OMEGA SITE

The note named a café on San Francisco Street and the coming Saturday. I read it a dozen times over breakfast, burned it on the doctrine of the empty cabinet, and spent the two days after turning the problem over. Understand the 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 telling you, gently, that he holds 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 patient 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.

The notice had been on the board three days: technicians wanted, Omega Site, quarters in the canyon. Omega 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 — the first machine of its kind on earth.¹ It wanted tending, and the tenders got canyon quarters and no weekend passes to speak of, which is why the notice had been up three days. The Hill counted a canyon billet a sentence — the mesa had dances and a picture show; the canyon had cottonwoods — and nobody was sent down. A man had to deserve it, or ask.

I asked Pomeroy the next morning, at the schedule board. He took his glasses off, which in Pomeroy was strong emotion.

"Klipspringer," he said, "you're the first man to ask."

"It looked like work that wanted doing, sir."

"They'll be glad of you down there. Steady habits, good ears." And he shook my hand as though I were leaving for the front, and beamed like a father at a christening. Of course I was the first man to ask. The others had seen the thing.

I did the sum on the Saturday in question, at the log table, at what I took to be the hour of the appointment, with the sphere sitting warm on its stand across the room. 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. Safety in the canyon was a divided command. The crew supplied the shielding blocks and the scram circuit; the Army supplied a rope, a signboard, and its settled conviction that danger, like venereal disease, is what happens to the man who has not read the posted material.

The work itself I saw my first morning. They pulled the control rod out by inches, the counters climbed from a tick to a purr, and grown men stood around a punch bowl making the most dangerous substance in creation multiply; then they drove the rod home and talked about lunch. The youngest of the doctors saw my face and took pity on it.

"She's tame," he said, patting the shielding. "Tamest thing on the Hill."

"And on the day she isn't?"

"Then we'd learn something," he said, and went to lunch with the others. That was the whole of my safety briefing. A physicist under thirty believes in his own death the way a bishop believes in sin: doctrinally, and mostly in other people.

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. 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 stood up and took 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 said, to the room at large, "Running the badges up while the light holds. Anybody want stamps?"

"Matches," said one of the doctors, not looking up from the rod.

I 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: 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 driven it home by hand and killed the run. No harm done, in the end. The sphere sat sulking, the counters wound down, and everybody came out into the sunshine rather faster than I had, and rather whiter, and stood among the trees performing that particular laughter men perform when the arithmetic has just been kind to them.

Then one of them saw me: eighty yards up the path, tray in hand, a man about an errand. The young doctor reached me first, still the color of a bedsheet.

"You walked out," he said. "Two minutes before the bell. How did you know?"

"Know what? I was taking the badges up."

"You knew."

"I carried badges," I said, and gave it the small frown, the frown of a man troubled by his own good fortune. "Luck. That's the whole of it."

By supper the mess had the story, and by the second telling it had grown: the new man had felt it — had heard something in the counters nobody else could hear. A boy from the counting room said so across the table, flatly, the way you report weather. "I heard nothing," I said. "I heard coffee getting cold." They took it for modesty. Then King himself came down the bench with two bottles of beer and set one in front of me.

"Keep those ears," he said. "I'd trade two of my doctors for them." He was not entirely joking, and the two doctors nearest him laughed loudest.⁴

Mark what I never said, that night or since. I never said 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 badges, and I said luck, and I objected to every improvement, and every objection improved it. 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 took the legend from the crew with every appearance of delight. Then he found me at the log table and leaned on it, grinning.

"So what did you smell?"

"Badges," I said. "And luck."

"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 would have found the second reading disquieting. I found it flattering. I have always preferred a good review to a safe one.

The missed Saturday I have already given you — me at the log table, alibied, irradiated, and a full canyon below reach — and I counted it a masterpiece of scheduling until the Wednesday after, when the next note arrived: through the Technical Area's internal mail this time, which was not supposed to be possible, 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 that down to the soup as well, which was good for the legend too. Everything fed the legend now; that is the way with legends, once a town has decided to keep one.

And the month had one more delivery in it. 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 the housing. I was running down the June list with a pencil, sorting the new arrivals out of old 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 found the pressure at last. Of all the physicists in all the divisions of that war, they had shipped me the only 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 in a reactor shed with the manifest in my hand, thinking, with the calm of a man reading his own chart at the foot of the bed, that the soup was now the third most dangerous thing in my canyon, and falling.