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 both your crimes is shipped to your fortress with a badge and a billet, and the June manifest had given me eleven days to choose between them. The first school hides. Hiding has paid my way more years than not, but it only answers when the man does not know you are there, and after Omega the town gossip would hand Fisk my name — the corporal with the ears — before his duffel hit the floor. The second school — mine, the family school, the one my father matriculated in the day he walked into a stranger's mansion and asked which room was his — holds that when you cannot avoid the man, you arrive first. Nobody believes an accusation against the fellow who just carried your bags.
So I spent part of the eleven days at the washroom shard, rehearsing a smile the way I had once rehearsed appendicitis — two parts old friendship, one part apology, a squeeze of the arm above the elbow — and on the fourteenth of June I stood at the east gate with the housing list when the bus came up from Lamy. The smile was on before the door folded open.
"Fisk! Nobody told me it was you." He came down the steps with the duffel on his shoulder, and I had hold of the strap before his boot found the ground. "No. 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 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, 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 gave up the strap and watched me carry it, the way a man watches a horse he is thinking of not buying.
He had grown into something in two years — bigger through the shoulders, quieter through the face, the valley coming out in him now the boyishness had burned off. His people dealt harvest machinery out of the San Joaquin: a hundred flat miles of heat, alfalfa, and Okies, the Okies being labor the growers ran like ditch water, turned on when the crop wanted it and never once asked where it drained. Farm country does not breed talkers; it breeds men who watch weather. I walked him to the dormitory making eleven remarks to his one.
The first week was a campaign, and I was happy in the work. I had the housing clerk billet him at the quiet end of the dormitory — a chemist from Rochester woke up Tuesday against the boiler pipes and never learned whose pencil moved him — and I seated him at the good table in the mess, clear of the rest of the June intake, earnest land-grant doctorates who would be brilliant at a blackboard all war and skinned at poker by August. I left a bottle in his footlocker with no note, the no-note being the note. At the urn after his first colloquium I told the circle a Pasadena story with the parts assigned my way. "This man once did a term of my mathematics in an evening," I said, "and thanked me for the practice." Young Fisk the prodigy, myself his cheerful inferior; it cost me nothing, and it dressed him in my version of us before he had unpacked. He took it all. He said thank you. He said almost nothing else.
And every evening, last thing — in the barracks, in the reading room, once standing in the road in the rain — he wrote in a notebook. A plain school notebook, numbered when it was full; everything in it dated; a small square hand you could read across a room. I made a joke of it, naturally.
"What goes in the book, Fisk? Sins or sums?"
He looked at me for a moment. "I like to know what happened," he said, and went back to the page.
Men who like to know what happened have cost me more than every liar in government service combined. The last one was the Minnesota boy who put plate five under the comparator — the upper Middle West raises the type by the county, flat, scrubbed, Lutheran, a people who came over to farm ice and stayed to disapprove — and he had only cost me a career. This one had a two-year head start and a numbering system.2
The blow came on the twenty-ninth, at the urn after colloquium. Pomeroy dealt it — dear, beaming Pomeroy — steering Fisk around the circle by the elbow: another Caltech man, T Division's gain, and of course you two know each other. Then, hand on my shoulder, with Bethe's back not four feet off, he said the sentence I had spent two years keeping away from exactly this audience: "And Klipspringer here went on to Berkeley after — the radiation lab, under Lawrence."
Fisk was the only 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 had been outside the door when I came out. The silence ran perhaps a second and a half; the Millikan silence ran five minutes, and I aged more in the short one. Fisk turned the sentence over once, the way he used to turn over a wrong sign in my arithmetic, and said, mildly, to Pomeroy, to Bethe's back, to the record:
"Summers, wasn't it." A beat. "He'd come back brown as a nut."
What I felt under the relief, set down plainly, was professional outrage. Brown as a nut — the corroborating detail, invented on the spot, unasked for, better than anything in my own stock. I had spent a lifetime learning that trade, and here was an honest man speaking it fluently, first time out. It is a terrible thing to hear your own language from a man with no debts; there is no knowing what he will say in it.
I got him alone that evening — cigarettes, the water tower, the last light going off the Jemez — and ran the three standard plays in order, because whatever else I am, I am orderly. Charm first: gratitude, the old days, the Sunday problem sets, wasn't it a war. He smoked and watched the mountains. Then the shiv wrapped in silk, offered gently, just so we understood each other: 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 thought for a moment I had reached him. I had, the way a man reaches a stove. So I brought out the wallet. "A man fixed the way I'm fixed can be useful," I said. "Rosters. Housing. The ears. A friend at court, and gladly."
He put the cigarette out on his boot heel, with care, the way he did everything, and 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 the damage — a standing invitation, thrown over the shoulder to a man he had just told he owned. Blackmail I could have paid. Denunciation I had three defenses against by Tuesday. But a man who held both my crimes, declined the bribe, let the threat go past unheard, and had covered my lie that same morning without being asked — for him I had no fourth play. I went to the coffee in the end; sitting across from him beat wondering. And on one of those Sundays I asked him straight out why he had done it — why brown as a nut, why any of it. He was writing when I asked. He finished the line, capped the pen, and said: "Not for you." Two words; he has had sixty years to enlarge on them, and where is he now, and where are the notebooks?3
After that I had to read them; there was no help for it. A dated, numbered, legible account of the world was being kept on my mesa, in a desk drawer eleven inches from where its keeper slept, and I did not know what was in it. It was the only lock I ever picked for pure need. I chose a Tuesday colloquium — he never missed one — and Feynman's course of instruction held good: the drawer's tumbler came over in ninety seconds with 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. Reach the Hill tomorrow. And then:
14 June. K. at the gate with a smile ready. He is the same.
And two weeks on, the entry 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, 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 for the first time in my life I was genuinely afraid of another human being. Not of what he'd do — of what he was for. Anton, when I met him at last, wanted things; de Silva wanted things; wanting things makes a man legible. Fisk wanted to know what happened, and would 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
That night on my cot I did the arithmetic, and it came out simple. The Hill held a captain who suspected me on schedule, a genius who had 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 shined my shoes, and that, gentlemen, is how I came to keep at last, 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.