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.
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. 'Nothing serious,' he said. 'We just sat down and kicked some ideas of his around. I told him to go ahead. We've been—ah—using him very much like a sort of computer, you know. Turning him loose on the problems that were too tough for me and some of the other men. He's got the itch for research now. It would be very interesting if his forte turned out to be creative.'
I agreed.
Julio didn't come down for dinner. I woke up in darkness that night when there was a loud bump overhead, and went upstairs in my pyjamas.
Gomez was sprawled, fully dressed, on the floor. He'd tripped over a footstool. And he didn't seem to have noticed. His lips were moving and he stared straight at me without knowing I was there.
'You 'all right, Julio?' I asked, and started to help him to his feet.
He got up mechanically and said: '—real values of the zeta function vanish.'
'How's that?'
He saw me then and asked, puzzled: 'How you got in here, Beel? Is dinnertime?'
'Is four a.m., por dios. Don't you think you ought to get some sleep?' He looked terrible.
No; he didn't think he ought to get some sleep. He had some work to do.
I went downstairs and heard him pacing overhead for an hour until I dozed off.
This splurge of work didn't wear off in forty-eight hours. For a week I brought him meals and sometimes he ate absently, with one hand, as he scribbled on a yellow pad. Sometimes I'd bring him lunch to find his breakfast untouched. He didn't have much beard, but he let it grow for a week—too busy to shave, too busy to talk, too busy to eat, sleeping in chairs when fatigue caught up with him.
I asked Leitzer, badly worried, if we should do anything about it. He had a direct scrambler-phone connection with the New York Security and Intelligence office, but his orders didn't cover anything like a self-induced nervous breakdown of the man he was guarding.
I thought Dr. Mines would do something when he came—call in an M.D., or tell Gomez to take it easy, or take some of the load off by parceling out whatever he had by the tail.
But he didn't. He went upstairs, came down two hours later, and absently tried to walk past me. I headed him off into my room. 'What's the word?' I demanded.
He looked me in the eye and said defiantly: 'He's doing fine. I don't want to stop him.'
Dr. Mines was a good man. Dr. Mines was a humane man. And he wouldn't lift a finger to keep the boy from working himself into nervous prostration. Dr. Mines liked people well enough, but he reserved his love for theoretical physics. 'How important can this thing be?'
He shrugged irritably. 'It's just the way some scientists work,' he said.
'Newton was like that. So was Sir William Rowan Hamilton—'
'Hamilton-Schmamilton,' I said. 'What's the sense of it? Why doesn't he sleep or eat?'
Mines said: 'You don't know what it's like.'
'Of course,' I said, getting good and sore. 'I'm just a dumb newspaper man. Tell me, Mr. Bones, what is it like?'
There was a long pause, and he said mildly: 'I'll try. That boy up there is using his brain. A great chess player can put on a blindfold and play a hundred opponents in a hundred games simultaneously, remembering all the positions of his pieces and theirs and keeping a hundred strategies clear in his mind. Well, that stunt simply isn't in the same league with what Julio's doing up there.
