“Not too boring,” he continued. “And miles better than getting killed. Or worse, having to kill someone else.”
Which gave me something new to think on. I’d worried plenty about Frank and the other neighborhood boys getting killed. But before then, I hadn’t spent ten seconds considering what it would be like for them to kill someone.
“How old are you?” he asked, direct as you please with such a personal question.
I never gave anyone that information in those days, yet I answered this boy right out: “Nineteen.”
“Oh,” he said, registering that I was older.
“Since last month. What’s all this math for, anyhow?” I’d taken a seat on the desk, legs crossed ladylike and acting casual, like guys came to help in the back room every day, yawn. My mother would have had kittens, right there on the office floor.
“No one knows,” he said, making tiny progress in getting a little flap of tape loose. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. “It must be important, though, because the assignments come from way up in the military.”
I straightened my sweater. I’d heard plenty such talk before. “You don’t say.”
Meanwhile he tightened his grip and pulled straight up. All three layers of tape came away in one fat strip, making a ripping sound as the box popped open.
“There you go,” he said, the coil of tape dangling from his hand like a just-killed snake. He turned to drop it in the wastebasket, then held that skinny but surprisingly strong hand out to me. “Charlie Fish.”
“Brenda Dubie,” I said, shaking hands. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Brenda.”
But neither of us let go, for a second there, neither one. Talk about a chord playing.
The little bell on our front door jingled again. I whirled to see Mr. Kulak striding into the store, taking off his hat. I rushed forward to meet him, not doing anything wrong, but feeling anyhow like I’d just been caught red-handed.
2.
The boys of the Metallurgic Lab at the University of Chicago worked at gray metal desks, with wooden chairs on wheels that creaked at the least movement; drawers that resisted, complained, and sometimes refused to open; flimsy in- and out-boxes on the desks’ front corners; and bare bulbs overhead. In winter, the room smelled of dry heat, iron from the rusty radiators. In summer, the scent was boys’ sweat.
All the desks were arrayed in a circle—so that no mathematician was ranked above another, and each received equal amounts of daylight from the wall that was all windows. The older workers did a geometric calculation, however, determined that desks to the south received 11 percent more light, and claimed those places for themselves. But some younger boys found the southern advantage to be seasonal, true only in summer, and they took proud possession of the northern desks. The debate over whose calculations were correct resurfaced whenever the workload was light, complete with competing formulas chalked across the big front blackboard.
There were two exceptions to the circle: one desk space open for the unit’s manager to enter and exit the circle, and a desk by itself near the door, which Cohen occupied. A recent Columbia graduate, he was disliked by everyone.
Charlie toiled in a middling desk, not caring to join either side in the location dispute, preferring to wrangle his assignments into order with what seemed, compared with his peers, to be of limited brilliance but limitless patience. He would work and work a problem, without complaint, however long it took to find a solution.
“That is why, you tiresome boy,” Cohen said on his way past, dropping a new assignment sheet atop Charlie’s overflowing in-basket, “you get to do arcs. And they want this one pronto.”
Arcs, meaning curves: how an object moves through space, where on a sphere to place electrical connections, what navigation path will help a vessel avoid a problem at sea. The other boys worked on concrete tasks: how much weight a ship could carry on deck before becoming top-heavy (which they guessed had to do with tank transport), what temperature a metal would reach during bursts of intense pressure (which everyone assumed meant the barrels of gunships), plus the raw number-crunching of supplying fuel, bullets, uniforms, tires, bandages, meals, coffins.
The primary difference in his work, Charlie gradually realized, was pi. No one else was reckoning with the irrational number. Because every arc problem involved pi, he could never arrive at a precise answer. It would always be approximate.
Charlie scanned Cohen’s latest assignment sheet. This time the object weighed 10,000 pounds, was released 11,000 feet in the air at a speed of 357 miles per hour. What would its arc be, how long would it fall, and how far away would it land?
Charlie took a pencil and began to draw on the assignment sheet. He liked to start every problem with a picture, to visualize what he needed to know. But halfway through the sketch, his hand went still. His mind had wandered to the young woman he’d met on Monday, Brenda, and the pleasantest thirty minutes in Chicago since August, when he’d arrived from Boston. Granted, she was a regular weathervane of moodiness. But she played the organ like an angel. And when he tore off that packing tape, her face had brightened like the sun coming out. Monday was his only day with a longer lunch break, though, which made getting back to that organ store feel further away than next spring.
Humming to himself, he drew the problem again: altitude of release, dotted line of the downward arc. To represent the target, he used a swastika.
“Does anyone think it is possible for Cohen to be a more inefficient jerk?”
Charlie knew who’d said it without raising his head. Richard Mather, Andover grad, snatched from Yale for a place on this team, winter home in Manhattan and summer place on Long Island, an unapologetic snob and an expert at baiting all of them into debates. On his desk Mather kept a framed photo of his sister, a smiling, tomboyish blonde holding a tennis racquet, which he would wave periodically before the noses of the other mathematicians. “Look all you like, suckers, because you will never get close.”
“Shut up, Mather.” That was Santangelo, a kid from Milwaukee whose hair was all tight coils. As a result Cohen called him Steel Wool, purely for the pleasure of annoying him. Santangelo was a mad-dash genius at arithmetic. If you walked up to him out of the blue and said, “Three hundred and fifty-seven times six hundred and twenty-four,” Santangelo would shrug and answer, “Two hundred and twenty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-eight.” “Divided by sixteen?” He’d blink twice and say, “Thirteen thousand, nine hundred and twenty-three.” Then he’d bend back over the lab notebook he was filling with calculations as fast as he could scribble them.
Now Mather had his hands on his hips. “Because you know I’m right, Santangelo?”
“Because you are such an itch.”
Mather swaggered away from his desk. Charlie knew: argument was this guy’s favorite way of procrastinating. “Let’s review the facts.”
A groan went up from the room.
“First, look at how he delivers new assignments, fifteen minutes after the workday starts. Every one of us has already begun something, has prioritized our tasks—”
“Which in your case includes lots of talking.”