“Gloria. It’s Justine.”
Justine heard her voice echo in the darkness as it struck the hard surfaces of the interior of Gloria’s house—wooden floors, plastered walls and ceilings, plain wooden trim.
“I know who you are. Come in here where I am.”
A click sounded and the lamp on the bedside table emitted a dim light. Gloria sat up in her bed, her back supported by pillows. She looked the same as she always had upon waking, except for the sizable carving knife in her hand. When Justine entered, Gloria asked, “Are you alone?”
When the answer was yes, Gloria tucked the knife under her pillow and smiled. “Welcome, my sweet. I told you to stay away, but I had no faith that you would listen to me. At least you’ve come at a time when we can have some hope that you evaded the eyes that are always on me.”
Gloria wore a high-necked embroidered nightgown made of a powdery blue cotton batiste, fine and half-sheer. It flattered her black eyes and graying black hair. Even when she slept, Gloria always had style. She reached out a hand toward an upholstered chair beside her bed where a matching blue batiste bed jacket lay. Justine handed her the bed jacket and sank into the chair. Its tweed felt rough against her legs. After carrying her shoes for miles, she could finally drop them to the floor. They clattered when they struck the polished oak.
“You look like you can barely hold up your head,” Gloria said. “Tell me what you came to say and then go to sleep. Your old bed is always waiting here for you.”
“You still have my rag doll on it, don’t you?”
“And I always shall. So why are you here? I trust that it is important, since I specifically told you not to come.”
“Since I saw you, I heard my boss talking about how hard it was for one of our machinists to machine slots into the carbon parts she was making, because she’s working to such close tolerances. That had to percolate in my brain for a while, but I woke up tonight thinking of Thomas Young’s double-slit experiment. And that made me remember what you said as I was leaving last week. You said, ‘Young. He is Young.’ I didn’t understand you then, but now I know that you were trying to send me a signal. You wanted me to focus on those openings in those slabs of carbon.”
“Yes. And I was doing that because I live in constant fear that my enemies are listening, but by all means keep talking. You might humor me by lowering your voice, though.”
Justine dragged her chair up to Gloria’s bedside and leaned in. She whispered, “You wanted me to pay attention to the design of the machined carbon parts. I’m going to get a chance to do that tomorrow.”
Gloria listened silently, nodded once, then picked up the notebook at her bedside and wrote:
You would not believe the pace at which my colleagues are advancing technology. I cannot be sure that they have not built infinitesimal microphones that can detect the faintest whisper. I have slept, so I do not trust that my home is free of such devices. It is not safe to speak outside, but I doubt that they have made such devices weather-safe, so it is safer than here. Follow me.
Gloria donned the delicate bed jacket and slid her narrow feet into a pair of blue satin slippers. Silently, she moved through the darkened house. The only sound came when she clicked the knobs on three dead bolt locks, then eased her back door open.
Gloria’s satin soles and Justine’s bare feet made no sound on the leaf-strewn brick patio as they crossed it to sit side by side on a wrought-iron settee.
Gloria’s voice was barely audible as she murmured into Justine’s ear. “So why are you here tonight?”
***
Mudcat had made it around the street corner where Gloria’s house sat. It was probably overkill at this time of night to move so carefully and stick so closely to the shadows, but his caution had kept him alive for quite some time. It had become an engrained part of him.
He was moving slowly when he heard the metallic click of a dead bolt lock opening. Then another. And another. The sounds brought him to a halt in the dark space beneath the branches of a live oak. Standing there, he could see something—no, two somethings—moving in the space behind Dr. Gloria Mazur’s house. One was wrapped in a garment as light and ethereal as moonlight, and one was wrapped in darkness. He remembered Justine’s coal-colored dress and scarf, so he knew which vague form belonged to whom.
They settled themselves on some patio furniture and began a conversation, quiet but intense. He would have given a lot to be able to walk across the street and stand in the shrubbery along Dr. Mazur’s backyard fence, but the risk was too great. Even an unusually loud breath would give him away.
Instead, he stood rooted on the concrete sidewalk, listening to voices but not words. He heard intensity. He heard a sudden nervous laugh, just one. He never heard anything he could use, nothing that enlightened him about what Justine Byrne and Gloria Mazur knew and what they were planning. The urgent tone of their voices confirmed what he already knew. Woe would befall anyone who underestimated them. Mudcat could think of no circumstance—outside of a contest of physical strength, perhaps—under which he would want to be the adversary of these two women. They were trying to ferret out war secrets—and possibly succeeding—while sitting on the patio of a nondescript bungalow in a New Orleans residential neighborhood.
When they finished their conversation and moved back inside, he would be able to resume motion in the direction that he needed to go. He reached within himself for the strength to be motionless for as long as it took.
***
“Why did you come?” Justine had never heard Gloria’s voice like this. It was urgent, afraid but strong.
“Like I said, I wanted to talk to you about Young’s double-slit experiment, and I’m trying to make sense of the other things you said. Also, I came to get a book.”
Gloria’s face turned sly in the reflected moonlight. She said, “Will you tell me what else I said?” and Justine couldn’t tell whether it was the kind of rhetorical question Gloria and her mother had always used when teaching, or whether she was trying to cover for the fact that she didn’t remember what she’d said.
Still murmuring, Justine said, “You reminded me that electrodes were both positive and negative. I know that, of course, but it made me think about electrodes. Anodes, actually. I know that some anodes are made of carbon, and that made me wonder about those slits that are being machined into carbon slabs. Maybe the carbon would work as an anode that attracts…something negative. I don’t know what. And then the slit in each carbon piece would allow some of the negative particles—”
“Whatever they are.”
“Yes, whatever they are. The slot would allow them to pass through, perhaps accelerate them, maybe to a place where they could be collected.”
“A separation process.”
“Yes, a separation process, and that’s why I’m here. Separation is what you do.”
“It’s what your parents did, too.”
Justine’s eyes were fixed on Gloria’s face. She hadn’t forgotten the other thing that her godmother had said.
If you think your parents’ deaths were an accident, then you are a fool.
“You also asked, ‘Do you know which way?’ Of course I know about the thought experiments that build on Young’s double-slit work, the ‘which-way experiments’ that illustrate the dual nature of photons, but I can’t connect them to the carbon pieces being machined at Higgins. Were you just trying to call my attention to the slits?”
Gloria nodded and spread her hands as if to say, “How smart you are to notice my clues. Too bad it took you a week.”
“So,” Justine said, “do you think I’m getting closer to understanding what’s going on? And can you lend me some books that will help? I think I need to start with Papa’s Thomson book. You know, Recollections and Reflections. I saw it here just last week.”
“It was one of his treasures. He entrusted me with it years ago, but you should have it now. Come.” Gloria rose from the settee like a goddess wrapped in fine linen, instead of a blue cotton nightgown. She glided into the house and paused to triple-click her dead bolts into place. Then she stalked her house from bookshelf to bookshelf, carefully selecting three volumes.
“The Thomson book,” she said, placing it gently in Justine’s hands as if it were made of eggshells. “It is autographed. Did you know that?”
“Yes.” Justine remembered her father taking it off his shelf when she was young and saying very simply, “This is my teacher. Everything I have done that is of worth, other than loving you and your mother, was because of him.”
She opened the book and found the autograph on its inside cover, two swooping, stylized “J”s followed by “Thomson” in careful nineteenth-century penmanship. Underneath his name, he’d drawn a bold, straight underline, as if to say, “Pay attention. I discovered the electron, and the Nobel Prize people were very happy about that.” Thomson had died shortly before her parents did, but she only heard about it later. When she’d learned that he was gone, it was as if her father had died again.
“You recall that Thomson did far more than just discover the electron?” Gloria asked. “He had to invent the mass spectrometer to be able to do that.”
“A separation technology,” Justine said.
It was not a question, but Gloria answered it anyway. “Yes.”
She handed Justine a second book, Isotopes, by F. W. Aston. It was a beautiful thing, bound in black cloth mottled with a colorful abstract pattern, with gilt-lettered red leather protecting its spine.
The third book was less grand. It consisted of hundreds of pages of scientific papers that were amateurishly gathered into a cardboard binding. Justine flipped through its pages and she saw work by Thomson, Aston, Meitner, Prout, Dempster, Einstein, Bohr, and many others. She recognized all of the names from her studies. Some of them she also associated with the kindly faces of people she’d met when her parents took her to Europe when she was very young.
“Your father wanted his most important sources bound into one book that he could keep at hand while he was writing or teaching. He could not be bothered to hire a bookbinder to create this text, because he was convinced that there was nothing that he could not do. This unmitigated arrogance is the physicist’s curse. He and your mother passed this trait on to you, unless I miss my guess.”
“You’re one to talk.” Justine looked at the lopsided book in her hand with the unfortunate creases across the spine and laughed. “Well, he could weld.”
“He could do a great many things, as could your mother, but nobody does all things equally well. And now it is time for you to sleep.”
The crispness of Gloria’s features had softened. Her mouth and eyes were more relaxed that Justine had ever seen them, as if she had unloaded her own burdens and placed them on Justine’s back. This moment of vulnerability revealed lines etched below her eyes and the slight sag that was forming along her jawline. For a moment, she looked maternal and, for the first time, Justine saw that she was beginning to look old.
Desperate to look away from evidence of the incontrovertible fact that she would eventually lose Gloria, too, Justine looked at her wristwatch. “I can’t sleep long. Maybe an hour and a half. I have to get back to my room and get dressed before the bus comes to take me to work.”
“Oh, my dear. Surely they can do without you for just one day.”
“You don’t understand. Tomorrow…today…is the day that I can talk to the carbon machinist without making anybody suspicious.”
The softness was gone, and so were the traitorous wrinkles. “I see. Then you will have to finish your sleep tonight, after a long day of questioning some unfortunate machinist. I will wake you in ninety minutes, and you will not be silly about the breakfast I will have ready for you. Today is a day that you should begin with wholesome eggs and strong coffee.”