He started and put down the dish he was wiping. "Julio Gomez, señor.
Porque, par favor? Que pasa?"
He wasn't the least bit scared.
"Nueva York Board of Health," said the admiral. "Con su permiso—" He took Gomez's hands in his and looked at them gravely, front and back, making tsk-tsk noises. Then, decisively: "Vamanos, Julio. Siento mucho.
Usted esta muy enjermo." Everybody started talking at once, the woman doubtless objecting to the slur on her restaurant and the cook to losing his dishwasher and Gomez to losing time from the job.
The admiral gave them broadside for broadside and outlasted them. In five minutes we were leading Gomez silently from the restaurant. "La lotería!" a woman customer said in a loud whisper. "O las mutas,"
somebody said back. Arrested for policy or marihuana, they thought.
The pretty waitress at the cashier's table looked stricken and said nervously: "Julio?" as we passed, but he didn't notice.
Gomez sat in the car with the half-smile on his lips and his eyes a million miles away as we rolled downtown to Foley Square. The admiral didn't look as though he'd approve of any questions from me. We got out at the Federal Building and Gomez spoke at last. He said in surprise: "This, it is not the hospital!"
Nobody answered. We marched him up the steps and surrounded him in the elevator. It would have made anybody nervous—it would, have made me nervous—to be herded like that; everybody's got something on his conscience. But the kid didn't even seem to notice. I decided that he must be a half-wit or—there came that crazy notion again.
The glass door said "U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Office of Security and Intelligence." The people behind it were flabbergasted when the admiral and party walked in. He turned the head man out of his office and sat at his desk, with Gomez getting the caller's chair. The rest of us stationed ourselves uncomfortably around the room.
It started. The admiral produced the letter and asked in English: "Have you ever seen this before?" He made it clear from the way he held it that Gomez wasn't going to get his hands on it.
"Si, seguro. I write it last week. This is funny business. I am not really sick like you say, no?" He seemed relieved.
"No. Where did you get these equations?"
Gomez said proudly: "I work them out."
The admiral gave a disgusted little laugh. "Don't waste my time, boy.
Where did you get these equations?"
Gomez was beginning to get upset. "You got no right to call me liar," he said. "I not so smart as the big physicists, seguro, and maybe I make mistakes. Maybe I waste the profesór Soo-har-man his time but he got no right to have me arrest. I tell him right in letter he don't have to answer if he don't want. I make no crime and you got no right!"
The admiral looked bored. "Tell me how you worked the equations out,"
he said.
"Okay," said Gomez sulkily. "You know the random paths of neutron is expressed in matrix mechanics by profesór Oppenheim five years ago, all okay. I transform his equations from path-prediction domain to cross-section domain and integrate over absorption areas. This gives u series and v series. And from there, the u-v relationship is obvious, no?"
The admiral, still bored, asked: "Got it?"
I noticed that one of his young men had a shorthand pad out. He said:
"Yes."
The admiral picked up the phone and said: "This is MacDonald. Get me Dr. Mines out at Brookhaven right away." He told Gomez blandly: "Dr.
Mines is the chief of the A.E.C. Theoretical Physics Division. I'm going to ask him what he thinks of the way you worked the equations out. He's going to tell me that you were just spouting a lot of gibberish. And then you're going to tell me where you really got them."
Gomez looked mixed up and the admiral turned back to the phone. "Dr.
Mines? This is Admiral MacDonald of Security. I want your opinion on the following." He snapped his fingers impatiently and the'stenographer passed him his pad. "Somebody has told me that he discovered a certain relationship by taking—" He read carefully, "—by taking the random paths of a neutron expressed in matrix mechanics by Oppenheim, transforming his equations from the path-prediction domain to the cross-section domain and integrating over the absorption areas."
In the silence of the room I could hear the faint buzz of the voice on the other end. And a great red blush spread over the admiral's face from his brow to his neck. The faintly buzzing voice ceased and after a long pause the admiral said slowly and softly: "No, it wasn't Fermi or Szilard.
I'm not at liberty to tell you who. Can you come right down to the Federal Building Security Office in New York? I-I need your help. Crash priority." He hung up the phone wearily and muttered to himself:
"Crash priority. Crash." And wandered out of the office looking dazed.
His young men stared at one another in frank astonishment. "Five years," said one, "and—"
"Nix," said another, looking pointedly at me.
Gomez asked brightly: "What goes on anyhow? This is damn funny business, I think."
"Relax, kid," I told him. "Looks as if you'll make out all-"
"Nix," said the nixer again savagely, and I shut up and waited.
After a while somebody came in with coffee and sandwiches and we ate them. After another while the admiral came in with Dr. Mines. Mines was a white-haired, wrinkled Connecticut Yankee. All I knew about him was that he'd been in mild trouble with Congress for stubbornly plugging world government and getting on some of the wrong letterheads. But I learned right away that he was all scientist and didn't have a phony bone in his body.
"Mr. Gomez?" he asked cheerfully. "The admiral tells me that you are either a well-trained Russian spy or a phenomenal self-taught nuclear physicist. He wants me to find out which."
"Russia?" yelled Gomez, outraged. "He crazy! I am American United States citizen!"
"That's as may be," said Dr. Mines. "Now, the admiral tells me you describe the u-v relationship as 'obvious.' I should call it a highly abstruse derivation in the theory of continued fractions and complex multiplication."
Gomez strangled and gargled helplessly trying to talk, and finally asked, his eyes shining: "Por favor, could I have piece paper?"
They got him a stack of paper and the party was on.
For two unbroken hours Gomez and Dr. Mines chattered and scribbled.
Mines gradually shed his jacket, vest, and tie, completely oblivious to the rest of us. Gomez was even more abstracted. He didn't shed his jacket, vest, and tie. He didn't seem to be aware of anything except the rapid-fire exchange of ideas via scribbled formulae and the terse spoken jargon of mathematics. Dr. Mines shifted on his chair and sometimes his voice rose with excitement. Gomez didn't shift or wriggle or cross his legs. He just sat and scribbled and talked in a low, rapid monotone, looking straight at Dr. Mines with his eyes very wide open and lit up like searchlights.
The rest of us just watched and wondered.
Dr. Mines broke at last. He stood up and said: "I can't take any more, Gomez. I've got to think it over-" He began to leave the room, mechanically scooping up his clothes, and then realized that we were still there.
"Well?" asked the admiral grimly.
Dr. Mines smiled apologetically. "He's a physicist, all right," he said.
Gomez sat up abruptly and looked astonished.
"Take him into the next office, Higgins," said the admiral. Gomez let himself be led away, like a sleepwalker.
Dr. Mines began to chuckle. "Security!" he said. "Security!"
The admiral rasped: "Don't trouble yourself over my decisions, if you please, Dr. Mines. My job is keeping the Soviets from pirating American science and I'm doing it to the best of my ability. What I want from you is your opinion on the possibility of that young man having worked out the equations as he claimed."
Dr. Mines was abruptly sobered. "Yes," he said. "Unquestionably he did.
And will you excuse my remark? I was under some strain in trying to keep up with Gomez."