The two of them had another round.
Satsuki's cheeks were already flushed, and Weber's gaze wasn't as tense as it had been before.
The conversation naturally slid from "sentiments" to "reality."
Weber set down his glass and leaned forward unconsciously. His speech speeded up significantly.
"Unification is a good thing. But the flip side of this good thing—the Treuhandanstalt is about to start swinging the axe."
"The Trust Agency," Satsuki added.
"Yes." Weber nodded. "Their mission is to handle all of East Germany's state-owned assets. They are going to split up, sell off, or shut down over eight thousand state-owned enterprises. There is only one standard—the numbers on the balance sheet. Keep what makes money, cut what doesn't."
His fingers tapped unconsciously on his knees.
"But how can the value of those things be judged just by the balance sheet?" Weber's voice tightened.
"That magnetron sputtering machine on the third floor of Building B at Zeiss Jena—the one I mentioned in my report last month—the model is ZSM-2200. East Germany only built three of them in total.
Its cathode target holder was hand-ground and assembled, with tolerance controlled within plus or minus two microns. If that machine could be transported here, the purity issue with the Mo/Si multilayer target would be solved on the spot."
He took a deep breath and continued.
"And the coating workshop at Zeiss Jena. Fifty years. From the 1940s until now, that's half a century of accumulated vacuum optical coating technology. That experience is all in the hands and minds of the technicians—most of it isn't even fully recorded in internal documents. If the workshop closes and the people disperse, these things will be lost forever."
"What about the Jena Glassworks?" Satsuki asked.
Weber's eyes lit up.
"You know about Schott Glass, right, Miss? The 'predecessor' of Schott was right here in Jena—founded by Abbe and Schott in Jena in 1884. After World War II, it split into two, East and West. The western Schott moved to Mainz, and what was left in the East became the Jena Glassworks."
He held out his hand and started counting on his fingers.
"After unification, West Germany's Schott will likely merge with the Jena plant. But 'merger' usually means—move what's useful, and shut down what's redundant. The special optical glass melting furnaces and formula archives at the Jena plant…" Weber's hand paused in mid-air.
"Those ultra-low expansion coefficient formulas—zero-expansion glass. The handwritten experimental notebooks are data recorded over decades! They are currently locked in the material department's filing cabinets and haven't even been digitized. If they are lost in the chaos of property rights integration—"
He didn't finish his sentence.
Satsuki held her glass, her gaze resting quietly on Weber's face.
Weber added another point.
"There are things in Dresden, too. The clean room of the VEB Microelectronics Combine—the process is indeed behind the West, but the vacuum evaporation equipment and some testing instruments inside can be used directly. I remember all the models and specifications…"
Then he started talking about people. His speech speeded up even more, and his breathing became rapid.
"There's an old partner of mine at Zeiss. His name is Hans Gruber. He does aspheric ultra-precision grinding and has been in the industry for twenty-three years. Out of the twenty-seven thousand people at the entire Zeiss Jena, there are no more than five who can achieve his level of precision."
"Then there is a material chemist at the Jena Glassworks named Peter Lange. He specializes in ultra-low thermal expansion coefficient glass. He made the glass substrates for East German military sniper scopes."
"That Dresden Microelectronics Research Institute also has a clean room engineering supervisor, Marcus Hoffmann. He was responsible for the environmental control of East Germany's most advanced pilot production line—Class 100 level. He has ten years of management experience."
Weber's voice suddenly dropped at this point.
"After unification, all these people and things will go cheap to the West Germans." He pursed his lips.
"Large West German companies will come to pick—Schott will pick, Siemens will pick, West German Zeiss will also pick. But they won't take everything. Those that are left over…"
He set down his glass. It made a clack sound, louder than he expected.
"The Trust Agency will sell the equipment for scrap metal prices and lay off the technicians on the grounds of 'redundant personnel.' Twenty-seven thousand people at Zeiss Jena, I heard—" His Adam's apple bobbed. "In the end, they might only keep three thousand."
There was a silence of two seconds.
"I worked at Zeiss for fifteen years." Weber looked into Satsuki's eyes. "Those people… they aren't just colleagues."
The room fell quiet again.
Satsuki set down the wine glass in her hand. She looked into Weber's eyes, her tone calm.
"What if I could get them to come to Japan?"
Weber's breathing stopped for a beat. He leaned forward, his eyes lighting up—it was the first time Satsuki had seen this expression on his face in the more than a year since he had come to Japan.
It was different from the excitement over scientific data; it was a more primal joy, one related to "people."
"Boss, are you serious? How? Through what channels? How will the visas—"
"Shh—" Satsuki narrowed her eyes and raised a finger. Her index finger stood between the two of them.
"Only people with value are worth the effort for me to save."
Weber's excitement froze for a moment. Then he slowly leaned back into his chair.
Right, why would the boss save a bunch of people who have nothing to do with her and have no value? So this is a transaction. But—at least, it is an opportunity.
Weber took a deep breath and sat up straight. Fortunately, his friends were all very talented people.
"Hans Gruber. Fifty-one years old. Aspheric ultra-precision grinding." His voice was flat and fast.
"His manual correction precision can reach λ/50—taking λ as 632.8 nanometers. Converted to an absolute value, that's a surface error within 12.6 nanometers.
What does this number mean? The number of people in all of Japan who can currently achieve this precision can be counted on one hand. If we put him into our EUV mirror processing line, conservatively estimated, the yield rate could increase by three to five percentage points."
He raised a second finger. "Peter Lange. Forty-seven years old. Material chemistry. The formula and firing process for zero-expansion glass—currently, only Corning and Zeiss in the whole world have mastered the complete process.
Lange has the entire East German version of the formula in his head—it's a completely different route from West Germany's Schott, using a variant of the lithium aluminum silicate system.
The performance indicators in certain infrared bands are even superior to the glass-ceramic of the Schott Group. If we are to make our own EUV mirror substrate materials—he is the key."
The third finger. "Marcus Hoffmann. Forty-three years old. Clean room engineering management. Class 100 level, he has managed it for over ten years.
Miss, if our underground laboratory is to be expanded—from air circulation to micro-vibration control to electrostatic protection—he is the most suitable person I can think of."
Weber put his hand down. His fingers loosened and then clenched again.
"Regarding equipment. The magnetron sputtering machine ZSM-2200 is on the third floor of Building B at Zeiss Jena, against the north wall, room number B-312.
The archives for the special formulas of the Jena Glassworks are in a filing cabinet on the second floor of the Material Department—a metal cabinet, gray, with three locks. There are about thirty notebooks, all handwritten, recorded from the early seventies up until last year."
He paused. "Additionally, there is a batch of design drawings—the assembly drawings for East German military optical systems.
They have no military significance anymore, but the optical path design ideas for the multi-reflective surface systems within them have reference value for our EUV optical path architecture."
Weber finished speaking. He rested his hands on his knees. He looked at Satsuki quietly, waiting for her to speak.
Satsuki had been listening attentively. At least, it appeared so. Her posture was upright, her gaze followed Weber's narration throughout, and she would occasionally nod slightly. After Weber finished, she was silent for two seconds.
"Mm, very good." She paused. Then she spoke with a straight face. "I didn't remember any of it."
Weber was stunned for a full three seconds. Then he saw Satsuki's face clearly. Red. From her cheeks all the way to her earlobes. Her eyes, although still facing his direction, her focus had clearly drifted. A hint of an arc between a "smile" and "dazed" hung at the corners of her mouth.
In the glass, the Rotkäppchen—she hadn't even drunk more than three glasses in total. Three glasses of sparkling wine. And the alcohol content was only eleven percent. She was drunk just like that.
"…Boss?" Weber carefully examined Satsuki's state. She looked somewhat unsteady, but Weber didn't dare to reach out and steady her directly—in some ways, she was even scarier than the Stasi.
Then Satsuki suddenly stood up. Her movements were steadier than Weber had expected—at least she didn't sway. But the moment she stood up, she closed her eyes, seemingly waiting for the dizziness in her head to pass. After all, Satsuki had shown him great kindness, and Weber was just about to embrace a do-or-die mentality to steady her.
Clack. Satsuki's shoe stomped hard on the floor, and her figure steadied again. She braced her body, reached out, and picked up the bottle of Rotkäppchen on the table that was still more than half full. Grasping the neck of the bottle directly, she actually turned and walked toward the door. As she walked, she said, her voice slurred.
"Go find Endō. Everything said just now—the personnel list, equipment list, location of the design drawings—repeat it all to him, without missing a single word…"
She walked to the door, one hand propped against the doorframe. She didn't look back. "If Endō thinks it's feasible after assessment—" She paused for a beat. "The Saionji family will do their best to save them."
After saying this, she raised the wine bottle in her hand, tilted her head back, and put the bottle opening directly to her lips—she gulped down a large mouthful.
The golden liquid spilled a little from the gap between the bottle opening and her lips, slid down her chin, and dripped onto the collar of her creamy white cashmere cardigan. She didn't wipe it off. She stepped into the corridor.
The sound of footsteps gradually faded away. Click—click—click— The sound of her small leather shoes hitting the concrete floor echoed in the empty underground corridor for a long time. Then it disappeared.
---
The laboratory was left with only Weber again. On the TV screen, the footage of the Berlin celebration had been cut away at some point. NHK began broadcasting the tail end of the international news, and the anchor was reporting on the Middle East situation in a steady tone.
Weber looked down at the glass in his hand. The bubbles in the sparkling wine had almost dissipated. The liquid surface was quiet, and the golden wine reflected the image of the fluorescent light tubes. He smiled bitterly and shook his head.
"What a strange boss…"
Obviously, her tolerance for alcohol was terrible. She could get flushed and tipsy after just three glasses. Yet she still insisted on running to the laboratory twelve meters underground—carrying a bottle of wine that only East Germans would recognize—to sit in front of the TV with a defector, watching the funeral of a country that no longer existed.
Weber raised the glass to his eyes and swirled it. The last mouthful of wine left a thin layer of gold on the glass wall.
"However—" His voice was very light, so light that only he could hear it. "She really is a very good leader."
He drank the wine in his glass in one gulp. The aroma of yeast lingered on the back of his tongue for a long time, like the temperature by a fireplace in Jena in winter. Very warm, and reassuring.