OMEGA SITE

The note named a café on San Francisco Street and the coming Saturday, and I spent two days turning it over like a bad tooth. Understand my position. I could not go: a corporal of no importance does not stroll into Santa Fe to take coffee with a Balkan gentleman unless he wants Captain de Silva reading the tea leaves after. I could not report it: reporting it meant explaining why such a gentleman thought me worth a note, and that conversation led through Pasadena by the shortest road. And I could not ignore it, because a man who returns gloves you never dropped is a man telling you, gently, that he has an inventory of your effects.

So I did what I have done all my life when cornered between two appointments: I made a third. If Saturday found me somewhere no pass, no telephone, and no Balkan gentleman could reach, then Saturday was not my fault — and there was exactly one posting on the Hill that fit the bill. They wanted bodies down at Omega.

Omega Site sat at the bottom of Los Alamos canyon, a good jolting drop below the mesa, a scatter of sheds among the cottonwoods where the physicists kept the experiments too rude for polite company. The new attraction that spring was the Water Boiler: a stainless-steel sphere about the size of a punch bowl, filled with a uranium soup rich enough to go critical, wrapped in its reflector like a pearl in cotton wool — the first machine of its kind on earth, and the men who ran it needed technicians, and technicians got quarters in the canyon and no weekend passes to speak of.¹ Pomeroy, when I volunteered, glowed like a father at a christening. "Klipspringer," he said, "you're the first man to ask." Of course I was. The others had seen the thing.

I want the reader to savor the economics of this, because I did not, at the time. To avoid one coffee with a spy, I had contracted to spend my Saturdays eleven feet from a bucket of the end of the world, kept warm. It is the eternal trouble with bolting: you may choose the door, but never the room behind it.

The crew were King's men — young, cheerful, appallingly casual, farm boys with doctorates who handled the soup the way their fathers handled livestock, firmly and without ceremony.² My duties were reading dials, logging runs, carrying the film badges up to be developed, and making coffee, and inside a week I had the vocabulary — scram, period, poison, a whole argot of cheerful doom — and inside two I was, as usual, indispensable and ornamental at once. The work ran like this: they would pull the control rod out by inches, the counters would climb from a tick to a purr to a mosquito whine, the pens on the recorder would lean upward like grass in wind, and grown men would stand around a punch bowl making the most dangerous substance in creation multiply, and then push the rod home and go to lunch. I have sat in on leveraged buyouts conducted with less nonchalance and far better cause.

Now, the day. It was a Tuesday in May, late morning, a run like forty before it.³ I was at the log table with the coffee going. And I will tell you exactly what I felt, because sixty years of interviewers have asked and I have always lied: I felt nothing mystical whatever. What I felt was the itch. I have had it since boyhood — the same itch that took me out of a poker game in Astoria an hour before the Kowalczyk cousins raided it, the same one that would take me out of a certain stock in the first week of March, 2000 — a small cold prickle at the back of the neck that says the room's arithmetic has changed. The counters sounded a half-tone wrong. The pen on the left recorder was leaning when it should have been level. Nobody else had looked up. The itch said: be elsewhere. And I have never once in my life argued with it, that being the whole secret of my longevity and the entire content of my philosophy.

I picked up the tray of film badges — always, always have a tray; a man with a tray is invisible and justified anywhere on God's earth — and remarked that I'd run the badges up while the light held, and strolled out past the shielding blocks and up the path under the cottonwoods, not hurrying, hurrying being for amateurs. I had gone perhaps eighty yards when the scram bell went off behind me like the end of a shift in Hell.

What had happened, I pieced together from the shouting afterward: a rod that should have driven home on the first alarm had hung up in its channel for some seconds — seconds being long ones in that trade — while the soup crept up its curve, and the crew had knocked the thing down by hand and killed the run, and everyone came out into the sunshine rather faster than I had, and rather whiter. No harm done, in the end: the sphere sat sulking, the counters wound down, and the young men stood among the trees performing that particular laughter men perform when the arithmetic has just been kind to them. And there — eighty yards up the path, tray in hand, serene as a bishop at a garden party — stood Corporal Klipspringer, who had left the building two minutes before the bell.

You may write the rest yourselves. How did you know? I did not say I knew. I have never once, in sixty years of this, said I knew — that is the amateur's error, the claim that can be tested. I said I'd been taking the badges up. I said it was luck. I said it modestly, with a small frown, the frown of a man troubled by his own good fortune, and by supper the canyon had decided, over my sincere objections, that the new man had felt it — had heard something in the counters no one else heard — and King himself stood me a beer and said, not entirely joking, that he'd trade two of his doctors for my ears.⁴ I objected sincerely, you understand, because sincere objection is the only fertilizer a legend needs. Deny a thing modestly enough and men will build it a shrine.

The one man who did not subscribe was, of course, my auditor. Feynman turned up at Omega that week — he turned up everywhere; the man circulated like weather — and heard the story from the crew with every appearance of delight, and then found me at the log table and leaned on it and said, grinning: "So what did you smell?" I said, badges, and luck. He said: "Uh-huh. You know what I think? I think you're the best instrument on this site. I just can't figure out what you measure." And he wandered off to annoy the counting room, leaving me to reflect that I had now been calibrated by the two best minds on the mesa and classified, respectively, as harmless and an instrument of unknown purpose, and that a wiser man than I would have found the second reading disquieting. I found it flattering. I have always preferred a good review to a safe one.

Saturday, meanwhile, had come and gone with me irradiated, alibied, and eleven hundred feet below reach, which I counted a masterpiece of scheduling until the Wednesday after, when the next note arrived — through the internal mail this time, which was not supposed to be possible, in the same small patient hand, and shorter: "Another Saturday, then. Your canyon is admirable. My calendar is long."⁵ I burned it in the coffee stove and stood the crew a round I could not afford, and if my hand shook pouring, the canyon put it down to the soup, which was good for my legend too. Everything fed the legend now. That is how legends work: once the first deposit clears, every fool in town banks for you.

And the month had one more delivery to make. Part of my duties was the paper — transfer rosters, badge lists, the manifests of incoming personnel, which came down to Omega so the crew could groan over how the housing would tighten. I was running down the June list with a pencil, pricing the new arrivals out of habit — rank, division, usefulness to me, in that order — when the pencil stopped by itself, the way the eye stops on a snake before the brain has said snake.

FISK, W. — Junior physicist, T Division. Reporting 14 June.

The Caltech pipeline, gentlemen, had finally found the pressure. Of all the physicists in all the divisions of that war, they had shipped me the one man alive who had watched both my crimes performed at close range and been thanked for his trouble with theft — the man whose problem sets had bought my first two years and whose textbooks had drawn my cosmic rays. I stood there in a reactor shed with the manifest in my hand, and I remember thinking, with the calm of a man reading his own chart at the foot of the bed, that the soup was now no worse than the third most dangerous thing in my canyon, and falling.