The Last Man Who Knew Everything by David N. Schwartz

Author:David N. Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

ON A MESA

LAURA AND THE CHILDREN WERE THE FIRST FERMIS TO ARRIVE ON the dusty, high-security mesa that was quickly becoming the focus of the Manhattan Project. Her husband was still shuttling between Chicago, Oak Ridge, and Hanford and would not arrive until early September 1944. In midsummer 1944, she took the train, as instructed, from Chicago to Lamy, New Mexico, a town fifteen miles south of Santa Fe. Like all those destined for Los Alamos, she was ignorant of her final destination. Arriving at Lamy, she almost missed her ride into town. A young Army officer was eagerly looking for “Mrs. Farmer.” Laura was not aware of her husband’s code name and at first did not respond. After a few moments of thought, though, she asked if he was looking for “Mrs. Fermi.” The young man looked her over, figured she was indeed the person he was looking for, and brought Laura and the children to 109 East Palace Road in Santa Fe, where the cheerful Dorothy McKibbin dutifully checked her in and gave her and the children ID cards.

From Santa Fe, she was driven along the twenty miles of dirt road, narrow with frequent switchbacks, to the top of the mesa. She settled herself and the children into a modest apartment, on the second floor of a barracks built to Army specifications for standard issue housing. The Fermis could have insisted on more spacious housing along “Bathtub Row,” a street with private houses that was built for project VIPs, where Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty lived, next to Berkeley physicist Edwin McMillan and his wife, Elsie. Those houses were equipped with bathtubs rather than the showers that prevailed in more standard accommodations, hence the name of the street. In typically modest fashion, the Fermis decided not to pull rank and lived where the Army assigned them. Their downstairs neighbors were German theorist Rudolf Peierls and his wife Eugenia. Their old friends the Segrès were also nearby, having moved from Berkeley not long before.

This was the third major upheaval in five years for the Fermi family: first to New York, then to Chicago, and now to Los Alamos. Of the three, the move to Los Alamos was the most dramatic and the most disorienting for the upper-class woman from Rome and her children. They were enclosed in a compound where the highest security procedures prevailed, where the simple act of going into town (Santa Fe, in this case) to buy provisions was difficult and sometimes impossible, and where they knew almost nothing of what was going on around them. The children were not allowed to wander off-site and attended a small school on the grounds. There, Nella and Giulio joined other children of scientists and engineers in elementary school studies. Nella recalls these days as a great adventure; she and the Peierls’ daughter Gaby would sneak out of the compound and then check back in at the main gate, causing considerable consternation. For Nella, it was all very

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