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After I’d been in it for about a year and a half, I was talking to Hans Bethe about something. He was on the big governing council all this time, and I told him about this trick with my wife’s nightgown and bedroom slippers. He started to laugh. “So that’s how you got on the town council,” he said.
It turned out that what happened was this. The woman who cleans the rooms in the dormitory opens this door, and all of a sudden there is trouble: somebody is sleeping with one of the guys! She reports to the chief charwoman, the chief charwoman reports to the lieutenant, the lieutenant reports to the major. It goes all the way up through the generals to the governing board.
What are they going to do? They’re going to think about it, that’s what! But, in the meantime, what instructions go down through the captains, down through the majors, through the lieutenants, through the chars’ chief, through the charwoman? “Just put things back the way they are, clean ’em up, and see what happens.” Next day same report. For four days, they worried up there about what they were going to do. Finally they promulgated a rule: No Women in the Men’s Dormitory! And that caused such a stink down below that they had to elect somebody to represent the …
I would like to tell you something about the censorship that we had there. They decided to do something utterly illegal and censor the mail of people inside the United States—which they have no right to do. So it had to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer not to seal the envelopes of the letters we sent out, and it would be all right for them to open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily accepted by us. We would leave our letters open; and they would seal them if they were OK. If they weren’t OK in their opinion, they would send the letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a paragraph of our “understanding.”
So, very delicately amongst all these liberal-minded scientific guys, we finally got the censorship set up, with many rules. We were allowed to comment on the character of the administration if we wanted to, so we could write our senator and tell him we didn’t like the way things were run, and things like that. They said they would notify us if there were any difficulties.
So it was all set up, and here comes the first day for censorship: Telephone! Briiing!
Me: “What?”
“Please come down.” I come down.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a letter from my father.”
“Well, what is it?”
There’s lined paper, and there’s these lines going out with dots—four dots under, one dot above, two dots under, one dot above, dot under dot …
“What’s that?”
I said, “It’s a code.”
They said, “Yeah, it’s a code, but what does it say?”
I said, “I don’t know what it says.”
They said, “Well, what’s the key to the code? How do you decipher it?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know.”
Then they said, “What’s this?”
I said, “It’s a letter from my wife—it says TJXYWZ TW1X3.”
“What’s that?”
I said, “Another code.”
“What’s the key to it?”
“I don’t know.”
They said, “You’re receiving codes, and you don’t know the key?”
I said, “Precisely. I have a game. I challenge them to send me a code that I can’t decipher, see? So they’re making up codes at the other end, and they’re sending them in, and they’re not going to tell me what the key is.”
Now one of the rules of the censorship was that they aren’t going to disturb anything that you would ordinarily send in the mail. So they said, “Well, you’re going to have to tell them please to send the key in with the code.”
I said, “I don’t want to see the key!”
They said, “Well, all right, we’ll take the key out.”
So we had that arrangement. OK? All right. Next day I get a letter from my wife that says, “It’s very difficult writing because I feel that the—is looking over my shoulder.” And where the word was there is a splotch made with ink eradicator.
So I went down to the bureau, and I said, “You’re not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don’t like it. You can look at it, but you’re not supposed to take anything out.”
They said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Do you think that’s the way censors work—with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors.”
I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, “Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?” She writes back, “No, I didn’t use ink eradicator in my letter, it must have been the—”—and there’s a hole cut out of the paper.
So I went back to the major who was supposed to be in charge of all this and complained. You know, this took a little time, but I felt I was sort of the representative to get the thing straightened out. The major tried to explain to me that these people who were the censors had been taught how to do it, but they didn’t understand this new way that we had to be so delicate about.
So, anyway he said, “What’s the matter, don’t you think I have good will?”
I said, “Yes, you have perfectly good will but I don’t think you have power.” Because, you see, he had already been on the job three or four days.
He said, “We’ll see about that!” He grabs the telephone, and everything is straightened out. No more is the letter cut.
However, there were a number of other difficulties. For example, one day I got a letter from my wife and a note from the censor that said, “There was a code enclosed without the key and so we removed it.”
So when I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, “Well, where’s all the stuff?”
I said, “What stuff?”
She said, “Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry.”
I said, “Wait a minute—that was a list?”
She said, “Yes.”
“That was a code,” I said. “They thought it was a code—litharge, glycerine, etc.” (She wanted litharge and glycerine to make a cement to fix an onyx box.)
All this went on in the first few weeks before we got everything straightened out. An way, one day I’m piddling around with the computing machine, and I notice something very peculiar. If you take 1 divided by 243 you get .004115226337
It’s quite cute: It goes a little cockeyed after 559 when you’re carrying but it soon straightens itself out and repeats itself nicely. I thought it was kind of amusing.
Well, I put that in the mail, and it comes back to me. It doesn’t go through, and there’s a little note: “Look at Paragraph 17B.” I look at Paragraph 17B. It says, “Letters are to be written only in English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, German, and so forth. Permission to use any other language must be obtained in writing.” And then it said, “No codes.”
So I wrote back to the censor a little note included in my letter which said that I feel that of course this ca
There was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back and forth. For example, my wife kept mentioning the fact that she felt uncomfortable writing with the feeling that the censor is looking over her shoulder. Now, as a rule, we aren’t supposed to mention censorship. We aren’t, but how can they tell her? So they keep sending me a note: “Your wife mentioned censorship.” Certainly my wife mentioned censorship. So finally they sent me a note that said, “Please inform your wife not to mention censorship in her letters.” So I start my letter: “I have been instructed to inform you not to mention censorship in your letters.” Phoom, phoooom, it comes right back! So I write, “I have been instructed to inform my wife not to mention censorship. How in the heck am I going to do it? Furthermore, why do I have to instruct her not to mention censorship? You keeping something from me?”