With an effort he said: “I should apologize for the abruptness and discourtesy with which I’ve treated you. I do apologize. My only excuse is that, as I’ve said, this is a crash-priority matter. May I have your assurance that you gentlemen will keep silent?”
“On one condition,” said the Sunday editor. “I want the Trib to have an exclusive on the Gomez story. I want Mr. Vilchek to cover it, with your full cooperation. In return, we’ll hold it for your release and submit it to your security censorship.”
“It’s a deal,” said the admiral, sourly. He seemed to realize suddenly that the Sunday editor had been figuring on such a deal all along.
On the plane for New York, the admiral filled me in. He was precise and unhappy, determined to make the best of a bad job. “I was awakened at three this morning by a phone call from the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He had been awakened by a call from Dr. Monroe of the Scientific Advisory Committee. Dr. Monroe had been up late working and sent out for the Sunday Tribune to read before going to sleep. He saw the Gomez letter and went off like a sixteen-inch rifle. The neutron cross-section absorption relationship expressed in it happens to be, Mr. Vilchek, his own work. It also happens to be one of the nation’s most closely guarded—er—atomic secrets. Presumably this Gomez stumbled on it somehow, as a janitor or something of the sort, and is feeding his ego by pretending to be an atomic scientist.”
I scratched my unshaved jaw. “Admiral,” I said, “you wouldn’t kid me? How can three equations be a top atomic secret?”
The admiral hesitated. “All I can tell you,” he said slowly, “is that breeder reactors are involved.”
“But the letter said that. You mean this Gomez not only swiped the equations but knew what they were about?”
The admiral said grimly: “Somebody has been incredibly lax. It would be worth many divisions to the Soviet for their man Kapitza to see those equations—and realize that they are valid.”
He left me to chew that one over for a while as the plane droned over New Jersey. Finally the pilot called back: “E.T.A. five minutes, sir. We have landing priority at Newark.”
“Good,” said the admiral. “Signal for a civilian-type car to pick us up without loss of time.”
“Civilian,” I said.
“Of course civilian!” he snapped. “That’s the hell of it. Above all we must not arouse suspicion that there is anything special or unusual about this Gomez or his letter. Copies of the Tribune are on their way to the Soviet now as a matter of routine—they take all American papers and magazines they can get. If we tried to stop shipment of Tribunes that would be an immediate giveaway that there was something of importance going on.”
We landed and the five of us got into a late-model car, neither drab nor flashy. One of the admiral’s young men relieved the driver, a corporal with Signal Corps insignia. There wasn’t much talk during the drive from Newark to Spanish Harlem, New York. Just once the admiral lit a cigarette, but he flicked it through the window after a couple of nervous puffs.
The Porto Bello Lunchroom was a store-front restaurant in the middle of a shabby tenement block. Wide-eyed, graceful, skinny little kids stared as our car parked in front of it and then converged on us purposefully. “Watch your car, mister?” they begged. The admiral surprised them—and me—with a flood of Spanish that sent the little extortionists scattering back to their stickball game in the street and their potsy layouts chalked on the sidewalks.
“Higgins,” said the admiral, “see if there’s a back exit.” One of his boys got out and walked around the block under the dull, incurious eyes of black-shawled women sitting on their stoops. He was back hi five minutes, shaking his head.
“Vilchek and I will go in,” said the admiral. “Higgins, stand by the restaurant door and tackle anyone who comes flying out. Let’s go, reporter. And remember that I do the talking.”
The noon-hour crowd at the Porto Bello’s ten tables looked up at us when we came in. The admiral said to a woman at a primitive cashier’s table: “Nueva York Board of Health, señora.”
“Ah!” she muttered angrily. “For favor, no aquí! In back, understand? Come.” She beckoned a pretty waitress to take over at the cash drawer and led us into the steamy little kitchen. It was crowded with us, an old cook, and a young dishwasher. The admiral and the woman began a rapid exchange of Spanish. He played his part well. I myself couldn’t keep my eyes off the kid dishwasher who somehow or other had got hold of one of America’s top atomic secrets.
Gomez was seventeen, but he looked fifteen. He was small-boned and lean, with skin the color of bright Virginia tobacco in an English cigarette. His hair was straight and glossy-black and a little long. Every so often he wiped his hands on his apron and brushed it back from his damp forehead. He was working like hell, dipping and swabbing and rinsing and drying like a machine, but he didn’t look pushed or angry. He wore a half-smile that I later found out was his normal, relaxed expression and his eyes were far away from the kitchen of the Porto Bello Lunchroom. The elderly cook was making it clear by the exaggerated violence of his gesture and a savage frown that he resented these people invading his territory. I don’t think Gomez even knew we were there. A sudden, crazy idea came into my head.
The admiral had turned to him. “Como se llama, chico?”
He started and put down the dish he was wiping. “Julio Gomez, señor. Porque, par favor? Que pasa?”
He wasn’t the least bit scared.
“Nueva York Board of Health,” said the admiral. “Con su permiso—” He took Gomez’s hands in his and looked at them gravely, front and back, making tsk-tsk noises. Then, decisively: “Vamanos, Julio. Siento mucho. Usted esta muy enjermo.”
Everybody started talking at once, the woman doubtless objecting to the slur on her restaurant and the cook to losing his dishwasher and Gomez to losing time from the job.
The admiral gave them broadside for broadside and outlasted them. In five minutes we were leading Gomez silently from the restaurant. “La lotería!” a woman customer said in a loud whisper. “O las mutas,” somebody said back. Arrested for policy or marihuana, they thought. The pretty waitress at the cashier’s table looked stricken and said nervously: “Julio?” as we passed, but he didn’t notice.
Gomez sat in the car with the half-smile on his lips and his eyes a million miles away as we rolled downtown to Foley Square. The admiral didn’t look as though he’d approve of any questions from me. We got out at the Federal Building and Gomez spoke at last. He said in surprise: “This, it is not the hospital!”
Nobody answered. We marched him up the steps and surrounded him in the elevator. It would have made anybody nervous—it would, have made me nervous—to be herded like that; everybody’s got something on his conscience. But the kid didn’t even seem to notice. I decided that he must be a half-wit or—there came that crazy notion again.
The glass door said “U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Office of Security and Intelligence.” The people behind it were flabbergasted when the admiral and party walked in. He turned the head man out of his office and sat at his desk, with Gomez getting the caller’s chair. The rest of us stationed ourselves uncomfortably around the room.
It started. The admiral produced the letter and asked in English: “Have you ever seen this before?” He made it clear from the way he held it that Gomez wasn’t going to get his hands on it.
“Si, seguro. I write it last week. This is funny business. I am not really sick like you say, no?” He seemed relieved.
“No. Where did you get these equations?”
Gomez said proudly: “I work them out.”
The admiral gave a disgusted little laugh. “Don’t waste my time, boy. Where did you get these equations?”
Gomez was beginning to get upset. “You got no right to call me liar,” he said. “I not so smart as the big physicists, seguro, and maybe I make mistakes. Maybe I waste the profesór Soo-har-man his time but he got no right to have me arrest. I tell him r
ight in letter he don’t have to answer if he don’t want. I make no crime and you got no right!”
The admiral looked bored. “Tell me how you worked the equations out,” he said.
“Okay,” said Gomez sulkily. “You know the random paths of neutron is expressed in matrix mechanics by profesór Oppenheim five years ago, all okay. I transform his equations from path-prediction domain to cross-section domain and integrate over absorption areas. This gives u series and v series. And from there, the u-v relationship is obvious, no?”
The admiral, still bored, asked: “Got it?”
I noticed that one of his young men had a shorthand pad out. He said: “Yes.”
The admiral picked up the phone and said: “This is MacDonald. Get me Dr. Mines out at Brookhaven right away.” He told Gomez blandly: “Dr. Mines is the chief of the A.E.C. Theoretical Physics Division. I’m going to ask him what he thinks of the way you worked the equations out. He’s going to tell me that you were just spouting a lot of gibberish. And then you’re going to tell me where you really got them.”
Gomez looked mixed up and the admiral turned back to the phone. “Dr. Mines? This is Admiral MacDonald of Security. I want your opinion on the following.” He snapped his fingers impatiently and the’stenographer passed him his pad. “Somebody has told me that he discovered a certain relationship by taking—” He read carefully, “—by taking the random paths of a neutron expressed in matrix mechanics by Oppenheim, transforming his equations from the path-prediction domain to the cross-section domain and integrating over the absorption areas.”
In the silence of the room I could hear the faint buzz of the voice on the other end. And a great red blush spread over the admiral’s face from his brow to his neck. The faintly buzzing voice ceased and after a long pause the admiral said slowly and softly: “No, it wasn’t Fermi or Szilard. I’m not at liberty to tell you who. Can you come right down to the Federal Building Security Office in New York? I-I need your help. Crash priority.” He hung up the phone wearily and muttered to himself: “Crash priority. Crash.” And wandered out of the office looking dazed.
His young men stared at one another in frank astonishment. “Five years,” said one, “and—”
“Nix,” said another, looking pointedly at me.
Gomez asked brightly: “What goes on anyhow? This is damn funny business, I think.”
“Relax, kid,” I told him. “Looks as if you’ll make out all—”
“Nix,” said the nixer again savagely, and I shut up and waited.
After a while somebody came in with coffee and sandwiches and we ate them. After another while the admiral came in with Dr. Mines. Mines was a white-haired, wrinkled Connecticut Yankee. All I knew about him was that he’d been in mild trouble with Congress for stubbornly plugging world government and getting on some of the wrong letterheads. But I learned right away that he was all scientist and didn’t have a phony bone in his body.
“Mr. Gomez?” he asked cheerfully. “The admiral tells me that you are either a well-trained Russian spy or a phenomenal self-taught nuclear physicist. He wants me to find out which.”
“Russia?” yelled Gomez, outraged. “He crazy! I am American United States citizen!”
“That’s as may be,” said Dr. Mines. “Now, the admiral tells me you describe the u-v relationship as ‘obvious.’ I should call it a highly abstruse derivation in the theory of continued fractions and complex multiplication.”
Gomez strangled and gargled helplessly trying to talk, and finally asked, his eyes shining: “Por favor, could I have piece paper?”
They got him a stack of paper and the party was on.
For two unbroken hours Gomez and Dr. Mines chattered and scribbled. Mines gradually shed his jacket, vest, and tie, completely oblivious to the rest of us. Gomez was even more abstracted. He didn’t shed his jacket, vest, and tie. He didn’t seem to be aware of anything except the rapid-fire exchange of ideas via scribbled formulae and the terse spoken jargon of mathematics. Dr. Mines shifted on his chair and sometimes his voice rose with excitement. Gomez didn’t shift or wriggle or cross his legs. He just sat and scribbled and talked in a low, rapid monotone, looking straight at Dr. Mines with his eyes very wide open and lit up like searchlights.
The rest of us just watched and wondered.
Dr. Mines broke at last. He stood up and said: “I can’t take any more, Gomez. I’ve got to think it over—” He began to leave the room, mechanically scooping up his clothes, and then realized that we were still there.
“Well?” asked the admiral grimly.
Dr. Mines smiled apologetically. “He’s a physicist, all right,” he said. Gomez sat up abruptly and looked astonished.
“Take him into the next office, Higgins,” said the admiral. Gomez let himself be led away, like a sleepwalker.
Dr. Mines began to chuckle. “Security!” he said. “Security!”
The admiral rasped: “Don’t trouble yourself over my decisions, if you please, Dr. Mines. My job is keeping the Soviets from pirating American science and I’m doing it to the best of my ability. What I want from you is your opinion on the possibility of that young man having worked out the equations as he claimed.”
Dr. Mines was abruptly sobered. “Yes,” he said. “Unquestionably he did. And will you excuse my remark? I was under some strain in trying to keep up with Gomez.”
“Certainly,” said the admiral, and managed a frosty smile. “Now if you’ll be so good as to tell me how this completely impossible thing can have happened—?”
“It’s happened before, admiral,” said Dr. Mines. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Ramanujan?”
“No.”
“Srinivasa Ramanujan?”
“No!”
“Oh. Well, Ramanujan was born in 1887 and died in 1920. He was a poor Hindu who failed twice in college and then settled down as a government clerk. With only a single obsolete textbook to go on he made himself a very great mathematician. In 1913 he sent some of his original work to a Cambridge, professor. He was immediately recognized and called to England, where he was accepted as a first-rank man, became a member of the Royal Society, a Fellow of Trinity, and so forth.”
The admiral shook his head dazedly.
“It happens,” Dr. Mines said. “Oh yes, it happens. Ramanujan had only one out-of-date book. But this is New York. Gomez has access to all the mathematics he could hope for and a great mass of unclassified and declassified nuclear data. And—genius. The way he puts things together . . . he seems to have only the vaguest notion of what a proof should be. He sees relationships as a whole. A most convenient faculty, which I envy him. Where I have to take, say, a dozen painful steps from one conclusion to the next he achieves it in one grand flying leap. Ramanujan was like that too, by the way—very strong on intuition, weak on what we call ‘rigor.’ ” Dr. Mines noted with a start that he was holding his tie, vest, and coat in one hand and began to put them on. “Was there anything else?” he asked politely.
“One thing,” said the admiral. “Would you say he’s—he’s a better physicist than you are?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Mines. “Much better.” And he left.
The admiral slumped, uncharacteristically, at the desk for a long time. Finally he said to the air: “Somebody get me the General Manager. No, the Chairman of the Commission.” One of his boys grabbed the phone and got to work on the call.
“Admiral,” I said, “where do we stand now?”
“Eh? Oh, it’s you. The matter’s out of my hands now since no security violation is involved. I consider Gomez to be in my custody and I shall turn him over to the Commission so that he may be put to the best use in the nation’s interest.”
“Like a machine?” I asked, disgusted.
He gave me both barrels of his ice-blue eyes. “Like a weapon,” he said evenly.
He was right, of course. Didn’t I know there was a war on? Of course I did. Who didn’t? Taxes, housing shortage, somebody’s cousin killed in Korea, e
verybody’s kid brother sweating out the draft, prices sky high at the supermarket. Uncomfortably I scratched my unshaved chin and walked to the window. Foley Square below was full of Sunday peace, with only a single girl stroller to be seen. She walked the length of the block across the street from the Federal Building and then turned and walked back. Her walk was dragging and hopeless and tragic.
Suddenly I knew her. She was the pretty little waitress from the Porto Bello; she must have hopped a cab and followed the men who were taking her Julio away. Might as well beat it, sister, I told her silently. Julio isn’t just a good-looking kid any more; he’s a military asset. The Security Office is turning him over to the policy-level boys for disposal. When that happens you might as well give up and go home.
It was as if she’d heard me. Holding a silly little handkerchief to her face she turned and ran blindly for the subway entrance at the end of the block and disappeared into it.
At that moment the telephone rang.
“MacDonald here,” said the admiral. “I’m ready to report on the Gomez affair, Mr. Commissioner.”
Gomez was a minor, so his parents signed a contract for him. The job description on the contract doesn’t matter, but he got a pretty good salary by government standards and a per-diem allowance too.
I signed a contract too—“Information Specialist.” I was partly companion, partly historian, and partly a guy they’d rather have their eyes on than not. When somebody tried to cut me out on grounds of economy, Admiral MacDonald frostily reminded him that he had given his word. I stayed, for all the good it did me.
We didn’t have any name. We weren’t Operation Anything or Project Whoozis or Task Force Dinwiddie. We were just five people in a big fifteen-room house on the outskirts of Milford, New Jersey. There was Gomez, alone on the top floor with a lot of books, technical magazines, and blackboards and a weekly visit from Dr. Mines. There were the three Security men, Higgins, Dalhousie, and Leitzer, sleeping by turns and prowling the grounds. And there was me.
From briefing sessions with Dr. Mines I kept a diary of what went on. Don’t think from that that I knew what the score was. War correspondents have told me of the frustrating life they led at some close-mouthed commands. Soandso-many air sorties, the largest number since January fifteenth. Casualties a full fifteen per cent lighter than expected. Determined advance in an active sector against relatively strong enemy opposition. And so on—all adding up to nothing in the way of real information.
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