The author here makes good the promise of the last number: the full circumstances of his departure from the California Institute of Technology, June 1942. Readers impatient for Los Alamos are assured that the mesa waits at the end of this installment, as it waited for him. —Ed.
I have left myself standing in Dorothy McKibbin's office with a lie halfway out of my mouth, and there I must leave me a while longer, for the lie had a pedigree, and I promised to supply it.
Pasadena in the fall of 1940 was the prettiest place I had ever seen and the richest place I had ever smelled, and the California Institute of Technology sat in the middle of it like a small, severe church endowed by people who preferred their religion to pay dividends. There were perhaps eight hundred of us. The rich men's sons arrived in roadsters, and the scholarship men arrived by streetcar, and inside a week each sort had identified the other by instinct, the way dogs do. I was scholarship, of course — the streetcar, the one good jacket, the trunk with another man's initials on it, bought secondhand and never explained — but I had learned in Astoria that the great advantage of being nobody is that nobody checks. By Thanksgiving I had let it be understood, without once saying so, that the jacket was old money being modest, and that the name — well. The name did its work, as it always did. I said nothing, and looked pained, and was elected to things.
The difficulty at Caltech was never social. The difficulty was that sooner or later they expected you to do physics.
For five terms I held them off with the three weapons every fraud carries: vocabulary, industry at the wrong things, and the careful selection of friends. The vocabulary I have described — I could talk cross-sections and coincidence counting with the best of them, provided nobody produced a pencil. Industry meant I was always the man who organized the study group, booked the room, mimeographed the notes: the one fellow in the section whose contribution nobody could quite name and nobody could quite deny. And the friends — well, there was really only the one friend, and his name I will give as Fisk, because I have decided to change it, for reasons that will appear in their proper place, some forty years from this page.1
Fisk was a farm-machinery dealer's son from the San Joaquin, and he was the genuine article — the thing I have spent my life impersonating. He did the problem sets the way other men breathe, without appearing to notice, and he explained them to me on Sunday nights with a patience I mistook, then, for stupidity. I know better now. Fisk explained things to me because he could not conceive of a man asking to understand who did not want to understand, and that innocence — it is the occupational disease of the honest — fed me for two years. I passed on his arithmetic the way my father had dined on Gatsby's cellar, and thought myself, God help me, the cleverer of the two.
Then, in the winter of 1942, the bill came in. It was called Junior Laboratory.
You could not talk your way through Junior Laboratory. You could not organize it, mimeograph it, or sit near it looking pained. They gave me a Wilson cloud chamber — a squat brass drum with a glass face, in which, if you worked the expansion at the proper instant, the passage of a single cosmic ray wrote itself in a thread of fog — and they gave me the roof of the Norman Bridge Laboratory, and a camera, and six weeks of nights, and they said: photograph what Heaven sends you. It was the identical apparatus with which, ten years before and one floor down, Anderson had caught the positron and made the Institute's name ring round the world, and every man in my section went up to that roof like a pilgrim.2
I went up twice. It was cold, the chamber leaked, the expansion valve stuck, Heaven sent nothing, and on the second night I understood with perfect clarity that I was not going to spend six weeks failing on a roof when the results could be produced in comfort at a desk. I had Fisk's textbooks, with their beautiful plates; I had a crow-quill pen, india ink, and a draftsman's hand my stepfather's schematics had trained without meaning to; and I had the fraud's great insight, which I commend to nobody: that an examiner sees what he came to see. My cosmic rays were composed in my rooms, between eleven and one, with a cigarette burning in the ashtray and the radio playing dance music from the Biltmore, and I am told my fog tracks curved more gracefully than nature's own. They should have. Nature was improvising; I was tracing.
For four weeks it went beautifully — went, indeed, too well, which is the one direction a fraud must never let things go. Prudence said: hand in tracks as dull as ditchwater and collect a quiet passing grade. But there was a girl I wished to impress — not the trustee's wife; a different one; Pasadena was a crowded season — and vanity took the pen, and on my fifth plate I gave them a track with a kink in it: a particle that arrived, thought better of things, and departed at an angle, shedding something unseen. A decay in flight. It was, I promise you, gorgeous.
The plate was up the hill in front of the section head by Tuesday. By Friday there was talk of showing it to Anderson himself, and men I had never met were shaking my hand at the Athenaeum, and I stood in the sunshine accepting congratulations with the particular smile I have since worn onto four magazine covers, while inside me a small cold voice observed that a real discovery meant a real inquiry, and a real inquiry meant the roof logbook, and the roof logbook showed that on the night my miracle particle crossed the chamber, the chamber had been under a canvas tarpaulin and I had been under quite different cover, in Flintridge, in the house of Mrs. Prine.3
I had better explain Mrs. Prine.
They trotted the scholarship men out twice a year at the Athenaeum, to be shown to the donors like promising yearlings, and it was at the second of these, in the spring of 1941, that a woman of forty in oyster-grey silk heard my surname across a tea table and set down her cup. She had summered on Long Island in the early twenties. She had been, she said, at the parties — said it the way veterans say a battle's name — and she looked at me for a long moment with an expression I had been receiving from schoolmasters since I was nine, and then she said, "You will come to lunch." Her husband was a trustee of the Institute, a man who understood everything about long-distance gas transmission and nothing whatever about his own house, and she drove a Duesenberg, an SJ, cream over black, which she handled the way admirals handle flagships, and what she saw in a nineteen-year-old scholarship fraud I will leave to the professors of such matters — though I note that what a woman of forty generally wants from a boy of nineteen is an audience, and I was the best audience west of the Mississippi. I don't ask pardon for it. No man of nineteen has ever declined that particular education, and the few on record as claiming the distinction are liars, or bishops, or both.
For a year she fed me lunches, introductions, small cheques, and instruction in matters they do not examine at Caltech, and I gave her in return the only coin I ever mint honestly: attention. And on the fourth Sunday in May of 1942, with the section still buzzing over my particle, her husband — who was booked, as he was always booked, for San Francisco and the gas pipelines — found the fog thick at Burbank, turned his car around, and walked into his own morning-room at half past eleven at night, where he found his wife at the piano and me beside her, and I will say only that nobody present believed for one instant that we had been discussing music, and that I was down the drive and over the wall before he had finished with her name. I never ran faster at Los Alamos, and at Los Alamos I ran a great deal.
That was the Sunday. On the Wednesday following, a graduate student from Minnesota — a boy with no conversation and the eyes of an auditing angel, the sort the Almighty keeps on staff for exactly this work — put my fifth plate under a comparator and observed that my beautiful kinked track passed clean across the shadow of the chamber's support wire without so much as a stutter. A particle may do many strange things, but it does not pass through brass. He took it to the section head without one word to me, which is how honest men fight, and I have never forgiven the breed for it.
So it was that on a fine June morning I stood on the carpet in Throop Hall before Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan himself — Nobel laureate, measurer of the electron, the most celebrated scientific administrator in America, and a man whose Christian forbearance was advertised in every direction like the Institute's endowment. I can report to history that the forbearance was real, and that it had a floor, and that the floor was me. He had the plates on his desk and the logbook beside them, and he let the silence do the first five minutes of the interview, which I respected then and have stolen since.
And here I did the only brave thing I ever did in Pasadena, which shows you what my bravery is worth. When he asked whether I understood what I had done, I said that I understood that in physics a man sometimes selected among his observations, and that I had merely selected among observations that had not yet occurred. I thought it rather fine. Dr. Millikan looked at me for a moment with an expression I could not read at eighteen and can read perfectly at seventy-seven, because I have worn it since — the expression of a man declining to ask himself a question — and then he informed me, in a voice off the Sierra snowpack, that I would be gone by Saturday.4
That it was "withdrawn — family circumstances" in the registrar's book, and not expulsion, prosecution, and the Los Angeles papers, I owe not to mercy but to plumbing: the trustee wanted no inquiry that might wander toward his morning-room, his counsel and the Institute's had one lunch, and both my crimes went into the ground in a single grave with a headstone reading family circumstances — which was, when you consider the matter, no lie at all. It was the first time I watched two institutions bury a scandal for reasons that had nothing to do with me, and I took the lesson to heart: a man need not be protected to be protected, he need only stand where the protecting falls.
Millikan said one thing more, at the door, which I did not repeat for fifty years. He said: "The world will find a use for you, Mr. Klipspringer. My duty was to see that the use is not physics." He was the greatest judge of men I ever stood before, and he was wrong inside fourteen months, and the manner of his being wrong killed seventy thousand people at a stroke, though I ran no part of that and will be at pains, in these pages, to prove it.
The rest you have: the draft board that autumn, the corporal at Fort Monmouth, Lawrence's name passing my lips like a bad coin passed at dusk, and the train, and Lamy, and the lady at 109 East Palace, and yes. They gave me a billet slip and a security lecture, and in the grey of the next morning an Army driver took five of us up a road the Almighty had clearly posted against trespass — forty miles of switchbacks with a drop on the passenger side that made two of the five pray aloud — to a mesa seven thousand feet in the sky, where the future was being assembled behind barbed wire by men in porkpie hats, and the mud came up over the duckboards, and nobody, blessedly, knew any physics duller than genius. I drew a cot, a footlocker, and a clipboard, and within the week I was what I would remain for the rest of the century: the man with the clipboard, adjacent to greatness, taking the minutes of other men's miracles.5
I had even begun to sleep nights. And then on the Friday my group leader looked up from the schedule board and said the words that have organized my whole life since, the first of the many, many Thursdays on which some bill of mine has fallen due:
"Professor Lawrence is through here Thursday week, with the Berkeley crowd. You'll want to pay your respects, Klipspringer — I expect he'll be glad to see one of his own."
The author, who elsewhere in the Papers changes no name — not the trustee's wife's, not his stepfather's, not those of men far better placed to sue — here announces that "Fisk" is an alteration, and offers no reason beyond a promise deferred forty years. The editor has located no candidate in the Caltech registers for 1940–42 and, for the present, draws no conclusion. Readers are advised to remember Fisk. —Ed.
Carl D. Anderson discovered the positron in August 1932 with a cloud chamber on the Caltech campus, and received the Nobel Prize for it in 1936 at the age of thirty-one; the author's account of the apparatus, the roof of the Norman Bridge Laboratory, and the six weeks of cosmic-ray photography assigned to junior men is accurate in every checkable particular. It is the uncheckable particulars that follow. —Ed.
No plate answering the author's description survives in the Institute's archives. The reader may weigh two possibilities: that it was destroyed in June 1942 as part of the arrangement described below, or that a forged photograph of a particle decay executed in india ink by an undergraduate was never as convincing as the author, fifty-eight years later, requires it to have been. The editor merely observes that these Papers contain many miracles, and that all of them improve with distance. —Ed.
The author's remark to Millikan about "selecting among observations" was less original than he believed. The selective treatment of data in Millikan's celebrated oil-drop measurements of 1910–13, and the disputed contribution of the graduate student Harvey Fletcher to that work, have been examined at length by historians of science since the 1970s. There is no evidence the author knew any of this in 1942; there is every evidence he had, as usual, guessed where a great man was tender and pressed there. The comparison flatters the author considerably, and he makes it considerably. —Ed.
The Army's Special Engineer Detachment, which regularized the position of enlisted technical men at Los Alamos, was not formally constituted until October 1943; the author's arrival on the mesa precedes the detachment's official existence by some months. This distinction troubled the Army's records for years. There is no indication it ever troubled the author. —Ed.