"C M Kornbluth - Gomez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

doesn't matter, but he got a pretty good salary by government standards and a per-diem allowance too.

I signed a contract too-"Information Specialist." I was partly companion, partly historian, and partly a
guy they'd rather have their



eyes on than not. When somebody tried to cut me out on grounds of economy, Admiral MacDonald
frostily reminded him that he had given his word. I stayed, for all the good it did me.

We didn't have any name. We weren't Operation Anything or Project Whoozis or Task Force
Dinwiddie. We were just five people in a big fifteen-room house on the outskirts of Milford, New Jersey.
There was Gomez, alone on the top floor with a lot of books, technical magazines, and blackboards and
a weekly visit from Dr. Mines. There were the three Security men, Higgins, Dalhousie, and Leitzer,
sleeping by turns and prowling the grounds. And there was me.

From briefing sessions with Dr. Mines I kept a diary of what went on. Don't think from that that I knew
what the score was. War correspondents have told me of the frustrating life they led at some
close-mouthed commands. Soandso-many air sorties, the largest number since January fifteenth.
Casualties a full fifteen per cent lighter than expected. Determined advance in an active sector against
relatively strong enemy opposition. And so on-all adding up to nothing in the way of real information.

That's what it was like in my diary because that's all they told me. Here are some excerpts: "On the
recommendation of Dr. Mines, Mr. Gomez today began work on a phase of reactor design theory to be
implemented at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The work involves the setting up of thirty-five pairs of
partial differential equations . . . Mr. Gomez announced tentatively today that in checking certain
theoretical work in progress at the Los Alamos Laboratory of the A.E.C. he discovered a fallacious
assumption concerning neutron-spin which invalidates the conclusions reached. This will be
communicated to the Laboratory . . . Dr. Mines said today that Mr. Gomez has successfully invoked a
hitherto-unexploited aspect of Min-kowski's tensor analysis to crack a stubborn obstacle toward the
control of thermonuclear reactions . . ."
I protested at one of the briefing sessions with Dr. Mines against this gobbledegook. He didn't mind my
protesting. He leaned back in his chair and said calmly: "Vilchek, with all friendliness I assure you that
you're getting everything you can understand. Anything more complex than the vague description of
what's going on would be over your head. And anything more specific would give away exact engineering
information which would be of use to foreign countries."



"This isn't the way they treated Bill Lawrence when he covered the atomic bomb," I said bitterly.

Mines nodded, with a pleased smile. "That's it exactly," he said. "Broad principles were being developed
then-interesting things that could be told without any great harm being done. If you tell somebody that a
critical mass of U-two thirty-five or Plutonium goes off with a big bang, you really haven't given away a
great deal. He still has millions of man-hours of engineering before him to figure out how much is critical
mass, to take only one small point."

So I took his word for it, faithfully copied the communiques he gave me and wrote what I could on the
human-interest side for release some day.