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They tend to write down the combinations, often on the edge of their desk drawers.

They tend to choose birthdays and other easily remembered numbers.

This last insight alone made an enormous difference. Of the 8,000 effective possible combinations, Feynman figured that only 162 worked as dates. The first number was a month from 1 to 12—given the margin of error, that meant he need try just three possibilities, 0, 5, and 10. For a day from 1 to 31 he needed six; for a year from 1900 to the present, just nine. He could try 3 × 6 × 9 combinations in minutes. He also discovered that it took just a few inexplicable successes to make a safecracker’s reputation.

By fiddling with his own safe he learned that when a door was open he could find the last number of a combination by turning the dial and feeling when the bolt came down. Given some time, he could find the second number that way, too. He made a habit of absently leaning against his colleagues’ safes when he visited their offices, twirling the dials like the perpetual fidgeter he was, and thus he built up a master list of partial combinations. The remaining trial and error was so trivial that he found himself—for the sake of cultivating his legend—carrying tools as red herrings and pretending that safe jobs took longer than they really did.

The Last Springtime

Friday afternoon again. Gravel switchbacks wound perilously down the mesa. Across a desert spotted with pale green bristles, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose like luminous cutouts thirty miles to the east, as bright as if they were a few city blocks away. The air was clearer than any Feynman had seen. The scenery left emotional fingerprints on many of the Easterners and Europeans who lived in its spell for two years. When it snowed, the shades of whiteness seemed impossibly rich. Feynman reveled in the clouds skimming low across the valley, the mountains visible above and below the clouds at once, the velvet glow of cloud-diffused moonlight. The sight stirred something within the most rational of minds. He mocked himself for feeling it: See, I’m getting an aesthetic sense. The days blurred, especially now—no more banker’s hours, not much theory to divert the mind. The pace of computation was hectic. Feynman’s day began at 8:30 and ended fifteen hours later. Sometimes he could not leave the computing center at all. He worked through for thirty-one hours once and the next day found that an error minutes after he went to bed had stalled the whole team. The routine allowed just a few breaks: a hasty ride across the mesa to help put out a chemical fire; or one of those Los Alamos seminar-briefing-colloquium-town-meetings, where, slouching as far as his frame would permit, he would sit in the second row next to a detached-looking Oppenheimer; or a drive with his friend Fuchs to some Indian caves, where they could explore on hands and knees until dusk.

Still, each Friday or Saturday, if he could, Feynman left this place behind, making his way down the rutted road in Paul Olum’s little Chevrolet coupe or sometimes now in Fuchs’s blue Buick. He turned over and over in his mind some nagging puzzle and let his thoughts drift back to the hard quantum problems he had left behind at Princeton. He made a difficult mental transition to his weekend. The trips down from those heights marked off full weeks for him, empty ones for Arline. He was like a spy invented by a novelist: “not certain whether this time spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this was the one time he was nothing at all, a void traveling between two points.” Later, when Fuchs, shockingly, turned out to have been a spy for the Soviet Union, Feynman thought it might not have been so strange after all that his friend had been able to hide his inner thoughts so well. He, too, had felt he was leading a double life. His anguish over Arline, so dominating his mind, stayed