Chicago, autumn 1949: on the twenty-third of September the President announces that an atomic explosion has occurred inside the Soviet Union, four years ahead of every official promise, and the question of how begins its long walk backward. The author, newly minted a founder, opens a private set of books; the reader who has kept count of his Sundays may open one too. —Ed.
The good years ran fourteen months and some days, and ended on a Friday morning by radio, between a card feed and lunch. I can give the room exactly: the front office on West Adams, the twenty-third of September, 1949, a few minutes past ten by the wall clock. Miss Dunn was at her comptometer, I was at my desk touching nothing, per charter, and behind the partition Zaremba kept a little Philco on a shelf for the ball games, playing dance music that morning to the arithmetic unit. At six minutes past ten the music stopped in the middle of a bar.
The bulletin was read twice: the President of the United States announced that within recent weeks an atomic explosion had occurred in the Soviet Union.1 That was the whole of it, and the announcer, having nothing to add, added it at length. The President had not even said the thing aloud; he sat across town at his desk while a press officer handed round a mimeographed sheet. I ask the reader to appreciate the instrument. A mimeograph had minted me a founder the year before; the trade evidently ran a full line of services.
Miss Dunn took her hands off her machine, which in that office did the work of a siren. Kessler came around the partition holding a tube he had forgotten he was holding. Ottley, who caught one word in three on his good side, received it as an explosion in the U.S., asked which state, and was for ten minutes the calmest man in Illinois.
"Four years," Kessler said at last. "They gave them 1955. The comfortable men gave them 1960."2
"Then the estimate was wrong," Zaremba said, "or somebody carried it over. There's no third box."
"Carried it how?" said Miss Dunn.
"In a head. In a briefcase. On a Sunday, in some ordinary man's pocket." He turned the radio down, which was somehow worse. "It's arithmetic. You don't come in four years under an estimate that fat on your own steam."
Kessler set the tube down with great care. "I have lived under experts on backward enemies before," he said, and went back behind the partition, and presently the machine resumed its hum, which was his way of voting.
I had sat still through all of it with my thumb on the eagle-stamped gyroscope, spinning the gimbal, watching it settle, spinning it again, and my shirt had gone through at the back the way it went at the dead board in June. The itch I had carried all summer and charged against tube heat stood up and gave its right name. I had smelled the tower in the desert two days out, and the tunnel in the Harz two days out, and each time the smell had come with a door: a jeep, a train, a chair by the exit. This one came with no door, because what it smelled was following me in particular, and you cannot be two days ahead of that. You can only be two days more frightened. The bill I had sniffed in July was in, addressed as I had guessed: to every man who had ever stood near the first bang.
By noon the newsboys were crying extras the length of West Adams, and the country spent the weekend doing what my office had done in four minutes, only louder. The brass who had promised us twenty years, on the sound military reasoning that a muzhik couldn't be trusted to wind a wristwatch, were on the wires by Monday explaining that they had said no such thing; columnists who in August could not have found the Urals with a globe and a porter were recommending preventive war by Sunday at so much a word. Under the noise the country settled on its verdict, spies, and for once the country was right; a hunt was coming, and it was going to be popular.
Saturday I lunched at the club in Lake Forest at my father-in-law's table, where the shock was general and wore cologne. Old Pruitt, who had commanded a desk in two wars, said the thing must be a bluff; he had toured a Soviet tractor works in '36, and the lavatories alone ruled it out. Halsted senior let him finish and went on cutting his beef. "Bluff or not," he said, "frightened countries retool. We will quote Washington polite, and double." The Halsted money took the end of the world for an order book, and I will say this for it, it was never once hysterical.
"Then we build a bigger one," Pruitt said. "That's the answer. A bigger one, and soon."3
Then he remembered me, loudly. "Jay was out there. Weren't you, Jay. Hero of the atomic desert! How did the Reds manage it, hey? You'd know if anyone would."
Every face at that table came around and admired me, and I felt each one land like a hand on my collar. I said my corner of the desert had been small and the men in it large, which drew the laugh a modest hero draws, and Pruitt said there, spies, of course, Klipspringer thinks so too, and the table agreed the way tables do. For six years I had let rooms remember me onto that mesa, in print, on letterhead, over chops; it was my working capital. Now, with the eyes on me, I did the sum every guilty man in America was doing that weekend, the count of witnesses who could put him at the scene, and mine came out at everybody who had ever admired me.
Sennett's wire found the office Monday, in his usual English with the money squeezed out: RADIO HEARD. TOWN COLD SOBER. OLD ADDRESSES INTERESTING AGAIN. DESERT MEN FIRST. EXPECT CALLERS. VOLUNTEER NOTHING. WRITE NOTHING. I read it twice and burned it in the ashtray, and felt my religion come back a little with the smoke.
There was arithmetic I could share with no wire at all, and I did it that night with the lamp off. Home in a duffel in 1945 I had carried a card in a small tidy hand, a Berlin address and four words under it: until the next war, then. The card was years burned and I could recite it asleep. The next war had now been announced by mimeograph, and on the other set of books, the set kept east of everything, I remained a going concern. My page there was short: a posting done in Berlin; a Sunday errand in Santa Fe once, four minutes from a hotel desk to a mailbox; small hire, promptly done, never paid for, never paid being how you are kept. Against it stood everyone who could place me: a WAC with a card tray, a hotel clerk who knew me for a lady's caller, the lady, the watchers who had entered me under the usual heading, the passengers of half the Sundays of a spring. None of them knew anything. Every one of them remembered something, and the trade now taking the field does not need knowledge. It collects remembering, by the gate log, and adds it up later.
In the middle of October the telephone brought me Corbett, who had run a spectrograph on the Hill and now professed at a university I won't embarrass, his voice a half-tone high.
"They came to see me, Jay. Two of them. Very courteous. Three hours."
"Asking what?"
"Everything. Who talked shop off the Area. Who was short of money. Who went down to Santa Fe, how often, with whom. Jay, they have the gate logs. Six years of passes, and they read them like scripture."4
"And you told them?"
"The truth. It's what I had." A silence stood on the line. "They said they would be seeing everybody. Has anyone called you?"
"Nobody," I said, "and nobody's going to hear from me either. Go to sleep, Corbett. Innocent men sleep."
And I rang off, having just committed to a public switchboard, in plain American, a conversation between two Hill alumni comparing notes on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I could have drafted the memorandum on us myself.
I will hand the apprentice the whole doctrine here, free, having paid the full rate for it that autumn. When the hunt is general, hold still. The amateur bolts, and bolting is a confession with luggage; the amateur telephones, wires, burns things visibly, improves his old lies, and every one of these is a fresh entry in somebody's book. The professional sits in his chair and goes on being exactly what the room already believes him to be. My sole difficulty was what the room believed me to be: the hero of the atomic desert, four columns in the Tribune, a letterhead for a birth certificate. I had spent fourteen months making myself interesting, and it is the one investment I have ever regretted, and I regretted it at leisure.
They reached my own door the first week of November, two young men in good hats, credentials out before their names. Not about me. About a sergeant of the old detachment I will call Haas, who had wired shot circuits alongside me in '44 and stood now for a clearance somewhere. Did I know him. Sound man? Political? Careful with a dollar? Ever down to Santa Fe? I gave them Haas plain and sunny, true in every particular and useful in none, while the younger wrote and the elder, whom the younger called Mr. Dow, let his eyes go around my front room in the manner of the trade: across the framed letter of intent, across the photograph of my palm on the main frame, coming to rest on the paperweight. He picked it up.
"Part of your machine?"
"A gyroscope," I said. "Souvenir of the instrument trade." The eagle sat under his thumb, stamped where its makers stamped everything, and I stood watching a man not know German, an experience I recommend to nobody.
At the door the younger one consulted his notebook, the afterthought they are taught to write down in advance. "Your own service, Mr. Klipspringer. Los Alamos, Special Engineer Detachment. And before that you'd be the one that was with Professor Lawrence at Berkeley?"
Six years, and the sentence had traveled from a corporal's rubber stamp at Fort Monmouth into a notebook of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wanting nothing from me but renewal, like a lease.
"Yes," I said, and they thanked me for my cooperation.
When they had gone I sat a while with both hands flat on the desk. Then I took inventory of paper, which is my substitute for prayer. In my own hand there existed nothing; that religion I had kept whole since '43. In other hands there existed the Bureau's letters to the Klipspringer machine, the circular, the clippings, an Army file, six years of gate logs, and now a notebook; and I saw at last, at twenty-six, the other face of the doctrine I had been so smug about in July. Paper testifies for whoever holds it last, and the whole country was holding paper on me. Nothing in the arrangement had moved. I had.
Tuesday's three lines arrived as ever: the lake was rough, the Averys were off to Arizona, and Daddy said the Russian business would be good for the works. I wrote the board of one its two true sentences, the machine is well and Chicago has turned cold, and sat a minute over her summer's fourth line, mind the machinery, darling, which I had never finished construing and which construed worse every month.
So the autumn's ledger, drawn as I drew it then, riding home along the shore in the early dark. One monopoly, lost, four years ahead of the promise. One announcement, by mimeograph. One nose, ringing on schedule, with no door to point at for the first time in its working life. One founder's face in the government's own type, an asset the day the tubes lit, a finding aid now. One club that knew me for the hero of the atomic desert; one notebook that knew me for the man who was with Lawrence at Berkeley; one set of books, east, that knew me better than either and had announced its new season over every radio on earth. And in Washington, on desks I would never see, six years of gate logs being read like scripture, and the long walk backward beginning, down every road that ever ran from the Hill to Santa Fe, to establish who rode which mile, and with whom, and why.5
I had ridden a good many of those miles. One of them I had driven. I put the ledger nowhere, per my religion, and slept that winter the way you sleep in a hotel that has had a fire on another floor: dressed.
The device the American services christened Joe One, for Stalin, was fired at dawn on August 29, 1949, at the Semipalatinsk test range in Kazakhstan: a plutonium implosion bomb of roughly twenty kilotons. The United States learned of it as the author could not have known that autumn: on September 3 a WB-29 of the Air Weather Service, flying the routine Japan-to-Alaska leg, brought home filter papers carrying fresh fission products, and three weeks of analysis, reviewed by a panel of senior scientists under Vannevar Bush, put the matter beyond argument. The announcement of September 23 was made exactly as the author describes: no broadcast, no address; the President's press secretary handed reporters a mimeographed statement, which read in part, "We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R." —Ed.
The estimates were as the office remembers them, and worse. General Groves, who had directed the wartime project, had publicly put the Soviet effort fifteen to twenty years away; the service and intelligence estimates in use in 1949 clustered around 1953 at the earliest, with mid-decade thought prudent. The device itself, it was established when the archives opened, followed the Nagasaki design in its essentials, which is not a resemblance engineering produces by coincidence. The author's account of the week's recantations is unkind; the clipping file supports it. —Ed.
The bigger one was nearer than the table knew. Within five weeks the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Oppenheimer in the chair, had recommended against a crash program for the hydrogen bomb on technical and moral grounds alike; within ten, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado had disclosed the debate's existence on television; and on January 31, 1950, the President directed the Commission to proceed. —Ed.
The machinery the author's caller describes was real and gathering speed, though the chronology flatters its pace. The President's loyalty program dated from March 1947 and had by 1949 processed its millions; the second perjury trial of Alger Hiss went to a New York jury that winter; and the Bureau's particular inquiry into the wartime project's leakage was opened that same autumn, though it worked the season chiefly in files rather than in parlors. Interviews of former project personnel at the length of three courteous hours belong mostly to the winter and spring that followed; the author's October caller runs early, which does not make him invented. The gate logs were as described: every pass, every date, kept and never burned. —Ed.
As to the walk backward: the government's certainty that the bomb had traveled was not a deduction from the debris. Since 1946, Army cryptanalysts at Arlington Hall had been recovering fragments of the Soviet services' wartime cable traffic, and by the autumn of 1949 those fragments pointed at a scientist of the wartime British mission to Los Alamos. None of it could be spoken in any court, or to any newspaper, for another forty-six years; what could be done was quiet and patient, and it was exactly what the author smelled: the assembling of every journey such a man had ever made to Santa Fe, mile by mile, against the day a confession would let the miles be said aloud. The name the traffic yielded is the business of the next number. The author already knew it; he had held the man's car keys. —Ed.