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plan to marry any time within the next year. But just a few days later, having received his degree and his new status, he wrote back to his mother, proudly updating his letterhead by penning “Ph.D.” after the printed “Richard Feynman.” He tried to respond reasonably to each argument. Neither Smyth nor the university physician were concerned about any danger to his health, he said. If marriage to Arline would be a burden, it was a burden he coveted. He had realized one day, arranging Arline’s transfer to the sanatorium nearby, that he was actually singing aloud with the sheer pleasure of planning their life together. As far as his duty to country was concerned, he would do whatever was necessary and go wherever he was sent. It was not that he wanted to be noble, he told his mother. Nor was it that he felt obliged to keep a promise he had made years before under different circumstances.

Marrying Arline was distinctly different from spinach. He did not like spinach. Anyway, he said, he had not eaten spinach out of love for his mother. “You misunderstood my motives as a small boy—I didn’t want you angry at me.”

He had made up his mind. He moved into a flat at 44 Washington Road immediately after graduation and for a while did not even tell his mother the address. He rapidly made the final arrangements—as Arline said, “in no time flat”:

I guess maybe it is like rolling off of a log—my heart is filled again & I’m choked with emotions—and love is so good & powerful—it’s worth preserving—I know nothing can separate us—we’ve stood the tests of time and our love is as glorious now as the day it was born—dearest riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we’re not little people—we’re giants … I know we both have a future ahead of us—with a world of happiness—now & forever.

With his parents frightened and unreconciled, he borrowed a station wagon from a Princeton friend, outfitted it with mattresses for the journey, and picked up Arline in Cedarhurst. She walked down her father’s hand-poured concrete driveway wearing a white dress. They crossed New York Harbor on the Staten Island ferry—their honeymoon ship. They married in a city office on Staten Island, in the presence of neither family nor friends, their only witnesses two strangers called in from the next room. Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline’s new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

LOS ALAMOS

Feynman tinkered with radios again at the century’s big event. Someone passed around dark welding glass for the eyes. Edward Teller put on sun lotion and gloves. The bomb makers were ordered to lie face down, their feet toward ground zero, twenty miles away, where their gadget sat atop a hundred-foot steel tower. The air was dense. On the way down from the hill three busloads of scientists had pulled over to wait while one man went into the bushes to be sick. A moist lightning storm had wracked the New Mexican desert. Feynman, the youngest of the group leaders, now grappled more and more urgently with a complicated ten-dial radio package mounted on an army weapons carrier. The radio was the only link to the observation plane, and it was not working.

He sweated. He turned the dials with nervous fingers. He knew what frequency he needed to find, but he asked again anyway. He had almost missed the bus after having flown back from New York when he received the urgent coded telegram, and he had not had time to learn what all those dials did. In frustration he tried rearranging the antenna. Still nothing—static and silence. Then, suddenly, music, the eerie, sweet sound of a Tchaikovsky waltz floating irrelevantly from the ether. It was a shortwave transmission on a nearby frequency, all the way from San Francisco. The signal gave Feynman a bench mark for his calibrations. He worked the dials again until he thought he had them right. He reset them to the airplane’s wavelength one last time. Still nothing. He decided to trust his