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: “For 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