109 East Palace (15 page)

Joe Lehman, a civil engineer, drove out west in his own car, and expecting that the capital of New Mexico would be quite a large metropolis, blew right by it. “I drove through the square and kept on going looking for the main part of town and I found myself out in the desert again,” he recalled. “So I turned around and came back and finally pulled into a service station right off the square and asked where downtown Santa Fe was. The guy said, ‘This is it. You’re in it.’” Unconvinced, Lehman asked for a telephone and called Dorothy McKibbin. “Where are you?” she asked. Lehman described his whereabouts as best he could, and she said, “Oh, yeah, I see you.” She was right across the Plaza from where he had stopped and went outside to wave at him.

Most of the new arrivals could not get over the inconspicuous little office that was the entrance to the all-important Los Alamos laboratory. One afternoon, Dorothy got a call from the Hill asking her to go over to La Fonda and round up two lost scientists. They had been sent from Chicago with instructions to report to 109 East Palace and had walked up and down the sleepy town without seeing anything that looked like a government office. Apparently, a child had been playing on the gate outside Dorothy’s office, and the iron-grill door had swung shut, further obscuring the miniature sign. Confused and tired, they had gone to the hotel, called the Met Lab in Chicago, and demanded, “Where the hell are we?” When Dorothy finally led them down the narrow passageway to her modest cubbyhole and invited them to fill out a few forms and turned the crank on the old-fashioned desk machine that produced their passes to the project, she saw the look of disbelief on their faces. “They were not impressed,” she observed dryly.

A silent understanding of sorts developed between Dorothy and the townspeople. The phone would ring, and it would be the owner of the corner drugstore calling to report that some oddly dressed character had blundered in: “There is a party here who is lost.” She would just laugh and reply, “Send him over right away.” After wandering around the Plaza for hours, Leon Fisher, one of the young Berkeley physicists recruited to work on the project, and his wife, Phyllis, staggered into a nearby bakery by mistake and hesitantly told the girl behind the counter that they had been “told to come here.” They stood staring in bewilderment at the freshly baked loaves, wondering if this was some elaborate ruse meant to mislead the general public, or if they were supposed to break open the bread to find a coded message bearing their final directions. Just then the bemused voice of the proprietor on the other side of the shop directed them to “the office down the way,” adding in a bored drawl, “People are going in and out of there all the time.”

For security reasons, even the word “physicist” was taboo. Some of the more jaded staffers took to calling physicists and chemists “fizzlers” and “stinkers,” but Dorothy thought that was disrespectful. The most famous physicists traveled under assumed names: Enrico Fermi was known as Henry Farmer, Emilio Segrè was Eugene Samson, Ernest Lawrence was Ernest Lawson. When G-2 fretted that Lawrence’s code name was becoming as well-known as his real one, they came up with an alternative—“Oscar Wilde”—reportedly because Wilde had written the play The
Importance of Being Ernest
. Dorothy was told to refrain from using their proper names at all times and to refer to them only by their “covers” when on the phone. Some came to stay permanently; others came only temporarily, as consultants. The latter included Fermi, who arrived in Dorothy’s office accompanied by John Baudino, a “tremendous bodyguard, a big halfback of a football team.” Baudino had been a lawyer before he was drafted into the army, and he now served as the famous Italian physicist’s plainclothes protector, chauffeur, and messenger. Fermi was short and stockily built, and seemed dwarfed by the hulking Baudino, though the latter, Dorothy observed, “tried to efface himself as much as he could.” Like most of the refugee scientists, Fermi was classified as an “enemy alien,” and it was safe to assume that among Baudino’s many duties was filing weekly reports to army intelligence.

Dorothy came to know Fermi quite well from his frequent trips, and he always stopped in, not only for his pass, but also to make a phone call. “He’d always call the Hill as soon as he got to Santa Fe and suggest they try such and such a computation. Then he’d call again from Lamy with another idea, and when he got back to Santa Fe, he’d call again with another suggestion.” He would often look at her in an inquiring way as he talked on the phone, as though she might possess the answers to his questions, his eyes twinkling, as his fingers nervously played with a pencil on her desk. Fermi found his all-American code name quite funny, especially since as soon as he pronounced it in his heavily accented English, it immediately aroused the suspicions of the Los Alamos security guards. He was always stopped and questioned, and once the guards demanded he produce letters addressed to “Mr. Farmer” to prove there even was such a person. Dorothy, who more than once came to his rescue, overheard one guard swear under his breath that enforcing the security regulations was not half as hard as trying to understand all the strange accents.

The code names were an endless source of confusion, missed connections, and delays. The physicists often forgot their aliases, or got them mixed up. The problems were compounded by the fact that many of the scientists or their family members were never informed of their new identities in the first place, so they failed to respond to the WAC drivers waiting to pick them up at the train station to take them to Dorothy’s office. Fermi, in particular, enjoyed making fun of all the cloak-and-dagger precautions, which struck him as fairly comical in the Wild West setting of New Mexico. He particularly loved the local Santa Fe policemen, who wore snappy Pancho Villa-type uniforms, all black and heavily studded with silver, and looked straight out of the movies. One afternoon, when Fermi and Sam Allison were in her office waiting for a car to take them up to the Hill, Dorothy, who had been instructed never to address any of the scientists using titles such as “Doctor” or “Professor,” could not resist teasing them. “As I made out their passes, I tossed my head and informed them that we had to demote them down here and speak of them and to them as plain ‘Mister,’” she wrote. But as usual, the two physicists had the last word on the matter:

They strolled around the town while waiting. Near the Cathedral, they noticed a statue in the yard.

“Who is that?” asked Allison of Fermi.

“That is Archbishop Lamy,” Fermi replied.

“Shhhhh,” whispered Allison, grabbing Fermi’s arm and glancing around cautiously. “Mrs. McKibbin would suggest we call him
Mister
Lamy.”

Dorothy understood that all the secrecy was because the army feared too many visitors in the off-season would give rise to curiosity. It was also the case that too many assorted European accents might have the same effect. There was also the possibility that some of the more famous scientists might be recognized from their magazine covers or newspaper photos, and that could lead to talk. It had happened once, in the case of the much-photographed Albert Einstein. As Dorothy recounted in her memoir, the little old man with the distinctive shock of white hair was sitting alone on a bench in the Plaza one afternoon when he caught the attention of one of Santa Fe’s more colorful gadflies:

Brian Boru Dunne was by no means an everyday small town reporter. He wore a great ten gallon hat and rode a white horse to town which he would tether in front of the Post Office. He was from the East, had written books one of which had a forward by H. G. Wells. He not only wrote a column on visitors for the town newspaper, a Cutting property, but was business manager in Santa Fe for senator Bronson Cutting’s interests. It was with undisguised excitement that he brought his column to the editor on a certain day. He had interviewed Einstein. The column was submitted to General Groves for approval, and brought the general storming into the office. The column was ordered killed and any mention of it forbidden. There was never an admission in the Los Alamos annals that Einstein ever visited Santa Fe.

While Dorothy tried to be vigilant about security, she comforted herself with the thought that Oppenheimer and company would probably be able to go about their business without people paying too much attention. “Santa Fe had always been a town of comings and goings,” she wrote. “After all, its only industries were tourists and politics.” For the most part, she was proved right. Will Harrison, who was editor of the daily paper,
The Santa Fe New Mexican
, instructed his staff not to bother her, cautioning them, “She won’t tell you anything.” In any case, the government had ordered the local papers to make no mention of the Los Alamos project until after the war. When the
Albuquerque Journal
slipped up and reported that Los Alamos personnel had helped put out a forest fire in the Jemez hills, the editor was raked over the coals by G-2. The official policy called for a complete media blackout—no newspaper and radio reports, no publicity of any kind, no mentions even indirectly related to the subject of atomic energy. The idea was to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. If everybody kept quiet, it would be easier to track the talkers and to pinpoint suspects. Another reason for the policy was to lull the Nazis into underestimating the Allied effort and, as a consequence, not to accelerate their own atomic research program.

No matter how busy or bizarre the comings and goings at 109 East Palace, people in Santa Fe went about their business just as if it were life as usual. They all watched the coal trucks tear up the old road to the Pajarito Plateau and said nothing. They heard about the big moving vans that got stuck on the washboard road and had to be pulled out of knee-deep bogs, and shrugged. Neighboring shopkeepers were aware that Dorothy’s office was in some way attached to a wartime project, but knew better than to ask about it. Dorothy did her part to keep it from becoming prematurely famous, using a combination of charm, soft soap, and double-talk to dismiss daily suspicions. When asked about people who had suddenly packed up and disappeared from town, as happened after she recommended her neighbor to fill the job as fire marshal on the site, or when a local baker went to work at Fuller Lodge, Dorothy made no reply. There were rumors that some folks had moved up to Los Alamos, but no one knew for certain. Over time, even her friends grew reluctant to stop by the office, where the most casual questions might be greeted by an awkward silence. They did not know what to say, so they stayed away.

At the end of March, Harold Agnew, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student, barged into Dorothy’s office and demanded to know if all his boxes had arrived safely. Most of the young laboratory staffers arrived in a sweat, panic-stricken that their irreplaceable equipment had failed to arrive in one piece. Having witnessed some alarming displays of nervous agitation, Dorothy knew there was nothing she could say to relieve his distress. Seeing would be believing. She just smiled serenely, handed him his pass, and pointed the way to Wilson’s Storage & Transfer. Agnew rushed straight to the shipping company, found a driver, jumped in the cab of the truck, and took off with his boxes without a clue where he was headed. All Dorothy had said was to “go on up” with the truck. She had supplied him with a yellow map covered with red pencil markings carefully indicating every mile and every turn of the last leg of the trip. He read the instructions: “Go around the Federal Building, turn north, Tesuque six miles, Pojoaque seventeen miles, turn west there and wind down the valley, cross the Rio Grande y Bravo, turn southwest ten miles and then ten miles directly west and up.”

In every direction he looked there were dirt roads leading off into nowhere. They passed through sleepy villages and fields being worked by farmers still using horse-drawn plows, as though in a time warp. He and a handful of others had been recruited by John Manley to be part of his team at the new laboratory, and before coming they had spent a few days at the University of Illinois helping him painstakingly dismantle his Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. Agnew’s bride of a year, Beverly, who had trained to be a schoolteacher, had stood there with a clipboard in hand, counting the number of boxes and making out the manifest. Some of the parts were made of hand-blown glass, and Agnew thought of them now, bouncing in the back of the truck. Manley had not been able to divulge their destination, but one night after dinner he had played them a record—“On the Santa Fe Trail.” Looking out the window of the cab of the truck as they climbed past lava beds and black escarpments, and cut through strange volcanic rock formations and a bed of white pumice, bits of stone clattering down the canyon walls and bouncing off the side of the truck, Agnew thought he was beginning to understand why Manley had been so reticent: “It was a dusty, isolated, uncivilized place.” A guard stopped him at the first gate and checked his pass and identification, and then it was another three miles of piñons and junipers to the settlement. Taking Dorothy’s last piece of advice, he stuck his head out the window and shouted for directions to the Tech Area.

Shortly after Agnew deposited his equipment, he set off for the Big House, where he was told he would be sleeping for the time being. On his way, he spotted Los Alamos’s tall, thin director walking in the distance, wearing his distinctive porkpie hat. “Like a little puppy I bounded over to him and said, ‘Hello, Dr. Oppenheimer!’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Hello, Harold. Where’s Beverly?’” Oppie knew that Agnew’s pretty blonde wife had worked for the head of the Met Lab back in Chicago and had handed out the security passes. Given how seriously shorthanded they were on the Hill, his only thought was that an experienced secretary was of far greater importance than the addition of yet another physics student. A much chagrined Agnew found himself stammering an apology for his wife’s absence, explaining that Beverly had been given special dispensation to delay her arrival in order to visit her brother before he was shipped overseas and would be there shortly.