The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  He stopped, turned to me. In spite of the weak light from the diodes on the tunnel floor I could clearly see Sixten’s face twist into a grimace. How the stiff and correct mask lapsed—and suddenly he threw his arms around me.

  “I’m sorry, Erasmus, but it’s just so dreadful! What we did then, without really knowing anything about the effects, and what you are still doing . . . so desperately looking for the formula to exterminate ourselves. Isn’t that utterly incomprehensible?”

  I nodded. There was so much I wanted to ask, all these veiled remarks, stifled indications. But I knew that the mussel could snap forever shut if one was too eager to get at the pearl. That’s what Edelweiss used to say.

  So I let Sixten regain his composure, lead us further down, without my having the slightest idea where we were. He kept checking his watch. After another couple of control boxes we emerged into darkness: unprepared tunnels, without either light diodes or floors being covered with any sprayed concrete. Then he got his headlamp out of his backpack and led me over the raw bed-rock, holding me gently under my left elbow because I did not take my own lamp out of the hybrid. It was a way of showing confidence. Giving back something in the exchange game.

  “Where are we now?” I said, not least to underscore his authority as pathfinder.

  “In the furthest outer edge. The idea was to make the area impressive. In total, 215,000 square feet of ground, many miles of tunnels just to connect the living quarters with the different laboratories.”

  “But it didn’t end up like that?”

  “No.”

  A short pause for effect.

  “It ended up many times larger. An almost exponential growth in the original plan—and not at all how it was first intended. I should say that in the end it was only Ingrid and I who had an overview and could work out precisely where one thing began and the other ended. Over time at least half of Stockholm was burrowed out and tunneled through. A complex system in which inside and outside somehow began to swap places, like a logical paradox, an impossible picture by Escher. And even though we called it all the Inner Circle, nothing down here was really circular or symmetric.”

  After a few minutes of watchful walking—even Sixten stumbling every now and then despite his headlamp—he stopped and bent forward, mumbling:

  “S.T.33, S.L.143 . . . just after the bend . . . I’m sure it was somewhere here . . .”

  Then I saw it, maybe before he did. A red trap-door in the ground, blasted into the uneven bed-rock, with the same type of chrome capital letters as in the Plutonium Laboratory. I could read “F.E.” in the light of Sixten’s lamp.

  “So what’s under there?”

  “Haven’t got the faintest idea.”

  “You haven’t looked? Seriously?”

  “Dead serious, Erasmus.”

  His tone darkened. I stood, waited for him to continue.

  “Aina isn’t too happy about my digging in history—so I promised her never to find out. But eventually I came to think that you could do it, Erasmus. There isn’t anyone better suited.”

  “And why don’t we just open the hatch now, Sixten?”

  “Because we don’t have the key.”

  Once again: there is a time for follow-up questions, just as there is for answers. I continued to let Sixten dictate the pace.

  “Besides which, we’ve got to get back up now, pretty quickly—so we’ll have to take the shortest route. Don’t let me out of your sight.”

  The time was 02.38, the depth 195. My whole body was aching as we moved steeply through the dark, raw tunnels with Sixten’s headlamp shining the way, our breath growing heavier. I was drained after the run and the sight-seeing tour. After Sixten’s story.

  By 03.13 we had come up to level negative 18.4 feet. Then I recognized where I was: this was the last spiral staircase up to Sixten and Aina’s house. We must have taken some sort of dark short cut, one of a myriad alternatives through the tunnel system.

  Sixten entered the code on the box in among the crevices in the rock wall—and the concealed trap-door hatch above the staircase slid aside. He crawled up first, then helped me through the hole with my enormous hybrid, and glanced at his watch.

  “We’ll have to get a bit of a move on.”

  He pushed the washing machine back over the trap-door and started to move the dryer, revealing what seemed like another ordinary but somewhat oversized drain. I thought it must be another way down into the tunnel system, possibly an emergency exit from the house in case the first one became blocked. He got this trap-door to open.

  What this revealed was a metal panel with a muddle of tiny controls and abbreviations lying flat under the floor. Most of them began with “T”, from 1 to 191 in symmetrical rows from left to right. There were also longer abbreviations such as “T.R.C.1”, “T.R.F.C.6”, “N.I3”, “T.232” and “O.G.F.4”.

  “So here it is,” he said with a satisfied little smile.

  “Yes: the control panel from the Liaison Center up in the Office,” I said.

  “Spot on, Erasmus. I took it with me when everything was to be removed: thought it might come in handy. And I’ve worked for a long time, I’d like you to know. Prepared for your arrival down to the tiniest detail, even though Ingrid kept me waiting so long for an exact date.

  “The hardest part was the initial work. To connect our house—we were still able to choose this very one, since it didn’t have the best view but was perfect for my needs, logistically and geologically—to the system. I knew that the thickness of the surface layer out here varied between ten and fifty feet and that this part had the softest clay. Yet it took time to dig down the necessary thirty-six feet or more before striking one of our old tunnels. Then to break through into it, synchronizing with the construction company’s night-time work so that no-one would notice the racket, and at the same time avoiding tunneling through into their own network.

  “But I got to know the developer out here, decent guy, who was happy to show me all of the plans. Then there was a rather extensive bit of electronic installation. New control boxes along the whole system, new code, new network down in the Test Rooms.”

  While Sixten was telling me this, interesting as it was, I was studying the designations on the control panel. It offended the cryptologist in me that I did not understand. So in the end I had to ask for a clue.

  “T.R.C.1, for example, Sixten? O.G.F.4? Or T.232? Just so I understand the idea.”

  “Yes, yes. The first ones are quite easy. The lighting in Test Rooms Case 1, furthest in on the eastern short wall. The Office Ground Floor Switch 4. But then it gets less straightforward. The ‘T.’ designations stand for the L.E.D.s in the floors of the relevant tunnels. Counting from the surface downward, in a rather complex cross-section system referring to the relative level where the particular connection ends: T.232, in other words, is tunnel number 232 from above, seen in cross-section, within the Inner Circle.”

  I just stared at him. All this elaboration. All these efforts to hide. Something.

  “There is of course a lot more I could explain about this, but now’s not the time. Using this control panel, however, we were able to turn the lights on and off at pretty much every point in our vast system. And you can imagine how I was amazed when the entirety of this machinery—the diodes in the ground, the illumination in the laboratories, basically all of the hatches and doors except for the ones up in the Office—still functioned.”

  “The display case furthest in along the short eastern wall—the one with the stuffed animals, the gorilla and the zebra?”

  “Correct. I’m illuminating it there now: a bit of night lighting for you and Ingrid.”

  He flipped up the switch marked T.R.C.1, gave a quick smile and looked at his watch. I did the same: almost 04.00.

  “I don’t have time to explain more. Eventually I’ll tell you about it all, before our day of reckoning. But I can say that we needed to know more about the long-term effects of certain particular substances—so I m
anaged to get hold of those animals and skeletons, which back then were in magnificent condition, and which would otherwise have ended up in some store room at the Natural History Museum. And when I returned to the Test Rooms after four decades, and was so shaken by their condition, my first intention was to get rid of them before your arrival. But then I thought they would be a kind of witness to all this horror, what the fight is actually all about. Hopefully be some kind of inspiration for your imminent mission.”

  Then Sixten pressed on the edge of the control panel, which hummed around in a half circle. What now appeared was a seemingly complete sketch of the Inner Circle. Not only all the connecting passages but also the chutes—marked with black blobs—and side passages shown as dashed lines through the bed-rock.

  “We needed a detailed plan of this underground landscape: the cartographers produced a minor miracle. Don’t you think, Erasmus?”

  I nodded, waiting for more.

  “But this wasn’t actually what I wanted to show you.”

  Sixten began to search with his fingers behind the map, between the paper and the metal plate itself. Had to reach around the whole control panel before he managed to get the object out.

  “It was this.”

  He put a key in my hand—it bore the same letters as on the red trap-door: “F.E.” The double-sided sticky tape, which had been used to attach the key to the back of the map, stuck to the palm of my hand.

  “It’s as if it’s been lying here, waiting for you. Erasmus Levine, of all people. What were the odds of that, do you think?”

  I could have asked what sort of key it was, what there might be under the trap-door in the unlit tunnel, why I was the chosen one. But I did not—because everything about Sixten said that there was no time now. He looked at his watch and took a deep breath, before covering up the control panel with the dryer and pushing the washing machine aside again. I dropped the key into the zipped pocket of my waterproof pants and followed him through the hole leading back underground.

  “Time to deliver you into Ingrid’s care, so I can return here before Aina wakes up, always on the dot of five. As I said, she doesn’t like me digging around in history. And certainly not at this time of night.”

  2.11

  I had a hypothesis, but not much more.

  As soon as Sixten had left me, closed the last protective door from the outside, I took my dissertation from the pocket of my combat pants. Ingrid was fast asleep: she did not seem to have woken up to register the fact that I had returned.

  My watch showed 04.41. The display case with the crumbling apes was lit up thanks to Sixten’s control panel. The gorilla seemed to fix its one good eye in the direction of my bunk. It would not be easy to get any sleep—but I was not even trying.

  I had not leafed through my dissertation for more than a decade. Not since Ingrid had without warning left the university and I became a part of NUCLEUS, was moved to the little Catholic University and buried myself in Sister Jane’s dark library, met Amba, started the family, had the children, one after the other, as if following a model set up by someone else. I could hardly recall anything of what I had written.

  I turned the pages, intently examining the sentences in search of one particular thing—though I could no longer remember if I had mentioned it in the dissertation.

  *

  Introduction

  It started with Einstein’s discovery in 1905, as astonishing as it was fateful. Three letters, one digit, an equals sign. E=mc2. The formula for both the sun’s life span and the end of the world.

  In a dizzying and seemingly predetermined sequence of events, from Einstein’s equation up to the end of the Second World War, his theory would become the most brutal fact. Radiation, decomposition and radioactivity became high scientific fashion during the first half of the twentieth century. The indivisible atom suddenly appeared anything but reliable. Each discovery came hard on the heels of the last: reality itself seemed literally to be collapsing before the very eyes of the researchers.

  In due course the formula was proved in the most macabre mathematical experiment ever to be carried out, down to and including the very skin of the civilian population, all of those who were burned into black lumps, first in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. The two atom bombs over Japan were and remain the only practical tests of Einstein’s equation.

  The Second World War was decisive for mankind in learning the riddle of the Bomb. There were so many apparently separate factors—but with the benefit of hindsight they cannot be viewed as anything other than linked, orchestrated, like a symphony of fate.

  Not least in playing a crucial role were the stepped-up Jewish laws in many parts of Europe. The Italian Enrico Fermi was one example of all these intellectuals who were first dispersed and then united, in the service of the American government. Having received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, Fermi did not return to his native country, the by now Fascist Italy, but instead immigrated with his Jewish wife to America and in due course joined the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Many brilliant nuclear physicists, who were themselves or whose close relatives were of Jewish heritage, took the same path. Leo Szilard from Hungary, the Dane Niels Bohr, and Einstein himself.

  Yet according to available sources, Einstein never became directly involved in the creation of the atomic bomb. Rather he exploited the platform of his pacifism to try to persuade the President not to abuse the power he himself had foretold with his formula.

  But the principal riddle remains Lise Meitner. At the outbreak of the Second World War, and following the death of Marie Curie in 1934, this Austrian researcher with Jewish heritage was the only really prominent woman within nuclear physics, and the one exception other than Einstein to the intellectual diaspora to Los Alamos. The accepted explanation is that she refused to work on the development of so terrible a weapon. Instead, she fled to Sweden in 1938 and after the war became a Swedish citizen.

  The remarkable appellation “The Mother of the Atomic Bomb”, for somebody who was said never to have worked on it, was given to her above all because of a mythical walk which she took over the ice in Kungälv on the Swedish west coast in 1939. It was said to have been on that very occasion that Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch realized how to understand the nature of nuclear fission. How, from one single uranium atom, one could derive two barium atoms.

  That a single element could in this way be transformed into another was theoretically unthinkable and seemed to be nothing more than a transmutation, pure alchemy. Everything that mankind had dreamed of since antiquity and the time of the old magicians.

  According to the myth, during their ardent conversation, Meitner and Frisch had sat down on a fallen tree in the forest. Brushed away the snow and taken out paper and pen.

  What followed was a key moment in the history of science. On Meitner’s piece of paper the picture grew of a balloon filled with liquid: how it slowly expanded before finally bursting. They called this process “fission”, a term which until then had stood only for how a biological cell splits itself in a natural and organic way.

  Six years later the world was to learn what this fission could bring about. That it was in practice not at all gentle and organic—it was unthinkably hard and violent. Only days after the detonation of the bomb over Hiroshima, the world’s press was lining up outside Lise Meitner’s boarding house in Leksand in the province of Dalarna, three hundred miles north of Stockholm, where she was taking her summer vacation. It was the beginning of August 1945. So it was Meitner who had to explain the theoretical principles of the new superweapon: Meitner who there and then was christened “The Mother of the Atomic Bomb” in the headlines.

  But there is nothing even in these interviews from Leksand that says anything in more detail about what Meitner was doing in Sweden, what sort of trials she was conducting with the aid of experimental reactor R.1 in the massive rock chamber under Stockholm’s Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. Scarcely a trace remains of her research. After she rec
eived Swedish citizenship in 1949, there is more than a ten-year gap in the sources, before, in 1960, it is known that Meitner moved to live with relatives in Oxford and in due course died after a succession of strokes.

  All of this—the vagueness, the absence of sources and records, the strange choice of a new homeland so far from the world’s leading nuclear physicists in Los Alamos, her friends and colleagues—suggests the existence of what I have chosen to call “Lise Meitner’s Secret”. This is the subject of the dissertation which follows.

  2.12

  I got no further before I fell into a kind of stupor. The following night, once Ingrid had fallen asleep, I read on—and the night after that. Yet I found no trace of what I was looking for.

  When I had gone through the whole dissertation, after two or three similar nights with the staring gorilla my only waking company, I was exhausted. Every night I fingered the key which Sixten had given me, locked myself in the shower room and weighed it reverentially in my hand. Felt all of its symbolic load. Carefully studied the engraving: “F.E.” Following the third of those nights, I decided to ask Ingrid about it as soon as she woke up, to tell her all about Sixten’s tour, the red trap-door in the tunnel floor with the same inscription. And then I never did.

  Sixten gave me no lead either. He came down to fill the refrigerator a couple of times a week, greeted me warmly—in the same way as before our long talk. As if it had never taken place, with all the secret history he had shared with me, all this trust. As if he had never given me the key to a space few others could have ever seen, maybe no-one had.