September 1944: the author carries a sealed pouch to the Metallurgical Laboratory, keeps an appointment he did not make, and meets the woman he would spend fifty years married to and eleven hours a year enjoying. The folder business in the middle cannot be corroborated and would, if true, be a hanging matter. —Ed.
The Army makes couriering simple: a sealed pouch, a chain, a wrist, and a receipt. What it cannot simplify is the passenger list. Anton's lunch and the Army's pouch went east out of Lamy on the same ticket, and I spent the first hour of the Super Chief locked in my roomette, pouch on my knees, doing the arithmetic: a bag I was under orders not to know the inside of — the one order of that war I obeyed with appetite — bound for a building stocked with the men best qualified to hang me, and lunch owed to a stranger who would know me and whom I must on no account know. I had walked into plenty of rooms blind; this was the first time anyone had issued me the room, the key, and the witness on a single voucher.
By Albuquerque I had stopped sweating, having remembered the first law of the trade — nobody watches a man who looks bored — and took my boredom to the club car.
The club car held matched luggage, two plainer girls, and Bunny — a rich man's daughter keeps a plain friend the way a jeweler keeps velvet, and Halsted money kept two. She was going home to Lake Forest from a summer of being improved somewhere, and she was — I say it across sixty years and one divorce I never got — the finest-looking thing I had seen since California: corn-gold, blue-eyed, built for the tennis court and the cotillion in that order. Lake Forest is where Chicago money goes to have the stockyards laundered out; the North Shore is the finest laundry in America — two summers, and a fortune can no longer remember what it did for a living.
I had my hat off before the porter — George; they are all George — had finished pouring. "Corporal Klipspringer," I said, "of the—" and stopped, regretfully, under orders.
"Of the what?" said Bunny.
"That's the difficulty," I said. "I'm not allowed to say."
She turned to the plain friends. "He's not allowed to say," she reported, delighted. "Daddy says half the men on this train can't say what they do. I think it's wonderful of you all."
The war-can't-say did more for me in thirty seconds than honest prospects could have done in a year. That class of girl is raised from the crib to marry a portfolio, and not one of them can resist a secret.
She was a sophomore at Northwestern. Evanston — the finishing school with a football team, where the daughters of the grain exchange major in one another until the right marriage comes to collect; educating that class of girl is engraving a ham — fine work, and still a ham. The next morning I would be sneered at down the length of the Metallurgical Laboratory by men from the University of Chicago — a different article altogether; Hutchins had abolished football there as a distraction from thinking. A Chicago man will make you feel a fool for not having read Aquinas; an Evanston girl will make you feel a genius for having heard of him. I knew which I could use. A clever woman is a poor bet for a man in my line; she reads the fine print. Bunny read the society page and her own reflection, and approved of both.
Here is the part I never told anyone: I could not read her. Reading people is the only talent I own that is not counterfeit — I have had the measure of every man and most women inside a minute since I was old enough to be lied to — and I ran the full instrument panel over Bunny Halsted across four hundred miles of Kansas and the needles never moved. Serene. Sunny. Bottomless. No want showing, no fear, no price. I took one sounding: what had she missed most, away all summer?
"Home," she said, pleasantly. "Though I expect now I'm going home I shall miss the summer. Isn't that always the way."
I waited for the needle. Nothing. I put it down, God help me, to stupidity, the way you put a locked door down as an empty room; congratulated myself on an easy mark; and asked might I have her address against a future leave.
"Just Halsted, Lake Forest," she said, and wrote it out anyway, in a hand as round and untroubled as a child's. "The post office knows Daddy." I have her buried in Lake Forest, and what was behind the blue eyes I know today exactly as well as I knew it in Kansas. Enough — she comes back; they all do.
Chicago received me at dusk in a cold rain off the lake, and rained all night. In the morning the cab ran me south through the Polack wards under the stockyard stink — you cannot always tell the parish from the pens by nose alone — to a university got up in grey Gothic with the end of the world quartered in its squash courts. The Metallurgical Laboratory received me worse than the weather had. Those were the men who had done the thing first — stacked the world's first working pile under the west stands of the football field they were too high-minded to play on, back in '42 — and then watched the glory and the sunshine emigrate to New Mexico while they kept the winter and the carbon paper, and the grievance had gone to the bone.1 Three anterooms later, a harassed major signed for the pouch.
"The return goes at four," he said, not looking at me. "Be findable, Corporal. Nothing else in this building has been today." I was shown out with three hours to kill in a strange city, and a lunch on my books I wanted the way a man wants the dentist.
I never found the restaurant. The restaurant found me.
I had gone to ground in a chophouse off the Midway, to be miserable somewhere the Army couldn't grade it, and I was three bites into a chop the stockyards should answer for when a soft voice at my shoulder said my rank and then my name, and a round little man in a wet overcoat was into the seat opposite before my fork was down, spectacles fogged. He gave no name. He asked, in an accent I could not place and did not try to — middle Europe is all one accent to me, and all one grievance — whether my journey had been comfortable; and while he asked he set his briefcase down against the table leg, beside mine. Brown, cracked, government-issue: the twin, to the scuffs, of the case that held my orders and receipts. My stomach executed a maneuver I have never forgiven it. This was not a lunch. It was a swap, and I had been freighted across a continent to move a briefcase eighteen inches under a table while its owner ate my dessert.
He was in no hurry. "A wet autumn," he murmured, over the menu. "At home it will be snowing already." Where home was I never learned — the Urals, for all I ever knew — because the street door opened on two hats. Topcoats, government shoulders, and the faces: whatever service stamps that breed stamps it from a single die — the hat, the jaw, the certainty of being owed — and has never varied it in all my years of being looked at. They looked at the room the way de Silva's people looked at rooms.2 If either case under that table came open, I would be signing statements until VJ Day.
I have heard what I did next called, by men who were not there, the coolest piece of tradecraft of the inland war. Here is the recipe: I panicked. I came up out of the chair all knees and apology — so sorry, wrong table, do forgive me — swept up the case at the table leg with a rattled soldier's clumsiness, and charged straight at the two hats with my hand out and my mouth running: were they the gentlemen from the major's office, sirs, because I had the four-o'clock return and daren't miss my train, and here were my papers, all of them, look — and I had the case open under their chins, spilling flimsies, the complete portrait of a corporal desperate to be inspected. Nothing on this earth retreats faster than authority from a keen fool with paperwork. They waved me off; they stepped back to let me pass; they wanted no share of whatever I was failing at. I went out the door apologizing and hit the rain at a trot, and I was two blocks north before I dared look at what was swinging from my hand. My own case. In the flap I had snatched back the one article I had been sent a thousand miles to leave behind — my orders, my receipts, my innocence in triplicate — and left the damp little man holding exactly what he had carried in. I had delivered nothing to nobody.3
Whoever owned the hats went home empty. The little man dissolved into the Loop — built for the purpose — with his own luggage. The only customer who had behaved suspiciously had done it at the top of his lungs, begging to be searched — the one cover no service has the imagination to distrust. What was meant to ride home in which case I never learned, and have taken pains never to be told.
At four the major chained the return to the same wrist, no wiser, and the university threw in a floor show while I waited for my cab. Across the wet flagstones went a small tidy quick man at a working pace, nothing about him of the legend and everything of a maths master late for a bus — Fermi, I was given to understand; I never got nearer and never needed to. And on the steps a wild-haired fellow stood in the drizzle haranguing two younger men about petitions and consciences and what the thing would do to the world — the great Szilard, I learned afterward, and he struck me then as he strikes me now: a man who had built a bonfire and wished to be admired for worrying about the sparks.4 I had a pocketful of the century's great men by then, and the sense to sell none of them retail.
The ride home I gave over to authorship, two accounts of Chicago being wanted and neither true in the same direction. One was for Anton, and had to read as loyalty and nowhere as flight: the hats arriving, the corporal keeping his head, the table kept clean under the government's nose. The other was for myself, and I have mostly believed it since — that pure animal funk had threaded a needle no professional on either side could have threaded. Cowardice gets its bad name from the men who practice it without talent.
I was back on the Hill the Friday, as promised. Under my door lay a note in the small tidy patient hand — "I trust Chicago was restful. — A." — which told me two things: that he already knew nothing had happened, and that he had decided, in his mercy, to carry the nothing on his books as my doing. I have since watched banks extend credit on the same principle, and to the same end.
And with it, forwarded through the Army's own post, a letter: three pages in a round untroubled schoolgirl hand, on the weather in Lake Forest, and a horse named Clipper, and how thrilling it must be to do whatever it was I did. I read it twice, which surprised me, and told myself it was reconnaissance; I have told myself that about Bunny's letters ever since. The censors passed every one of them beaming — a girl, a horse, the weather; wave it through — and in half a century of beaming it never once occurred to anybody in a uniform to wonder why a girl who wrote about nothing wrote so very much of it, or to me.5
Fermi's team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction beneath the west stands of Stagg Field on 2 December 1942; the University of Chicago had indeed dropped intercollegiate football under President Hutchins the year before. The author's account of the Metallurgical Laboratory's resentment of Los Alamos is unkind and substantially accurate. —Ed.
Soviet intelligence did run a Chicago channel adjacent to the Metallurgical Laboratory in this period, a fact not established in open sources until the 1990s. That the author places himself at the center of a courier swap there in 1944 is either remarkable corroboration or, far more likely, a remarkable reader of the 1990s releases retrofitting himself into them. The chophouse is not named. Chophouses seldom are. —Ed.
The reader will note that in the author's telling his single act of espionage was accidentally foiled by his own cowardice — a construction that leaves him, conveniently, a Soviet asset who never once delivered. It is the perfect alibi: treason attempted, treason failed, credit for neither. Whether it is true or merely perfect, the editor cannot say. It is certainly perfect. —Ed.
Leó Szilárd was at this date circulating among his colleagues the anxieties that would produce, the following summer, the Szilard petition against the bomb's use; the author will encounter that document again. The characterization of Fermi as resembling "a maths master late for a bus" is impertinent and, by the testimony of several who knew him, not entirely wrong. —Ed.
The author married Barbara "Bunny" Halsted, of Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1945; her father's firm, Halsted Tool & Die, will figure in these Papers repeatedly and rarely to the author's comfort. The suggestion, dropped here and elsewhere, that his wife was less simple than he found convenient to believe is one the editor will return to, with documents, in its place. —Ed.