And maybe what bothered him most of all was just that—that he couldn’t say these things to Imogen. The secrecy shit, she called it. He and she were scientists, for God’s sake. Vernon had had a physics teacher at Wake Forest who one day plowed through a long string of calculations on the blackboard to arrive at one of Maxwell’s equations. He turned toward the class and jabbed the chalk against the board behind him. “This is true.” The students sat in a midafternoon doze. He tried to wake them: “Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of whatever any of you have ever said, or will ever say in your lives, is either unproven, unprovable, or false. This”—jab—“is”—jab—“true,” and on the final word he broke the chalk against the board, fragments falling to the floor in arcs determined by their initial direction and velocity, the force of gravity, and air resistance. There had always been, would always be, too little knowledge in the world, and a scientist’s role was to enlarge it. Which meant sharing it.
In his last weeks, Vernon couldn’t stop saying to his RAND lunchmates, “Cheer up! We’ve got the keys to the candy store.” Even though he is an introvert—or maybe because of it—he has never shied away from arguments. Sometimes a colleague got mad at him and he got mad back. He has never shied away from anger, either. Sitting in his study looking back, seventy years old, lonely as hell, surrounded by six and a half thousand classical music records, he can’t remember what anyone else at the lunch table said. He sees that, in rejecting RAND, he became a true RANDoid: he was Wohlstetter and Paxson, obliterating his opponents with his rightness, leaving behind nothing of their idiocy but melted steel frames.
He submitted his resignation in August. For two months he’d been secretly casting about for other employment, and he’d found a job in Massachusetts. Imogen had always wanted to live in the Northeast, after her college days at Mount Holyoke. His paycheck would come from the Air Force, but he would be doing pure research on the absorption profile of ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere. Unclassy and unclassified. Over the next thirty-five years, through a series of carefully designed balloon and rocket tests, he amassed the data set that became the accepted standard in his field. There are half a dozen solar physicists worldwide who know and value his work. To anyone else who asked him, during those years, what kind of physics he did, his pleasure was to begin and end with the disclaimer, “It has no conceivable application.”
1953
Wednesdays after work at the Victor Chemical Company, instead of taking the train back into Chicago, she hops on a bus to Park Forest. She gets off near the clock tower and walks through the brand-new shopping plaza, where she stops to get a bite to eat, then continues north to the farmhouse at the edge of the open field. In good weather, as on this cloudless late April day, the walk gives her such a lift. The sun has just gone down and half the sky is orange.
She always arrives punctually at 7:50 for her 8:00–11:00 shift. Greets the funny old fart, “Sarge” Dannenfelser, who’s often in the downstairs office fussing about the incomplete schedule and the unpredictable volunteers. He was an army sergeant in World War II—his real name is Hubert—who keeps his hair in a bristly flattop and sits as though he has an ironing board up his ass. But he likes Imogen, because he’s got just enough brains to see she’s reliable. He’s somewhere in his forties, fit and trim. Occasionally as she comes downstairs from the lookout she can hear him doing push-ups in the office.
“Hi, Sarge.”
“Mrs. Fuller! I heard your steps and knew it was you. Good viewing weather.”
“The best. Still no one at eleven?”
“Not a blessed soul. Midweek is hard. But we’re doing better than the other area posts. There are a lot of ex-military folks in Park Forest with a can-do, pitch-in attitude.”
“That’s what I hear.” From you, in fact, once a week. Sweet old fool. She signs in, pins on her wings (this is hilarious, but Sarge likes them to be “in uniform” when they’re manning the post), and heads up the stairs, out onto the roof, and up the three steps into the booth. “Hi, Viv.”
“Hi, Gen.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Well, the full moon just came up.”
“Did you call it in?”
“Satellite flash! Satellite flash!”
They both laugh. Viv is wonderful. Smart and lively. She majored in astronomy at Northwestern but now has two little boys, comes out here twice a week to give her husband a little practice at helping out at home. She wishes she could take a midnight shift to enjoy the stars, but Warren won’t have it. What if one of the boys is sick, or has a nightmare, Viv says he says. He has a full-time job.
Viv pulls the string to turn on the overhead lightbulb, gathers her things. “Did you hear about the Friday graveyard shift hullabaloo?” she asks.
“No.”
“Turns out that high
