June 1945: the trucks run south by night, the General's party comes west, and the author, ordered by Dr. Pomeroy to render the month "in English" for a colonel out of Washington, gives the first performance of the trade he will practice for fifty years. The General attends for ninety seconds, asks two questions, and eats. —Ed.
Pomeroy had the teletype at arm's length when I brought in the Friday minutes, holding it the way a man holds a letter from a lawyer.
"The General's party," he said. "Inside the fortnight.1 There will be a colonel from his office wanting the month explained — progress, schedules, the whole picture — and these people don't — that is, one can't simply—" He gave it up and made a gesture that took in his blackboard, his notation, and his life's work. "You keep the month, Klipspringer. Nobody else can read it. You'll walk him through it. In English."
I said English was, as it happened, the one subject I had never failed. In two years on that mesa I never once heard "in English" pointed at another man, and I had sense enough even then to know what was being pointed.
The Hill that June was draining south. Trucks went down the switchbacks after dark in strings of a dozen and came back empty; men vanished off the duty rosters onto a line that said detached, and reappeared a week later burned brick-red in a pattern no mountain sun lays down, saying nothing with great fluency. Nobody asked south where. It was not a post that rewarded asking, and I have never needed to be told that twice.
The reader would suppose an establishment in that condition had no hours to spare for paint. The Army found the hours. Rocks were whitewashed. Duckboards condemned since the thaw were replaced overnight, ahead of sounder boards that carried no traffic to the visit. The great men of the age tidied their blackboards like fourth-formers before the head's rounds, and on Bathtub Row the wives drafted letters for delivery into the General's own hand. Frankie's counter had the date three days before the adjutant did, which is the correct order of intelligence on any post.
The arithmetic of the visit ran ahead of it: the General's ear was guarded by colonels, the colonels by aides, and one of the aides, it was given out, would be walked through the month by a corporal. For one week the shortest road to the General's ear ran through the quiet end of T-4, and the Hill discovered me the way a town discovers the toll bridge.
A group leader who had addressed me for two years as "you" took my elbow at the urn. "My section sleeps over a generator," he said. "Eleven men. It wants mentioning — casually, you understand." Casually cost him a bottle of bourbon. A European professor required justice for an April report in which the order of the names had done him an injury — not for himself, he said, for Science, which keeps its bank account, I have noticed, in the names of its friends. A third man's crates had sat six weeks on the siding at Lamy, and he paid in cigarettes to have the siding deplored.
Pomeroy came last and shyest: if the question of his group's staffing should happen to arise — not that it should — not that one would engineer it—. I promised every man his line. They held the brass, every man of them, in a contempt you could have bottled, and they queued for the General's ear like chorus girls at a stage door.2
The colonel came up two days ahead of his General. Lieutenant Colonel Harmon Boyce,3 of the Washington liaison: fifty and sleek, with a tan no weather had produced and a handshake practiced to a fine smoothness. Boyce served in the oldest outfit in the American service and the only one never to have taken a casualty: the officers who carry the war between the men who are fighting it. He received me in a borrowed office with his cap set square on the desk, and he wrote nothing down, ever. In his line a note is evidence of the hour when the knowledge was somebody else's.
"Don't give me science," he said. "I can requisition science by the hundredweight. I brief the Secretary's people; they brief better people than that; and by the third telling it had better still stand up. Give me the month in sentences that survive the trip."
I told him he would have it Thursday at nine, and went away to manufacture it. Two nights at the annex, and the method was subtraction. The first night I went through the month's fair copies and struck out everything I did not understand, which shortened the war considerably. What remained is the whole secret: dates, tonnage, freight, housing, overtime, sickness, morale, money, and blame. Who is ahead. Who is behind. What it costs. When it lands. Whose fault. There is no month on earth, in any enterprise from a war to a wedding, that does not reduce to those five questions, and I have never met a man of power who asked a sixth.
The second night I dressed it. Every number rounded until a man could repeat it at dinner; every behind issued with a culprit attached — a railroad, a subcontractor, the weather over the Sangres — and I had the wit to seat Washington's own paperwork third on the blame bench, and smiling. What the trucks went south for appeared nowhere, and not from discretion: I hadn't got it to give, and Boyce would only have dropped it on the platform.
I tried a stretch of it on Fisk over the Sunday coffee, by way of a first house.
"That's not what happened," he said.
"It's what happened in English."
He turned his cup once. "They'll like it," he said, which from Fisk was not a compliment to either party.
The party came up the switchbacks the Wednesday before ten, three olive cars under one plume of dust. The General came out of the middle car already moving and did not, so far as I ever witnessed, stop moving again. He was bigger than his photographs, which do not attempt the shoulders, and he walked at a rate that put full colonels into a trot; between the cars and T his hand went into a pocket and came out with chocolate, which was dispatched without loss of stride or sentence, offering none, expecting no comment, receiving none.4 He went through the Tech Area firing numbers at whoever stood nearest — when, how many, how long — and the finest minds of the century answered in the passive voice, shifting from foot to foot. A professor with a prize began, "In principle—" and finished the sentence to an empty corridor, the General being by then three doors along.
My hour came at nine the Thursday, in Pomeroy's office, with the schedule board wheeled in and a pot of coffee. Boyce settled in like a man at his barber's. "Now then, Corporal. In your own words. Who's ahead, who's behind, and who's to blame?"
I gave him the month as freight and calendar. So many flatcars through the railhead against May's count, and what stood waiting on them in crates. Housing up by so many units and the water line made sound at last. The sick list down, the overtime up, and the daylight between those two lines expressed in dollars. Morale I gave him in beer, dances, and the softball standings, which is where morale is actually kept, whatever the chaplains report. When it lands I gave him as a season rather than a date, there being exactly one date in New Mexico that summer, and I did not have it.
He took it like a man being fitted. "Beds are schedule," he said. "Say the freight part again. Slower." I said it slower, in the same words, for a brief is not information, it is dictation. Once he stopped me altogether, one hand up.
"Who's behind?"
"Do you want who's behind, Colonel, or who Washington should hear is behind?"
"There's a difference?"
"There's a career in the difference."
He said it over to himself twice, once as a question and once as his own. Near the end he moved a hand toward the window and the Tech Area entire. "And the scientific side of the house. Sound?" "Ahead of its own paperwork, Colonel." "That goes in whole," he said, with feeling, and in it went. By the second cup he had stopped asking questions and begun rehearsing answers, my sentences coming back in his voice with the serial numbers rubbed off, and I nodded admiringly at my own goods — a service I have billed separately for ever since.
At half past ten the door opened without a knock and the General filled it, all four sides. Boyce came off his chair like a flushed partridge; I stood up straight and shut up. The General read the schedule board, then me.
"Whose figures?"
"The divisions' own, sir. I add them. I don't improve them."
"How many has T lost south this month?"
"Nineteen, sir. Twenty-three by Friday."
There was a pause in which Boyce could be heard not breathing. Then the General grunted, said "Friday" in the tone other men keep for oaths, told Boyce, "Shorter. And Washington hears nothing until I've said it first," and was gone. I hold six doctorates of the honorary kind and a medal from a President, and I rank the grunt above the lot, on the testimony of men who had served him five years and never got one. Boyce sat down the way men sit down after shellfire and asked me, in a changed voice, to begin again at the flatcars.
We ran to noon, the encore included, and I will state plainly what was born in that office: I stood between the men who know and the men who decide, fluent in both directions, loyal to neither. That is the whole trade. Vision I had sold once already, by accident. This could be sold on purpose, weekly, and it has been, under letterheads that improved by the decade.
The party went east after lunch, and every man who had paid me called round inside a day to learn how his grievance had landed. Every man left satisfied, because I reported the General's face at the relevant moment, and a face in report can be made to say anything. One grievance did in fact travel: the eleven men over the generator went to Boyce as color, because the item was true, it was cheap, and housing is the subject on which the General answers letters personally and with joy. The section had its transfer inside the month, and its group leader has dined on his own boldness ever since. Pomeroy glowed for days. "The colonel was very taken with the section," he told the urn; by the third telling it was the General who had been taken. I corrected nobody.
The list went up the Tuesday following: personnel detached for temporary duty, fourteen days or the duration of the task, destination not stated, trucks at four in the morning. My name sat in the middle of the K's — requested, Pomeroy told me, as though he were handing across a prize, for a proven ability to keep a clear record under field conditions. That is the economy of armies, and of every firm I ever billed after them: explain a thing well enough and you are sent to stand next to it. The orders said south.
The tempo is historical. The General directed the project from a modest office in Washington and spent much of the war in motion between it and the sites — Tennessee, the Northwest, Chicago, New Mexico — much of it overnight by train with the work continuing in the compartment; his subordinates' memoirs disagree on nearly everything else and agree that no one ever saw him rest. He had driven the construction of the Pentagon immediately before taking on the project, and is said to have regarded it afterward as the lighter assignment. The record puts him in New Mexico more than once inside the fortnight the author names; for once the author's calendar and a general's meet without strain, and the editor sets the coincidence down without leaning on it. —Ed.
The mutual regard of the General and his scientists is documented on both sides. He is credibly reported to have consoled his own staff with the reflection that the site contained, at great expense, the greatest collection of crackpots ever assembled; the crackpots repaid him in epithets that have likewise survived. Neither establishment could have functioned a month without the other, both knew it, and neither ever said so where it could be written down. The grievance traffic described above is consistent with every memoir the editor has consulted, each memoirist recalling with perfect clarity that it was the others who lobbied. —Ed.
Of Lieutenant Colonel Harmon Boyce the record holds nothing: no officer of that name appears on the surviving manifests of the General's parties, in the liaison rosters of that summer, or anywhere else the editor has looked. The class of officer is, by contrast, abundantly attested in every theater of the war, and men who attend events in order to have attended them leave the lightest of footprints. The reader has met the arrangement before: where the author needs a sin, he supplies his own man to carry it. The editor observes, gently, that a man who invents his customer has not necessarily invented the sale. —Ed.
The sweet tooth is documented past argument. The safe in the General's Washington office held, beside papers of the highest classification in the Republic, a standing reserve of chocolate, maintained with the same logistical seriousness as everything else in his charge; his physicians despaired on schedule and were ignored on schedule. No account known to the editor records his offering a piece to anyone. In a number where the author has invented a colonel entire, the chocolate, the editor is obliged to report, is the part that is true. —Ed.