109 East Palace (14 page)

G-2’s secret office was located in the old post office across the street. The army had a separate office nearby in the Bishop Building, but there were plenty of mix-ups with people reporting to the wrong address, and they could not be too careful. On one memorable occasion, security called and alerted her that a suspected German operative was in the Plaza. “There is a spy coming your way and she’s dressed in an American tweed suit and speaks very good English,” the G-2 agent informed her, adding that she was in the company of an army sergeant. Dorothy decided she had better take a look for herself. She made a “constructive little trip” around the Plaza and peeked into one or two shops on Palace Avenue before spotting the woman in tweed, who was “very nice looking.” Dorothy hurried back to her station and was sitting at her desk when they came in. The woman demanded a pass for the site, explaining that she “had a ride with the sergeant.” Dorothy said pleasantly, “Well, that’s nice, and who are you [here] to see?” When the woman could not name the person who had requested she visit the site, Dorothy told her, “Well, I’m awfully sorry. I cannot possibly issue a pass to anyone unless I have instructions from the Hill to do so.” They went back and forth this way for five or ten minutes, the woman’s voice rising and the sergeant just standing there, while the security guards at the door looked on impassively. Dorothy stood her ground, and finally they stalked out. “She didn’t get up to the Hill,” Dorothy noted with satisfaction.

Dorothy knew that most people were unaware of how many agents, or “creeps,” as they were sometimes called, were in town. Operatives rode the trains and buses in and out of Santa Fe, and a soldier from the Hill, going home on furlough, might find himself engaged in casual conversation with another GI in a smoker. If one of the soldiers was indiscreet, he might find himself in the clutches of detectives before he reached home. In such cases, he would be packed off to some rear-echelon post without so much as a court-martial. Even a closed trial, it was pointed out to her, would involve records and stenographers. Instead, the soldier would be sent to a commanding officer with secret orders assigning him to a remote Pacific island where there was no chance of being captured. Suspected agents were not immediately arrested, but put under twenty-four hour surveillance, so security could follow their trail and see who their friends were. As an example of G-2’s vigilance, Dorothy recalled the time a visitor made a random remark about machinery that caught G-2’s attention. She later learned he was “tailed” for 1,500 miles before finally being cleared. She heard stories about tipplers sounding off in bars as to what was going on up at the Hill while an operative stood at their elbow taking notes. If the loudmouth turned out to be a young laboratory staffer, he was hauled in front of G-2 for violating security and given harsh punishment. If it turned out he was just a rancher who had imbibed one too many, he was saved from a good grilling by the fact that he was plainly talking through his hat.

Despite all the precautions and checkpoints, security agents worried constantly about espionage and the chance that an enemy agent would slip through their fingers. “We were haunted by G-2,” she told a reporter as her thoughts turned back to when the threat of spies was on everyone’s mind. “We needed to be. We were in a very dangerous spot as the frontier to Los Alamos.”

The hours were long, and the pace fast, relentlessly so, as though “a spark was lighted day and night.” But the scientists’ sense of urgency and anticipation was contagious. Everything had to go through the office on East Palace, with many of the rules and ways of doing things improvised along the way. In the early days of the pass system, before the proper equipment arrived, Dorothy had to supply typewritten letters of identification to everyone going to the site, whether the person was a truck driver with a single load or a regular member of the staff. To top it off, because the letters were usually folded, read, and refolded repeatedly throughout the day, and carried in sweaty back pockets, a collection of torn illegible passes were turned in each week with a request for replacements. As Charlotte Serber, who was helping out in Oppie’s office, recalled, “They were a nuisance to type since no erasures were allowed, and the system resulted in writer’s cramp for the director, and bad tempers for the typists.”

The phones rang incessantly. None of the lines were connected interoffice, so whenever Oppie got an important call, Dorothy would have to jump up and search the premises, drag him out of whatever office he happened to be in and then out across the courtyard, and force him to attend to the business at hand. When Oppie was on the Hill, he called down several times a day, usually inquiring about an overdue scientist and sending her on a frantic search for the missing individual. Usually, it turned out that the person was stuck out at a ranch in the valley and had been waiting for hours for one of the army’s antediluvian buses to rattle by. Dorothy would promise to do her best to rustle up some sort of transport, and she cheerfully advised physicists who had never in their lives been on a horse, “If not, I’m afraid you’ll just have to go on practicing your riding for a while.”

Communication with the site was not easy, and the arduous process was enough to make an impatient scientist “tear his hair” while the operator repeated endlessly, “The line is busy.” The only existing telephone at the school was a primitive ranger’s phone that had a dozen parties on it and was operated by vigorously turning the small handle. The telephone line itself was made of iron wire, and there was no telling how many years ago the Forest Service had laid it down over the thirty-five miles between Los Alamos and Santa Fe. Charlotte Serber, who was working in the Tech Area one afternoon, went to answer the phone during a violent spring thunderstorm. Just as she reached for it, a bolt must have hit, and she saw a spark jump from the line to a lamp cord just inches away. Following that demonstration of the laws of physics, no one went near the phone in inclement weather. But even on a good day, it could take more than an hour to get a call through. Priscilla Greene, who was temporarily running the mail room, had to take over manning the switchboard at night because the scientists were getting so frustrated that they could not reach anyone. Moreover, the line, eaten away by chipmunks over the years, carried so much static, it was necessary to shout over and over again to make oneself understood. “We all yelled so loud you could probably hear us all the way from Santa Fe to Los Alamos,” said Dorothy, who screamed herself hoarse every morning just trying to find out how many mouths she had to feed. Charlotte remembered one call from the Hill asking them to send up eight extra lunches: “The request as we heard it above the noise, but lucidly could not fill, was for eight extra-large trucks.”

One way or another, the phone was their nemesis. The scientists were fond of sending telegrams, but the only means they had of transmitting them was through the telephone operators. Most of the telegrams sounded a little silly because of the code the Tech Area used when referring to classified material: “top” for “atom”; “boat” for “bomb”; “spinning” for “smashing”; and “igloo of urchin” for “isotope of uranium.” The messages were never signed with proper names, and the Los Alamos physicists devised their own system of disguising their names, while Oppie and Groves employed a quadratic letter code that each man carried in his wallet throughout the war. “Western Union really must have hated us,” observed Charlotte. “There were wires in makeshift codes, wires that said only ‘Butane’ or ‘Yes.’ There were wires in foreign languages. Wires and more wires.” After a few weeks, they could spell words like
PHYSIKALISCHE ZEITSHRIFT
in their sleep.

The chaos in the office often spilled outside onto the street on East Palace Avenue. There the army drivers stopped hourly for personnel going up to the Hill, pulling up so close to the curb that the huge green buses would crash into the sagging corner of the old portal and its ancient posts. Young WACs (Women’s Army Corps personnel) driving official cars, or “taxis,” as they were euphemistically referred to by project members, parked out front until they were dispatched to Lamy to pick up important visitors. Nervous young scientists, driving trucks for the Procurement Office, paced outside, waiting for the delivery of equipment so sensitive it could only be shepherded up the bumpy, torturous mountain road by one of them. The narrow old street was never intended to accommodate such a circus, and the traffic would become backed up, and the police summoned. Invariably, one of the bus drivers would be given a summons for blocking the road and creating a hazard if the fire trucks needed to pass in a hurry. Worse yet, the physicists, many of whom came from abroad and were always driving on the wrong side of the road, would be ticketed and would come into her office waving their hands and protesting loudly. Dorothy would then have to trot round to the local magistrate, who was aware of the project’s existence if not its purpose, and using all her feminine charms, plead with him to tear up all the tickets and set things right with the town authorities. In turn, she would promise that the army buses would stand at her door for only brief intervals. Then everything would be fine for a few days until the next crisis.

“There was never a dull moment,” she recalled. “The office was a madhouse. It was bedlam. We worked six days a week but even so I couldn’t wait to get back to work in the morning. There were always people who needed attention—they were hungry, exhausted, in a hurry. If there was anybody [left] at the end of the day I sometimes took them home with me.” When she noticed that Bob Bacher had a cold, she insisted he stay the night with her in town, refusing to allow him to go up to the Hill because she could not be sure he would be properly looked after. From then on, her adobe farmhouse became known as a refuge for weary scientists, the only place they could steal away to for a good meal, warm bath, and peaceful night’s sleep in a real home.

Because of her importance to the project, Dorothy held a Q badge, giving her laboratory security clearance and permitting her home on Old Pecos to be used as an officially sanctioned “safe house” by scientists who needed to overnight in town in order to catch an early train the next day. As the months went by, however, it turned into a popular getaway spot for couples who were desperate to escape the military post and enjoy a late night on the town. Kevin would return home some Friday nights to find cars stacked in the driveway, and bodies in sleeping bags strewn all over the lawn. “It was the only place Los Alamos people could fraternize off the Hill, so they would all come for the weekend,” he said. “On weekends, the house was always full to overflowing.” A hastily scribbled note from his mother on the kitchen table would inform him of the obvious: “All the beds are full. See if you can find a bedroll and a place to park it out back.”

Dorothy was on call twenty-four hours a day and became accustomed to fielding frantic messages from Oppenheimer in the middle of the night. Once he phoned in a state explaining that Ed McMillan had returned late from a trip and had gone straight to La Fonda only to discover “there was no room at the inn.” Dorothy promised to fetch him, hurried down to the hotel, and brought him home. McMillan had said an official car would be coming to take him to Los Alamos, so the following morning when Dorothy left for work at 7:00
A.M.
, she did not wake him. When Kevin got up, he found a stranger in his kitchen breaking eggs, and the two sat down for an amiable breakfast. They got to talking about Kevin’s car, an old ’27 Chevy parked in the driveway, which he had purchased with money he had been saving to buy a horse. He had gotten a good deal on the car, he told the Berkeley physicist, but it just would not start. McMillan offered to take a look under the hood, and happily employed, they lost track of time. “That’s where my mother found us at noon after the lab had called, urgently searching for the scientist who’d missed his crucial appointment,” said Kevin. Dorothy informed the Hill of McMillan’s whereabouts, and shortly thereafter a car came and spirited him away.

All that month and the next, a steady stream of scientific luminaries stumbled into Dorothy McKibbin’s office from the great universities across the country, from Harvard and MIT to the universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, and California. She took particular note of a fellow who came from Princeton, her husband’s alma mater, a gangling youth named Richard Feynman, who hardly looked old enough to be an expert in anything. Many were foreigners, with oddly tailored clothes and battered briefcases, who looked poignantly out of place on the platform in Lamy. Displaced and disoriented, often showing up days after they were expected, the travelers collapsed into a chair as though they “could never move again,” she wrote, so exhausted “one could almost see [their] fatigue dropping off and piling up against the old adobe walls”:

They arrived, breathless and sleepless and haggard, tired from riding on trains that were slow, trains that were held up for troop trains, trains that were too crowded to take on the hundreds of passengers waiting on the platforms, tired from missing connections, and having nothing to eat, and losing their luggage, or sitting the dawn hours in an airport waiting for a plane…. The new members were tense with expectancy and curiosity. They had left physics laboratories, chemistry, metallurgy, engineering projects, had sold their homes or rented them, had deceived their friends, had packed their
lares et penates
[personal belongings], and launched into the unknown and unheard of.

All they knew of their actual destination was contained in the “Arrival Procedure Memorandum” sent to all laboratory employees, instructing them to find their way to Santa Fe and report to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office at 109 East Palace Avenue. “The following procedure is suggested as the method by which your arrival in Santa Fe and the Site can best be simplified for you and for this office …” it began in language that was as bureaucratic as it was uninformative. East Palace Avenue was their last known address before the heavy door of secrecy shut behind them. It was the rabbit hole they fell into. In the jargon of the Manhattan District, Los Alamos was never referred to by name and was designated as “Site Y” or the “Zia Project.” But as neither phrase really caught on, it was known generally as “the Site,” “the Project,” or simply “the Hill.” These were all code words they learned to use interchangeably. Machinists dashed in and asked, “Where is the dance hall?” “Thirty-five miles to go” was all the reply they would get from Dorothy.