Finally, Gordon developed defenses. On the telephone he was quick to hang up—so quick that he cut off his own mother once, when he did not recognize her voice and could not make out anything intelligible over the transcontinental static. Crank manuscripts and letters were equally easy He wrote a note saying that while the person’s ideas were “interesting” (a suitably non-judgmental term), they were beyond his competence, so he was unable to comment on them. This worked; they never replied. On-the-spot cranks were the worst. He learned to be abrupt, even rude. This got rid of most of them. The harder, persistent sort—such as Edwards—Gordon learned to derail, to gently deflect onto other matters. Then he would edge them toward the door, murmuring reassuring phrases—but never a promise to read a manuscript, attend a lecture, or vouch for a theory. That way lay further involvement and more wasted time. He would edge them toward the door and they would go—grudgingly, sometimes, but they would go.
A side effect of this crank traffic came to light in casual remarks from other members of the department. They noted the cranks with interest at first. Amusement followed, and Gordon provided them with anecdotes of strange theories and even stranger behavior. But in time the mood changed. Other faculty disliked having the department known for its garbled image in the San Diego Union. They stopped asking him, at the afternoon coffee break, what new crank had come by. Gordon noticed the change.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE SAN DIEGO AREA WAS GROWING AND SPREADING. Rather than pattern itself on the jumble of Los Angeles, the younger city to the south chose to encourage white-collar employers, “clean” industries, and think tanks. The largest such tank in the area was General Atomic, scarcely a mile from the fledgling University. Quite considerable fish were to be seen swimming in its waters, puzzling at government-sponsored problems. Noted names from Berkeley and Caltech spent pleasant months scribbling on blackboards while outside, the General Atomic squirrels and rabbits lazily foraged for their handouts. The animals were part of a psychologist’s deliberate plan to evoke rest, quiet, and deep thought; the resemblance to a Disney film may have been accidental. The architect’s remorselessly circular motif for the central General Atomic offices, with the eagerly cooperative library at its center, had a similar aim. The ringed roads and buildings recalled Oriental notions of completeness, of serenity, of rest. The curved hallways would increase contact between researchers. In fact, though, the inescapable geometry meant that no one could see further than thirty feet along the curving corridors. This tended to prevent the accidental meetings as scientists came and went; they passed out of view before they could be noticed. To go home or to the library meant moving radially, and thus seeing nobody. As Freeman Dyson said that summer, “The mean interaction distance around here is no bigger than a soccer goal.” Yet often it was enough; these were exciting times. Only six months before, Mariner II had surveyed Venus close up for the first time. Gell-Mann and others were plumbing new depths in particle theory. In April, J. Robert Oppenheimer was named winner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1963 Fermi award. Oppenheimer had been, in the eyes of many scientists, the public whipping boy of the McCarthy era; he had been declared a security risk in 1954. Now at last the government seemed to be serving some penance for its stupidity. Hard feelings against Edward Teller, who had not spoken out strongly for Oppenheimer, in turn began to wane.
The feeling of opening, of fresh starts, was on the political scene already a cliché. The Kennedy ambience was a canon of media hype. Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family” album, which mocked the Kennedy clan, sold briskly; the public sensed that the derision was all in good fun. Scientists were a more skeptical lot, however, mostly liberal or radical, and bothered by Bobby Kennedy’s generally perceived ruthlessness and neglect of the legal niceties of wiretapping. But the rise of support for scientific research was now coming to seem like a permanent feature, beginning with a sudden rush after Sputnik and rising linearly. Everyone knew it would plateau out, but not soon; there was much to be done, and few to do it.
Freeman Dyson came to California on leave from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, to work on the Orion project. Dyson had an immense reputation as a theoretical physicist and thus was invited to give one of the last spring Colloquia in the UCLJ Physics Department. Gordon was pleased. He was to give the very last Colloquium of the year, and to have Dyson speak beforehand about some speculative ideas might defuse some of the reaction to Gordon.
Dyson was slim and humorous, moving gracefully before the blackboard as though in a light trance, thinking hard about what he wanted to say and bending each sentence to strike a precise point. He had been very careful earlier to correct George Feher when he was referred to as “Doctor.” Dyson had never finished his doctorate and now seemed slightly proud of it, with the Englishman’s pride at being, at least in the formal sense, an amateur. But there was nothing amateurish about Dyson’s Colloquium. His slides were neat, with clear graphics, some in color. They had the professional aerospace finish that to Gordon underlined the pleasant perks of prosperity; in his undergraduate days at Columbia, rough sketches and hand-lettered slides were universal.
Dyson described his years of work on Project Orion, a plan to propel huge spacecraft by exploding nuclear bombs behind them. The blast would strike a “pusher plate,” which would transfer the muted kick through shock absorbers to the ship itself. The idea at first seemed like a Rube Goldberg design, but as Dyson spoke it became plausible. The only way to ferry truly large payloads around the solar system was through nuclear drives of some kind. Orion was basically simple and used what we were already good at: making efficient bombs. Why not use man’s destructive capability for something useful? Dyson thought that a strong effort would not simply put men on the moon by 1970—Kennedy’s goal—but beyond, all the way to Mars. The principles involved had been tried in small-scale experiments and they worked. The problem, of course, was the first stage: lifting the craft from the earth’s surface on a stuttering trail of nuclear blasts.
“Won’t you plaster us with radioactive debris?” a voice from the Colloquium audience called.
Dyson pursed his lips. He was a compact man and his sharp features seemed to pin the problem like a butterfly. “Much less so than the atmospheric tests we and the Soviet Union are now conducting. We calculate Orion would add no more than one percent to the level of radiation that politics—” he pronounced the word carefully—“already sets for us.”