Mattias Berg - The Carrier

“But in actual fact Sixten and I, like Lise, were devoting all of our efforts to a Third Tier development project. The ultimate weapon. As we saw it, transuranic elements were going to bring Sweden to a new era as a superpower. The first since the death of Karl XII at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

“That was why the tunnel system became so peculiar and so extensive: because we needed to hide it as it was being built. New emergency exits were forever required. Secret spaces like the fallout shelter where we met up after our flight, my treasure, strange little play areas where Sixten and I let our chosen few scientists test the short- and long-term effects of those elusive transuranic elements. Like the Test Room.”

A moment’s silence, a faint smile. Then she noticed my empty plate.

“Would you like some more?”

I nodded, had my plate filled up again. Began to eat. Alert as she continued.

“One day we just came to a standstill. Our huge appropriations via hidden accounts, which had made all of this development work possible, boxes inside boxes, together with this meandering tunnel system designed to conceal the left hand from the right, all the night-time bus loads of explosives experts and mining engineers to and from Kiruna, the massive logistics, slowly but surely started to run dry because our secretive little group never managed to produce concrete results. Not just the coded transfers from the Swedish state, where those arranging the money movements were under the impression that we were still working on the fission weapon: the atomic bomb, the First Tier development project. But also the largest part of our funding—which came directly to Sixten’s bank account. From a mysterious financier with the signature J.E.

“Once I had met that peculiar Edelweiss a few times, after a couple of years in the U.S., he revealed that he had been the name behind the initials. That most of the support for the research Sixten and I were organizing had in other words come from the American nuclear weapons program. Via him, of all people, as a front.

“Eventually Edelweiss explained to me that Sixten’s and my Swedish development project had been a relatively large expense even by their standards. And that the Americans too had been wondering what a super-brain like Meitner might have been up to over there in Sweden during all those years, why she had always turned down their invitations. And since they never got to the bottom of it at the time—despite what was apparently a major espionage effort, Stockholm’s addresses crawling with agents, even at Tekniska Högskolan—they felt they needed to find out what she had actually achieved. Before anybody else did.

“So Meitner’s name was all it took to justify these magnificent allocations from the U.S. to Sixten’s account, a number of heavily encrypted transfers among many others, right across the globe.”

She paused and I looked up from my plate, which was empty again. She must have sensed some sort of doubt.

“You must understand, Erasmus, that nearly a decade had passed since the invention of the hydrogen bomb by the time Sixten and I came into the program at the beginning of the ’60s. So both superpowers were thirsting for yet another Doomsday weapon, to keep up the pace: as few as seven years had passed between the birth of the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb, from 1945 to 1952. So the transuranic elements had to be the next step. Both sides did whatever it took to get to the apocalypse first. Cared nothing about either the financial or the ideological burden, every layer in the process had only to demonstrate to the one above that it was actually doing something.

“And Edelweiss himself was one of those most actively involved in the search for ‘Lise Meitner’s secret’. That man was to become my direct boss for thirty-three long years—before our roles were reversed and I became his superior, as Alpha in our newly created Team. But he never found out that I was the one in that position. Until our magnificent flight from NUCLEUS, my treasure.”

I took a deep breath. I had come into the story, been addressed, given perhaps the biggest supporting role. She looked past me, into the darkness, out through the window. As if back in time.

“Be that as it may… at the same time as our funds were drying up came the news that Lise was dying at her home in Oxford. So this was in October 1968, as you know. Sixten therefore asked me to go there before it was too late and try to get the missing piece of the jigsaw, The Holy Grail. The Philosopher’s Stone. Whatever was needed to allow us to create the third generation of nuclear weapons. He was convinced that Lise still had the secret with her, perhaps just in her head, and that I was the only one capable of getting it out of her. That I had the gift. To persuade and manipulate, the sort of thing I’d mastered since my childhood.”

She began to waggle her foot, I heard the soft rustling of her best mufti trousers under the table. Not even Ingrid could keep the mask in place as she approached the seat of her pain.

“In fact I did not want to travel abroad at the time. I was already five months pregnant—filled with dreams and terror, in equal proportions—even though I was hardly showing. You know I have always been good at hiding things. I was almost as slim as normal in the middle of my pregnancy, didn’t say a word about my condition to Sixten. But I’ve never been able to say no to him. So I took myself off to Lise, all the way to her sickbed, introduced myself as one of her students from the guest lectures at K.T.H. A real admirer.

“And it took its time, it really did, a whole day and night of meandering discussions. But in the end I managed to persuade her that I was just as much for the cause as she was, that peace was mankind’s natural state. So finally Lise sat up, reached in under her pillow and gave me two objects. First, the key to her underground laboratory. Secondly, the tiny black case which Seaborg handed over to her, together with the diploma and the Fermi medal, when he visited her home in 1966.

“I recognized the case at once, from the photograph I had seen in the newspapers: the one which we put into your dissertation many decades later. But it was significantly heavier than I had supposed. Just an inch or so wide, at most two inches long—and weighing as much as lead or refined gold.

“Lise gave me both the key and the case on the condition that I should not ask any questions and as soon as possible destroy both objects for all time. The significance of the key escaped me, however. Until Sixten told me when we met again up in Ursvik, for the first time in nearly forty-five years. So I told her about Mount Doom. Promised that I was going to throw them both down there, among the mass of debris from the excavation of the new 1,770-foot level, back home in Kiruna. Right inside what we in the end started to call Pluto.”

I could feel the heat in my face, my temples were pounding—reactions which one could never really control, however much one trained. The theater of the body.

“And it was those objects which sealed my fate. The case and the key, in that order. Brought to an end that phase of my life. The program and Sweden. Sixten. Love and death.”

She gazed at the label on the wine bottle again. Intact after all years.

“I bought this so we could celebrate when I got home. One wasn’t quite so careful in those days, people both drank and smoked all the way up to delivery, just kept going as if nothing had changed. And the woman in the wine store assured me that it was the best there was. Could be stored essentially for as long as one wanted. Although that in itself was less important: Sixten and I were going to crack it open as soon as we had the chance.”

Maybe I nodded, before I stole a look at my watch. Nearly midnight. I emptied my glass, waited for the finale. And after a long pause it unfurled.