. She used to love that sharp high-altitude cold. Back when she climbed the Wildspitze, she slept on the mountainside so she could start her cosmic ray experiments at first sun. Stepping out of her sleeping bag, jumping into a glacier lake, leaping out and running naked around the meadow to dry herself, she would feel braced, embraced by the air. She thought she could taste the air; it was tingly, like sekt wine, but lighter, crisper.
In those days, she encountered the physical world like a lover. Photons and gamma rays, cold air, steep climbs, all exhilarated her. She lies now on foreign ground, watching the stars. The constellations are the same that her papa showed her when she was a little girl, but they don’t pulse with the life she once found in them.
She crumbles the soil underneath her fingers. There is no point to the work she is doing here; it’s the same mind-numbing drudgery she performed at Uranverein 7. There is more food, her shoes fit, the body is properly housed, but the same high fences, the same guards surround her every morning when she walks from her room to her lab. Her mind is turning to a desert as arid as the one at the bottom of this mountain.
Once men discovered they could use the atom to make bombs, they lost the excitement of the hunt for its secrets. Even her own work has been degraded by the quest for a bomb. The array she had designed, why had she put it on paper to begin with? Tempting the gods, who will always laugh in your face.
“I know you, Fr?ulein Martina,” the woman Memler had snarled the morning she was sent from Innsbruck to the east. “You can’t stop drawing and scribbling and imagining equations and machines. I want them now. You will have no use for them, after all, when you reach your journey’s end.”
She had stared unflinching at the younger woman. Why had she not noticed the coarseness of her expression when Memler applied for a place in her lab at the Radium Institute in 1934? Why had she assumed that this young woman shared her passion for unfolding Nature’s heart?