Linda approached him in the corner and asked, “What did you see?”
Wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve, Wayne regained his composure. The feeling of nausea left him. “Nothing worth talking about,” he paused, “Why don’t we look for some type of warning sign for the dangerous material outside the room?”
“Makes sense to me,” Linda agreed.
They casually surveyed the entire floor, each time having to avoid passersby.
“Shit!” Wayne exclaimed after the fruitless search. “We covered most of this floor and still nothing.”
Linda looked at a steel door down the hall with a digital readout, “What’s that?”
“I don’t know. The sign was out.”
Linda approached it. The sign blinked on and off before reading: ACHTUNG — RADIOAKTIV MATERIELL.
“Please, let this be it,” Wayne said. “How many…” He paused as a person, dressed in lab clothes, passed by. “How many radioactive areas can this place have?”
“Hopefully, only one,” Linda returned.
“Have that gun of yours handy,” Wayne said. “We might need it. In case there’s anyone in the room, do you think you could ask, in German, where the Gadolinium crystals are stored?”
“The what crystals?”
“Gad-o-lin-ium.” Wayne spelled it out, as if trying to teach a kid a new word, “G-a-d-o-l-i-n-i-u-m. Can you remember that?”
“Gadolinium, got it.” Linda said, irritated.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m just—“
“Time is wasting,” Linda reminded him.
“You’re right,” Wayne concurred. “Let’s go.” They quietly entered the room.
Two middle-aged chemical engineers were busy at work on a contraption that Wayne thought looked much like an electron particle generator machine that he had used during his first year Introduction to Physics class at NYU. The intruders went unnoticed. “Ask about the crystals,” Wayne silently mouthed to Linda.
Linda cleared her throat to get the attention of the preoccupied men. The chemists turned around and fixed their gaze upon the uninvited interlopers. Linda said, “
Neither man offered a response.
“
Wayne trailed the bearded chemist’s stare to the identity tag. His stomach sank, “All right, just give us what we want and we’re out of here. You won’t be hurt. I need Gadolinium crystals. Where are they?”
Linda retrieved the gun from her coat pocket and directed it at the worried chemists.
Dr. Krauss turned the intruders’ attention towards a large industrial-sized refrigerator that had a locked padlock on its door. “The mixture is not a stable one,” he warned.
“Why do you want them?” a chemist asked in broken English.
Wayne ignored the question. Studying the appliance, he demanded to know, “Where’s the key to this thing?”
Not bothering to wait for the answer, Wayne firmly grasped the handle of a hammer that had been resting on a worktable with other tools of its kind. He banged, with all of his muscular force, the pounding tool down on the padlock. It remained intact. He pounded the tool again. On the fourth try, the padlock broke apart. Wayne swung open the refrigerator door. Inside, it was stocked with jars, vials, flasks, and bottles of many different sizes and shapes, all of which had been punctiliously labeled with the correct names of the various compounds and mixtures that they boldly held. Wayne spotted a vial containing a light, greenish substance. He examined the word on the label: GADOLINIUM. Wayne cautiously picked up the small vial and removed it from the icebox. “I go it, Linda,” he exclaimed and placed the sealed vial in his shirt pocket.
“Great,” she said, still aiming her gun at the chemists. “What are we going to do with them?”
Wayne glanced around the laboratory-workshop and observed a roll of electrical cable wire. “No problem with that.” With his hands, he motioned to the chemists to move towards the room’s head radiator. “Come on, get together; no wasting time.”
The two middle-aged men did as instructed and bunched close to one another. “Please,” Dr. Krauss pleaded, “you must be very careful with the substance that you have taken. It can be…”
“Keep your concerns to yourself, Doc,” Wayne said. He grabbed a pocketknife from the tool table and began to rapidly tie the cable wire around the chemist’s collective arms and feet, using the knife to cut the wire as needed.
“Your type sickens me,” Linda informed the captives. “Have you no conscience about what you do?”
“They don’t care,” Wayne replied for them. “They just follow orders like the rest of them. Mindless robots.” He finished securing the bound chemists, with additional cable, to the radiator. “Thanks, gentlemen. You have just saved the world. Before you know it, you’ll both be working as high school science teachers.”
Their mission accomplished, Wayne and Linda left.
“Hans,” Dr. Krauss said, “reach into my back pocket. I have a lighter. Use it to burn the wire.”
Wayne pushed the first floor button on the elevator’s control panel, in the same elevator that, formerly, he had freely taken up to the ninth floor. The door slid shut and the cab initiated its descent. Linda at his side, he said, “You screwed up.”
“What?” she barely raised her voice.
“You asked for Gadolinium crystals,” Wayne pointed out. “They are GADOLINIUM crystals. You pronounced them wrong. I thought you had it down.”
“Are you calling me stupid?”
“No, I didn’t say that. It’s simply that you have no idea…”
Linda became mad. “What are you bitching about? You got them, didn’t you?”
“It’s important!” Wayne stated irately. “That’s probably what tipped them off that there was something fishy about us. There’s too much riding on this.”
“Maybe we should think of getting out of here now instead of arguing,” Linda firmly suggested.
The elevator stopped. Wayne pressed in the “door close” button, preventing the lift’s door from opening.
“What are you doing?” Linda asked.
With his hand, Wayne wiped away freshly formed droplets of salty perspiration from his forehead. “Everything has gone smoothly so far. I need a few moments to think.”
“About?”
Wayne, after remaining silent for half a minute, said, “About how we can get safely back to New Berlin. Our best bet is to get a hold of a car.” As if to build up his confidence, he reiterated, “Yep, that’s what we’ll have to do. Get a hold of a car.”
“We can do it,” Linda reassured him. “I know we can.”
Wayne released the “door close” button. When the door opened up, with the building’s first floor spread out before them, he said, “Just act like we belong, and no one will bother us. I used to sneak into these fancy, rich folks beach clubs all the time. It was easy. Just acted like I belonged there.” They exited the elevator.
They ambled toward the main door. Each time a passerby walked by, Wayne’s heart would skip a beat. He avoided eye making eye contact with anybody. Finally reaching the big main entrance, Wayne extended his hand to grip the large door’s brass handle, splendidly bedecked with little ornamental swastikas. Wayne’s fingers, a mere six inches from clutching the gateway to freedom, paused in its movement.
A shrieking whistle, much like the one that would wake the prisoners at Hollenburg, sounded out. Wayne, temporarily immobilized by a sudden terror, tried hard to brush off the alarm. He could not, for he knew the purpose of its being. In a mania, he threw his sweaty fingers around the brass door’s big handle. Linda heard something click in the door that sounded like a lock. Wayne pushed on the swastika-garnished handle. It would not budge. He slammed his upper body into the large door, with no success in getting it in motion.
“Shit,” Linda exclaimed, almost inaudible above the deafening alarm that continually blared through the numerous loudspeakers.
Wayne twisted around to behold a Nazi
“You got any good ideas now?” Linda questioned.
