That light—what was that, anyway? She traced it through a lens in the wall to a room at the very center of the observatory, and from there to an object of ungainly beauty.
A pair of centrifuges spun side-by-side in synchronized orbit. They were attached over something that looked like a vat of stars.
As each centrifuge came around again, the starscape reflecting up from the vat was angled back into the room she had just come from.
Susan stepped closer, and brushed the side of the mirror. She frowned in amazement as the stars shimmered slightly. This was no mirror. It was a vat of mercury, a huge vat of mercury that stretched thirty feet across the floor.
She recalled a similar device in the Four Winds Bar, but that one had been a toy compared to this monster. This, she realized, was the secret Conrad Hartmann had died to discover: Zentralbund had been building a telescope at Site Y.
She recognized Sirius by its placement low on the western horizon. But something was wrong. It was huge and lustrous and misshapen. It seemed to change and grow before her eyes.
“You are not looking at the star itself.”
She spun around at the sound of the voice. She had her pistol out.
“You are looking at an effect Herr Einstein calls ‘gravitational lensing.’ Something three billion times the mass of the sun comes this way, bending the starlight behind it as it nears.”
Here was the shrunken man in the wheelchair. He was laughing at her. Two men stepped forward to take her gun. She pulled the trigger on them; nothing happened. She had spent her seven rounds just getting in here.
She turned for the door. Arms encircled her waist. She threw back an elbow and caught somebody in the ribs. That man went over her shoulder and into the vat of mercury.
She never found out what happened to him. Something like electricity rattled every nerve from the base of her skull to the base of her spine.
She dreamed of Russian rockets.
Chapter Eleven
SOME PART OF HER WONDERED if this was her penance for all those people in Berlin.
—But only a small part. Mostly, Susan was not thinking about much of anything but keeping the weight off her shoulders and wrists.
Two men were trying to find out what she was doing here. One of them—Florian from Plauen (he’d turned it into a little song at one point, and encouraged her to sing along. She had declined, politely) leaned back in a chair behind his desk and sniffed her socks whenever he thought the other one turned away.
Occasionally he would ask her a question, as if it had only just come to him that he should. Occasionally he would adjust a chain wound about a peg in the corner of his desk, and her wrists would ratchet another excruciating notch up behind her head.
The other one—a pimply-faced youth named Ralf Koehler—held a ball peen hammer over her feet, asking if she knew how they taught Jews to rumba at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (which apparently was some sort of alma mater). He would ask her this in a thoughtful way, as if her answer were a matter of some scientific interest.
She had already tried telling him to go screw himself. Ralf Koehler had responded by testing her reflexes with his little hammer. Her reflexes were good. She saw the gleam in his eye and moved at the crucial moment.
The hammer pulped a depression in the phone book a quarter-inch from her big toe and deep as a rivet head.
Ralf Koehler smiled. He raised a finger—ahh—an appreciation of style. If they ever turned this phone book dancing into an Olympic event, Susan had one judge in her pocket, no question.
She guessed she spent an hour after that, gaining the grudging admiration of her two dancing instructors. She had no time for pride. With each leap she took off the edge of the phone book, the odd popping and squeaking of her shoulders reverberated a little longer. The pain shrieked a little louder. The questions—Who are you? Who sent you? How did you get here?—grew a little more seductive.
She looked up at some point to see Ralf Koehler setting a second huge phonebook on his desk. He was soaking it in kerosene from a little tin cup, muttering something about teaching her the merengue.
This is when the man in the wheelchair rolled in.
“Has she said anything?”
“No, Stürmbannführer.”
“You were not persuasive.” The voice was churlish. Susan remembered a petulant doctor’s wife she had nannied for during her junior year at Boston College—“You were not thorough with the silverware . . .”
The soldier looked abashed. “She has been dancing on the phone books for over an hour. No matter, she hurls abuse at us.”
Susan heard a tongue cluck mockingly. “ ‘Hurls abuse at you.’ ” He turned to his companion, an angel-eyed kid who seemed to excel at lounging and looking disinterested. “There must be something in the conventions about that, ehh, Karel?”