Her first months in Nevada were spent gulping down papers and books, learning Feynman diagrams, the Lamb shift, quantum electrodynamics, tracing the new particles. At first the physics came back to her slowly, like the return of her flute playing, like the English she studied in Gymnasium, but has forgotten. After seven months, though, she’s suddenly confident in all those arenas—although her English has acquired the southwestern twang of the machinists and electricians around her.
She pines to be at Cornell, where Bethe is developing his theories of the meson, or at Columbia, where the most exciting new experiments are unfolding. She is not a shirker, though. Despite the fact that her project could be done by a beginning graduate student, she works through her equations meticulously, passes them to her lab partner to recheck, just as she will, tomorrow, recheck his results.
Today, she stays until everyone except the guards has left the lab. She returns to the computing machine and calmly unscrews the panels herself. This is not the interior of the computer put together at Princeton by von Neumann and his team. Even though the Princeton work is highly classified, she’s managed to see photographs and sketches. This Chicago machine is two-thirds the size of von Neumann’s and there are no vacuum tubes. Instead, there are a series of plates with wires extending from them; it looks like a loom for making copper tablecloths.
Martina screws the panels back into place. After dark, she goes to the mountain to think. A soldier patrolling the perimeter of the camp reminds her that she can’t climb any higher than this. Martina nods at him, acknowledging the order. She doesn’t speak; the sight of barbed wire and guards turns her stomach into knots.
In the morning, she watches as the Memler is given a tour of the lab, of the base. Martina chats with the work crew in a way that’s alien to her. The men tell her Memler used to be here in Nevada, but she’s been assigned to the Chicago project in order to work for the man who sponsored her immigration. Edward Breen is an electrical engineer, they tell Martina; he served with the U.S. Army in Europe; at war’s end, he found the Memler in a weapons lab near Innsbruck and brought her back to help with rocket and weapons research for the United States.
The men talk freely with Martina, not because she has an easy camaraderie about her: she doesn’t. She talks to them formally, but she respects the work they do. Unlike a number of other scientists, she consults them on equipment design. They respected her at first for her work ethic, but after fifteen months of seeing her close up, they’ve come to a grudging admiration: she’s a woman, she’s a foreigner, but she’s a born problem solver. One smart cookie, they say to each other. It’s most unlike her to want to gossip, but the crew are happy to oblige.
“The Memler dame was here for a couple years, but when Breen went back to Chicago to work on computing machines, he took her with him. Good riddance, too. Damned Kraut—pardon my French—always acted like we were too dumb to know which end of a soldering iron to pick up.”
“She’s not on the University of Chicago faculty, is she?” Martina asks.
“As for that, I couldn’t tell you. I just know she’s attached to the project that’s working on computations for the Super.? You want to see the inside of Breen’s machine, we can show you after Memler and her ass-lickers take off—they’re heading back to Chicago after lunch.”
Martina smiles her thanks, doesn’t tell them she already looked. While her department head is seeing Memler and her sycophants onto their waiting C-47, the work crew unscrew the panels and Martina once again sees the magnetic lattice board inside. This time she inspects the wiring more closely. Not perhaps the most efficient design—she would have used a finer wire and coiled it around the armature—but probably a serviceable enough way to organize the counters.
Martina thanks the men, returns to her lab, but at the end of the afternoon, she drops into her department head’s office. She tells him that the Memler was her student in Vienna.
“She was a secret Nazi during the thirties while the Party was outlawed in Austria, but after the Anschluss, she became quite public and boastful about her Party connections. During the war, they put her in charge of the part of Uranverein Seven that was working on fission bomb design.”
“We know Miss Memler’s wartime history, Miss Saginor. Many people felt compelled to become Nazis to protect their jobs, and that was true for Miss Memler, as well.”
“Uranverein Seven ran on slave labor and I was one of the slaves,” Martina says. “The Memler woman took great pleasure in overseeing our torture and punishments. When the Germans ran out of money and interest in building a nuclear weapon, I was among the expendable: the Memler sent me east to the concentration camps.”