7th August 1945, Farm Hall
"It seems to me unbeliveable that the Americans have managed to achieve this."
Otto Hahn moved the salt back to the middle of the table. Lunch had been brought by the housemaid, Mrs. Smythe, who was now lingering in the hall waiting for the Uranium Club to finish, a government agent lingering beside her.
"Could it be true?" Erich Bagge asked, placing down his fork. Unlike most of his colleagues he actually liked the whale meat. It was the dense puddings he did not, served with a thin yellow sauce that tasted mostly of flour. "Could they not be exaggerating?"
"Five thousand tonnes of TNT? How could it be?" , stabbing at his whale meat, taking a bite and beginning to chew. "It could not be carried on an aeroplane. Could it even be true?" He watched as his colleagues turned their heads in disbelief.
"The man out there, hey, hey!" Horst Korsching called out to him, "You, you told us it was an atomic bomb!"
The man did not move, instead, just repositioned his feet. Von Weisaecker looked across to Heisenberg. The man had stood before them the evening before, and put on the wireless, sitting with them while the BBC World Service read out its own announcement again. Then, after telling them it was an "atomic bomb, the tall thin man had he had taken the radio away, and another man, shorter and stockier, had taken his place, until he left in the evening, leaving the German uranium scientists alone.
"I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?" Diebner had asked. Heisenberg, carrots heading to his mouth, stopped his arm in its trajectory and looked at the man.
"Oh no, they're not as cute as all that. I don't think they know the real Gestapo methods; they're a bit old fashioned in that respect."
"Then why are we here?" Paul Harteck asked. "To keep us out of the way? Even he told us that if anyone found out where we are we will be in a different continent. Anyway," Harteck continued, "I would have understood the words "uranium" or "nuclear fission bomb", but these were not on the news broadcast." He paused, pushing his plate away. The food was terrible, but at least it was filling. "In our work, with Wirtz," he nodded to Karl Wirtz, "We worked with atomic hydrogen and atomic oxygen."
"Yes," agreen Wirtz, "Perhaps the American scientists might have succeeded in stabilising a high concentration of separate atoms; that would produce a tenfold increase over a conventional bomb, more than enough to equate to the TNT you describe, Bagge." Eric Bagge looked over his fork - he was enjoying the food, and his eye was drawn to the leftovers on von Laue's plate.
"So, what explains why we did not produce one?" asked Otto Hahn, asking the obvious question.
"And I would say, if we had had the will, we would," von Weisaecker told them. "And we did not." He thought of the one person missing from the group - he had liked Miss Ashby, who was nothing but straightforwardly honest and liked to devise practical jokes.
Her brain was akin to theirs, fission, and gaining energy from the uranium machine the only thing on her mind. And, she kept Heisenberg docile: Carl Friedrich often wondered what might have happened to them all had Werner not had her close at hand. He might well have gone down the route of a bomb, just for the sake of competing with himself, to prove it could be done.
"We needed far more uranium than even Joachimstal could produce," Heisenberg told them. "I calculated it, and checked it twice over, gave it to Gerlach here."
It was not raining, at least. Walther Gerlach hated the rain, and the clouds that hung in the sky did at least look less dense than the ones spilling water all around the house for the majority of the day before. "Yes," he agreed.
"I for one am happy that we had not been able to build a nuclear bomb for Adolf Hitler," von Laue told them.
"Oh, come on!" Diebner exclaimed. "I for one am very disappointed that we did not." Gerlach, indulging in his plum pudding, had nodded in agreement. "If the Americans have a uranium bomb then we're all second-raters!" But von Weisaecker shook his head.
"She would have told us; she told us everything," Carl Friedrich shook his head. A silence fell on top of them all; each and every man had worked with Milo Ashby. She was one of them; she should be with them all now, the complete team, working with that chimera of elements. One sneeze and the uranium nuclei fissioned, it seemed.
"Letter for you," Mrs. Smythe told them. "Which of you is Otto Ha-hn?" The housekeeper stumbled over the words.
"Harn," Heisenberg told her, and he gestured to Hahn, waving his fork in his direction. He too was enjoying the food - even the grounds here, apart from the rain of late had been pleasant, and they had enjoyed many games of badminton on the lawn. He missed Melusina greatly, so refused to dwell on her name, or even herself.
She was gone now, and what Heisenberg had told himself was that he had his family to return safe and well to, Elisabeth, and his children. Had she only been of the Prussian ideals - all of them, and no less. And he had forgiven himself for the indiscretions between them - 1933 had been a difficult time on the emotions.
Hahn, however, was now sitting back in his chair, reading the letter again.
"What is it?" von Weisaecker had asked. Wordlessly, Hahn handed it over for his colleague to see. Von Weisacker brought it cl
oser to his face. Then, he jumped up wildly and clapped Hahn on the back."Well?" asked Diebner, eyebrows raised.
"Otto Hahn has been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize...for Chemistry...for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei." He looked down at the letter again, and then over to his colleague. Otto Hahn shrugged.
"I...accept," he replied, and now everyone was on their feet, clapping their colleagues on their backs, lauding Hahn, and smiling for the first time since they had got to Hall Farm. Perhaps, thought Heisenberg, it represented one small step on their path of going home.
88888888
Early hours of the morning, 8th August 1945
So Milo had let Turing in, along with a lot of the east wind and its rain, and Turing had accepted her offer of tea, and had slept on the couch while Milo went back to her old bed, in the bedroom.
And the next morning, when she had gone to the bathroom and used the facilities, Turing had been on the other side of the door, waiting for her to come out. They had exchanged a nod and Turing had left, and Milo had gone back to bed again.
It was only on the afternoon, when Alan had returned, in a brighter, more convivial mood that Milo had managed to get dressed, and was just going to the refectory when the man climbed the stairs to the front door.
"Would you like some company?" he asked. Milo had nodded, for no other reason than because she couldn't think of a reason why not, and they walked in silence across the lawns to the dining hall, Turing noticing the difficulty the woman had when walking. It was still raining, and she was trying to hurry. Turing walked at her pace, saying nothing, asking nothing. He held open the door, and then held back a chair for her at a table for two, calling for menus.
But there was little choice; most of the menu had been inked, different things in different colours, the menus being updated as the war shortages went in, just one or two foods to begin with, and then more being added as the war went on, interrupting the cuisine of the intellectuals at Cambridge.
A thin soup appeared first, pea and ham, although with a scarcity of both, and then a lamb cutlet each with a piece of National Loaf, grey and dense. Milo bit into hers and chewed, grateful of anything considering how little she had to eat some days in the closing weeks of the war in Germany.
And she sensed they both wanted to ask the same question, and they both had the same answer: what were they doing there, and why, the answer being related to war work. Instead, they were eating dinner together, Alan and Milo, for they merely knew one another's names and that they both were employed at Cambridge.
"I am only in Cambridge for a few days; I am on my way to Manchester," Alan told Milo, when she paused in her effort to chew the lamb, and the thought struck her that he had said he was a mathematician, and also that Christ's was the college to which he was affiliated. "I went back to where I began my time here."
"That's me, too," Milo conceded to tell him. "I came back here, because there is nowhere else for me." Then, she lowered her fork, the memory stirring, like an old dormant monster prickled by the warmth of spring. "Manchester?"
"I had...war work," Turing told her, "And after that finished, I went to work using machines to calculate mathematical functions, to develop them," he added, then lowered his head. "I was at Teddington...let me say, it did not work out."
"I could say the same, except my war work did work out," Milo thought, a shaft of bright sunlight piercing the dull fog of her mind at the thought. She had worked to prevent the bomb being developed, and now the Americans had used it in Japan. All the world had seen its destructive capabilities, and she, along with her agreement with von Weisaecker, had kicked along an idea that no-one really wanted to develop.
"And now you're back here? Where you began?"
It was true - her work had begun here. And now her mind was racing, the density of her thoughts, all bundled up together, were unravelling from that first thought about Manchester, like a neutron breaks apart a uranium nucleus - all kinds of things came out, including a lot of energy an a new element, in Milo's case the beginnings of a plan for her life where, an hour before, she was nothing more than a empty case in human form, her thoughts and feelings deeply buried so as to cause her least harm.
But now she didn't mind the harm, as she spoke to this man who had turned up at, admittedly, his own doorstep where Milo had been squatting, and told him she had worked with Ernest Rutherford in Manchester, and here in Cambridge.
That was, however, all her mind would release just then, but Milo felt happy to be able to tell this stranger, who she sensed would take the information, but not use it, and it was just then that a thought lodged in her mind, that this Dr. Turing reminded her of someone she knew well.
"What will you do in Manchester?" Milo asked, as Turing played the gentleman to perfection, calling for the dessert menu and coffee.
"I don't know if you've read my paper? I discuss the logical structure of machines, to best use them for mathematical computations." Milo shook her head.
"I am...very behind on my reading. My work was highly specialised. When was it published?"
"1938." Milo shook her head.
"I was...away."
And that was all she could say. The Official Secrets Act, which Frederick Lindemann had impressed on her that she must keep, or risk execution, bound her. But Milo would not have spoken anyway - to whom might one speak who knew what she had been doing? Who might understand?
And what doing now...
Nothing, I do not know what I am doing now.
"I just came to a place where I knew." Turing paused in his eating of the dense, raisin pudding they had been served.
"Yes," he agreed.
"So," Milo asked, the momentum of her mind refusing to stop, "Your paper, what was it about?"
"If you will tell me about yours," Turing told her, his face lighting up as he spoke. "I was long impressed by the practical applications of mathematics, making something tangible, physical, from theoretical ideas."
"And that was what your paper was about?"
"It's what my work is about to be. Max Newman worked with me...during the war. He put my name forward based on that to the overseer of the whole project at Manchester, to make a difference engine, to make a machine that can carry out computations. But my work, well, it asks whether machines can think."
Milo said nothing for a moment. Rain hammered down on the dining room roof, and she thought of the machines she had left behind, those she had sold to Downton, and to other people. Those, the electrical circuits, just provided a medium for the movement of energy through electrons.
"You are asking if machines could be made to think? Do you mean independently?" Turing shrugged.
"Why not? They would have needs, would they not? The human brain has evolved to be able to problem-solve, but before it can carry out higher level tasks, basic functions need to be met - food, shelter, warmth, and so on." Milo nodded. That made perfect sense.
"So too a machine, an independent machine," Milo replied. "To be self-sustaining, it would need to be aware of itself, or at least know how it can survive." She shook her head. "In that case, I think you mean a machine that replicates the processes a human mind carries out. What?" Milo had broken off because Alan Turing was staring at her. When he realised she had, Turing looked away, waving his spoon towards her.
"No, nothing. You just remind me of someone, that's all. Yes," Alan conceded, "That is what I meant, of course."
"And that's the job, is it? In Manchester?"
"I...don't know," Turing admitted. "It is what I believe to be so; many young researchers producing the physical components, something which I am - " He broke off. "I can advise on the practicalities, and continue my work in computing, working on the code needed to make the machine function. Was it like that back in your time?" Milo smiled, the first smile she had given to anyone, a genuine smile relating to the presence of the companion and her engagement in their conversation.
"My time?"
"You are clearly older than I am. And if you worked with Rutherford, you must have been here at the time Chadwick discovered the neutron."
I was here when Chadwick discovered the neutron, Milo thought. I did the calculations and operated the equipment as he needed. I co-worked with him. Then my life became...complicated...Aitch Bee...the child...the work...Lindemann...uranium...
"Yes," Milo replied, giving a mean average reply of all the emotions she had felt about all of her years since her postgraduate dinner up until then. And she noticed Turing had finished his pudding. She got to her feet.
"Wait, Miss Ashby!" Turing called, as she made to walk away, being all the more difficult with feet that no longer fitted her shoes. "I do know about your work - you...you - " Turing broke off and caught up with her, as she had got to the door. The incessant rain was thundering down overhead. "Raining stair-rods" was an East Anglian phrase, as if the water was coming down almost vertically. Turing took off his coat and held it above her as they walked across back to Milo's old rooms, now, technically, his.
"You don't know anything about me," Milo told him, as she climbed with painful steps up to the door of her rooms. Turing hurried after her.
"I do believe I do," he told her, following Milo back into the maisonette, crossing unresisted the floor. Milo turned, and looked at him, pitifully. Turing swallowed, looking at the woman who seemed older even than she could have been, staring back at him.
"What do youi know?" Milo asked, eventually. Turing shifted between his feet.
"That you developed what is now known as RADAR," he told her, "And that you worked in radio waves, and, and you worked beside Chadwick, and other scientists at the Cavendish!" He smiled, warmly, and Milo did not repulse a friendly hand on her shoulder.
"RADAR? What is that?" she asked, shrugging. Turing took his hand away.
"The ability to send short radio signals between transmitters in order to detect the speed at which they return, thus by detecting the Luftwaffe aeroplanes and engaging them in combat." Milo stared back at him.
"Cockcroft," she replied. "It could only have been him."
"It was him," Turing agreed. "And Ernest Walton. He refused to go back to Ireland and boost the ranks of the Republic's prestigious, stayed and perfected the RADAR stations - I thought everyone knew about that GCHQ's poorly-kept secret.
"I told you, I was away," Milo said, knowing that she had little to wear now the rain had soaked what she was wearing. She was aware of Turing staring at her again.
"RIght, I know, away," he told her. "A brilliant scientist such as yourself, with nowhere else to go other than her former rooms at the university where she was raised."
"Like yourself," Milo replied. "Do you love him?"
At this, Alan Turing was taken aback, and he stared from Milo, to the window and then the door, and then back to Milo again.
"Who?"
"The man you were kissing in by the King's rooms this morning." And Milo was pleased when a look of panic crossed Turing's face. He did not know whether he loved Neville Johnson, a son of one of the professors of Christ's, who worked now as an artist. But he had written to Neville, and rekindled their relationship which they had consummated when Alan had been an undergraduate.
"I was...out," he told Milo, his cheeks pinking. And Milo crossed to Turing, this time, her hand on his arm. "You cannot shock me Mr. Turing," she told him, then added, "My husband is a homosexual."
And then, Milo hated herself, hated that she had used that word, such a bland and accusory statement to describe Thomas Barrow. Thomas was not just that, could never be just that...he had been her world for so very long. Milo felt her heart filling with sadness, and she crumpled her hands to her eyes.
"And you were away, and away from him, and now you are back, with no-where to go," Turing told Milo sotto voce, his words soothing her, somehow, and he placed a hand on her arm again. Milo nodded.
"I was...blackmailed of a sort," Milo told him, "Blackmailed for him, although, where I went I was pleased to go. He...made me happy." And Milo pictured the face of Werner Heisenberg, merry with spirit, deadly serious at work, so highly competitive with himself and those around him it was frustrating. Lieblien...it had been his name for her, the last word that he had shouted desperately when Prew had led her away. She had been part of his team; she was one of the Uranium Club.
"Here is a suggestion, Miss Ashby," Turing told her. "Whatever job I am going to, sure you could be of use...give you some...purpose?" His words were soft, kind, and Milo wondered how it was she felt at ease with him. Being an academic, she supposed, for university life was Milo's life.
"I am leaving in the morning for Manchester," Turing continued, "Why don't you come with me?"
