The second bundle comes off its string as the first did, labeled in the author's hand: Loot. The hand is still the strong one; the deterioration the reader has been promised belongs to later bundles than this. It covers the years from the German surrender in 1945 to the spring of 1953, opening at a wedding in Lake Forest, Illinois, and closing in a hearing room on the sixth floor of a federal building in Chicago, and it is the second of the nine. Where the pads were found, and on whose authority they are printed, the first preface has said; none of it will be repeated here.
The label earns its keep three ways, and the reader may as well have all three at the start. First, the literal plunder: the German rocket men gathered out of the ruins, the trainloads of patents and prototypes, the machine tools shipped west under the collection program that became Paperclip, the author signing manifests at the railhead. Second, the founding credit of the computing age, which he acquired as he acquired everything, by caption rather than by work; the founding machine was ENIAC, and it was a UNIVAC, on the election-night broadcast of November 1952, that fixed the word father on him before an audience counted in millions, no correction ever catching up with it. Third, and oldest, the atomic debt contracted in the first bundle, which came to collect in these years and was paid; with what, the reader will see. The bundle keeps that order: Germany first, then the machine, then the collection.
A word on the notes, which are heavier here than in Trinity, and for cause. In these years the author's life runs beside the most thoroughly documented history of the century: the Paperclip files, the machine's own surviving record, a television broadcast watched by millions, the paper of the personnel-security program, and the decrypted Soviet cables. This is accordingly the most checkable of the nine bundles, and the notes lean hard on the public record. It is also, precisely, the stretch of his life where that record flatters him most conveniently, and the reader should carry both facts in the same pocket. The method is unchanged: where he can be corroborated the notes corroborate him; where he can be contradicted they contradict him; where he can be neither, the reader is on his own.
One warning is owed at the door, and I give it without ornament. Trinity was a coward's book; the worst thing in it was a man saving his own skin. Loot is colder. Somewhere in these pages the charm stops merely dodging and begins to cost, and the cost falls on other people: an honest man is ruined on the author's word, and the machinery that ruined him afterward cleared the author, because the author had fed it. The reader who came for the likeable rogue is entitled to know this before going in. The notes mark the place; the author, a better witness against himself than any I could call, marks it too.
Two threads run under the whole bundle, and I locate them now so as not to interrupt later. The first is the figure the author calls Anton, whom the reader met in the first bundle, whose requests are always small, whose patience is not, and whose errands give this bundle most of what order it has. The second is the cables: the decrypted Soviet traffic made public in 1995. The reading-room register of a university library shows the author requesting the published volumes on four occasions in the last year of his life, and the pads of this bundle, alone of the nine, carry pencil marks in his hand keyed to those pages. What he was verifying, the notes will say where they can; I record the fact and pass on.
Certain names in this bundle have been altered on the advice of counsel and are marked where they occur. Nothing else has been touched. The author's opinions, and his account of his own conduct, are printed unsoftened, as in the first bundle and for the reason given there, which repetition would not improve.
Palo Alto, 2026 — Ed.