6th August 1945
Milo lay on her old bed in her old bedroom in her old rooms in Cambridge.
It had been remarkably easy to return to her old university, and back to somewhere she knew, for the door was unlocked and the rooms unguarded. Mr. Chatteris, the groundsman had tipped his had to her. Not even Mrs. Evans, the cleaning lady, had remarked on her return.
It had been a month. Three miles in shoes ill fitting to bones which had not mended properly, over fields and through crops which now would surely be being harvested. It hurt to walk back to the university with her poor feet and it had been a relief when the familiar outline of the university buildings - Christ's College, the Atrium, came into view.
And now, it felt to Milo that she had never left, that the last twenty years of her life had surely happened to someone else. It had only taken her two days to risk going to the refectory across from her rooms for food.
A suspicious Milo might have thought that she was being allowed to stay there, undisturbed. But the truth was, the university was mostly deserted. No lectures were being given, not even summer concerts. All was still as a hot Sunday afternoon, where even insects wondered whether the last bit of the season's nectar was really worth the effort.
Milo's mind drifted to sleep again. It was what she was good at, these days - she felt awfully tired every hour of the day.
...her mind drifted into memories, and she smiled at the one now lodged in her consciouness...
...it was when Heisenberg had tried to stop her from heing taken, von Weisaecker had had to hold him back...
...she had liked Carl Friedrich; bright, humourous, of some nobility in Germany and she told him about Downton, calling him, "M'lord" to get his attention, especially when they were in the vast cavern and words echoed.
Von Weisaecker was also bright humoured and magnanomous in defeat, especially when they played cards.
"Buba...Dame...Koenig...Achs!" He would say of an evening before they went to their homes in Haigerloch and she was taken under guard back to a house in the town where she had been given a room. He would unfold his hand to reveal a streak, then Milo would produce a full house, and lose the matches she was playing with.
Aitch Bee did not like it when she lost on purpose - he could not understand it, Milo knew. To him, not to try her best to defeat her opponent was incomprehensible, but the truth was, she liked the card games. When Milo had beaten people in the past, they soon gave up.
And she enjoyed the company of the men with whom she worked. Before they left for the night, it was a camaraderie before a long, cold night lying on a straw-stuffed mattress, with sometimes a dinner of some sort of meat and what once might have been a vegetable, sometimes nothing at all except for brown water from a stand pipe in the courtyard at the back of the guarded building. So it made no sense to alienate von Weisaecker, or Diebner or Bagge, who liked to play the most ferocious games of poker.
But there was another truth: Milo could no longer depend on her memory as once she had. She had suffered when she had been taken away, two years before, taken by the SS, feet broken with bats; burned with brands. Sleep deprived. Immersed in freezing water. All to tell them something she did not know.
And then one day Jack Prew had arrived, shouting something at the guards all the time that he spent freeing her, helping her into clothes, leaving with her. She had written a "confession" in Irish, which amounted to the fact that she had been sent to Germany three years before and had been working on a project to do with uranium. What more was there to say?
But she wasn't taken back to Berlin. It was to the south of Germany, to Haigerloch, she had returned, to the Uranverein. Heisenberg had begun working on a reactor there, and she had continued with them. It had been there she had begun to play cards. Aitch Bee watched her with amusement most of the time. He had already persuaded the authorities he could not to any of this without her.
Not true of course; he was trying to keep her close. They needed one another, although she was the only one who remained behind un the cave unde the church, as he went home to Elisabeth and their ever growing family.
Perhaps he did need her; he had lost four Jewish colleagues, Peierls as one of them, and with Planck and Laue, had helped them to escape, Laue being one of the "gang" so to speak. How could anyone think that they had been doing anything other than sabotaging the idea of such a destructive bomb...
...such had been dropped on Hiroshima that day...
...the first news report had not mentioned "nuclear", but Truman's address to the world had...
But, how her heart was sore for Planck, his only comeback from the arrest and killing of his son was a half-hearted salute at the evening he had organised to celebrate the life of Fritz Haber. Laue had been cannier, and made sure he was always carrying something in both hands so the question of a salute never came up.
And now, here she was, having been interned by her own country...Lindemann had told her, dismissively, that the Hall Farm scientists would be allowed to go back to Germany, but she would never be free.
"And yet, after all this, you would not have commanded Rutherford's respect," Milo had told him. "After Haber, you would be the next man he would hold in such contempt."
Bold words, which Milo saw bite at Lindemann's soul, because of their truth. And he had told her that, instead of freeing her, as he had been going to do, and taking her where she wanted to go, she would have to, "Bloody well walk!"
And he had driven off. So Milo "bloody well walked", all the way back to her old university, not even a coat to her name. Lindemann had been given a pound note - that was before her outburst, though he hadn't tried to get it back off her - Milo had no idea what she could even buy with that. Before the war, she would be doing quite well. And it might not be the money, Milo considered, but the availability - she had been given no ration card.
Rain fell over the roof and ran down the window. If Milo felt the hunger pains as she used to, when she was last here, she might have concerned herself with dinner. But, instead, lying still and quiet was what she wanted, just to rest her body and still her mind...
...they had been making their own reactor, that had been the story, to make energy for the Reich...when Prew had taken her away from the uranium machine's cave, under the church in Haigerloch, she had heard von Weisaecker point out in German, loudly, so all of the men could hear, that this was an energy machine, and they had given up the idea of building a weapon.
"Wasn't that always our idea?" he had asked of Heisenberg, when they knew that the invasion of the country was imminent. "Like when we visited Bohr, and you tried to explain," he added. But Aitch Bee had shaken his head.
"It is because we didn't have enough time to develop a bomb, and we could never manage it, in whatever timeframe they would be given, knowing how much enriched uranium he had calculated would be needed.
...and it was this uranium machine, a power station, had been the design he had slipped to Bohr in 1941, making sure he loudly boasted that Germany would, of course, win the war. Milo had smiled at that - anyone who knew Aitch Bee would never have doubted his patriotism. So he had used it as a foil, this time, under von Weisaecker's guidance.
..."And I drew on your paper, Lieblein," he told her, when they had got back to Berlin. Ad, of course, Milo had told him the of the Ogham letters, that she knew Frisch would be able translate, interpreted it for him.
"Gut, gut," Heisenberg told her, and had laughed when she told him that she had written one more word at the corner, particularly for Oppenheimer.
"Apfel!" Aitch Bee had laughed, one of the only times Milo remembered him to be so mirthful.
It was the last time they had kissed. Milo had put it down to his over-exuberance. When Heisenberg got excited, he tended to do rash things. But he had a young family, and Milo had no thoughts in her mind to be his mistress. Yet, they were bonded, in some way, in mind, or in common history. Why was it, throughout those years of horror, that only the good memories survived, the bad, the terrible, the horrific falling from the mind like a caterpillar's cocoon, leaving behind only the butterfly of comfortable wonder and happy optimism. The mind, she supposed. To keep the mind from losing control...
And then Milo sat up. She was used to the stillness and the peace of the rooms, of her bed, and this was a noise that was extremely tangible. She got up, not even noticing whether she was dressed or not, but she reached for her dressing gown - her's, from the last time she was there - no-one had thought to clean it out, or dispose of what few clothing items she had left behind when she had last flitted from Cambridge to Germany...
...or had it been Denmark, that time? Copenhagen? To visit Bohr...?
The scraping continued, and suddenly a key turned in the lock. Milo froze, for the door did not lock, or at least from the outside. She had turned it from the inside.
Clearly, whoever it was, was determined to come in, and the caller knocked when he realised his key was futile. Milo swallowed to concentrate her courage, and opened it.
A man was standing there. Short, black-haired, he carried a small bag, and turned with a wary smile.
"Hello," he said to Milo, and gave her a quick look. "Oh? Have I made a mistake?" He looked at the outside of the door, the number 171 stencilled onto the brickwork. "No," he concluded, a little apologetically. "These are my rooms." He held out a piece of paper, which Milo could clearly see had her rooms as the address. Behind him, the drizzle had turned back to thick, heavy rain sheets again.
"Come in," Milo told him, and opened the door wider. The man stepped in, bringing with him two small puddles of water from his shoes.
"Yes," the man nodded, "We can sort this out in the morning." He put out his hand. Milo took it, and they shook, beginning what neither of them knew was going to be a lifelong friendship.
"Milo Ashby," she told the man, her words seeming to appear in front of her lips like ghosts in the coldness of the rain.
"Pleased to meet you Miss Ashby," the man acknowledged. "I'm Turing, Alan Turing."
