Martin shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“My grandfather didn’t steal the design,” Alison said, her voice quivering on the brink of tears. “He was a brilliant engineer! The BREENIAC was a masterpiece; every history of computers describes it as more elegant than von Neumann’s machine, and ahead of its time. Don’t talk about my family as if we were a group of crooks!”
Martin glanced at her stormy face and turned his attention to his tea, turning the cup round and round in his hands.
“I’m sorry, Alison,” he mumbled. “It’s not a crime to collaborate with someone on a project as big as a new computer design. Steve Jobs didn’t think up the Macintosh all by himself, either.”
“Why did you go dark?” I asked, when Alison didn’t say anything.
“That was after I talked to Mr. Breen. I guess Jari talked to Mr. Breen and Mr. Breen called me. He was in Stockholm, at Metargon’s Swedish plant, and he made me kind of, well, nervous.”
“Did he threaten you?” I asked.
“Not in so many words.” His glance flickered at Alison, sitting very still; he turned back to the tea as if it held the secret of dark matter. “He told me I didn’t know how big a mistake I could be making if I didn’t leave these matters strictly alone. ‘That patent expired in 1970,’ he said, ‘so don’t go imagining there’s money to be made from it.’ Then he went on about national security, nuclear secrets and staying the hell away from Alison, from his daughter.
“I couldn’t tell if he thought I was hoping to get Alison to support me, or if he thought I was going to uncover something shameful from the U.S. bomb program, but he said if I meddled in things that were none of my business he’d know and he’d take appropriate action. He reminded me how easy it was for Metargon to track people. I worked on some of those programs, so I knew he could find me anywhere I left an electronic—not even footprint—toenail fragment.”
“I can’t listen to you talk like this,” Alison burst out, getting up from her chair.
“I’m not saying this to hurt you,” Martin cried.
Alison made a gesture of frustration and ran up the stairs.
“You’re talking about her father,” I tried to explain. “Girls hold their daddies sacred. She doesn’t want to believe you, even though she knows it’s true.”
Martin looked toward the stairs again, but said, “When Mr. Breen hung up, I knew I had to figure out some way of proving that all I cared about was where the first idea for the BREENIAC came from. I mean, nobody could build a computer from that sketch on his workshop wall—it was the central concept, but miles away from workable memory. I knew, though, if I was going to do research, I couldn’t do it online. Even if I created a separate online identity, Metargon could tell if I was mining data that was relevant to the BREENIAC or Edward Breen or any of the people involved in the hydrogen bomb.
“I went down to my mom’s place. I was hoping she still had these papers she’d taken from my gramma’s dresser, and I found them. One of them was this letter from Ada Byron, saying that Martina Saginor had applied for a U.S. patent for ferromagnetic memory back before America entered the war, and the person who found the patent could prove that Martina had created the design for the Metargon-I.
“As soon as I saw Ada Byron’s name, I knew I had this huge clue, because of who she was, in computer history, I mean. So I figured it was a cover name. I went back to Chicago and looked her up in the public library. One of the reference librarians did some work for me; she found Byron’s name listed in the catalog of Dzornen papers.”
“So you went to the University of Chicago and stole the second page of the letter she wrote Benjamin Dzornen when he was dying?” I said.
He flushed. “I’ll give it back. I thought if someone, I don’t know, like Jari Liu, followed the same trail I did, he’d get to the letter—the second page had this address here in Tinney on it. So I came here and passed the tests that Martina left. Then, when Dorothy let me into the workshop, well, then I realized that Ada was really Martina. At first I couldn’t believe it, but the more time I spent down here, the more real it became.”
“How did you figure it out?” I asked.