Chapter 38

I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.

—Richard Feynman

Dick Feynman’s talk at the Pocono conference had been a disaster. He’d driven the three hours back to Ithaca without saying a word, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on the radio when they could get reception, while Hans Bethe alternately snoozed in the passenger seat and stared out at the springtime countryside of Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Dick dropped Hans at his house, then, without going home himself, he headed straight to his favorite bar, three blocks from the Cornell campus. It was a Saturday night; something had to be going on.

I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

“You’ve been ignoring me all evening,” said the blonde in the form-fitting silvery dress as she slipped onto the barstool next to him.

Feynman had a taste of his beer. “Not all evening,” he said, looking off in the distance. “You came in here at 9:44.”

It was a little after midnight now. “And you’ve been with five guys since.”

“Only four!” Her blue irises rolled up a bit as she mentally counted. “No, you’re right. Five.” She gave him a half smile. “But not you.”

He pointed up at the ceiling fan with its trio of light bulbs, each in a tulip-shaped holder, each casting a conical beam in the smoky air.

“You know,” he said as if it had been the topic of conversation all along, “you could argue that light is the hardest-working thing in the universe. After all, it goes faster than anything else—almost seven hundred thousand miles an hour. But it’s actually lazy. It does it by taking the easiest possible path. That’s something called the principle of least effort. I subscribe to that, and so all you’re getting for free is that one physics lesson.”

Feynman often answered yes to that question—there was another week before his thirtieth birthday, and he looked younger than his age. Undergrads were far more likely to let him pick them up if they thought he was still a student. But, after the humiliation of the Pocono conference, he felt an urge to assert his status. “No, I’m a physics professor.”

She twisted her mouth sideways as she studied his face, presumably for wrinkles. “Maybe,” she said at last.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years—but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

“In fact,” said Dick, looking the blonde full in the face for the first time, “I worked on the atomic bomb.”

“Now I know you’re kidding. That was Hans Bethe, and, one, that’s a New York accent you’ve got there, not a German one, and, two, you aren’t nearly old enough to be him.”

Feynman felt a rueful smile creasing his features. Yes, here in Ithaca, Bethe was the famous physicist, formerly head of the Technical Division at Los Alamos. But Dick had come to think of Hans and the others who’d been at the Pocono conference, including Bohr, Dirac, Oppenheimer, Rabi, Teller, and Feynman’s old doctoral supervisor, John Archibald Wheeler, as peers, as colleagues—as though he were now their equal. But Edward Teller had challenged him at Pocono almost as soon as Dick had started to explain his new method for diagramming particle interactions under quantum electrodynamics.

Dick had tried to go on, tried to explain the simplicity, the clarity of his new method, but the assembled geniuses just weren’t getting it. He turned to look at the girl next to him. She was somewhere between pretty and beautiful, twenty, twenty-one, with a sort of Dutch air to her. He hadn’t asked her name and certainly wasn’t about to proffer his own if it was inevitably going to be greeted with a “never heard of you,” so he decided to mentally call her Heidi.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

“Do you know who Paul Dirac is?” Dick asked, expecting and receiving a shake of Heidi’s lovely head. “Well, he won the Nobel prize in physics. Among many things, he’s responsible for the concept of anti-matter.”

“Oh, really?” Heidi said. “I’m pro-matter myself.” She winked. “It’s better than nothing.”

The girl was clever! He laughed, and she took that as a sign of encouragement, rotating slightly on her stool to bring her right knee, in that silky dress, into contact with his left, covered by his jeans.

“Anti-matter is like regular matter,” Dick said, “except it has the opposite charge.”

There was a pile of white paper napkins on the bar counter; it was almost as if this place were meant for doing physics. Dick grabbed one and took a beat-up fountain pen out of his breast pocket. He printed a lower-case e in the lower left of the napkin, the indigo ink spreading to mostly fill in the enclosed part of the letter, then he drew a superscripted minus sign next to it. “That’s an electron—negative, see?” In the lower right, he printed another little e but gave this one a superscripted plus sign. “But this guy, he’s got the same mass but the opposite charge. He’s an anti-electron, or, if you prefer, a positron.”

He drew lines diagonally upward from each one converging in the center of the napkin.

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now, yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

“But I left out a couple of things,” Dick said, and he pulled the napkin toward himself and began marking it up some more. “A graph needs axes. This one, going up—the y-axis—is time, and this one, across, is space.” She nodded, but her gaze was wandering a bit, presumably scanning the bar for a better prospect. “Oh, and of course there are directions of movement.” He drew a little arrowhead pointing diagonally upward in the middle of the diagonal line coming from the electron—and one pointing diagonally downward in the line connected to the positron. “See what I did there?”

“Make you a deal,” he said. “You see what’s interesting there, and I will buy you a drink.”

He was violating the rule a bartender back in Albuquerque had taught him in 1946. Never give girls you want to sleep with anything, never buy them anything. When everyone else is, they’ll become obsessed with the guy who isn’t. But Dick figured he was making a safe bet, and—

“Wait a minute,” said Heidi. “You said time was going from the bottom to the top, right?”

“And so the electron is going forward in time—as well as moving to the right in space.”

“Going left across the page and down. You’ve got it going backward in time. That can’t be right!”

Feynman may not have known the girl’s name but he knew the bartender’s well enough. “Mike?”

I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

A martini. Which, of course, brought Oppenheimer—the master—to mind, and took Dick right back to the humiliation in the Poconos.

“That’s what I put on the chalkboard during a conference I was just at,” Dick said. “A positron going back in time. And Dirac—Mr. Anti-Matter himself!—leaps to his feet and says what you just said: ‘That can’t be right.’ To which I say, no, it is right—a positron is nothing more than an electron moving backward in time. And, of course, he brings up causality—that you can’t have an effect happening before its cause—and I say who says so? And he calls out, ‘Is it unitary?’ And I didn’t know what the hell that means. The Brits use that term more than we do, apparently; turns out it means, do the probabilities all added together equal one. But I didn’t know that, so I simply said, ‘I’ll explain it to you, so you can see how it works. Then you can tell me if it’s unitary.’” Dick took a sip of his old beer and nodded thanks at the bartender who had delivered a new one along with Heidi’s martini. “The whole thing was a fiasco.”

“What a wonderful notion, though!” Heidi said, after her first sip. “If you could go back in time, what would you change?”

What would he change? Well, for one, he’d have prepared a better introduction to his new way of diagramming quantum-electrodynamical interactions for that conference! And—

And—he wouldn’t have hit on Professor Smith’s wife, especially not while being his house guest.

And he wouldn’t have gotten those two girls—the waitress and the student—pregnant last year.

But he still would have married Arline, married her even though he knew she was dying of tuberculosis. Their marriage had been the happiest, and, true, the saddest, time of his life, but oh so worth it.

P.S.: Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.

When she’d finished her martini, the young lady held out her hand. “Susan,” she said.

He had signed that unsent letter, penned a year and a half ago, “Rich,” but that was the short form he saved solely for her, for his darling Arline, for his Putzie, for his wife. “Dick,” he said, shaking Susan’s hand.

There was no turning back time, no changing what was always going to be. He rose and offered her his arm, and they made their tipsy way out, blackness overhead, and he knew he’d do what he’d done so often since Arline’s passing: try once again to fill the ravenous void.

Work continued apace on the Arbor Project for the rest of 1948, the various teams separately pursuing their assigned lines of research. Although he was still fond of management by walking around, Oppie rarely visited the Compact Cement division where Feynman, Gödel, and Szilard did what they did best: thinking up wild ideas—“botching,” as Leo called it. Partly it was so he wouldn’t be seen as undermining Kitty’s authority as head of that group, and partly it was because they were housed in a separate building, far from Fuld Hall.

Still, Leo Szilard was as given as ever to perambulation, and running into him as Robert made his way from Olden Manor to his own office was a common enough occurrence.

“Guten Tag!” declared Leo as he approached. He preferred to speak German with those who knew that language.

“Yes,” said Szilard. “For his work on cloud chambers and cosmic rays. I’d kind of thought it would go to Yukawa for his prediction of the pi meson, but I suppose it’s too soon after the war for even the neutral Swedes to honor a Japanese, and ...”

“Robert?” said Szilard, touching the sleeve of Oppie’s jacket. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No,” said Oppie. “Not a ghost.” He blinked a few times. “I’m happy for him.”

“Who?” said Leo. His chatter had apparently veered off in another direction while Oppie had been lost in his own thoughts, and so he had to give voice to the name again, a name he hadn’t spoken in two decades. “Blackett.”

Oppie looked down at his feet, splayed left and right like clock hands at ten and two. “He had his chance.”

Leo’s tone was puzzled. “Now, now, Oppie. After all, you were just on the cover of Time! Glory enough for us all.”

Oppie gave Leo a curt “auf Wiedersehen” and began walking off, his mind thousands of miles away and decades in the past.