Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [113]
Inevitably, he then ran afoul of regulation 8(l), a delightfully (to Feynman) self-referential law requiring the censorship of any information concerning these censorship regulations or any discourse on the subject of censorship. He got the message to Arline nonetheless, and her acid sense of fun took over. She started sending letters with holes cut in them or blotches of ink covering words: “It’s very difficult writing because I feel that the —— is looking over my shoulder.” He would respond with numerical fancies, pointing out how peculiarly the decimal expansion of 1/243 repeats itself: .004 115 226 337 448 … and his increasingly frustrated official audience would have to ensure that the string of digits was neither a cipher nor a technical secret. Feynman explained with subtle glee that this fact had the empty, tautological, zero-information-content quality of all mathematical truths. In one of her mail-order catalogs Arline found a kit for do-it-yourself jigsaw puzzles; the next letter from the Albuquerque sanatorium to Box 1663 came disassembled in a little sack. From another the censors deleted a suspicious-sounding shopping list. Richard and Arline talked about a booby-trapped letter that would begin, “I hope you remembered to open this letter carefully because I have included the Pepto Bismol powder …” Their letters were a lifeline. No wonder, under watchful eyes, the lovers found ways to make them private.
The censorship, like the high barbed-wire fence, reminded the mesa’s more sensitive residents of their special status: watched, enclosed, restricted, isolated, surrounded, guarded. They understood that no other civilian post office box had all its mail opened and read. The fence was a double-edged symbol. Few scientists were so important as to merit armed soldiers patrolling their laboratory perimeters. They could not help feeling some pride. Feynman admonished his parents to maintain secrecy: “There are Captains in the Army who live up here who don’t know what we’re doing. (Even Majors.)” Much later, in a post–Catch-22 world, the military trappings were remembered as irritants and targets of mockery. At the time it was not so simple. The men and women of Los Alamos resented the fence and respected the fence. Feynman explored most of its length. When he discovered holes, with well-beaten paths leading through, he pointed them out in a spirit of good citizenship, annoyed only that the guards responded so lackadaisically. (“I explained it to him & the officer in charge,” he wrote Arline, “but I bet they don’t do anything.”) He never realized that the holes had semiofficial sanction. The security staff tolerated them—with Oppenheimer’s connivance, it seemed—so that people from the local tribes could come to the laboratory’s twelve-cent movies.
Feynman’s exploring drew him to every secret and private place. He had a fidgety way of prying into things—the laboratory’s new Coca-Cola dispenser, for example, a contraption that secured the bottles with a locked steel collar around their necks. This device replaced an older container, the most ancient prototype of the soda machine: customers would open the lid, take a bottle, and honorably drop their coin in a box. The new dispenser struck Feynman as a withdrawal of trust; thus he felt entitled to accept the technological challenge and finesse the mechanism. Was that right or wrong? He debated the moral principles with his friends. Meanwhile he found himself abstaining from liquor. He had got so drunk one night that he could tell it was ruining his drum playing and joke telling, although it did not stop him from running all over the base singing and beating pots and pans; finally he passed out, and Klaus Fuchs took him home. He decided to give up alcohol, along with tobacco, and wondered whether it was a sign of encroaching conventionality. Was he getting “moraller and moraller” as he got older? (“That’s bad.”)
His reputation