Strindberg's Star (17 page)

“It feels different when you see it, doesn’t it?” said Eberlein.

By now, Eva had also leaned over the table. She grabbed hold of the
gray padding, pulled the glass plates closer, and studied them. Eberlein shook a pair of thin gloves loose from the pile of cotton and handed them over. She slipped them on and lifted up and examined the delicate glass.

“Collodion negatives,” Eberlein said after she had been looking for a while. “The emulsion is made up of guncotton dissolved in alcohol, ten seconds of exposure. Good definition, isn’t it?”

Don met the mirror image of Eva’s eyes in the dark fragment.

W
hen Eberlein lifted away the next layer of padding, they could see a bundle of yellowed notes on the bottom of the carton. They appeared to be bound with wire, and on the top page was stamped:
STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY COLLEGE—BERZELIUS LABORATORY
. Under the stamp came rows of numerals and abbreviations, carelessly written more and more densely in dark blue ink.

The German placed the bundle of papers on the table next to the glass plates. Then he unwound the wire, loosened the first page, and gave it to Don, along with a pair of white gloves.

“From the experiments in mid-June 1895,” said Eberlein.

Don was able to recognize a few chemical terms, but the rest of the text ran off in impossible, meandering handwriting.

“Arends’s stenographic system,” Eberlein said. “Nils Strindberg always used shorthand when he was working alone in the laboratory. What you’re looking at concerns some of his early experiments with acids. He later attempted to use chemicals to affect the surface of the metal, but he didn’t get any results there, either.” Eberlein turned some papers to the side.

“This is from later at night, when he had begun to examine the inscriptions on the ankh. Nils Strindberg used a magnifying glass and a microscope, but his notes on this are rather muddled, because he couldn’t explain how someone had managed to carve the etchings into the ankh. He couldn’t do anything to its surface at all, not even when he used one of the Berzelius Laboratory’s instruments for testing
hardness, which had a diamond tip. Another thing that surprised him was the exceedingly light weight of the object.”

Eberlein pointed at a column of crossed-out numbers.

“The ankh and the star hardly gave any reading at all on the laboratory scale.”

Turning a few more pages.

“Several days later, he actually began to ask himself whether the objects were composed of metal at all. It was true that they reflected incidental light and they had a luster of metal, but no matter how hard he tried, he could get the ankh and the star to conduct neither electricity nor heat. Nils Strindberg tried to heat up the objects one at a time on the wire gauze of his Bunsen burner, but they didn’t seem to be affected even at 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Nor did he need tongs to remove them from the flame, for he writes that the objects were still cool, almost chilly, after being warmed for half an hour. It wasn’t until June 27, 1895, that he had the breakthrough he’d been waiting for.”

Eberlein searched ahead a bit through the pile with his white cotton fingers. At last he seemed to find the right place, and he put aside the pages he’d skimmed.

The notes that lay before them now were very different from the earlier ones; they were filled with rough sketches that appeared to have been jotted down in great haste. In several places the ink had been blotted into dark blue puddles.

“You see,” said Eberlein, “the Bunsen burner at the Berzelius Laboratory had a maximum temperature of approximately 2700 degrees, but on the evening of June 27, Nils Strindberg had set up a cylinder of pure oxygen at the air intake to see if he could push the temperature up a bit more. In a moment of carelessness, or plain laziness if you prefer, he warmed the two objects up simultaneously for the first time, and he had placed the star on the crossbar of the ankh. Just when he was about to make the blue flame turn white via the gas valve—the objects melted together completely unexpectedly. At that time the temperature had only reached …”

“Two thousand, two hundred twenty-eight degrees,” said Eva Strand.

She pointed at the number next to the exclamation point.

“At 2228 degrees”—Eberlein nodded—“on the wire gauze in the flame of the Bunsen burner, the objects melted together. Nils Strindberg writes that it was as though the star suddenly just sank into place totally seamlessly, in the crossbar of the ankh, as though the two objects were really just two parts of something that had once been a whole. Yet on earlier attempts the star and ankh had been completely resistant to heat.”

Don felt a wave within him; the dextroamphetamine capsules must finally have dissolved and begun to work. A quickly increasing alertness made his mouth feel dry.

“You can see for yourselves,” said Eberlein, pointing at one of the sketches.

In the middle of the sketched ankh there were indeed five thin lines, the rays of a star that had been affixed to the handle under the eye. Alongside the picture was a vertical note, written in pencil. Don turned the paper and read:

Don looked up at Eberlein:

“Navigational instrument?”

He looked down again at the fused ankh and star, which Nils Strindberg had so hastily sketched at different angles all over the sheet. At the very bottom of the page was a version in which the ink had run out into a smudged blue hemisphere, like an arched halo above the horizontal object.

“He was able to depict the reaction better on the next page,” said Eberlein, switching pages.

Here Nils Strindberg had taken the time to make two considerably larger and more detailed drawings.

In the upper picture, what Don had interpreted as just a blot of ink had been sketched as a gray-blue sphere that arched like a dome above the fused ankh and star. Seven points were marked in a familiar pattern at the highest part of the sphere, and there was another penciled note next to the topmost point.

The North Star in the Dragon’s Wing

“The Dragon’s Wing,” said Eberlein. “Nils Strindberg’s name for the constellation we call Ursa Minor today. The Little Bear, or sometimes the Little Dipper.”

From there, his fingers followed the seven points on the sphere above the ankh and star, from the square of the dipper up to the end of its handle. “First the double stars Pherkad and Kochab lit up. This one is Anwar al Farkadain, and here is Ahfa al Farkadain. Then come Urodelus and Yildun, and at the very top here is Polaris, the Polar Star, or the North Star, as Nils Strindberg calls it. The star that is always fixed above the north pole of the earth.” Eberlein sat silently for a minute and studied the drawing. Then he said:

“According to Strindberg’s notes, the pattern of these seven points appeared out of thin air just above the ankh and star, almost immediately after the objects had fused for the first time. At first he thought it was a case of some stray sparks from the Bunsen burner, and he couldn’t understand why they remained suspended there. Then, after a minute or so, the constellation was joined into this first celestial sphere that he’s drawn over the ankh and star. He later wrote that it was like watching a halo form out of nowhere.”

“The
first
sphere?” asked Don.

Eberlein nodded toward the lower drawing.

D
on passed his tongue over rough lips and slowly moved his gaze. In the next picture, there was indeed another sphere. Under the starry sky with the Little Dipper, Nils Strindberg had drawn yet another
half circle above the ankh and star, a smudged gray lower dome, covered in contours that could hardly be misunderstood.

“He’s drawn the northern hemisphere?”

“He’s drawn the other sphere,” said Eberlein.

And the German followed the lines of land with a cotton-clad finger:

“The Siberian coast along the Arctic Ocean. The Kola Peninsula. The fjords in northern Norway, Svalbard and Sjuøyane. The ends of the glaciers in Greenland and the Lincoln Sea. The Canadian north coast, and the tundra in Alaska at the Bering Strait. And here—”

His finger moved back toward the middle of the lower sphere.

“The North Pole.”

“So what is that?” said Eva.

A thin line ran from the North Star toward a point several inches below Eberlein’s finger.

“That,” said Eberlein, “is a ray of light. At the end of the reaction, it fell from the North Star down toward the northern hemisphere, and Nils Strindberg seems to have assumed almost immediately that it served as some sort of guide.”

D
on lifted the yellowed laboratory papers to get better light from the glass lamps.

The ray that fell from the North Star ended in a small X just north of the contour that Eberlein had called Svalbard. But now that the light was brighter, Don could see that there were actually several small X’s in this particular area, drawn in pencil and carefully numbered. They seemed to correspond to a list in the right margin:

“After several attempts, Nils Strindberg managed to measure with surprising accuracy where the end of the ray pointed,” Eberlein said when Don looked up. “As you see, small but regular changes in position occurred from the start, and it took a long time before he was able to map a pattern.”

The German flipped past several pages of increasingly detailed drawings of the sky, the hemisphere, and the ray, until he arrived at a carefully organized chart. He followed the dates and the positional notations with his finger:

“This is, as far as we know, the first proper compilation that Nils Strindberg made of the movements of the ray. It was in the beginning of August 1895, and he must have learned to sketch quickly by that time, because the reaction with the spheres lasted only about ten minutes at each attempt. After that time, the ankh and star fell apart once again into two cool, perfectly shaped objects, and it was as though they had never fused.” Eberlein let the chart remain in front of them as he began to collect the glass plates on the gray padding.

“As you can see,” he continued, with his head bent, picking among the glass plates, “there were about fifty attempts, during which the sequence of events was always the same. Nils Strindberg laid the star on the handle of the ankh on the wire gauze of the Bunsen burner and adjusted the flame to the correct temperature. When the ankh and star fused together into a single instrument, the seven points always began to shine. At each attempt they formed the pattern of the Little Dipper, with the North Star at the zenith above the star, which was fused to the middle of the ankh. After another minute or so, the celestial sphere appeared, soon followed by the dark half circle of the northern hemisphere. The terminus of the reaction was always the bright, thin ray that fell from the North Star down to a
point in the vicinity of the eighty-third parallel, north of Svalbard and Spitsbergen. And if you look there in the list, the distance between the positions as they changed is small; they are within a radius of approximately seventy miles. In the end, Nils Strindberg came to the conclusion that the change in position returned regularly, and that the ray moved about every third day. It was almost as though it was following something within this limited area north of Svalbard. Like an indicator searching for a target.”

Eberlein folded the padding around the glass plates. Then he laid them carefully back in the carton.

“Ver volt dos geglaibt,”
Don said quietly.

T
he frozen instant had slashed its way into Elena’s dreams time after time, forcing her to wake up in a cold sweat. And even now, when she had sat up on the edge of the bed and looked out into the darkness of the attic apartment, she couldn’t get the image to disappear completely.

The memory of the woman whose face was so like her own; the short black hair, the high cheekbones, the wide mouth. Her mother was still there, on her knees on the marble floor at the bottom of the stairs in the banking hall, her arms open, calling for Elena to come. Then the lingering echo of her own short answer, the voice of a six-year-old, squeaky and thin in the great room:

“
Wer ist sie, Vater?
Vater, who is that?”

And when she had seen the guards coming, she gripped Vater’s bony fingers even harder. Because of course she knew quite well who it was, who had finally come to the bank in Wewelsburg to fetch her. But that woman had come far too late.

*

E
lena first dared to whisper her deepest secret to her mother at the age of five. That she had the ability to look into other people’s
thoughts, see all their dreams and hopes in distorted, brilliantly colored forms.

At first her mother had laughed at her and passed everything off as a child’s fantasies. But when Elena drew pictures of the strange perversions and desires of adults, her mother’s smile had faded away.

That spring so long ago, when all Elena wanted to do was play with her sisters, she had been dragged to her first series of parapsychology tests.

Like a circus monkey, she had been made to demonstrate her ability to read hidden series of numbers. The
ganzfeld
experiment, in which her eyes were covered and she was forced to wear headphones full of white noise. And then: the long journey to the man in the north and the language that sounded so dirty and hard. The memory of panic as her head was put into something that was like the opening of a washing machine. Her hair twisted together with metal clips and the top of her head covered in adhesive wires, the first measurement of a little girl’s extraordinary ability to perceive astral wave patterns and electrical activity.

She had been abandoned there in Wewelsburg with Vater for more than a year, as one winter had turned into another. Until one early December morning when a woman had come back, as though dropped from heaven into the banking hall, to bring her home.