CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Scott and Winnie crept up the stairs to Fermi’s office. Winnie made them pause and listen for guards at the top of each flight. By the time they made it up to the fourth floor, Winnie was convinced that no one was lying in wait, not even a lazy university security guard half-asleep at his post. She and Scott were the only ones in the building.
Scott led the way to a plain wooden door with a placard that read:
ENRICO FERMI
451
Winnie was struck by the banality of its appearance—just an ordinary door, nearly identical to countless others in the dusty hallways of academia everywhere. But behind this door lay state secrets, pieces to the quantum puzzle at the heart of the world, and—perhaps—the key to their freedom from Hawthorn.
By entering, they were committing espionage. To frame Hawthorn for treason, they had to actually commit it. She glanced up at Scott’s face. She’d put him in so much danger that now this was their safest option.
He reached into his satchel and pulled out a screwdriver and the smallest claw hammer she’d ever seen.
“You’re going to break the lock?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to remove the doorknob—we can reinstall it after. It will probably show some damage, but not so much that it won’t be believable that Fermi didn’t notice it.”
Scott started to pop the metal collar around the knob.
“Wait!” Winnie said. She felt so sick to her stomach that she thought maybe she was about to see a splinter.
Winnie put her hand to the door and paused a moment, waiting for the splinter to strike, hoping it might give her some sort of insight into what this choice held for them.
There was nothing. The awful clenching in her stomach was just nerves.
In no world did they leave this door unopened. She should have expected as much.
The office had a cozy, lived-in feel. There was a half-empty coffee cup on the desk, and next to the black Bakelite rotary phone was a day planner covered in squiggly abstract doodles and sloppy sketches of cats, mice, and hats. This, of all things, seemed deeply personal. For the first time, Winnie felt as though they were really trespassing.
Scott began searching through one of the five-drawer standing metal file cabinets, while Winnie scanned the papers on Fermi’s cluttered desk.
Scott pulled out a green file folder, opened it up, and regarded the papers inside with a frown. “I can’t figure out how his files are organized . . . if they’re organized at all. Here are copies of his published papers on isotopes—filed under ‘F.’”
“Hmm, ‘F’ for Fermi, do you think—filed under author name?”
“Perhaps. But there’s an article by Heisenberg stuffed in here too.”
Winnie opened a large, unlined notebook. Unlike his desk, Fermi’s handwriting was tidy, his neat print running margin to margin, interrupted only by experiment diagrams.
When Winnie had imagined exploring Fermi’s office, she stupidly thought she would be able to sift through all the notebooks and data as easily as she did her own father’s research, but that was work she was directly involved with. Some of Fermi’s notes might as well have been in Italian, for all the sense they made to her.
“How are we going to get through all of this?” Winnie asked.
Scott shrugged. “One page at a time,” he said, and continued flipping through Fermi’s files. “In a way, it’s an advantage, not knowing what we’re looking for—we don’t need anything in particular, just something important.”
That was true. If Hawthorn was found in possession of any of his rival’s top secret files, things would look very bad for him. The content didn’t matter—any sort of vital information about the Manhattan Project would do.
Winnie opened the top shelf of the filing cabinet next to the one Scott was searching. “Is it too much to hope there’ll be a file marked ‘Manhattan Project—Top Secret’?” she asked lightly.
Scott gave her a tired smile. “Probably.”
“But you do think he’ll have some of the papers here, right?”
Her whole plan relied on the hope that he would. So far, everything had gone so smoothly, but that wouldn’t mean anything if they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
“I mean, I think so—there has to be something.” Scott gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “It’s a good plan, Winnie.”
“I think so too,” Winnie said. “But I thought that about our other ones also.”
They decided the best plan of attack was to quickly skim through the files and pull anything that looked especially important, then set it aside for further review. It would be easier if they could make a mess, but the break-in was supposed to have happened before James’s death a few days earlier, so they couldn’t leave any obvious sign that things had been disturbed.
“Oh, now, this is interesting,” Scott said. “It’s a copy of Gamow’s article on quantum tunneling. Fermi has marked up the margins everywhere. It looks like he thinks that quantum tunneling might allow not only energy but matter to pass through barriers—barriers like the ones between different realities.”
“That is interesting. Does he say how?”
Scott frowned. “No, he doesn’t mention a mechanism of travel. Not here, anyway.”
“Let’s take it,” Winnie said.
“I don’t think a published article is going to—”
“Not to plant on Hawthorn.” Winnie gave him a faint smile and shrugged. “I just want to read it.”
They continued to pore over materials, focusing on anything handwritten: mostly diagrams and scribbled experiment results.
They spent the next hour or so skimming Fermi’s files, sorting the papers they pulled into three piles: the first, papers they were (almost) certain were worthless, but that contained some handwritten note from Fermi about the Manhattan Project; the second, experiment results that seemed important and needed a closer look; and the third, copies of memos that appeared to detail his results in more plain speech for the military higher-ups. By the time they were on the final file, Winnie’s brain was starting to feel a bit mushy from scanning so many equations, and they had yet to find anything that seemed a fail-safe way to send Hawthorn to prison.
She tossed a folder onto Fermi’s desk, a bit careless from exhaustion, and accidentally knocked the doodle-covered day planner off his desk. As she bent over to pick it up, she noticed a folded piece of draft paper lying on the desk—it must have been tucked under or inside the planner. As soon as she touched it, a sick frisson shivered up her arm, as if the paper were somehow charged not with electricity, but something just as deadly and far stranger.
She laid the paper flat on the desk. It was a large sketch of some sort of pod, the bulb of it tapered then extending to a platform. The thing looked like a weapon—a torpedo, perhaps. She quickly scanned the specifications and began to shake.
“What is it?” Scott asked.
“The bomb,” she whispered. “It’s the schematic for the atomic bomb.”
It was just a piece of paper, but it detailed a terrifying force.
This was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for.
Scott whistled low. “Now, that does look treasonous, doesn’t it?” He gave a relieved-sounding laugh. “Yeah, I think that should do.”
Winnie agreed that this must be just about the last piece of paper government officials would want in outside hands.
“This is the kind of thing that could be sold to the Axis for money that would make even Hawthorn blush,” Scott said with a grin.
But Winnie found it impossible to return Scott’s smile.
She passed the paper to him. She didn’t want to touch it anymore.
“Did you see the output?” she asked.
Scott nodded. “A sixty-terajoule blast!” He sounded dazzled.
Winnie frowned at him. “Scott, an explosion like that . . .” She trailed off. “It’s a terrible thing,” she finished after a moment, unable to find the words to adequately express how it horrified her.
“Yes,” Scott said, nodding seriously. “I’m glad it’s ours.”
“It shouldn’t be anybody’s. It shouldn’t exist!”
“Well, that’s debatable,” Scott said, “but the fact is, it does exist—or it will. There’s nothing we can do to change that, even if we wanted to.”
Winnie frowned at him, trying to think of some way around the harsh truth of his words. There wasn’t one. The plans for the atomic bomb were surely duplicated in other offices, and more irretrievably, in other minds. They couldn’t eradicate them all.
“Winnie,” Scott said gently, “this frees us. We found our ticket out of the whole mess, just like you planned.”
Slowly, Winnie nodded her head.
“So, let’s go,” he said. “We’ll plant this in Hawthorn’s office. Then we can go home.”
Winnie carefully folded the schematic and tucked it securely in the pocket of her skirt. She tried to shake the guilty feeling it gave her, using something so awful for her own ends. She was just one girl. She couldn’t stop people from killing each other. She couldn’t end war. But maybe she could save Scott. Maybe she could save herself.
They put Fermi’s office back in order carefully. Winnie refiled most of the papers they’d pulled, but kept several of the more important-looking ones, in addition to the bomb schematic. They wanted enough evidence that it would be irrefutable that Hawthorn had stolen items from Fermi’s files, not just stumbled on one vital piece of paper.
When they were done, Scott reinstalled the doorknob. Then he checked his watch. “My god! It’s almost five!”
Winnie gave a tired laugh. “You sound surprised, but that feels about right.”
“We need to plant these in Hawthorn’s office quickly, so we can get you back home before Professor Schulde wakes up.”
She hadn’t thought about how long things might take when they were coming up with this plan. Father usually got up around six o’clock.
“You’re right—we’d better hurry.”
“At least for that, I have a key. Hawthorn’s office is in the same suite as your”—he looked away guiltily—“as Winnie’s father’s.”
“I didn’t expect to just take her place,” she said. “You know that, right?”
“I know,” he said.
But he still wouldn’t look at her.