“You told us one day in class how deep his works were.”
This was actually a diplomatic recollection of Herr Papp at his most biting: My dear young ladies, I know that the word “philosophy” makes your lovely eyes turn to glass, where you reflect back to me what I’m saying without absorbing more than a glancing ray of light. Therefore, when you hear the name Leibniz, I know that I am not even throwing pebbles into a bottomless well, just shying them off a glass wall. But his was the deepest mind of the German Renaissance.
“You told us that besides inventing the calculus, Leibniz thought on many mathematical problems, including how to express all computations in binary numbers. And you showed us a photograph of a medallion he made with a design for a computation machine engraved in it.”
Herr Papp’s wandering blind eyes focused on her face. He turned abruptly to Frau Werfel, demanding that she lead him to a bookcase by the window.
Frau Werfel spoke for the first time. “Herr Papp, you are too tired; this woman, she is importuning you for her own gain.”
Martina was about to protest, but Herr Papp forestalled her by telling Frau Werfel she was speaking nonsense. “If a young lady who cares about electron scattering remembers a lecture of mine from fifteen years ago, I am almost immortal. Take me over to the bookcase, the mahogany one.”
The housekeeper, shooting Martina a venomous look, led the professor to the case. He wouldn’t let Frau Werfel touch the papers, but felt among them, shelf by shelf. In the end, he brought back a document whose title was in the elaborate script of the seventeenth century: De progressione dyadica. On binary progression.
“Return it to me when you’ve read it, Fr?ulein Saginor. It’s a facsimile copy, of course. A high school mathematics professor cannot afford an original of Leibniz.”
She had curtsied again on leaving, a gesture that Herr Papp sensed, since he gave her an ironic half-bow in return. Martina had rushed back to the Institute, completely forgetting that she had promised to retrieve K?the from the Herschel apartment at six.
She stayed at the Institute library until past midnight, making slow going of the old Latin. It took her over a week of late nights to translate the most significant passages into usable German: she had won no prizes for languages in high school. In the end, she had made a good enough effort to share the excerpts with her students.
When she returned to the Prater to give the manuscript back to Herr Papp, Frau Werfel told her the professor was resting and had no need to talk to her further.
“The old cow is jealous of you,” her student Gertrud Memler crowed when Martina told her team about the incident.
“Don’t be vulgar, Fr?ulein Memler,” Martina said, although she wondered if Memler’s comment might be true. Was this another instance of what her mother and Benjamin both accused her of? Blindness to ordinary human emotions?
The students on her team couldn’t find a way to make Leibniz’s theoretical computing machine a reality. Martina had them experiment with different tubes that could store a charge, to see if they could use the signals to replicate the mechanical gates and registers Leibniz had imagined, but the war came before their research amounted to anything. Martina drew a number of careful charts of her own, showing the way in which she imagined electron capture could be used to make an automated computing machine.
Fr?ulein Memler had been a hardworking scientist, lacking in imagination but willing to stay long hours testing vacuum tube signals with Martina. After the Anschluss, though, it turned out she had been a secret member of the Nazi Party since 1935. It had been outlawed in Austria until the German annexation, but once the Nazis were in power, Memler refused to take orders from a Jew.
By that time, Martina had abandoned vacuum tubes as a way to store computation results. A study of Onsager’s work on oscillation in magnetic fields took her in a different direction: she saw that, among other things, Onsager’s studies meant a ferromagnetic surface might be used for data storage. Martina couldn’t get materials to build anything, but she was able to do imaginary experiments. She continued these until the day she was forced to leave Vienna for Innsbruck.
Martina thought she had seen the last of Fr?ulein Memler the day in 1939 when Memler ordered her out of the Institut für Radiumforschung. A month after Martina was sent to Uranverein 7, though, the Memler arrived, assigned to head the fissile materials unit.