Mattias Berg - The Carrier

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.

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.

One evening, just before he had finished filling up our supplies and while Ingrid was in the shower room after yet another yoga session, I confronted him. Started gently, so the mussel would not close.

“We couldn’t go for another run, could we, Sixten? It was great to be able to stretch my legs, breathe fresh air.”

He gave me a sympathetic look. Almost pitying.

“I wish we could. It must be hard work for you here in the bed-rock, I do see that.”

Sixten stopped, seeming to concentrate on getting the last of the meatball sandwiches with beetroot salad and a slice of orange into the fridge next to the tubes of cod’s roe paste, which Ingrid appeared to be emptying with regularity.

“But I’ve promised Aina not to head out like that again. She was beside herself with worry when I got back to our bedroom after our little tour. Poor thing had lain awake all night—and that hadn’t happened since Ingrid made contact a few years ago. She had even started to imagine that I’d gone off with you lot.”

He managed to fit the broad sandwich in beside the tubes, as precisely as he did everything else.

“So at least until Aina’s jubilee, which will be trying enough for her as it is—not to be able to invite any guests apart from you, because we don’t dare tempt fate at the moment—I don’t want to disturb her more than I can help. But I can let you out to go running on your own, Erasmus. As long as Ingrid is happy with that.”

As Sixten packed the empty containers into his backpack, I wondered whether I could ask about the key. In the end I held back. I suppose I did not want to trouble either Aina or him any further.

“That would be great, Sixten. I’ll check with Ingrid.”

It took time. Each initiative started to feel ever heavier, as if we were under water. Edelweiss would say we must now be in the fourth stage of the curse of tranquility. So I did what I could. Methodically built up the level in my strength training on the floor beside the bunk. Checked the briefcase, its contents, the mechanism, the functions, over and over again. Repeated the rituals. Mumbled the different steps for launch, as if they were prayers for myself. Kept writing in my notebook. Trained, showered, trained, in an unending wait for Ingrid to give us our orders.

Just after my return from the long tour with Sixten, she had said that we would be ready to regroup soon. Proceed to our first stop, one of the few places which had still to be connected up to the whole, before her plan could be set in motion. By the time she said “soon” to me again, a month had passed: we were deep into October.

There was now also a sweetish smell around the Nurse, whenever she momentarily abandoned whatever it was she was doing in her smaller rock chamber and passed by Ingrid’s and my bunks on her way to or from the refrigerator. It was as if she did not have much to do with us.

Nor was there the slightest peep from across the Atlantic. Not from the Team, nor from Edelweiss, nobody was put forward to negotiate with us, not even the President himself. Nothing.

That too was entirely in accordance with the directives: our escape had to be concealed by them as by us. In some of our training exercises, public opinion had swung in favour of the terrorists. Even if they were threatening to blow up the world, having commandeered the means to do so, sooner or later the tide could turn against us. The fact that the U.S.’s proud system for mastering The Weapon—all these dual controls and double checking, piles of proclamations and international documents to stop it spreading to other nations—also involved something like our strange little team.

The silence, unlike in our training, was ghostly in the extreme. Finally I asked Ingrid if I could go for that run around the area on my own. Perhaps not so much for the sake of the exercise, the oxygen, the sky. But to see if the world above ground really was still there.

“Absolutely, my treasure. So long as Sixten is happy with it.”

Once more her confidence—in both him and me. When Sixten next came down to fill up the refrigerator, he was aware of his other task: to follow me to the surface and let me out of the house at about the same late hour as the first time.

Aina had already gone to bed.

“I’ll set the egg timer to one hour. After that I’ll call the police,” he said with a straight face.

With some ceremony, Sixten turned off the house alarm—they seemed to use it even when they were at home.

“And keep to the forest, Erasmus. The security company looks to have increased their patrols after the mysterious demolition of a wall up in the new school development.”

Only then did he give his warm little smile. Looked at me with his deep-blue eyes and opened the door.

“Bye, my friend. Please take care.”

Out on the sidewalk everything swam before my eyes for a moment. I took a few unsteady steps before I got into my stride. My whole compromised state. Solitude, freedom, captivity, all at once. The air felt fragile and ice-cold. It crackled in my nostrils as I lengthened my stride toward the wooded area, the thermometer on my watch showing below zero. Ingrid had said during our rare conversations that it was unusually cold for the time of year.

Naturally this was another test set by her. To let me run free, literally speaking, with the primitive cell phone my only lifeline. To see if I came back. The Nurse had certainly put some sort of tracer in the hybrid I took with me, no doubt as hard to find as the one that was in the briefcase.

And where was I supposed to go to? Back to my family, which I had been betraying for so long? The rest of the Team? To a court martial, a death sentence?

When I got to the place to which Sixten had taken me, the hollow of dense trees, I did not turn back again as I had said I would, but went further on the path which I had memorized since our tour together. Once I caught sight of the yellow surveillance light, I followed the fence around the area. The sense of being able to choose my own route, simply pull a little at my chains, was intoxicating.

Up by a massive white wooden building I stopped to drink, to breathe. My heart was pounding. The timer on my watch showed that I still had twenty minutes until Sixten’s deadline: I must have run faster than I had calculated. Thoughts raced through my mind as I looked at the facade of the building. The sign seemed to be newly made from an old original: “Gunpowder Railway. Ursvik stop.” The laminated images on the building showed train enthusiasts gathered around an electric engine which looked to be from before rather than after the Second World War.