No. 3 — In Which I Pay My Respects

There is a particular sensation — I have had it perhaps a dozen times in my life, and it has never once been wrong — of hearing, in a perfectly friendly sentence, the sound of a trapdoor being oiled. He'll be glad to see one of his own. I stood at the schedule board nodding and smiling at my group leader, Dr. Pomeroy, a kind man who believed in me the way he believed in the conservation of energy, and I performed the small laugh of a fellow looking forward to Thursday week, and inside me the actuary who keeps my books had already ruled a line under Los Alamos and written insufficient funds.

Understand the arithmetic as I understood it that night, flat on my cot while the barracks snored. Ernest Lawrence was not a name on a form. He was the most famous experimental physicist in America, the emperor of the Radiation Laboratory, and the one man on earth who knew to a certainty that Corporal Jay Klipspringer had never worked a night shift for him in the radiation line or any other line. He was coming here, to a fenced mesa I could not leave, with my group leader planning — out of pure kindness, which kills more men than malice — to present me to him like a prize calf. And on this mesa the discovery of my little invention would not mean a quiet lunch between lawyers, as it had in Pasadena. There was a war on. Men were being locked up for less than I had done before breakfast.

So I did what I have always done when the smell of smoke arrives ahead of the fire: I looked for the doors. There proved to be three, and I tried them all, and I record the results here as a caution to young frauds everywhere, for it was the week I learned that on a project like that one there are no doors, only walls with paint on them.

The first door was duty. The couriers ran to Albuquerque twice a week, and a man on the courier run was a man honorably elsewhere. I volunteered with a modesty that would have wrung tears from a stone, and Pomeroy was delighted — delighted, and refused me flat. It wouldn't do, he said, beaming, to have me forty miles down the road when Lawrence came through; he'd already put my name forward for the welcome party. My volunteering had accomplished exactly one thing: it had reminded him I existed. I have never volunteered for anything since without first making sure it could not possibly be granted.

The second door was medicine. I presented myself at the post infirmary on the Monday with a right-side abdominal pain I had rehearsed against a textbook borrowed from the hospital's own shelf, which shows you the state of security in that first year. I performed it, if I say so myself, beautifully — the guarding, the rebound, the reluctant-soldier grimace, it's probably nothing, sir — and the post surgeon listened with his head tipped, felt my belly with two fingers like a man candling an egg, and said, comfortably, "Well, we'd better have it out tonight, then." I have faced Soviet intelligence officers, Senate counsel, and the general counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and I never met a bluff called faster or with less malice. I made a recovery on that table that belongs in the literature — the pain, I decided aloud, was likelier the mess hall's chili — and the surgeon agreed gravely that the chili had a reputation, and watched me put my shirt on with the expression of a man filing something away for his memoirs. If he wrote them, I never found them; I looked.¹

The third door was geography. There was gun work in those months at a proving ground a few miles off, and men were wanted to stand about at a safe distance and fetch things, and I contrived through a sergeant who owed me cigarettes to be posted to the Thursday range detail. This one worked. This one was watertight. And on the Wednesday night the weather over the Sangres shut the roads, the visiting party's schedule slid a full day, the range detail was scrubbed for the same rain, and I woke on the Friday morning to Pomeroy's hand on my shoulder and Pomeroy's happy face saying they were an hour out, and that he'd squared it so I'd have a moment with the Professor personally. Kindness, as I say. You can dodge malice; malice wants something and can be fed. Kindness just keeps coming.²

I will tell you honestly what I considered, standing before the mirror shard in the barracks washroom that morning, and let it complete your portrait of me: I considered the fence. Not seriously — the seriousness of the MPs was the whole character of the place — but I considered it, the way a man on a ledge considers flying. Then I considered the mirror instead, and the face in it, which was a good face, an open face, a face that had been believed by schoolmasters, registrars, corporals, and one Nobel laureate's receptionist, and I did what my father must have done on a hundred mornings in that house on Long Island with the bill for his lodging morally due: I tied my tie, and went down to be introduced to my host.

They received the party outside Fuller Lodge — brass, badges, and a knot of civilians with that unmistakable Berkeley polish, tans in wartime — and Lawrence came through them the way weather comes through a valley. I had built him up all week into a hanging judge, and here instead was a big, sandy, booming man with a grip like a stevedore and a smile that arrived before he did, who wanted to see everything, praised everything, and moved at a pace that suggested the war was a personal inconvenience being cleared up by Thursday. He was on his second circuit of the group when Pomeroy — dear, fatal Pomeroy — got a hand under my elbow and steered me into the current with the words I had been dying of all week: "Professor — you'll remember Klipspringer. He was with you at the Rad Lab."

And there it was. The pause. A half-second, no more, in which the famous blue eyes came around to me and went — I saw it; I was watching from a foot away with everything I had — perfectly, roaringly blank.

What I did in that half-second I did on the same instinct that took my father through a decade of other men's houses, and I claim no more credit for it than a duck claims for swimming. I did not wait to be remembered. I supplied the memory. I came in fast, and humble, with my hand out: "You wouldn't remember me, Professor — one of the mob on the night shifts, my second year. I mostly remember being told to stop watching the dials and start watching the experiment." Which was a thing he actually said, in one form or another, to every man who ever passed through that laboratory — I had it off a genuine Berkeley man in my barracks, along with the night-shift coffee, the smell of the oil vapor, and the great man's habit of arriving at two in the morning in a dinner jacket — and I watched the blankness in those eyes fill, warm, and light, like a house at dusk when the family comes home.

"Watch the experiment!" he boomed, delighted, to the group at large. "You see? — that's what a man keeps." And then, God help us all, he improved it. He remembered the night shifts fondly; he remembered the crowding; he was very nearly remembering me specifically by the end of it — "good crew, that crew" — and he clapped me on the shoulder with a blow that moved my heels and told Pomeroy, over my head, in a voice you could have heard in Santa Fe, that this was what he'd always said, that the Rad Lab trained men the war could use. The party moved on. The whole transaction had taken ninety seconds. My lie now had a witness — had, indeed, a sponsor, a Nobel laureate who would go to his grave gently believing he had trained me, because I had handed him a memory with his own fingerprints already on it.³

I have run that trick, with refinements, for sixty years — on generals, on chairmen, on two Presidents and any number of venture capitalists — and I set down here, free of charge, the whole mechanism, because it is the mechanism of my century. A great man's memory is not a ledger; it is a public utility, and it is overloaded. He has met ten thousand of you. He cannot say so. Bring him a memory that flatters the way he sees his own life, and he will not check it against the files, because you are the files; and every man who watches him accept you becomes a second witness, and by the third telling it is not a lie anymore but an anecdote, and anecdotes are the only currency that never devalues.⁴ The physicists on that mesa were at that very moment discovering that matter could be made to confess anything under sufficient pressure. I had made my little parallel discovery in the same week, on the same hill, and mine, I would point out, required no tower and no rain delay.

They toured the tech area; there was a lunch; Lawrence's laugh came through the walls of Fuller Lodge at intervals like distant artillery, each report meaning, to me, safe, safe, safe. By four o'clock the caravan was rolling down toward the gate, and I stood with the others waving it off with an affection entirely sincere, for I never in my life loved any man so much as I loved Ernest Lawrence driving away.

I was still glowing at supper. I want that on the record, the glow — because it is the punctual arrival of the glow, every time, in the very hour of my escapes, that has kept me alive where cleverer men went under; a man who stops to enjoy his luck sits down exactly where the next wave breaks. I was on my second helping of the chili whose reputation had saved me from surgery, composing in my head the letter to my mother in which the Professor and I renewed our old acquaintance, when a runner from the T-building put a folded slip beside my tray, and the mess went on roaring around me, forks and steam and homesick boys, while I read it twice.

It was a summons, polite as a hangman's breakfast. I was to report the following Thursday — Thursday, again; the day had marked me by then, and I take its recurrences in these pages neither as invention nor coincidence but as something the century did to me personally — to a Captain de Silva, of the office nobody on the Hill named out loud. Underneath the typed line, in a small, tidy, unhurried hand, the Captain had added five words:

Bring your Berkeley dates. Both.⁵