to leave at all. Once, in a fanciful conversation about likely candidates to be a Nazi spy, one friend, Klaus Fuchs, a German turned Briton, suggested that it could only be Dick Feynman—who else had insinuated himself into so many different parts of the laboratory’s work? Who else had a regular rendezvous in Albuquerque? In its unreal isolation, with its unusual populace, Los Alamos was growing into a parody of a municipality. It took its place in the mental geography of its residents as it was officially: not a village in the lee of the Jemez Mountains, not only a fenced-in circle of houses on dirt paths by a pond, with ducks, but also a fictitious abstraction, P. O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. To some it carried an ersatz resonance of a certain European stereotype of America, as one resident noted—“a pioneer people starting a new town, a self-contained town with no outside contacts, isolated in vast stretches of desert, and surrounded by Indians.” Victor Weisskopf was elected mayor. Feynman was elected to a town council. The fence that marked the city line heightened a magic-mountain atmosphere—it kept the world apart. An elite society had assembled on this hill. Elite and yet polyglot—in this cauldron, as in the other wartime laboratories, a final valedictory was being written to the Protestant, gentlemanly, leisurely class structure of American science. Los Alamos did gather an aristocracy—“the most exclusive club in the world,” one Oxonian said—yet the princely, exquisitely sensitive Oppenheimer made it into a democracy, where no invisible lines of rank or status were to impede the scientific discourse. The elected councils and committees furthered that impression. Graduate students were supposed to forget that they were talking to famous professors. Academic titles were mainly left behind with the business suits and neckties. It was a democracy by night, too, when inflamed parties brought together cuisines and cocktails of four continents, dramatic readings and political debates, waltzes and square dances (the same Oxonian, bemused amid the clash of cultures, asked, “What exactly is square about it—the people, the room, or the music?”), a Swede singing torch songs, an Englishman playing jazz piano, and Eastern Europeans playing Viennese string trios. Feynman played brassy drum duets with Nicholas Metropolis and organized conga lines. He had never been exposed to culture as such a flamboyant stew (certainly not when he was a student learning to disdain the packaged morsels that MIT handed to its would-be engineers). One party featured an original ballet, to modernistic-sounding music by Gershwin, titled Sacre du Mesa. At the end a clattering, flashing mechanical brain noisily revealed the sacred mystery of the mesa: 2 + 2 = 5.
Los Alamos built its wall against theoutside world and thrived within. Separately and privately Richard and Arline, too, sought what refuge they could. They made their secret lives. They built a fence of their own. None of his scientific friends knew that he called her Putzie and she called him Coach; that she noticed the muscles hardening in his legs from all his hiking; that the days of respite from her illness were growing rarer. She wrote him in code, playing to his love of unraveling puzzles; his father did this, too. Their letters caught the eye of the military censors at the laboratory’s Intelligence Office. The censors alerted Feynman to regulation 4(e): Codes, ciphers or any form of secret writing will not be used. Crosses, X’s or other markings of a similar nature are equally objectionable. Censorship had been designed delicately to accommodate a nonmilitary clientele, university people who still liked to imagine that they were volunteers in a project of scientific research in a nation where the privacy of the mail was sacred. The censors trod carefully. They tried to turn mail around the day they received it, and they agreed to allow correspondence in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. They felt entitled at least to ask Feynman for the key to the codes.
He said he did not have