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By Root 2263 0

peering at the wild West from the vantage point of Route 66. Missouri, the Mississippi River (thick and reddish-brown, just as he had imagined it), Kansas, Oklahoma—none of this struck him as very Western, actually. In fact it looked not unlike his rural corner of New York. He had decided that modern America resembled Victorian England, particularly in the attention devoted to furnishing middle-class homes and women. His destination was Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he intended to pursue Schwinger, who was presenting his work in a series of summer-school lectures. Feynman, meanwhile, was heading for Albuquerque to resolve an entanglement with a woman he had known at Los Alamos. (She was Rose McSherry, a secretary whom he dated after Arline’s death. Another of Feynman’s current attachments was needling him by calling McSherry his “movie queen.” Dyson’s guess was that he would marry her.)

Dyson realized that he was not taking the direct route to Ann Arbor, but he relished the chance to spend time with Feynman. No one interested him as much. In the months since Pocono, he had begun to think that his mission might be to find a synthesis of the difficult new theories of quantum electrodynamics—rival theories, as he saw it, though to most of the community the rivalry seemed lopsided. He had heard Feynman’s theory in informal blackboard sessions, and it still troubled him that Feynman was, as it seemed, merely writing down answers instead of solving equations in the normal manner. He wanted to understand more.

They drove, sometimes stopping for hitchhikers, more often maintaining a determined pace, and Feynman confided more in Dyson than he had done with any friend in his adult life. He startled Dyson with a grim outlook on the future. He felt certain that the world had seen only the beginning of nuclear war. The memory of Trinity, sheer ebullient joy at the time, haunted him now. Philip Morrison, his Cornell colleague, had published an admonitory description of an atomic blast on East 20th Street in Manhattan—Morrison had witnessed the Hiroshima aftermath and wrote this account in a horrifyingly vivid past tense—and Feynman could not meet his mother at a midtown restaurant without thinking about the radius of destruction. He could not shake a feeling that normal people, without the burden of his accursed knowledge, were living a pitiful illusion, like ants tunneling and building before the giant’s boot comes down. This was a classic danger sign—the feeling of being the only sane man, the only man who truly sees—but Dyson suddenly felt that Feynman was as sane as anyone he knew. This was not the jester he had first described to his parents. Dyson wrote later: “As we drove through Cleveland and St. Louis, he was measuring in his mind’s eye distances from ground zero, ranges of lethal radiation and blast and fire damage… . I felt as if I were taking a ride with Lot through Sodom and Gomorrah.”

As they drew closer to Albuquerque, Feynman was also thinking about Arline. Sometimes it occurred to him that her death might have left him with a feeling of impermanence. Spring flooding in the Oklahoma prairie closed the highway. Dyson had never seen rain fall in such dense curtains—nature as raw as these plainspoken Americans, he thought. The car radio reported people trapped in cars, drowned or rescued by boats. They pulled off the road in a town called Vinita and found lodging in a hotel of the kind Feynman knew all too well from his weekend trips to visit Arline: an “office” on the second floor, a sign reading, “This hotel is under new management, so if you’re drunk you came to the wrong place,” a hanging cloth covering the doorway to the room he shared with Dyson for fifty cents apiece. That night he told Dyson more about Arline than ever before. Neither of them forgot it.

They talked about their aspirations for science. Feynman cared far less than Dyson about his still-patchwork scheme for renormalizing quantum electrodynamics. It was his sum-over-histories theory of physics that claimed his passion. As Dyson saw, it was a grand vision