The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

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  • • •

  They rented a bungalow on Dimmick Avenue, about a mile from the RAND offices. Vernon walked the twenty minutes to work every morning through miraculous California weather, past palm and eucalyptus trees, aloes, bougainvillea. Unless the Santa Ana was blowing, he could feel the cool breeze from the ocean a few blocks away. The RAND building was a low rectangle of pale pink. It had been designed, he was told, to facilitate interaction between the workers, with each office opening directly onto long corridors leading to common areas, so that scientists and analysts would always be walking past each other, depositing pollen on each other’s pistils. There were eight internal courtyards where you could eat your lunch in the eternal sunshine and fecundate some more with your colleagues.

  The work of the nuclear physicists was classified, but Vernon had had little difficulty obtaining his clearance. Unlike most of his colleagues, who’d come from academic—or worse, European—families, sullied by socialist flirtations on the part of siblings, parents, spouses, or even their past selves, Vernon’s and his wife Imogen’s backgrounds (excepting one loose-lipped homo from whom Vernon was convincingly estranged) was a pristine phalanx of incurious dirt farmers, appliance salesmen, insurance agents, racists, mountain moonshiners, and a lone college graduate (Imogen’s father, a civil engineer and deep-dyed Republican), most of whom would have lynched any Commie of their acquaintance faster than the House Un-American Activities Committee could say, “Are you now, or have you ever been . . . ?”

  The RAND offices were open around the clock, to allow self-styled geniuses their 3:00 a.m. brainstorms, but Vernon kept regular hours. Maybe that was the Navy Pier in him. Imogen had his breakfast ready at 7:30; he left the house at 8:00 and reached his office half an hour later. Taking an hour for lunch, he left at 5:30 and arrived home for dinner at 6:00. On weekends he relaxed at the house, listening to a record or a ball game on the radio, fiddling with the antenna for the black-and-white TV set he’d recently bought, watching Dragnet or Playhouse 90 with Imogen after she’d put stubborn, squally Susan to bed.

  Every now and then his colleagues would get it into their heads to stay in the offices late to finish some project. One enthusiast would rub his hands and say, “We’ll have to work through the night!” and another would catch the bug and chirp, “Let’s brew coffee and set up cots!” RAND encouraged that sort of malarkey: fortifying whiskey in the bottom desk drawer, camaraderie around the urinal, cheek stubble glinting in the morning light, pats all around, “We’ve done it, boys!” Maybe it was from growing up in the swampy South, but Vernon felt in his bones that slow and deliberate was the smarter way to go. He’d call Imogen, give her the bad news, work through the night, at least maybe hear a good joke or two, then walk home bleary-eyed in the leaden morning. Once, half asleep, he stepped in front of a car and RAND nearly lost one of its geniuses.

  For the first year or so, though, he believed in the work. In 1956, the hydrogen bomb was three years old. The original theoretical insights that made it possible were not something Vernon would ever have been able to figure out on his own, but now it was tinkerers’ time. The first Atlas missiles were under development and would enter production within a year or two. Preliminary tests had indicated—surprise!—that their accuracy wasn’t as good as the military had promised. It was therefore desirable to raise yield without increasing the size or weight of the physics package. And once you had your clearance and got a look at the basic design of a two-stage weapon, you saw it was a fiddler’s dream come true. Scores of slightly different configurations of slightly different materials were possible, each requiring reams of calculations to produce semi-educated guesses about yields. Vernon chose to study the interstage, the part of the warhead that transmitted the radiation from the fission primary in a (one hoped) efficient way so as to implode and ignite the fusion-fission secondary. As with most dynamic processes, the physics was complicated, the engineering problems fantastically finicky, and Vernon spent a happy eight months immersed in the details.

  Years later, people would occasionally ask him how he could have worked on the Bomb. Since those who had the simplicity of mind to ask essentially knew nothing, he didn’t dignify them with an answer. But after he’d left RAND he pondered the question himself from time to time. The August 7, 1945, newspaper article telling him he would live a while longer had identified Hiroshima as an important army base. Later, it became a little clearer that it was an army base surrounded by 300,000 civilians. Still later, Vernon read Hersey’s Hiroshima, and that account bothered him enough that he read others. Somewhere among all the horror he picked up a detail he couldn’t get out of his head. On August 5, 1945, the city of Hiroshima had ordered schoolgirls to help raze houses in order to create firebreaks in case of an incendiary raid. So when Little Boy threw a tantrum at 1900 feet on August 6 there were more than eight thousand of these young girls working outside under the clear sky. Most were killed instantly, but survivors’ accounts kept mentioning seeing girls tottering blindly, their faces burned featureless, holding their boiled arms out in front of them with their hands dangling down—like kangaroos, one witness said—the skin of their hands slipping off like rubber gloves.

  Yes, the fire-bombing of Tokyo killed as many people as the Hiroshima bomb. But that was the result of a decision to use those bombs in a particular way, a decision a society could abjure, while retaining incendiary bombs for other uses. That is, you didn’t have to “uninvent” the incendiary bomb. But atomic weapons were different. There was no conceivable use for them that did not involve the indiscriminate slaughter of populations. And now here was the H-bomb, which made Little Boy look like a firecracker. As a physicist, Vernon could appreciate more than most how admirable the H-bomb was as a product of the human intellect. It was a brilliantly designed, exquisitely engineered instrument for turning as many schoolgirls as you might want into kangaroos.

  So how could he have worked on it (boo hoo)?

  To the simple-minded, he would have said (had he dignified them, etc), It depends on your definition of the word “use.” In fact, the H-bomb did have a use, though it involved not using it. It was the only thing ever invented that could keep the other guy from using his own H-bomb. Yes, deterrence. Yes, Mutually Assured Destruction. Go ahead, make mushheaded jokes about it. Anyone with an ounce of practical sense in 1945, anyone who paused for a moment to remember how human societies actually worked, as opposed to humane dreams about how they might work if humans weren’t human, knew that world government was an impossibility. If you liked the idea of not dropping more nuclear bombs on more cities, there was only one hope. MAD, but true.

  So you could say the robustness of deterrence was the reason he signed on with RAND. And he supposes you could say it was also the reason he quit.

  It takes a lot to make Vernon change direction. He loves routine. He thinks of himself as a homebody. Imogen calls him a wet blanket. If Imogen could ever compromise on anything—a condition contrary to fact—maybe they could agree that he’s merely a stick-in-the-mud. On his own, perhaps he would have reached the necessary point of anger and disgust with RAND within six or eight years. Gen helped him get there inside twenty-four months. Anger and disgust are her specialties.

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  • • •

  In September 1950, there were seventy graduate students in physics at the University of Chicago, sixty-nine of whom were men. The seventieth was Imogen.

  All of the men wanted to help her with her homework. In fact, she needed it. As an undergraduate, she’d taken more classes in chemistry than in physics, and at a women’s college to boot. She freely admitted she was having difficulty. She was pretty, with wavy auburn hair, dark brown eyes, a good figure. Out of sixty-nine men jostling at her door, textbooks in hand, she eventually chose Vernon. Part of him has always wondered why. She was better-looking than he was, came from a better family. But she has never talked about her reasons.


  At the university, before she chose him, she liked to go out with the men in a group, drink, smoke, argue; not physics, but everything else, especially religion and politics. She had a way of throwing back her head and snapping, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” She had another way of pointing her somewhat pointy nose down, pushing her glasses against the bridge, and snorting, “What a crock of shit!” The first time she swore in his presence, he objected, probably said something priggish about unladylike behavior, and she slapped him right down. “I’ll speak as I like.” She noticed he always ordered Coke, and when he explained he didn’t drink alcohol, she averred that that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.

  Vernon had a girlfriend back in North Carolina—his first and, he’d assumed, his last. She was a sweet hometown girl, recently become his fiancée. But she mailed the ring back to him along with a brief letter just before he went home for Christmas, no doubt to forestall an awkward scene on her doorstep. She was sorry, he was a great guy and would do great things, but she’d fallen for a sweet hometown boy. Vernon had already been helping Imogen with her homework—from entirely innocent motives—and the broken engagement upset him enough that he spoke of it to her. Which was the first time outside the drinking group that they discussed anything personal. So he supposed he had Margaret to thank for breaking the ice.

  A few of the things that, individually, were the most ridiculous thing Imogen had ever heard were the various beliefs and customs of the Southern Baptist Church. Like Vernon, she’d grown up in it. Her mother’s roots were in Alabama, where Gen was born. Her father had taken a job with the federal government in D.C. when she was two, and by the time she was twelve she was attending services, family be damned, in the basement chapel of the unfinished National Cathedral. High Church Episcopalianism was as far as she could get from Southern Baptism without turning Catholic—which was out of the question, as Catholicism unavoidably involved the Papacy, than which there was no larger crock of shit. “Episcopalian music is beautiful,” she said, “and the ministers are less likely to be small-town ignorant assholes.”

  She got him out on the dance floor and she put a beer into his hand, later a scotch. She made wicked fun of their professors. His church became St. Edmund’s Episcopal, near the campus, and for special services, St. James Cathedral. The St. James choir sang Bach cantatas and Mendelssohn motets, which music was a revelation to this former jazzman. Clouds of incense rose into the ribbed vaults, carrying his sinful soul with them. Imogen hadn’t bothered to argue him into any of this. It was simpler than that. Did he want to be with her, or didn’t he? He did. His main worry was that he didn’t deserve her. She was an only child, the apple of her parents’ eyes. She’d won piano competitions as a teenager, horse-jumping competitions in college. Her father had an engineering degree from Cornell.

  At least he could help her with her homework. As the end of the year approached, she needed it more and more. “It was a mistake to switch from chemistry,” she said, and he silently agreed. They studied together every evening in the last month, and she squeaked through her exams. Then she wrote to her parents telling them she was engaged and would be leaving school. From her indignant reaction to the letter she received back from her father, Vernon knew they weren’t pleased. “They think it’s too sudden, that I’m too young.” Vernon wondered if they also disapproved of him, his background. But he couldn’t quite ask.

  “My mother married late. But it’s none of their business.” She wrote back and slapped them down.

  Vernon’s parents and his sister Patty drove up from Durham to D.C. late in the summer, so that the two families could meet. They said they’d stay in a reasonably priced motel somewhere, have dinner with Imogen and her parents, and spend the following day seeing the capital sights, which they’d always promised themselves they’d do. Vernon’s mother wrote him that she didn’t know how they would ever make it, it was so far, what if a hurricane flooded the roads, or the old car gave up the ghost in the middle of nowhere, she was a silly woman, and wouldn’t burden Vernon’s father with her fears, and she knew J. V. was out of patience with her, so she’d say no more about it.

  On the day, both the prevailing weather system and the Fuller family’s 1942 Ford were kind, and they arrived unscathed at the house on Harrison Street NW. The car doors opened and out popped the homely, heavy faces. They were all overweight, as Vernon had been before the Navy (only Julian seemed naturally slender), and his mother and Patty in particular looked, he suddenly realized, an awful lot like W. C. Fields. When Imogen’s father invited them in, Vernon could see that his mother and sister were discomfited by the comparative fineness of the furnishings, and he worried that his mother would declare she was afraid to sit on so good a chair, provoking his sister into opining that a chair was a chair and for her part she didn’t understand why some people spent more than they had to. But his father must have given them a talking-to ahead of time.

  Vernon was particularly anxious about Patty, who wasn’t so easily quelled as his mother. She disapproved of people who were smarter or better than she was, and as that description fit just about everybody, she was perpetually aggrieved. He was afraid someone might offhandedly refer to something universally accepted as true—say, that objects expand when heated, or that ice floats—and Patty would retaliate against the chairs, the slimmer figures, the better education, and declare, with a tone of brooking no nonsense, “Well, I don’t believe that.” He was equally worried she would make some reference to Negroes—as shiftless, lazy, stupid, thieving, lying, violent, self-gratifying, childlike, improvident, impulsive, or some combination thereof—because Imogen was fierce about Negro rights.

  But disaster failed to strike. It turned out that Gen herself was nervous because she had prepared the meal with her mother, who was acknowledged a fine cook. Over the tomato soup (Imogen wondered if she’d oversalted it; “Not at all,” Vernon and his father said simultaneously) it was Imogen’s own mother who introduced a story turning on recent activity by local blacks—in this case, thieving plus self-gratifying plus lying—and Imogen went after her hammer and tongs, while both fathers respectfully addressed their bowls and Patty visibly relaxed. The dessert was a peach pie made by Imogen—table-lore had it that her mother was famous for her pies—and Gen was so flustered she delivered a dollop of whipped cream straight into Vernon’s mother’s lap. Gen yelped, but Vernon’s mother laughed with genuine good humor. After eight hours on the road wondering whether the catastrophe lying in wait for her was a hurricane or a spontaneously combusting automobile, discovering that it was only a spoonful of whipped cream on her ten-year-old Woolworth’s dress was giddy relief.

  The only other time the two sets of parents met was four months later, at the wedding. By then Vernon had figured out that Imogen’s mother came from nearly as backwoods a background as his parents, having grown up on three Alabama acres of chickens, yams, corn, swamp, and clutter. She had a passel of loud, ignorant brothers, one of whom had climbed a grid pylon in drunken mischief when he was twenty and managed to electrocute himself, and a handful of slightly smarter sisters who tended toward cheerful circular chatter that, accelerating, gradually rose free of the ground of facts. One of the sisters insisted on being the photographer at the wedding, unaware that her camera was cracked. The photos all showed Imogen on the arm of an attention-seeking blob of light, or Vernon cutting the cake with help from the blob, or the blob flanked by proud parents. Vernon thought it unfortunate but hardly calamitous, whereas Imogen was—as she would have termed it—apeshit. She threw the photos away and didn’t speak to her aunt for five years.

  The newlyweds had neither time nor money for a honeymoon. Vernon had classes and Imogen had found a paid research position at a chemical company. They moved into an apartment in the attic of a Presbyterian parsonage three blocks from the University of Chicago campus. Vernon remembers those times as the happiest of his life. He’d surv
ived his war, he’d won his freedom, he loved his work, and he’d found his girl. Occasionally now—decades later, in his study, listening to Beethoven with his headphones on—he glances through the notebook of household accounts he kept daily for the first three years of his marriage: 69¢ for lunch, 23¢ for cigarettes, 6¢ for a cup of coffee. He remembers the dim light of the physics department canteen, the cherry-tobacco smell of the corner store, the shade and sun of the walk to the laundromat. At the end of every day he totaled the expenses, subtracted them from cash on hand, added each week his stipend as a teaching assistant and Imogen’s paycheck. Everything—savings, income, expenditures—such small amounts. He sees that on January 16, 1953, he calculated that at some point during the day he had lost a penny. Weep for what little things could make them glad.

  The plan was to put off children until he had his PhD, but Murphy’s Law decreed the appearance of Susan in 1954, when he still had two years to go. Life was more complicated after that. Imogen’s mother came out to help for six weeks and the two women fought like cats. Then Vernon’s father delivered Vernon’s mother as a replacement, and for a while things were at least less noisy. Babies were one of the few things on God’s green earth that did not frighten Vernon’s mother, and as long as he and Gen didn’t ask her to do anything else, such as step out of the apartment, they could count on her with Susan during the day while they each worked. On evenings and weekends she kept up a continual prattling, weaving mundane, not wholly ridiculous concerns—electric outlets, kitchen knives, heavy items of furniture that conceivably could topple on a baby if a large enough person blundered into them at sufficient speed—with outlandish scenarios—the fact, for example, that lightning did occasionally kill people indoors, or that airplanes did occasionally fall on houses.