Orphan Monster Spy

by Matt Killeen

  Elsa was unusually quiet throughout.

  “You’ve met the Führer?” Sarah asked, fascinated.

  “Indeed, many times,” Schäfer enthused.

  “What is he like? In person, I mean.”

  “He is a very sweet and thoughtful man, excellent with children. But he is also passionate and loves to talk, even in the middle of movies.” He leaned on one elbow, as if confiding a great secret. “I’ve watched one Gary Cooper movie with him several times, and he always talked all the way through. I still don’t know how it ends!”

  He laughed and Sarah giggled. His story wasn’t that funny, but the mirth seemed inevitable, as if everything he said was hilarious. Everything seemed that extra bit shinier, tasted that extra bit better. Even Elsa’s growing frown seemed increasingly amusing.

  “So what do you do for the Reich, then?” Sarah assumed a theatrically serious voice. Big questions to ask.

  “Very important work.”

  “Boring work,” Elsa spat.

  “No, really, what exactly?” Secret questions.

  “I’m not sure you’d understand.”

  “Try me, I’m very, very clever, a really smart little girl. No, wait, that’s a secret, shhhhh.”

  Hans Schäfer smiled indulgently. His face had stopped making sense to Sarah. “I study nuclear physics,” he said self-importantly.

  “Oh, oh, I know what that is . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .” Thought gone. “What is it?”

  “Everything is made of tiny atoms, each of these atoms is made of smaller particles. They can be persuaded to change or swap atoms, to great effect.”

  “My uncle mentioned that once.” Careful. “He read it in a really dull magazine he gets. One that looks like a book with no cover.”

  “What does your uncle do?”

  Yes, what does he do?

  “He makes wireless sets, everyone has one of his radios. But he says one needs to know about the latest discoveries that we could use to . . . you know, win.”

  “He’s a smart man.”

  What were you asking? Really important.

  “So, what exactly are those effects? And why should anyone care?”

  Shut up now, dumme Schlampe.

  Shut up, yourself.

  You are not thinking clearly.

  “It’s going to change the world.” He was suddenly serious.

  Sarah’s thoughts were like cats, darting away from her as she bent to pick them up. “Wow, that sounds exciting. Elss-sa, you said it was boring.”

  “It is boring. Night after night with his big machines, making tiny, tiny amounts of something you can’t even touch or it’ll make you sick,” Elsa ranted. “It’s stupid.”

  “Alas, I don’t think my daughter is destined to be a scientist.” He sounded sorrowful.

  “All we’re taught to do is hate Jews and have babies. I don’t think any of us are going to be scientists,” Sarah complained.

  “Well, that’s where the Führer and I differ. I would love Elsa to understand me better . . .” There was a sadness to his voice that cut into Sarah’s heart.

  “Oh, you want to understand your father, don’t you, Els-sa?”

  Elsa’s frown deepened further. “I’m not sure I ever want to truly understand him.”

  Sarah looked from the fuming Elsa to her impassive father. Why would she say that? She wanted to fix it, to make her happy.

  Stop talking.

  She pressed on. “Well, tell me and then maybe I can explain to Elsa what you mean.”

  “Oh, he’ll tell you, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry one bit.”

  Venomous. Really, really upset with someone.

  Sarah was confused. Everything was very brightly lit but seemed to be on the other side of a piece of curved glass. Her thoughts were foggy, a little like having a fever. Her back was itching, so she began squirming against the embroidered chair.

  “Let’s not argue. Look, here comes dessert,” said Professor Schäfer.

  Into the room rolled the largest Black Forest cake that Sarah had ever seen. It filled a vast silver salver, its frosted cream sides like an alpine mountain, the cherries the size of golf balls. Hungry. Something sweet.

  “Look, Elsa! I bet this one doesn’t have rancid cream and rotten cherries.”

  “You ate that? That’s a First Year mistake.” Elsa seemed happy again. Good.

  The cake was every bit as moist as it looked, with fruit that was tart and sweet at once and the thickest cream. When she’d finished her piece, Sarah looked down to see a visible swelling under her silk dress, a dress that—of course—had food spilt down it. She showed Elsa.

  “Told you. So, Herr, Professor, Doctor . . . Schäfer, are you going to show me your experiment . . . lab . . . thing?”

  “I’m afraid it’s all very secret.” No! Serious voice.

  “Not fair! Elsa’s seen it. Come on. Want to see.” Sarah let a petulant tone slip into her voice. She was enjoying this far too much.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Ah, you mean not at all.” She slumped in her seat. Her back was hurting now.

  “I think you should take her, Father. Alone, of course, as I think it’s all really dull.”

  The professor watched his daughter for a few seconds, then came to a decision. “More wine first, then.” He clapped his hands together.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sarah felt as if the floor were rolling like the deck of a ship. Professor Schäfer tried to guide her.

  “Stop jostling me, Professor.” Sarah giggled.

  This part of the building was gloomy with bright pools of light to guide the way. As Sarah weaved through one of them, he stopped her.

  “What happened to your back?” He sounded shocked. He held her shoulders and examined the welts in the lamplight.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t let one of the teachers at Rothenstadt beat a weaker student. She beat me instead,” she said grandly. I’m a hero. A Werwolf. Shhhhh.

  “That’s barbaric.” He ran a finger down her back.

  “That’s the school you send your daughter to. Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

  “I had no idea.” His finger reached the small of her back.

  Sarah squirmed and faced him, almost losing her balance. “Well, we’re all really happy about your ignorance, Professor.” Something had made her really angry, and she couldn’t turn it off. “You and all the other Nazis, happy to see your children starved, beaten, and generally abused. Many thanks for that.”

  “You talk about the party as if you aren’t part of it,” he said in a very different tone.

  Suspicion, exposure, capture. Fix it, dumme Schlampe.

  “Well, you know—I’m just a little, little girl. I don’t care whether—you know, our misery makes Germany great or not. I know I should, but—”

  “Shhh . . . it’s all right.” He reached out and stroked her hair.

  “Careful, you’ll mess it up.” The danger had passed. “Elsa spent ages on it.”

  “I know, it looks just like hers. Just a few years ago,” he said, so softly that Sarah almost missed it.

  “Come on.” She bounced crookedly down the corridor. “I want to see all the experiments. Tell me what you do again. Properly, this time.”

  Careful.

  Why? This is working!

  Something . . .

  Professor Schäfer caught up with her as she reached a thick steel door. A sign on it read Zutritt verboten.

  Sarah had nearly walked into the guard sitting on a stool next to it, only seeing him as he shuffled to his feet and saluted.

  “Good evening, Max, and merry Christmas,” Professor Schäfer said, returning the salute.

  “Merry Christmas to you, sir.” He was deferential and cautious.

/>   Schäfer produced three keys and opened three locks, top, middle, and bottom. “Are you off tomorrow with all the others?”

  “Yes, sir. You’ll still have the perimeter, obviously.”

  “Well, give my love to your family.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sarah grew bored and hopped from leg to leg. She thought she might need the toilet. The professor pushed the massive door handle up, and the door swung open.

  “Sir? Are you bringing the girl with you?”

  “Yes. I am.” He was brusque.

  The soldier fidgeted. “Yes, sir.”

  “You get off back to barracks, now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Come on, get on with it.

  He saluted and marched away down the corridor. Professor Schäfer turned to Sarah. “Well, Fräulein Haller. You wanted to see the science? Step into my office.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was pitch-black. Sarah thought they had gone outside, but this place was warm like a summer evening. It must have been a vast space, judging from the echoes as they clattered down the steel staircase. A legion of competing buzzing, pumping, rattling machine noises rose to meet them.

  “There is an element called uranium,” he began. “It is common and can be pulled from any colonial dirt hole. If you hit it with a fast-moving neutron, one of the individual atoms will split apart.”

  His voice was soft and warm. Sarah let the familiar words wash over her, thinking about the Captain and the bits, spit, split. He’ll be so proud, she thought. She leaned into the professor for support.

  “You get two new elements, three new flying neutrons, and a burst of heat and light. A Jewess from the Institute wanted to call it fission, a dull word to describe something so powerful and violent. It’s like Odin releasing his ravens to start the end of all things and calling it flap-flap.”

  Sarah found this increasingly hard to follow. She was getting tired. She hoped she’d be able to recall anything important later.

  “Then each of those flying neutrons can hit another atom and start the process all over again. Three times, then nine times, then eighty-one times—the energy just grows and grows . . .”

  They stepped off the stairs onto a rough floor, as if they had stepped into the woods. This made no sense to her.

  “In fact, all it takes is for you to bring together enough uranium, with enough violence, and this reaction will just spread out like a web and every atom will split simultaneously.”

  “That sounds like a bomb,” Sarah interjected. She felt woozy. Now she was here, she began to doubt she was capable of . . . whatever was needed of her.

  “Exactly. Now, everyone thinks the amount of uranium you need is thirty tons, or something equally ridiculous.” He let go of Sarah’s shoulders and began turning a switch Sarah couldn’t see. “Some people, like that fraud Heisenberg, think you need to wrap it in carbon or heavy water. No—all you need is the right kind of uranium . . .”

  The lights began to flicker on.

  “All you need to make that is space . . .”

  They were in the enormous greenhouse. The white pillars that supported the glass domes gleamed in the faint, sickly light, wrapped in pipes and wires.

  “And power . . .”

  The entire structure was filled with gas tanks, pipes, and humming machines, the same huge structure repeating over and over, lining the wide tiled avenues that traveled off into the distance.

  “And patience.”

  But it was not the vast machines that caught Sarah’s attention. Between the gray steel machines, across the floors, around the columns, and in the crumbling flower beds, the greenhouse’s vegetation had remained, wizened, brown, and rotting.

  “Everything’s dead—all the plants,” Sarah whispered.

  Among the chemicals, grease, oil, and ozone, there was the thick funk of death. Sarah began to feel queasy.

  “You’re missing the point, dear,” he went on excitedly. “None of that is important. Let me show you what is.”

  He guided Sarah along the machines, arm around her waist, waving at different parts of the machine.

  “I push the uranium gas into these tanks through a membrane, and all the good stuff separates out. The secret is the cooling. I’ve used the greenhouse’s natural gas heating system to create electricity right here. I do this again and again and finally . . .”

  Membrane . . . gas heating . . . Sarah wanted to stop listening.

  They came to the end of a long row of devices. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves that went up to his elbows and picked up a small, dull silver rock. To Sarah, it looked utterly banal.

  “This is pure uranium 235.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “Or as I call it, Ragnarök . . . the end of the world, when even the gods themselves will burn.”

  She took an involuntary step back, and he laughed.

  Sarah felt dizzy, as if she had spun around in the center of the nursery and wandered out into the grown-ups’ part of the house.

  Why am I here?

  To ask questions.

  No, yes—but why am I allowed in here?

  What does that mean? Ask your questions.

  “So you’ll build a bomb using this?”

  “Better than that,” he said excitedly. “Come with me.”

  He slid a wide metal door slowly to one side and revealed a laboratory, all white tiles and new concrete, shining contraptions, dials, and pipes. At one end there was a furnace and a milling machine, but Sarah didn’t see any of this at first, because the room was dominated by something that chilled her through the room’s heat.

  It was a long black metal tube, maybe three meters long and a meter thick, rounded at the ends, with fins and a tail.

  It was clearly a bomb.

  It had been opened lengthways to reveal the inside. Sarah walked toward it like she was approaching a tiger at the zoo, without being entirely convinced the cage door was properly closed.

  Her head began to throb. This was it, the purpose of everything. She had to tell the Captain . . . no, she had to do something herself. What was she doing here? Questions . . .

  “You’ve built it,” she managed. “Is it ready?”

  Professor Schäfer sat at a bench and opened a thick and much-repaired notebook. He jotted something down.

  “Not quite. If it fired now, it would . . . what would the Jewess call it? Fizzle. Probably like a powerful explosive . . . but very soon it will be the greatest weapon the Earth has ever seen. Only a small amount of 235 needed now.” He returned to her side. “See? Here, conventional explosives fire a pellet of uranium down this tube—it’s an artillery barrel, the whole thing is—until it hits this ring of uranium, here. When the two pieces are together, that much 235 undergoes a chain reaction and . . . Götterdämmerung! The twilight of the gods.”

  Sarah couldn’t remember what he had just said. She wasn’t even sure how she had gotten here. Her mouth was filling with saliva. She held on to him for balance. Questions.

  “What happens when this goes off?”

  “Theoretically? The energy trapped inside, the mass of the metal multiplied by the speed of light squared, will appear all at once. There will be a flash so bright and hot that anyone within a kilometer of the explosion will simply disappear.” He stood, both hands in the air, smiling. “Everything within two kilometers will burst into flames. Everyone within three and a half kilometers will be dead instantly as the blast wave expands across the target . . .”

  Sarah began to shake. Questions.

  “What happens when everyone has these bombs?”

  He came over to her and put his arms round her. She realized she didn’t want to be touched. “No one does. Not even the Reich knows about this yet,” he said soothingly. “We’ll use it to destroy our enemies, and it’ll never b
e needed again.”

  Our enemies. Sarah knew what they looked like. What it felt like being one.

  “I bet the first human to pick up a big stick said something similar,” she said without thinking.

  “You’re an unusual girl, Ursula Haller.” He pointed at his notebook. “I just added something to my records.” His voice sounded like he was singing a song. “Tonight, the twenty-third of December, I found something more brilliant and more beautiful than my Ragnarök.”

  Sarah closed her eyes and swayed. “What?”

  “You. You are so clever—and so, so beautiful.”

  Sarah twisted out of his arms and retched violently, a thick, red, stinking vomit. She continued to heave long after her stomach was empty and Elsa was carrying her to her room.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE CEILING WAS an intricate flower whose petals wove up and under one another into concentric shapes, drifting out from its center like a circular tide. It was very white and very bright, except for one dusty strand of cobweb sailing in an unseen breeze.

  Sarah stretched, and a piercing ache cut through her head. It was replaced by a throbbing twinge, like her brain was wearing an undersized, rough shirt. Daylight bathed the room, but the window was too intense to look at.

  She was somewhere . . . didn’t remember how . . .

  The door burst open, and Elsa walked in carrying a tray, dressed in riding gear.

  “Wakey-wakey! I have breakfast and a remedy to cure many ills.”

  Sarah opened her mouth, which was dry and crusty. She smelled of vomit.

  “I threw up?” she croaked. She coughed, and a bitter taste filled her mouth.

  “Never has French couture been so comprehensively ruined,” Elsa proclaimed. “You threw up on my father, too. That suit was Italian, so you’ve offended the fashion houses of our allies as well as our enemies.”

  “Oh . . . no. I don’t think I remember that.” Sarah felt shame that was barely distinguishable from her nausea.

  “That’s why men drink wine, to forget. Sit up.”

  Sarah’s body ached like a dose of flu, and queasiness rippled through her as she moved, but her head was the center of her misery; its stabbing pain consumed her. She tried to piece together the flashing fragments of the previous night, but there were lengthy gaps and an incomplete denouement.