July 1945: ordered south for the duration, the author spends his last fortnight on the Hill holding two pieces of paper — a petition out of Chicago, addressed to the President on moral grounds, and the mesa's dollar book on what the gadget will do. He returns the first with a speech, keeps the second with a margin, and is quoted admiringly for the rest of the century. —Ed.
The duration began, as the Army's durations do, with a wait. The list was posted, and through the first fortnight of July the trucks went south without me — by batches, by name, at four in the morning, headlights dropping down the switchbacks in the dark. Twice I woke to the runner's flashlight working the aisle and twice it passed my bunk for some other man's. Pomeroy fussed over the going. "They'll have instruments down there," he said at the urn, "but take your own pencils. A man's record is half his pencil." I promised him the pencils and kept the promise, the cheapest I made that summer.
In April the mess-hall radio stopped its dance music at supper, and a cook came out of the steam and stood holding his ladle while the announcer said, twice, that the President had died at Warm Springs; men wept over their trays who had voted against him with both hands. In May the same radio gave us Reims, and the beer came out, and the German-born professors drank very little of it, politely, like men at the funeral of an uncle who had ruined them. The customer the article had been ordered against was out of business, in any trade I ever practiced the shop would have shut by Friday. This shop put on lights, and the trucks ran south heavier every week.
It was that fortnight the book opened.1 A theoretician stopped me at the urn, a man who in two years had addressed me twice, both times about chalk. "There is to be a book," he said, in the tone his kind reserves for business. "On the result. What the gadget gives on the morning, a dollar the ticket, the pot to the nearest guess — and it wants a banker." I asked why me, knowing. "You keep a clear record under field conditions. It is on a flimsy somewhere, so it must be true." I took the bank on terms I described as Christian: I held the stakes, I ruled the ledger, and the pot rounded in the bank's favor, as pots have rounded since Babylon. The figures I never understood and would not print now, having signed things.
The sheet taught me the mesa faster than two years of minutes had. The young men bet big, a big number being a compliment to their own mathematics; the older men bet small, having watched more things not work. One of the Hungarians took the top line and looked wounded that the sheet stopped where it did. A group leader came back on the Tuesday to move his figure down — "Helen feels—" he said, and did not finish what Helen felt — and I moved him down a line and charged a second dollar for the ink. A lieutenant of the security office put his dollar in like a parishioner; the chaplain's assistant took two tickets and hedged them opposite ways, which I thought showed his training. The men who declined to bet declined the way teetotalers decline, at volume, to the room, and I wrote their names in the back of the book anyway. No charge.
My own ticket I wrote last, and I wrote zero. Not conviction — coverage. A dud paid the pot to the man holding it; a miracle made me the modest man who never believed, gloriously wrong, pointed out at reunions ever since.
The other document reached me by way of Arthur Pell, a young chemist in the Metallurgical Laboratory's document room who, the autumn before, when I carried a pouch to Chicago and was told to come back at four, had signed my receipt, split his liverwurst sandwich down the middle, and watched me learn his building's first names inside the hour. In the second week of July he came up with a records party, three days and a visitor's badge, and found me in the mess hall at the slack of the afternoon. "They told me the coffee would know where you were," he said, sitting down. "Jay, there's nobody on this post you can't reach. Our whole shop says so." It happened to be true.
Then he brought out the envelope. He had carried it folded twice in his breast pocket, through two gates, riding next to his pass, and I aged a year watching it come into the light. I did not touch it — I put my fists in my pockets like a boy at a fruit stall — but I could read it where it lay: a fair copy of the Chicago paper, the bottom third of the sheet ruled for signatures, the lines as neat as a payroll. "It wants twenty minutes and the right table," Pell said, low and shining. "The men here haven't seen it, and half the names that would matter are on this mesa. You could get it seen, Jay. Everyone said you were the man."
I give the paper as the mesa gave it, rumor for once dead level with the fact: drafted at the Chicago laboratory,2 addressed to the President, asking on moral grounds that the thing not be used on Japan without warning given first, and gathering names by the score back east. Its draughtsman was the same gentleman I had watched on the Chicago steps the autumn before, haranguing the weather about consciences — the man who had built the bonfire and wished to be admired for worrying about the sparks. Chicago signed readily, their share of the work two years finished; conscience in that breed is kept like an expense account, nothing paid from the man's own pocket, every scruple receipted, and the whole submitted to posterity for reimbursement.
On the Hill it never went up on a board. The authorities had considered whether the paper might circulate among us and concluded that it might not3 — no copy posted, no reason given, the word passing at the urns in the tone men keep for things they have not been told. The same authorities had no objection on earth to the betting book, open at every urn in the Tech Area. A dollar on the result was a soldierly amusement; a sentence about it addressed to the President was contraband; and I raised no difficulty over the distinction, being the bank.
My deliberations were finished before Pell got to the end of "signatures." A man on the July list, asked for by name for the real one, does not hand the security office a fresh reason to read him; a man whose Berkeley summers never happened does not put his hand where handwriting is collected; and a petition, whatever it pleads, is a confession with the co-signers attached, collated and alphabetical, saving the government the cost of a second interview. What I read on that sheet was the ruled lines.
But the slack hour was not slack enough. A T/5 out of the radio section and two of the computing girls had drifted inside earshot, trays down, ears up, and a refusal witnessed is a refusal reported; the declining would have to travel in a version of my own manufacture. So I looked at the envelope a long moment, then out the window at the flagpole, which costs nothing and photographs as everything, and gave them the speech. I said I was a corporal, and the President kept wiser heads than mine within reach of his bell. I said a soldier's opinion of his orders weighs what his rank weighs, and mine weighed two stripes. I said there were men south of us sleeping on the ground beside their instruments, and that my mother had given the Army a son without asking to be consulted first. I said I had passed two years on that mesa keeping other men's arithmetic straight, and the day I set my name over advice to my Commander-in-Chief would be the day I had decided I knew his desk better than my own bench. A man does the work in front of him, I said, and trusts the men over him to be better than he is — "and a private soldier's signature," I finished, looking at nobody, "never yet shortened a war, though it has lengthened a good many files."
Admire the materials, never the mason: the men south were off the shipping lists on the mess wall, mother was out of my Tuesday letters home, and duty hung in four colors between the bond poster and the venereal one, the whole of it composed wet, in the time an envelope takes to change hands. Nor was the house hard to play: half that room had a brother sweating off Okinawa or a cousin under the kamikazes, and barracks opinion on warning the Jap first ran solid against, with a strong faction for sending him two of the articles and the invoice.
Pell folded the envelope away. "That's fair," he said, and then, quieter, to the table, "that's fair." He shook my hand — he shook it — and went back down the Hill on the Thursday with his paper still folded twice, still riding next to his pass, God keep him and every earnest man who carries his convictions through checkpoints on his own chest.
The speech stayed behind and prospered. The T/5 had it at supper that evening, close enough to true; by Wednesday it was being performed in the other barracks with gestures. By Friday it reached Pomeroy, who handed it back to me at the urn — "the bench and the desk, Klipspringer; very finely put" — with a sentence in it I had never said, and better than mine.
On the Sunday the chaplain preached on the centurion, the man in Scripture likewise set under authority, and gave the congregation my bench and my desk at half the speed and twice the length; chaplains are clergy of a special communion, whose God has never once been caught disagreeing with the post commander. Thirty years on I met the speech again, twice, in print, credited to an enlisted man whose name had not survived.4
Fisk poured at nine that Sunday and let me get the first swallow down. "The Chicago paper," he said. "It reached the Hill, then." I gave him the bench and the desk, to see how it wore at close range. "I've heard it three times now," he said. "It improves." Then: "Was it brought to you?" "Nobody brings me documents, Fisk. I make my own." He fetched the current notebook, wrote one line standing, dated first, and did not turn the book around. "Would you have signed?" I asked, because a man likes company. "Nobody brought it to me," he said, and closed the book. "Yes." We finished the pot on the weather.
The last days went in crates and manifests. Bunny's July letter came up midweek, three pages — the Lake Forest weather close, Clipper second at the show and robbed — and the censors passed it beaming, as they passed everything of hers. From Santa Fe, nothing; Anton's quiet had run unbroken since spring, and it was not the quiet of a man who had lost my address. On Tuesday night the runner's flashlight stopped on my bunk at last: full kit, no return date, trucks in the motor pool. I rolled the duffel with Pomeroy's good pencils on top where he could believe in them, and the book went into the sock roll, sheet, stakes, and all — the bank travels with the banker, and most of my depositors were on the same list. The barracks light went out at ten, and nobody slept behind it. The trucks came at four.
The pool is among the best-documented wagers in American history: entries at a dollar, the subject the size of what was coming, the guesses running from nothing at all to figures the security office would have preferred kept off even a betting sheet. The winning entry, by its owner's own cheerful telling, was chosen because the plausible numbers were already taken. Several memoirs record the pool; every one agrees the stakes were held; none says by whom — and the reader may weigh for himself the likelihood that a pot of physicists' dollars administered itself. None mentions a shortfall either, which proves nothing about the altitude. —Ed.
The petition is historical, and public these many years, though it was a long time getting there. In July 1945 Leo Szilard drafted, at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, a petition addressed to the President of the United States, urging on moral grounds that the new weapon not be used against Japan without terms and warning given first. It gathered some seventy signatures at Chicago and moved among the project's sites by hand; it then went toward the President by channels, correctly endorsed at every stage and at the pace channels keep, and had not reached him when the question it raised was settled from the air. No evidence has ever been produced that he saw it, and the document itself stayed classified into the 1960s. As for the author's estimate of the drafter, the reader should have the dates: the man had been worrying about the sparks since 1933, some years before there was a fire. And of the expense account, the editor will say only that the worrying was done aloud, under the man's own name, and at the man's own cost — three particulars in which it differed from the speech given above. —Ed.
The non-circulation is likewise documented. Copies reached senior hands at the New Mexico site that July; circulation among the staff was not permitted; whose hands, and whose decision, the surviving accounts give variously, and the editor lets them vary. No account suggests the enlisted ranks were ever shown the document, and it collected no signatures on the mesa — the one point that summer on which the author's private arithmetic and the official mind were in perfect agreement, a coincidence neither party would have cared to be told of. The reader may set the fact beside note 1: in the same weeks, at the same establishment, a betting book on the result ran openly at a dollar a ticket. The editor sets the two side by side and leaves them there. —Ed.
The speech had the career the author claims for it, and a longer one. A memoir of 1962 prints a version — bench, desk, and centurion now permanently married — as an instance of "the quiet heroic realism of the enlisted men"; a memoir of 1974 gives it at greater length and higher polish, credited to "a corporal of the Special Engineer Detachment whose name has not come down to us." The name has come down to us. Neither memoirist was in the mess hall; each had the speech at several removes, improved by every hand it passed through. What the memoirs offer as the conscience of the enlisted ranks was composed in under a minute, by a man on a list, declining to put his name where it could be photographed. The reader now has the text, and the reason it exists; the editor observes, gently, that the memoirists' phrase is accurate in every word but one. —Ed.