When Justine opened her eyes, she doubted that she’d slept an hour. Her mind had kept churning while she slept, and she sensed that it had done important work. She just didn’t know what it was.
She was out of bed before her mind had fully grasped what the face of her clock said. It was three a.m.
Two thoughts were fighting for space in her brain. One of them was simple.
I need to see Gloria.
The second was tenuous, diffuse, hard to grab, but it was everything. Justine had dreamed a dream, and the answer to…something…was hiding behind her wispy memories of it.
The intuitive leaps made by scientists dreaming dreams are famous and legion.
Mendeleev dreamed of an array of elements arranging themselves by atomic and chemical properties. Awakening, he transcribed the periodic table of the elements.
Kekulé dreamed of a dragon seizing its own tail, an image that led him to the ringlike chemical structure of benzene.
Bohr dreamed his model of the atom into being, electrons moving around a nucleus in orbits distinguished by their energy levels.
Einstein dreamed of sledding, faster and faster, while looking at the eternal stars shift above him. His theory of relativity was inspired by this dream, and he later said that his entire career flowed from it.
Like them, Justine had found what she needed in a dream. She had seen piles of earth and rock blasted with energy and vaporized. The resulting mixture of earth and gas had rocketed along, uncontrolled, until it encountered a barrier that was blacker than black, with only a narrow opening to pass through. This narrow opening—A slot? A door? A window? A gash? No, a slit!—had brought order to the rocketing vaporous stuff, and this was the key to…something.
The word “slit” took her straight to Thomas Young’s famous double-slit experiment, and that’s when she knew that she had underestimated Gloria. She had let her concern over her godmother’s mental condition make her forget how brilliant she was, but the dream had pointed her at the truth.
What was it that Gloria had said?
“Young. He is young.”
Why had she been so quick to believe that her godmother was losing her mind? Gloria had been fully aware of what she was saying, and she’d believed that Justine would understand her. Gloria had believed that spies were watching her—and who was to say that they weren’t?—so she had been speaking in code. Justine should have known.
What Gloria had actually said was not “He is young.” It was “He is Young.”
She’d been speaking of Thomas Young, the polymath who had lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s, during a time when scientists dabbled in everything.
Young’s description of elasticity had lived on in physics texts as “Young’s Modulus.”
He had lectured on the function of the heart and arteries.
He had pioneered the study of the eyes.
He had first used the word “energy” in the modern sense.
He had developed the “Young Temperament” for tuning musical instruments.
He had helped translate the Rosetta Stone.
But it was none of this work that had caused Justine to dream up the beginning of a solution to her own problems. The work of Thomas Young that had startled her awake was his double-slit experiment.
Justine hadn’t yet gotten a close look at the work of the Carbon Division’s machinists, but she’d heard that they were carefully cutting slots—long, narrow holes that might as well be called “slits”—into thin carbon slabs and that they were doing this to very fine tolerances. She’d told Gloria this. By pointing her to Thomas Young, Gloria had been trying to tell Justine that the slits were important.
What else had Gloria mentioned? She’d said something about electrodes being positive and negative, which was so self-evident that she must have been trying to get Justine to think harder about electrodes and their purpose. She would have to mull that one over.
Justine hadn’t figured everything out yet, but an idea was forming. And it was terrifying. There might be nothing she could do. Probably, there was nothing that she could do, but she had to try.
Gloria would be angry at her for coming, but Justine needed to talk to her. Her godmother would yell at Justine for exposing herself to the ominous forces that she believed to be everywhere. And perhaps they were. Perhaps Gloria wasn’t delusional at all.
Justine had no other option than to simply go to Gloria. If she called her on the house phone, everyone on the first floor of The Julia would hear everything she said. A pay phone might work, but she didn’t like the idea of standing behind the glass door of a phone booth, exposed. Not at this time of the night, and not while suspecting the world-shaking importance of those slits in those closely machined carbon parts.
Justine yanked her nightgown over her head and put on a bra. Pulling a shirtwaist dress off a hanger and slipping her feet into a pair of loafers, she was dressed to leave The Julia in seconds. But how was she going to get to Gloria’s house?
She could hear Gloria’s voice in her ear. Don’t let them follow you.
She trembled at the thought of being alone at night on the streets around The Julia, but stepping on a streetcar would be as stupid as stepping into a phone booth. Penning herself up that way would be like the star of a Western movie choosing to ride his horse alone into a box canyon, only worse, because the box canyon would have glass walls.
Besides, she didn’t know whether the streetcars ran at all at that time of night. She’d never had any reason to know.
Nevertheless, Justine had grown up in this city. She knew its streets, so she knew a million routes to Gloria’s house and she could walk any of them in an hour or so. If her luck held, she could talk to Gloria, grab an hour of sleep, then take the streetcar home in a crush of morning commuter traffic that would make her less of a target. She could do this.
Her dress was black as carbon. Her shoes were black. The purse slung over her shoulder was black. Her orange curls were fairly well fluorescent, so she covered them with a black scarf. She was ready. She opened her window and stepped out onto the fire escape, then she descended into the dark streets of The Crescent City.