“I will introduce myself. I will see what sort of a man he is.”
The lights are on in the big house on University Avenue. Benjamin rings the front doorbell. A brief wait, then Breen’s son Cordell, named for the Secretary of State for whom Breen once worked, opens the door for them. Cordell knows Professor Dzornen, and tells him his father is in the coach house, which contains his private workshop. Cordell looks curiously at Martina, whose corduroy trousers and hiking boots are stained with travel, but he sends her and Benjamin up the flagstone path to the coach house.
In the workshop, any idea of a polite introduction, a conversation about who Breen is and does he know he created a machine from a stolen design, dies before it is born: Gertrud Memler is in the room.
“The Nazi swine is digging up other people’s acorns?” Martina says to her in German.
Color floods Memler’s face. “You were dreck in Germany and now you are dreck in America. The FBI will be glad to know you have shown your ugly Jewish face.”
“The FBI will be glad to hear how you tortured ugly Jewish faces,” Martina says. “They will also like to hear how you stole my equations and my designs in the middle of your bestiality.” She fingers her face; a scar from Memler’s last assault on her runs across her left cheekbone.
“Oh, your equations, your designs, as if Fermi wrote equations for you alone that no one else in the world was clever enough to understand.”
Martina gives a tight smile and says to Breen in English, “Tell me how you realized the electronic Fermi surfaces were the key to using hysteresis in constructing a ferromagnetic core.”
Breen shakes his head. “My designs and my formulas are patented; I don’t share them with strangers.”
“Forgive me.” Martina bows slightly. “I am Martina Saginor, doctor of philosophy from G?ttingen, 1931, working on ferromagnetic properties in crystalline lattices. Professor Dzornen supervised my research. The Memler woman became my own student three years later. She then became my warden when I was a slave labor physicist near Innsbruck. The designs she stole while I was her prisoner are perhaps what you used to build your Metargon-I. I will know as soon as I see your blueprints.”
“So you can claim them for your own?” Breen says, contemptuous. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Anyone can pretend to have made a design once an engineer produces a working model. That’s why we have patent laws in this country.”
He turns to Memler. “Is this the woman you said would come here to blackmail me?”
“The patent laws in your country, yes, I know about them,” Martina says. “That is why I applied for American patents to my initial lattice designs in 1939. When the patent office produces my application, we can compare my drawing to the sketch the Memler stole from me, and to the sketches you made of your own work. We can watch the thief try to wriggle out of this little spiderweb she wove for herself.”
“Dr. Memler has been most helpful in supplying suggestions for my design,” Breen says, “but all the initial ideas and work were my own.”
“Edward!” Memler’s eyes flash. “That is not—that isn’t—you know I only gave them to you because I couldn’t get funding myself.”
“You have American citizenship,” Breen says calmly. “You were well rewarded. The patents are in my name.”
There is a moment’s silence in the coach house. Memler suddenly picks up a chisel and lunges at Martina.
“I should have had the guards kill you in 1942,” she screams. “I wanted to see you hang over a furnace, watch you roast, but they put you on the train instead.”
Benjamin, who’s been standing silent, grabs at Memler but can’t stop her. Martina darts behind a bench and Memler follows her, knocking over vacuum tubes, retorts, burners. Benjamin tries to wrestle with Memler, Breen tries to protect his equipment. Wires and chisels and arms and legs all tangle together.
Breen’s old sidearm, the Colt he carried as an officer in Europe, is on a shelf. They all see it at the same time.
49
ISAAC NEWTON’S OPTICKS
YOU SAW THE BREENIAC SKETCH at Alison’s barbecue,” I said. “We know that, but we don’t know what you did between that and going to your mother’s house three weeks ago.”
We were sitting at the worktable, trying to put the different pieces of the story together. Dorothy was with us: she’d come down the stairs when she realized we’d unlocked the secret entrance.
She nodded sourly when she saw Martin standing a few feet from Alison. The two had run to meet each other, and then stopped, as if both realized the size of the obstacles between them.