June 1944: the man the author calls Fisk — the one name in these Papers the author changed — reports to the Hill. The reader was advised in an earlier number to remember him. The editor repeats the advice, and adds: watch the notebooks. —Ed.
There are two schools of thought on what to do when the witness to your crimes is shipped to your fortress with a badge and a billet. The first school hides. I have no quarrel with hiding — it has paid my way more years than not — but hiding only answers when the man doesn't know you're there, and Fisk would know I was there before his duffel hit the floor; the Hill was a small town with a fence around it, and I was one of its celebrities, God help me, the corporal with the ears. The second school — my school, the family school, the school my father matriculated in the day he walked into a stranger's mansion and asked which room was his — says: when you cannot avoid the man, arrive first. Get to him before he has chosen his tense. A denunciation needs a cold start; nobody believes an accusation against the fellow who just carried your bags.
So on the fourteenth of June I was at the east gate with the housing list when the bus came up from Lamy, and I had my smile on before the door folded open, and I want you to appreciate the workmanship, because I had rehearsed that smile in the washroom shard the way I'd once rehearsed appendicitis: two parts old friendship, one part apology, a squeeze of the arm above the elbow. Fisk! They didn't tell me it was you — here, that's mine to carry. Sixty seconds, in front of an MP, a housing clerk, and two other new men, and the record of the Hill now opened with Klipspringer and Fisk, Caltech men, thick as thieves.1 Let him try an accusation after that. Envy, the town would say. Sad, what the war does to friendships.
He let me carry the bag, too, which I ought to have read as the warning it was. The Fisk of Pasadena would have blushed and wrestled me for it. This one handed it over and watched me carry it, the way a man watches a horse he is thinking of not buying.
He had grown into something over two years — bigger through the shoulders, quieter through the face, the San Joaquin coming out in him now that the boyishness had burned off. Farm country does not breed talkers; it breeds men who watch weather, and I had the pleasant sensation, walking him to the dormitory making eleven remarks to his one, that I had become weather. I ran the full orchestra that first week — introductions, the good table at the mess, a bottle placed where a bottle does the most good, two stories at the colloquium urn in which young Fisk of Caltech featured as a prodigy and I as his cheerful inferior, which cost me nothing and armored him in my version of us before he'd unpacked. He took it all. He said thank you. He said almost nothing else. And every evening, last thing, in the barracks or the reading room or once standing in the road in the rain like a man with no nerves in his skin, he wrote in a notebook — a plain school notebook, and when it was full, I came to learn, a numbered next one — in a small square hand you could read across a room, everything in it dated, like a Baptist grocer's ledger. I made a joke about it, naturally. He looked at me for a moment and said, "I like to know what happened," and went back to it, and I stood there with my drink feeling the temperature of the room change, because men who like to know what happened are the natural enemies of men in my line, and this one had a two-year head start and a numbering system.2
The blow fell on the twenty-ninth, at the urn after colloquium, and it fell from the kindest hand on the mesa, as blows generally do. Pomeroy — dear, beaming, lethal Pomeroy — steering Fisk around the circle: another Caltech man, T Division's gain, and of course you two know each other, and then, to the group at large, with his hand on my shoulder, the sentence I had been waiting two years to hear spoken in front of the wrong audience: "And Klipspringer here went on to Berkeley after — the radiation lab, under Lawrence."
I have stood in some long silences. The Millikan silence ran five minutes and I have billed clients for techniques learned in it. This one ran perhaps a second and a half, and I aged more in it than in the five. Because Fisk knew. Fisk was the one man on earth who knew there had been no after — that June of '42 had ended not in Berkeley but in Throop Hall with the plates on the desk; he'd been outside the door when I came out. And I watched him take the sentence, and turn it over once, the way he used to turn over a wrong sign in my arithmetic, and he said, mildly, to Pomeroy, to Bethe's coffee-drinking back, to the record:
"Summers, wasn't it." A beat. "He'd come back brown as a nut."
I will tell you frankly what I felt, and you may check your instinct to warm to me at the door: what I felt, under the relief, was professional outrage. Brown as a nut. The detail, gentlemen — the corroborating color, invented on the spot, fluent, unasked-for, better than anything in my own file. I had spent a lifetime learning that trade and here was an honest man speaking it like a native the first time out. It is a terrible thing to hear your own language in the mouth of a man with no debts. You don't know what he'll say in it.
I got him alone that evening — cigarettes, the water tower, the last light going off the Jemez — and I ran the three standard plays in order, because whatever else I am I am orderly. Charm first: gratitude, the old days, Sunday problem sets, wasn't it a war, though. Nothing; he smoked and watched the mountains. Then the shiv wrapped in silk, offered gently, just so we understood each other: it would be a shame, I said, if old Pasadena stories got loose up here and tangled a new man's clearance — mine, his, who could say how these things spattered. He turned his head at that, and I congratulated myself that I had reached him, and I had, in the sense that a man reaches a stove. And then the wallet, or the promise of one: a fellow situated as I was could be useful — rosters, housing, the ears — a friend at court, and gladly.
He put out the cigarette on his boot heel, with care, the way he did everything, and he administered, in eleven words, the worst beating I took in the entire war:
"I know what you did. Both things. Your coffee's cold Sundays."
And walked to the dormitory. It was the Sundays that did it — the standing invitation, if that's what it was, tossed over the shoulder to a man he'd just told he owned. I stood by the water tower in the dark running the sentence through every instrument I had, and the needles just swung. Blackmail I could have priced. Denunciation I had three defenses against by Tuesday. But a man who tells you plainly that he holds both your crimes, declines your bribe, insults your threat by not hearing it, covers your lie in public with better material than your own, and then mentions coffee — there is no drawer for him. I asked him once, weeks later, straight out, why he'd done it — why brown as a nut, why any of it. He was writing when I asked, and he finished the line first, and capped the pen, and said: "Not for you." Two words, and he has had sixty years to enlarge on them, and where is he now, and where are the notebooks?3
You will understand that after that I had to read them. No — you'll understand nothing unless you've lived it: a man was keeping a dated, numbered, legible account of the world, on my mesa, in a desk drawer eleven inches from where he slept, and I did not know what was in it. It was the only lock I ever picked for pure need. I chose the Tuesday colloquium — he never missed one — and Feynman's course of instruction held good: a school notebook's guardian was a desk drawer, and the drawer's tumbler was the work of ninety seconds and two bent pins, and I sat in an honest man's chair with my heart going like the Water Boiler's counters and read.
Physics, mostly. Work notes, clean as type. And threaded through them, one line a day, the other ledger. 11 June. Letter from Dad — the McCormick's man came about the reaper parts again. Told him no. 13 June. Reached the Hill site tomorrow. And then:
14 June. K. at the gate with a smile ready. He is the same.
And two weeks on, the entry I have carried since, the one I could recite under anesthetic:
29 June. Confirmed K.'s Berkeley story to Dr. P. and the others. That makes me part of it now.
That was all. No why. No what-I-shall-do. He had covered for me and then walked home and entered the sin in his own ledger, against his own name, dated, in the hand you could read across a room. I put the notebook back to the millimeter, worked the tumbler over, and left, and I will make the confession the reader has perhaps been awaiting since Pasadena: that was the first moment in my life I was ever genuinely afraid of another human being. Not of what he'd do — of what he was for. Anton, when I finally met him, wanted things; de Silva wanted things; wanting things makes a man legible. Fisk wanted to know what happened, and was willing to write himself into the charges to keep the account straight, and a man who will pay his own money to balance a ledger is capable of absolutely anything, on any timetable, at compound interest.4
I did the arithmetic that night on my cot, and it came out simple. The Hill now held: a captain who suspected me on schedule, a genius who'd classified me as an instrument of unknown purpose, and an honest man with both my crimes in a numbered notebook and some private reason for sitting on them. Santa Fe held one patient gentleman who had never once, in three notes, told me anything but the truth.
On Monday I put in for a Saturday pass. If I was to live surrounded, I would at least choose which creditor got the interview, and I find I can work with liars and buyers of men; it is the honest ones who ruin you. The café was on San Francisco Street. I even shined my shoes — you would have, too — and that, gentlemen, is how I came to keep, at last and in the best barbered calm I could counterfeit, my appointment with the man I have been calling Anton.5
An oral history recorded in 1982 preserves the arrival: the witness, then a housing clerk, recalled "two Caltech fellows at the east gate, thick as thieves — the smooth one carried the bags." The reader may divide that recollection into the half the author engineered and the half he would pay to strike. —Ed.
Five junior physicists joined the Theoretical Division in the week of 14 June 1944. Four are fully accounted for in the open literature. The personnel file of the fifth was sealed by an instrument of 1981 and remains sealed until 2031 — an arrangement whose origin the editor has been unable to establish, and whose date the reader is invited to set beside the author's promise, made in an early number, that the reason for Fisk's alias would appear "some forty years from this page." —Ed.
The editor does not know where the notebooks are. The editor has come to believe, on evidence that will be presented in its place, that somebody does. —Ed.
The reader is reminded that the sole witness to the contents of an honest man's private ledger is the burglar who picked its lock, and that the burglar's transcriptions have been offered at several previous points in these Papers with equal confidence and less corroboration. The entries quoted are, however, consistent in one respect with everything else the record yields about the man: he is the only figure in the Papers who appears to have kept accounts against himself. —Ed.
The pass is real: the Technical Area's leave register for July 1944 shows the author issued a Saturday pass to Santa Fe, his first since arriving on the Hill — a document establishing, for once beyond argument, that whatever happened at the café on San Francisco Street, the author went to it shaved, rested, and entirely of his own accord. The editor commends the register to the author's several biographers, all of whom have him dragged into everything. —Ed.