by James Gleick
Los Alamos built its wall against theoutside world and thrived within. Separately and privately Richard and Arline, too, sought what refuge they could. They made their secret lives. They built a fence of their own. None of his scientific friends knew that he called her Putzie and she called him Coach; that she noticed the muscles hardening in his legs from all his hiking; that the days of respite from her illness were growing rarer. She wrote him in code, playing to his love of unraveling puzzles; his father did this, too. Their letters caught the eye of the military censors at the laboratory’s Intelligence Office. The censors alerted Feynman to regulation 4(e): Codes, ciphers or any form of secret writing will not be used. Crosses, X’s or other markings of a similar nature are equally objectionable. Censorship had been designed delicately to accommodate a nonmilitary clientele, university people who still liked to imagine that they were volunteers in a project of scientific research in a nation where the privacy of the mail was sacred. The censors trod carefully. They tried to turn mail around the day they received it, and they agreed to allow correspondence in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. They felt entitled at least to ask Feynman for the key to the codes.
He said he did not have a key or want a key. Finally they agreed that if Arline would enclose a key for their benefit they would remove it before the envelope got to Feynman.
Inevitably, he then ran afoul of regulation 8(l), a delightfully (to Feynman) self-referential law requiring the censorship of any information concerning these censorship regulations or any discourse on the subject of censorship. He got the message to Arline nonetheless, and her acid sense of fun took over. She started sending letters with holes cut in them or blotches of ink covering words: “It’s very difficult writing because I feel that the —— is looking over my shoulder.” He would respond with numerical fancies, pointing out how peculiarly the decimal expansion of 1/243 repeats itself: .004 115 226 337 448 … and his increasingly frustrated official audience would have to ensure that the string of digits was neither a cipher nor a technical secret. Feynman explained with subtle glee that this fact had the empty, tautological, zero-information-content quality of all mathematical truths. In one of her mail-order catalogs Arline found a kit for do-it-yourself jigsaw puzzles; the next letter from the Albuquerque sanatorium to Box 1663 came disassembled in a little sack. From another the censors deleted a suspicious-sounding shopping list. Richard and Arline talked about a booby-trapped letter that would begin, “I hope you remembered to open this letter carefully because I have included the Pepto Bismol powder …” Their letters were a lifeline. No wonder, under watchful eyes, the lovers found ways to make them private.
The censorship, like the high barbed-wire fence, reminded the mesa’s more sensitive residents of their special status: watched, enclosed, restricted, isolated, surrounded, guarded. They understood that no other civilian post office box had all its mail opened and read. The fence was a double-edged symbol. Few scientists were so important as to merit armed soldiers patrolling their laboratory perimeters. They could not help feeling some pride. Feynman admonished his parents to maintain secrecy: “There are Captains in the Army who live up here who don’t know what we’re doing. (Even Majors.)” Much later, in a post–Catch-22 world, the military trappings were remembered as irritants and targets of mockery. At the time it was not so simple. The men and women of Los Alamos resented the fence and respected the fence. Feynman explored most of its length. When he discovered holes, with well-beaten paths leading through, he pointed them out in a spirit of good citizenship, annoyed only that the guards responded so lackadaisically. (“I explained it to him & the officer in charge,” he wrote Arline, “but I bet they don’t do anything.”) He never realized that the holes had semiofficial sanction. The security staff tolerated them—with Oppenheimer’s connivance, it seemed—so that people from the local tribes could come to the laboratory’s twelve-cent movies.
Feynman’s exploring drew him to every secret and private place. He had a fidgety way of prying into things—the laboratory’s new Coca-Cola dispenser, for example, a contraption that secured the bottles with a locked steel collar around their necks. This device replaced an older container, the most ancient prototype of the soda machine: customers would open the lid, take a bottle, and honorably drop their coin in a box. The new dispenser struck Feynman as a withdrawal of trust; thus he felt entitled to accept the technological challenge and finesse the mechanism. Was that right or wrong? He debated the moral principles with his friends. Meanwhile he found himself abstaining from liquor. He had got so drunk one night that he could tell it was ruining his drum playing and joke telling, although it did not stop him from running all over the base singing and beating pots and pans; finally he passed out, and Klaus Fuchs took him home. He decided to give up alcohol, along with tobacco, and wondered whether it was a sign of encroaching conventionality. Was he getting “moraller and moraller” as he got older? (“That’s bad.”)
His reputation as a skilled prier spread. One scientist left some belongings in a storeroom at Fuller Lodge and borrowed Feynman’s fingers to pick the Yale lock. Paper clips, screwdriver, two minutes. Two men arrived, breathless from running up the stairs, and begged Feynman to crack a file cabinet holding a crucial document about a ski tow. Combination locks still seemed too hard. As a group leader he had been issued a special steel safe for sensitive material of his own, and he had not yet managed a way to break in. He would spin the dial from time to time. Occasionally it occurred to him that his interest in locks was turning into an obsession. Why? “Probably,” he told Arline,
because I like puzzles so much. Each lock is just like a puzzle you have to open without forcing it. But combination locks have me buffaloed.
You do too, sometimes, but eventually I figure out you.
Locks mixed human logic and mechanical logic. The designer’s strategy was constrained by the manufacturer’s convenience or the limits of the metal, as it was in so many of the bomb project’s puzzles. The official logic of a Los Alamos safe, as displayed in the dial’s numbers and hatch marks, indicated a million different combinations—three numbers from 0 to 99. Some experimentation, though, showed Feynman that the markings disguised a considerable margin of error, plus or minus two, attributable to plain mechanical slackness; if the correct number was 23, anything from 21 to 25 would work as well. When he was searching combinations systematically, therefore, he needed only to try one number in every five—0, 5, 10, 15 … —to be sure of hitting the target. By thinking in terms of error ranges, instead of accepting the authority of the numerals on the dial, he brought a pragmatic physicist’s intuition to bear. That one insight effectively reduced the total combinations from one million to a mere eight thousand, almost few enough to try, given a few hours.
An American folklore had developed about safes and the yeggs who cracked them. Through the cowboy era and the gangster era safes grew thicker and more elaborate—double walls of cast iron and manganese, triple side bolts and bottom bolts, curb tumblers and pressure handles—and the legend, too, grew thicker and more elaborate. The consummate safeman was thought to need sandpapered fingers and hypersensitive ears. His essential skill: a feeling for the vibrations of tumblers lining up or falling into place. This was pure myth. It was true that once in a long while someone would open a safe by feel, but, the lore notwithstanding, the chief tools of successful safecrackers were crowbars and drills. Safes were cracked; holes were torn in their sides; handles and dials were torn off. When all else failed, safes were burned. The safeman used “soup”—nitroglycerin. The Los Alamos physicists had been conditioned by the myth, and when word started spreading that the laboratory had a skilled safecracker on its staff, most of them believed—and never stopped believing—that Feynman had mastered the art of listening to the tiny clicks.
To learn how to crack safes he had to find his way past the same myth. He read pulp memoirs of safemen to look for their secrets. They inspired him to dreams of glory: these authors boasted abou
t opening bullion-filled safes underwater; he would write the book that would top them all. In its preface he would intone, I opened the safes which contained behind them the entire secret of the atomic bomb: the schedules for the production of plutonium, the purification procedures, how much was going to be needed, how the atomic bomb worked, how the neutrons are generated … the whole schmeer. Only gradually, as he looked for the nuggets of useful information, did he realize how mundane the business was. Because his repertoire would have to omit drills and nitroglycerin, it would have to make the most of such practical rules as he could find. Some he read; others he learned as he went along. Most were variations on a theme: People are predictable.
They tend to leave safes unlocked.
They tend to leave their combinations at factory settings such as 25-0-25.
They tend to write down the combinations, often on the edge of their desk drawers.
They tend to choose birthdays and other easily remembered numbers.
This last insight alone made an enormous difference. Of the 8,000 effective possible combinations, Feynman figured that only 162 worked as dates. The first number was a month from 1 to 12—given the margin of error, that meant he need try just three possibilities, 0, 5, and 10. For a day from 1 to 31 he needed six; for a year from 1900 to the present, just nine. He could try 3 × 6 × 9 combinations in minutes. He also discovered that it took just a few inexplicable successes to make a safecracker’s reputation.
By fiddling with his own safe he learned that when a door was open he could find the last number of a combination by turning the dial and feeling when the bolt came down. Given some time, he could find the second number that way, too. He made a habit of absently leaning against his colleagues’ safes when he visited their offices, twirling the dials like the perpetual fidgeter he was, and thus he built up a master list of partial combinations. The remaining trial and error was so trivial that he found himself—for the sake of cultivating his legend—carrying tools as red herrings and pretending that safe jobs took longer than they really did.
The Last Springtime
Friday afternoon again. Gravel switchbacks wound perilously down the mesa. Across a desert spotted with pale green bristles, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose like luminous cutouts thirty miles to the east, as bright as if they were a few city blocks away. The air was clearer than any Feynman had seen. The scenery left emotional fingerprints on many of the Easterners and Europeans who lived in its spell for two years. When it snowed, the shades of whiteness seemed impossibly rich. Feynman reveled in the clouds skimming low across the valley, the mountains visible above and below the clouds at once, the velvet glow of cloud-diffused moonlight. The sight stirred something within the most rational of minds. He mocked himself for feeling it: See, I’m getting an aesthetic sense. The days blurred, especially now—no more banker’s hours, not much theory to divert the mind. The pace of computation was hectic. Feynman’s day began at 8:30 and ended fifteen hours later. Sometimes he could not leave the computing center at all. He worked through for thirty-one hours once and the next day found that an error minutes after he went to bed had stalled the whole team. The routine allowed just a few breaks: a hasty ride across the mesa to help put out a chemical fire; or one of those Los Alamos seminar-briefing-colloquium-town-meetings, where, slouching as far as his frame would permit, he would sit in the second row next to a detached-looking Oppenheimer; or a drive with his friend Fuchs to some Indian caves, where they could explore on hands and knees until dusk.
Still, each Friday or Saturday, if he could, Feynman left this place behind, making his way down the rutted road in Paul Olum’s little Chevrolet coupe or sometimes now in Fuchs’s blue Buick. He turned over and over in his mind some nagging puzzle and let his thoughts drift back to the hard quantum problems he had left behind at Princeton. He made a difficult mental transition to his weekend. The trips down from those heights marked off full weeks for him, empty ones for Arline. He was like a spy invented by a novelist: “not certain whether this time spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this was the one time he was nothing at all, a void traveling between two points.” Later, when Fuchs, shockingly, turned out to have been a spy for the Soviet Union, Feynman thought it might not have been so strange after all that his friend had been able to hide his inner thoughts so well. He, too, had felt he was leading a double life. His anguish over Arline, so dominating his mind, stayed invisible to the colleagues who saw his aggressively carefree self. He would sit in a group and look at someone—even at Fuchs—and think, how easy it is to hide my thoughts from others. A third springtime was coming to Los Alamos, and Feynman knew it would be the last. For a moment he thought he felt a break in the tension. He found a way to get the computation group running smoothly enough to allow him a few hours more sleep. He took a shower. For a half hour he read a book before falling asleep. It seemed, just for a moment, that the worst might be over. He wrote Arline:
You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as other times but it rises & falls like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a resevoir for your strength—without you I would be empty and weak … I find it much harder these days to write these things to you.
He never wrote without saying I love you or I’m still loving you or I have a serious affliction: loving you forever. The pace quickened again, and Feynman sometimes thought about long days he had worked for twenty dollars a week waiting on tables and helping in the kitchen of his aunt’s summer hotel, the Arnold, on the beach at Far Rockaway. Wherever he went, his drumming could be heard through the walls, nervous or jaunty, a rapping that his staff had to enjoy or endure. It was not music. Feynman himself could barely endure the more standard tunes of his friend Julius Ashkin’s recorder, “an infernally popular wooden tube,” he called it, “for making noises bearing a one-one correspondence to black dots on a piece of paper—in imitation to music.”
Stresses were tightening, too, between the security staff and the scientists, and Feynman had lost his eager spirit of cooperation. A colleague had been interrogated for more than an hour in a smoky room, questions fired by men sitting in the dark, as in a melodramatic movie. “Don’t get scared tho,” Feynman wrote Arline, “they haven’t found out that I am a relativist yet.” Fear sometimes clutched Feynman now. His intestines suffered chronically. He had a chest X ray: clear. Names rushed through his head: maybe Donald; if a girl, maybe Matilda. Putzie wasn’t drinking enough milk—how could he help her build her strength at this distance? They were spending $200 a month on the room and oxygen and $300 more on nurses, and $300 was the shortfall between income and expenditures. His salary as a Manhattan Project group leader: $380 a month. If they spent Arline’s savings, $3,300 plus a piano and a ring, they could cover ten more months. Arline seemed to be wasting away.
Letters went back and forth almost daily. They wrote like a boy and a girl without experience at the art of love letters. They catalogued the everyday—how much sleep, how much money. Macy’s sent Arline an unexpected mail-order refund of forty-four cents: I feel like a millionaire … I.O.U. 22¢. His sporadic bad digestion or swollen eyelid; her waning or waxing strength, her coughed-up blood and her access to oxygen. They used matching stationery. It was a mail-order project of Arline’s—soon most of her relatives and many of Richard’s friends on the hill had the same green or brown block letterhead from the Dollar Stationery Company. For herself she ordered both formal (Mrs. Richard P. Feynman) and informal, with the same legend she had once caught Richard slicing from her pencils:
RICHARD DARLING,
I LOVE YOU
PUTZIE
She decorated the envelopes with red hearts and silver stars. The army decorated them with tape: OPENED BY U. S. ARMY EXAMINER.
They called each other “Dope” and then worried about whether they had given offense. You’re never that—just sill
y & cute & lots of fun—you know what I mean, don’t you coach? Alone in her cramped sanatorium room, decorated with a few pictures and knickknacks received as wedding gifts, Arline worried about Richard and other women. He was a popular dancer at Los Alamos parties; he flirted intently with nurses, wives, and a secretary of Oppenheimer’s. All it took to set Arline’s mind racing was an offhand mention of the wife of a colleague. Or worse: the scientists were in an uproar over the appearance of M.P.’s around a women’s dormitory (the army had discovered an active prostitution trade there), and for some reason Richard had been chosen to lead the protest. He reassured her continually. Everything is under control—& I love you only. She explained and reexplained the facts of their love like an incantation: he is tall, gentle, kind, strong; he supports her, but once in a while can lean on her, too; he must confide everything in her, as she has slowly learned to confide in him; we have to think in terms of us, always; she loves the way he stretches casually to open a high window beyond her reach, and she loves the way he talks babytalk with her.