This installment concerns the author's dealings, in the latter half of 1943, with a junior physicist of the Theoretical Division whom he declines to name and no reader will fail to recognize. The safecracking is, regrettably, consistent with the record. The account of the enlisted men's dance is offered with considerably more relish than corroboration. —Ed.
The most dangerous man on that mesa was not the director, and it was not the General, and it was certainly not Captain de Silva, whom I had by then tamed to the monthly feeding of gossip like a zoo bear. It was a twenty-five-year-old from Far Rockaway who fixed adding machines for sport, fought a private war against the mail censors for entertainment, and cracked the safes of his elders and betters on the principle that a locked box was a form of boasting, and boasting was to be punished.1
He was a Jew, from Far Rockaway, with the accent of the handball courts and no more reverence in him than a crowbar — and before the reader reaches for his collar, let me explain that I speak as a professional beneficiary of the arrangements then in force. Columbia had turned him from the door on the quota,2 and men have grown pious about this since, and I decline to join them, for I am the one man living who will tell you what the quota was actually for. It was for me. Every gate built to keep out the able is a pension for the plausible; the Klipspringers of this world have dined off restricted lists since the Flood; and had the clubs and colleges of my day ever once admitted men on merit, I should have died selling radios in Queens. So when the Army — which had a war on, and could not afford taste — swept a dozen such boys onto one mesa and handed them the keys of creation, I watched with the mixed feelings of a bootlegger at Repeal: splendid for the country, death for the trade. A world that promotes on results is a hard world for a man whose results are other men's. I will say this for the old arrangements, though: they had another twenty good years in them yet, and I invoiced every one.
You will remember where I left him: in my doorway at two in the morning, wanting to know why I wrote down everything except what mattered. I have faced that species of question from a Senate counsel with subpoena power and from a Soviet gentleman with worse, and I want it minuted that neither of them ever put the wind up me like that grinning boy in the doorway, because lawyers and spies are hunting a thing — a date, a name, a folder — and things can be fed to them one at a time. He was hunting a why, and a why is the one commodity I have never kept in stock.
So I did what you do when a man has you cold: I sold him the small confession to spare him looking for the large one. I said I wrote around the mathematics because I couldn't follow the mathematics — never could, never would — and a man in my line learned to record the shape of what he couldn't understand. And his whole face lit like a switchboard, and he said it was the first honest sentence anyone had spoken to him on the entire mountain, and sat down on my table, and talked at me until reveille about the conspiracy of nodding — his phrase, and I stole it, and have billed clients with it since — by which grown men at the colloquium agreed not to notice that none of them had understood the third blackboard. The most honest man I ever met certified me an honest man on the strength of the one confession I have ever made for cover. I dined out on the joke privately for years, and I dine on it now in print: I am the only fraud in the history of the American century whose references were written by Richard Feynman's own instincts, and the instincts were right about everything but me.
We became, after a fashion, friends — and I will pause on the word, because I have used it perhaps four times in these Papers and mean it perhaps twice. What we had was a shared trade worked from opposite ends. He stripped the varnish off things to find out what they were; I varnished things to prevent exactly that; and each of us could watch the other work all evening with pure professional pleasure. He was also — and the histories in their reverence leave this out — the best company on the mesa by a furlong: a mimic, a needler, a man who beat drum rhythms out of any chair back or wastebasket within reach until the room moved whether it meant to or not.
Which brings me, in the proper spirit, to the girl, and to the other interest the two of us shared, and I am happy to report that this episode contains no lesson whatsoever.3
There was a nurse at the post hospital called Billie, out of Amarillo, with a laugh you could hear across the tech area and a figure that had stopped work in two divisions, and I had invested a full week in her — cigarettes to the dance band, a swapped duty roster, a manufactured errand past the hospital daily, the whole quartermaster's catalogue of courtship. The Saturday dance came; I had her; the campaign was a walkover, and I say so because you should know the scale of what happened next. The band took its break, and that grinning menace sat down on a folding chair, tipped a wastebasket between his knees, and started a rhythm going — nothing, taps and knuckles — and inside four minutes he had the floor packed and the band's own drummer standing on a chair to watch his hands, and Billie of Amarillo was gripping my arm and asking, in the voice women otherwise reserve for film stars and racehorses, who that was.
I have lost women to rivals, to husbands, to the Church, and once, in Nevada, to a rodeo, but that night remains the only time I was ever run clean off the field by a man who was not competing. He drummed his set, took no bow, drank a lemonade, dissected my evening's technique to my face on the way out — he had watched the whole campaign, it developed, the roster swap included, with the pleasure of a man watching a good card mechanic, and wanted to know whether the errand past the hospital was calibrated or instinct, because if it was calibrated I was wasted on the war — and then he went home early, as he always went home early, to write his letters.4 And here is the part I insist the record keep: I got the girl after all, and I got her on his rhythm. I walked Billie home retailing Feynman — his tricks, his safecracking, his war with the censors, two of his stories lightly re-hung with myself in the supporting role — and she laughed all the way to the nurses' quarters and some distance past it. I have operated on borrowed money my whole life, and borrowed memory, and that night on borrowed genius, and of the three I recommend the genius; it holds its rate.
Now, the filing cabinet, because his version got into the books and mine is the correction of record.5
I kept nothing on paper. Doctrine, not laziness: a man reporting monthly to Captain de Silva, with a Santa Fe café in his near future though he didn't yet know it, files nothing he may someday be asked to eat. My cabinet — government steel, combination lock, T-building annex — held blank pads, spare carbons, and a bottle of the marrying kind of bourbon, and I was proud of it the way other men are proud of a library, for it was my entire method rendered in furniture: a strongbox any burglar would ruin his conscience cracking, to find it beautifully, insolently empty.
He cracked it, naturally, one night while I was three buildings away being indispensable. In the great men's safes he had found the secrets of the age filed under birthdays; he left his little notes and made his little point. In mine he found a bottle. And it bothered him — he came to me with it directly, no note, no grin, and said he'd opened a hundred boxes on the Hill and mine was the first that had ever frightened him, because a man who keeps nothing is a man who expects to be searched, and why would a stenographer expect to be searched?
I told him the truth again — the small truth, the working denomination. I said: because the last time anyone went through my things properly, I was expelled from a very good school, and a man remembers. He looked at me a long moment with that quick disassembling look — Oppenheimer's look, but with a grin hung on it — and then he laughed, and let it go, and filed me, I have no doubt, under harmless. It stung for the length of exactly one drink — no man loves hearing the jury come back with too light to hang — and by the bottom of the glass I had the thing valued correctly: harmless is the finest cover ever issued; it cannot be bought, only conferred; and I had just had it conferred on me by the sharpest instrument on the continent. I have worn his verdict like armor for sixty years. Half the money I ever made walked past me to the table because the men guarding the table had me down as the entertainment.
He taught me to pick a lock, too, before the war was out — a desk drawer, nothing grand; I never had the fingers for safes — and it is the only technical skill I took from the entire Manhattan Project, and I have used it in Berlin, in Menlo Park, and once in a suite at the Fairmont, and it has out-earned the atom for me by a comfortable margin.
One more picture and I'll close the file on him. He was building that autumn the thing the histories now bow to — the computing room in T, the human pipeline, clerks and card machines in a line, each soul punching one step of an implosion it was not cleared to imagine, the whole roomful driven like one vast brain.6 I stood in that room once on an errand and felt my neck prickle, and it took me a moment to place the feeling, and then I had it: the orange juicer. My mother's two hundred oranges; the butler's thumb; the miracle out front and the hundred buttons pressed in the dark. He had built, to deliver the age of the machine, a machine made of people — and where other men saw physics I saw, in one glance, the whole coming century's org chart, and I resolved on the spot to spend that century adjacent to the fellow at the front with his name on the output. It is the single most profitable resolution I ever made, and I made it on government time, in another man's room, watching his machine run. I told you the week of Lawrence's visit taught me my trade. That room taught me my market.
He walked me back to the annex late that winter under the mesa's ridiculous stars — more stars than any man needs, the one commodity the Hill never rationed — and talked the way he did, about how the stars and the gadget and the two of us were the same few particles doing the same few tricks, and wasn't it wonderful, and didn't I want to know. And for about a heartbeat and a half, gentlemen, I did. It passed, as fevers do. Wanting to know for its own sake is how a man winds up on a plaque, and I have given the reader my views on plaques. But I'll allow the record this much: it was the only sales pitch in sixty years that ever moved me without wanting anything from me. I bought nothing, naturally. I have, however, been retailing the salesman at a markup ever since.
He went off whistling. I went in to my empty cabinet and my full bottle, well satisfied with the winter's ledger: certified harmless by genius, solvent in borrowed charm, one lock-picking course to the good. And in the morning there was a note under my door in a small, tidy, patient hand, naming a café in Santa Fe and a Saturday, and my first thought, I am proud to say, was entirely calm: that whatever this appointment was going to cost me, I had at least learned to pick a lock. My second thought was that it would not be my locks the gentleman wanted picked.
The physicist's exploits against the Los Alamos safes, the mail censors, and the site's mechanical calculators are recounted in his own memoirs and corroborated by numerous colleagues. He treated a locked safe as a boast in need of correction, and left notes inside to advertise the visit. The author does not appear in any published account of these exploits — being, on his own theory of himself, beneath the notice of the record he was robbing. —Ed.
The quota was real, and Columbia's loss to MIT by way of it is a matter of record. The author's theory of the arrangement — a pension for the plausible, of which he was a drawing member — appears in no institutional history, the institutional histories having been written, as he would be the first to point out, by the pensioners. He is, so far as the editor is aware, the only defender of the quota on record whose defense is also a confession. —Ed.
It contains a lesson. —Ed.
The letters were to his wife, Arline, who was gravely ill with tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Albuquerque throughout his years on the mesa, and who died there in June 1945. He wrote to her constantly, in codes and puzzles to tease the censors, and the record of that correspondence is among the tenderest documents the war produced. The author knew this when he wrote "as he always went home early." He tells the joke anyway. The reader may decide which of the two facts about the author is the more instructive. —Ed.
No empty cabinet appears in the physicist's published safecracking stories, which favour senior victims and careless secrets. Whether the omission proves the author's version — a box too barren to be worth a story — or convicts him of grafting himself onto an anecdote he admired, the editor cannot say. It is noted that of the two possibilities, the author would be flattered by either. —Ed.
The hand-computing group of the Theoretical Division — human "computers" and IBM punched-card machines pipelined so that no single operator saw the whole calculation — is historical and accurately described. The author's claim to have derived "the whole coming century's org chart" from one glance at it in 1943 is the sort of assertion these Papers make uncheckable by design; the editor merely notes that the author's subsequent career is, regrettably, consistent with it. —Ed.