CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Columbia’s campus was completely empty, and more still than things ever got in the city. The night had the sort of bright, hard chill to it that seemed to amplify sound, and Winnie’s and Scott’s footsteps on the brick walkways echoed loudly across the quad.
“Should we be on the lookout for campus security?” Winnie asked nervously.
Scott shook his head. “We aren’t doing anything wrong—yet.”
Winnie wasn’t as familiar with campus as Scott was, but she thought they were heading in the direction of Amsterdam Avenue, which was on the opposite side of campus from Pupin Hall.
“Isn’t the physics building back that way?” she said, pointing toward 120th Street.
“It is—I’ll explain in a minute.”
Scott led her through an open wrought-iron gate toward a smaller brick building, less institutional than its surroundings, its peaked roof and dormer windows making it look almost like a large, stately home.
“Before Columbia was Columbia,” Scott said, “it was Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. This is all that’s left of it—aboveground. Underground, there’s this labyrinth of tunnels. And that’s how we’re going to get into Pupin Hall.”
These underground tunnels originally linked the various asylum buildings, he explained, and over the years these tunnels had been added to with infrastructure for all the new construction: steam tunnels, conduits for electricity, small underground rail tracks for transporting the coal that was used to heat the buildings.
This complex underground web now rivaled the centuries-old system of tunnels under the Kremlin, supposedly, and the passageways—some officially charted, some not—were a territory ripe for students’ exploration. The administration frowned on it, but turned a blind eye so long as no one got too badly hurt or destroyed school property.
“Probably I should have asked earlier,” he added, “but you aren’t claustrophobic, are you?”
“Not that I know of,” Winnie said.
The idea of prowling through some dark tunnels at night didn’t thrill her, but what choice did they have?
Scott led Winnie around to the back of the old asylum building. There was an entrance to a storm cellar, its wide metal doors covered in ivy and secured with a padlock.
“Damn!” Winnie cursed. “We’re going to need bolt cutters.”
“It isn’t really locked,” Scott assured her, and true enough, the padlock’s shackle hadn’t been clicked down into the body of the lock.
Scott took a furtive glance around, but there was no one in sight. He opened the cellar door, and they descended into the dark.
They turned on their flashlights, which sent long shadows up the stone walls of the underground room.
“Do students really like to come down here?” Winnie asked, glancing around doubtfully. “It’s kind of spooky.” She put an exploratory hand against the brick wall. It was cold and thoroughly damp.
Scott laughed. “People come here because it’s spooky. It’s a whole thing—fraternity initiations, dares. You aren’t really a Columbian until you’ve explored the tunnels.”
“Ah, then you’ve been down here before,” Winnie said, relieved. “You know the way?”
Scott scratched at his head in a failed show of nonchalance. “Oh, well, not exactly. But I’ve talked to students who have. And I borrowed a map.”
He held up a crumpled, hand-scrawled piece of paper.
Winnie tried to remind herself that a wasp’s nest of shoddily documented tunnels was certainly better than turning herself over to Hawthorn, which was the only alternative she’d been able to come up with, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were in over their heads. This had been her idea; if it went wrong, it was her fault.
“You should stay here,” Winnie said. He could give her the tunnel map and tell her how to get into Fermi’s office. She would be able to tell which documents were important enough to use to frame Hawthorn.
“What? Absolutely not!”
“But what if there is night security posted in Pupin Hall these days? They wouldn’t necessarily advertise that, would they? Why should we both get caught?”
“Whatever happens now,” Scott said firmly, “it happens to both of us, together.”
His words weren’t some magic spell. The stakes were still high, the outcome uncertain, and Winnie was quite scared. But at least she wasn’t in it alone.
They descended a ladder whose thin metal steps and rails were slick with damp. Scott chivalrously went ahead of her, and at the bottom pressed a hand into the small of her back as he helped her off the slippery thing. Winnie’s heart skipped a little at his touch. She felt her cheeks get hot. She was glad for the dark of the tunnels.
As soon as she had both feet on the ground, Scott quickly pulled his hand away, as if she were incendiary. She wondered if it was because he didn’t want to touch her, or because he wanted to touch her too much.
Everything was all tangled up.
They had been frantically scrambling away from threat after threat these past few days. Winnie knew her double’s death hadn’t fully registered yet, not for her, and especially not for Scott. Not because it was so fresh, but because Winnie was still there, in front of him. Winnie knew this because she had experienced it herself. She had seen her Scott die, but here he was, breathing, moving, smiling at her. It softened her suffering.
Winnie shook off the thoughts and tried to focus on their mission.
Scott paused to double-check his makeshift map. “This way,” he said, gesturing to a tunnel that branched off to the right.
Scott had told her the oldest tunnels were constructed in the 1880s, but Winnie would have easily believed them older still. The tunnel floor was made of crumbling brick, forcing Winnie to focus on each step or risk tripping—a welcome distraction from the danger ahead.
The tunnel quickly grew too narrow for them to walk abreast of each other. “Would you like to walk in front or behind?” Scott asked.
“Um, you can go ahead.”
Winnie could feel the dark yawning behind her, the complete blackness a void at her back, urging her forward.
“We need to be careful not to rush, and watch out for the pipes,” Scott said, motioning toward the fat metal pipes running over the tunnel walls on both sides. “They’re quite hot. Marcus told me he got a nasty burn on his elbow bumping into one, and that was through his shirt.”
They traveled in silence for a few more minutes, until the path narrowed even further. Winnie estimated that the span of walkable space between the boiling hot pipes was perhaps no more than three feet wide.
“Careful, now—but this should be the worst of it,” Scott said. “The tunnels are oldest here. Closer to Pupin, they’ll open up a bit.”
After a few hundred feet, they took a sharp left turn, ducked through a squat opening meant for the coal carts, and emerged into a much wider tunnel whose floor was threaded down the center with a slender line of railroad track. They followed Scott’s map, and aside from some muck, a few rats, and a stomach-clenching moment when Winnie’s flashlight flickered, died, and required a few slaps before it would light again, the rest of the way to Pupin was hardly more uncomfortable underground than it was above.
But even with the extra room, Winnie found it hard to take a full breath. The closer they got to Fermi’s office, the greater the danger—and the more empty space around them, the easier it would be for some guards to hide in wait.
They entered Pupin Hall through a cavernous room in the basement. A massive machine filled about one quarter of the space, the U shape of it a magnet large enough to hoist a car and curved around two giant metal disks. Winnie recognized that it must be the cyclotron John R. Dunning had constructed a few years earlier.
“I’ve never actually laid eyes on the atom smasher before,” Scott said, voiced tinged with awe. “Funny seeing it down here, casual as a washing machine in a basement.”
Winnie nodded, but really, she had no attention to spare. At any other time, she would be just as enthralled with the contraption—the most powerful particle accelerator on the East Coast, vital to the department’s nuclear experimentation—but all her focus was attuned to the sounds in the building around them, anxiously awaiting the creak of a chair or a beat of footfall even though Scott had been certain there would be no guards.
“Where’s Fermi’s office?” she asked.
“Fourth floor,” Scott answered, a bit distractedly. He went up to the cyclotron and laid his hand gently on the curved metal of its side as if he were steadying a skittish horse.
“Then let’s go.”