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 a monthly feeding of gossip. It was a twenty-five-year-old from Far Rockaway who fixed adding machines for sport, fought a private war against the mail censors, and cracked the safes of his elders and betters on the principle that a locked box was a form of boasting.1 The safes barely slowed him. He found the secrets of the age sitting behind combinations set to the great men's own birthdays — no great man having yet been born who can believe his birthday is a matter of indifference to the world.
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.
The reader will remember where I left him: in my doorway at two in the morning. I was alone in the annex with the fair copy in the machine, and he leaned on the jamb, grinning, in no hurry at all.
"You write down everything except what matters," he said, for the second time that night. "I've been reading you for a month. Why?"
I have taken that species of question from a Senate counsel with subpoena power and from a Soviet gentleman with worse, and neither ever put the wind up me like that boy in the doorway. Lawyers and spies hunt a thing — a date, a name, a folder — and a thing can be fed to them a piece at a time. He was hunting a why, and I have never kept a why in stock.
So I sold him the small confession, to spare him the search for the large one.
"Because I can't follow the mathematics," I said. "Never could. Never will. A man in my line learns to record the shape of what he can't understand."
He came off that jamb as if I had fired a pistol behind him. "That is the first honest sentence anybody has said to me on this whole mountain," he said, and sat down on my table, and stayed until reveille. Most of the night went to the third blackboard from Tuesday's colloquium. Half the room, he said, had lost it by the second line, and every man of them had nodded — the conspiracy of nodding, he called it; his phrase, and I stole it, and I have billed clients with it since. Toward dawn he stood up, shook my hand, and pronounced me honest. I am the only fraud of the American century whose references were written by Richard Feynman's own instincts, and the instincts were right about everything but me.
After that we were, after a fashion, friends. We worked the same trade 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 professional pleasure. What the histories in their reverence leave out is that he was the best company on the mesa: a mimic, a needler, a man who beat drum rhythms out of any chair back or wastebasket in reach until the room moved whether it meant to or not.
Which brings me to the girl, and I am happy to report that the 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. The mesa ran ten men to the girl, and the girls knew it to the decimal: a plain one held court up there like Cleopatra, and a pretty one could have had the Hill drafting her letters home. Billie was pretty. I invested a full week regardless — cigarettes to the dance band, a swapped duty roster, a manufactured errand past the hospital daily — and by Saturday the campaign was won. I set that down plainly so the reader knows the scale of what happened next.
The dance was the enlisted men's Saturday affair, in the mess hall with the tables pushed back, the Army's notion of recreation being, like everything else it issued, olive-drab and oversubscribed. The band took its break. 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 the floor was packed and the band's own drummer stood on a chair to watch his hands. Billie of Amarillo had hold of my arm.
"Who is that?" she said, in the voice women otherwise reserve for film stars and racehorses.
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, and drank a lemonade, and on his way out he stopped to give my week its review — he had watched the whole campaign, it developed, roster swap included, with the pleasure of a man watching a good card mechanic.
"The errand past the hospital," he said. "Every day, never the same hour twice. Calibrated, or instinct?"
"Calibrated," I said. It seemed the evening for honesty.
"Then you're wasted on the war." And he went home early, as he always went home early, to write his letters.4
I got the girl after all, and I got her on his rhythm. I walked Billie home retailing the drummer — the safes, 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 all my life on borrowed money and borrowed memory; that night I operated on borrowed genius, and of the three the genius holds its rate.
Now, the cabinet. It never made his stories, so it will have to make mine.5
I kept nothing on paper. Doctrine, not laziness: a man reporting monthly to Captain de Silva keeps 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. It was my entire method rendered in furniture.
He cracked it, naturally, one night while I was three buildings away being indispensable, and found the bottle and nothing else. He came to me directly — no note left inside, no grin on arrival.
"I've opened a hundred boxes on this hill," he said. "Yours is the first that ever frightened me."
"It's a cabinet of blank paper."
"That's the fright. A man who keeps nothing is a man who expects to be searched. Why does a stenographer expect to be searched?"
I gave him the truth again, in the small denomination. "Because the last time anyone went through my things properly, I was expelled from a very good school. 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. Then the grin arrived, and he laughed, and let it go, and his verdict, I have no doubt, came back harmless.
It stung for the length of exactly one drink. By the bottom of the glass I had it valued right: 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 before the war was out — a desk drawer, nothing grand; I never had the fingers for safes. He despaired of my ear inside the first evening. "Stop listening for footsteps," he said. "Listen to the pins." The advice was sound, and I have never once taken it. That drawer is the only technical skill I carried out of the entire Manhattan Project; it has since served 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 room and I am done. He was building that autumn the thing the histories now bow to: the computing room in T — clerks and card machines in a line, each soul punching one step of a calculation it was not cleared to imagine.6 I stood in it once, on an errand, and my neck prickled, and it took me a moment to place the feeling. The orange juicer. My mother's two hundred oranges, the butler's thumb — out front the miracle, in the kitchen the buttons pressed in the dark. He had built a machine made of people, and where other men saw physics I saw the coming century's org chart. I resolved on the spot to spend that century standing next to the fellow at the front with his name on the output. 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, drumming two fingers on the rail of every porch we passed. Halfway he stopped in the road and pointed up.
"Same stuff," he said. "The stars, the gadget, you, me — the same few particles doing the same few tricks. Isn't that wonderful? Don't you want to know?"
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 will 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 been retailing the salesman at a markup ever since.
He went off whistling between the barracks. I went in to my empty cabinet and my full bottle, well satisfied with the winter's ledger: certified harmless by genius, solvent on borrowed charm, one lockpicking course to the good. 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. My first thought, I am proud to record, was perfectly calm: whatever the appointment was going to cost, 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.