So how could he have worked on it (boo hoo)?
To the simple-minded, he would have said (had he dignified them, etc), It depends on your definition of the word “use.” In fact, the H-bomb did have a use, though it involved not using it. It was the only thing ever invented that could keep the other guy from using his own H-bomb. Yes, deterrence. Yes, Mutually Assured Destruction. Go ahead, make mushheaded jokes about it. Anyone with an ounce of practical sense in 1945, anyone who paused for a moment to remember how human societies actually worked, as opposed to humane dreams about how they might work if humans weren’t human, knew that world government was an impossibility. If you liked the idea of not dropping more nuclear bombs on more cities, there was only one hope. MAD, but true.
So you could say the robustness of deterrence was the reason he signed on with RAND. And he supposes you could say it was also the reason he quit.
It takes a lot to make Vernon change direction. He loves routine. He thinks of himself as a homebody. Imogen calls him a wet blanket. If Imogen could ever compromise on anything—a condition contrary to fact—maybe they could agree that he’s merely a stick-in-the-mud. On his own, perhaps he would have reached the necessary point of anger and disgust with RAND within six or eight years. Gen helped him get there inside twenty-four months. Anger and disgust are her specialties.
• • •
In September 1950, there were seventy graduate students in physics at the University of Chicago, sixty-nine of whom were men. The seventieth was Imogen.
All of the men wanted to help her with her homework. In fact, she needed it. As an undergraduate, she’d taken more classes in chemistry than in physics, and at a women’s college to boot. She freely admitted she was having difficulty. She was pretty, with wavy auburn hair, dark brown eyes, a good figure. Out of sixty-nine men jostling at her door, textbooks in hand, she eventually chose Vernon. Part of him has always wondered why. She was better-looking than he was, came from a better family. But she has never talked about her reasons.
At the university, before she chose him, she liked to go out with the men in a group, drink, smoke, argue; not physics, but everything else, especially religion and politics. She had a way of throwing back her head and snapping, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” She had another way of pointing her somewhat pointy nose down, pushing her glasses against the bridge, and snorting, “What a crock of shit!” The first time she swore in his presence, he objected, probably said something priggish about unladylike behavior, and she slapped him right down. “I’ll speak as I like.” She noticed he always ordered Coke, and when he explained he didn’t drink alcohol, she averred that that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.
Vernon had a girlfriend back in North Carolina—his first and, he’d assumed, his last. She was a sweet hometown girl, recently become his fiancée. But she mailed the ring back to him along with a brief letter just before he went home for Christmas, no doubt to forestall an awkward scene on her doorstep. She was sorry, he was a great guy and would do great things, but she’d fallen for a sweet hometown boy. Vernon had already been helping Imogen with her homework—from entirely innocent motives—and the broken engagement upset him enough that he spoke of it to her. Which was the first time outside the drinking group that they discussed anything personal. So he supposed he had Margaret to thank for breaking the ice.
A few of the things that, individually, were the most ridiculous thing Imogen had ever heard were the various beliefs and customs of the Southern Baptist Church. Like Vernon, she’d grown up in it. Her mother’s roots were in Alabama, where Gen was born. Her father had taken a job with the federal government in D.C. when she was two, and by the time she was twelve she was attending services, family be damned, in the basement chapel of the unfinished National Cathedral. High Church Episcopalianism was as far as she could get from Southern Baptism without turning Catholic—which was out of the question, as Catholicism unavoidably involved the Papacy, than which there was no larger crock of shit. “Episcopalian music is beautiful,” she said, “and the ministers are less likely to be small-town ignorant assholes.”
She got him out on the dance floor and she put a beer into his hand, later a scotch. She made wicked fun of their professors. His church became St. Edmund’s Episcopal, near the campus, and for special services, St. James Cathedral. The St. James choir sang Bach cantatas and Mendelssohn motets, which music was a revelation to this former jazzman. Clouds of incense rose into the ribbed vaults, carrying his sinful soul with them. Imogen hadn’t bothered to argue him into any of this. It was simpler than that. Did he want to be with her, or didn’t he? He did. His main worry was that he didn’t deserve her. She was an only child, the apple of her parents’ eyes. She’d won piano competitions as a teenager, horse-jumping competitions in college. Her father had an engineering degree from Cornell.
At least he could help her with her homework. As the end of the year approached, she needed it more and more. “It was a mistake to switch from chemistry,” she said, and he silently agreed. They studied together every evening in the last month, and she squeaked through her exams. Then she wrote to her parents telling them she was engaged and would be leaving school. From her indignant reaction to the letter
