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. That’s what it was like in my diary because that’s all they told me. Here are some excerpts: “On the recommendation of Dr. Mines, Mr. Gomez today began work on a phase of reactor design theory to be implemented at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The work involves the setting up of thirty-five pairs of partial differential equations . . . Mr. Gomez announced tentatively today that in checking certain theoretical work in progress at the Los Alamos Laboratory of the A.E.C. he discovered a fallacious assumption concerning neutron-spin which invalidates the conclusions reached. This will be communicated to the Laboratory . . . Dr. Mines said today that Mr. Gomez has successfully invoked a hitherto-unexploited aspect of Min-kowski’s tensor analysis to crack a stubborn obstacle toward the control of thermonuclear reactions . . .” I protested at one of the briefing sessions with Dr. Mines against this gobbledegook. He didn’t mind my protesting. He leaned back in his chair and said calmly: “Vilchek, with all friendliness I assure you that you’re getting everything you can understand. Anything more complex than the vague description of what’s going on would be over your head. And anything more specific would give away exact engineering information which would be of use to foreign countries.”
“This isn’t the way they treated Bill Lawrence when he covered the atomic bomb,” I said bitterly. Mines nodded, with a pleased smile. “That’s it exactly,” he said. “Broad principles were being developed then-interesting things that could be told without any great harm being done. If you tell somebody that a critical mass of U-two thirty-five or Plutonium goes off with a big bang, you really haven’t given away a great deal. He still has millions of man-hours of engineering before him to figure out how much is critical mass, to take only one small point.” So I took his word for it, faithfully copied the communiques he gave me and wrote what I could on the human-interest side for release some day. So I recorded Gomez’s progress with English, his taste for chicken pot pie and rice pudding, his habit of doing his own housework on the top floor and his old-maidish neatness. “You live your first fifteen years in a tin shack, Beel,” he told me once, “and you find out you like things nice and clean.” I’ve seen Dr. Mines follow Gomez through the top floor as the boy swept and dusted, talking at him hi their mathematical jargon. Gomez worked in forty-eight-hour spells usually, and not eating much. Then for a couple of days he’d live like a human being, grabbing naps, playing catch on the lawn with one or another of the Security people, talking with me about his childhood in Puerto Rico and his youth in New York. He taught me a little Spanish and asked me to catch him up on bad mistakes in English. “But don’t you ever want to get out of here?” I demanded one day. He grinned: “Why should I, Beel? Here I eat good, I can send money to the parents. Best, I find out what the big professors are up to without I have to wait five-ten years for damn declassifying.” “Don’t you have a girl?” He was embarrassed and changed the subject back to the big professors. Dr. Mines drove up then with his chauffeur, who looked like a G-man and almost certainly was. As usual, the physicist was toting a bulging briefcase. After a few polite words with me, he and Julio went indoors and upstairs. They were closeted for five hours-a record. When Dr. Mines came down I expected the usual briefing session. But he begged off. “Noth-