Free Curse the Names by Robert Arellano Page B

the pseudofamous geezers with a feature spread, if not a cover, before they were too old or too dead. If you write about them in their little rag in their artificial world on the Hill, maybe they won’t go around looking for attention in the real world of journalism, the world of conspiracy theorists, spies, and identity thieves.
    My subjects wanted to see their stories in print. I want people to know my name, they thought as much as anyone else with their talents, but I can’t talk to anybody outside my division about what I really do. Nobody can know what I’m really known for, so out of necessity I cultivate an odd hobby, a decoy accomplishment, a small masterwork of gardening, gadgetry, or gizmo collecting, in order to get a bit of print recognition in my lifetime.
    I put the finishing touches on a profile of a famous physicist, eighty-nine-year-old Barney Marcosi, and his interest in fly-fishing. We had spoken about his fly collection. The August issue was about to get put to bed, and I wrote three one-sentence captions for the photos Golz had chosen to accompany the profile.
    I jotted a few shorthand notes for the questions I would ask my 10:30 subject, and then I got on my computer and searched the collection at the Lab’s library for Mora, New Mexico . Nothing, but that wasn’t surprising. The Lab’s library is pure science, a “National Research” library on physics and aeronautics.
    I got on the Los Alamos Mesa Public Library catalog and found a small-press book about Mora titled Valley of the Witches . I sent the call numbers to my phone and left the office at 10:15, informing Golz over my shoulder, “Interview.”

 
    I brought a pen and an empty notebook and walked a brisk half-mile back across the parking lot to the Spider. Although I always typed drafts of my profiles on the office computer, I still preferred pen and paper for interview notes. It set most subjects at ease better than a geek wielding a laptop or tablet between them, and there is no substitute for blank paper when literally drawing connections between topics and themes. Besides, I like to cross my legs when sitting for an interview. Try typing on crossed legs.
    I parked in the shade of a cottonwood in front of the residence of my subject: Harumi Ogawa, a Japanese physicist famous in the field of systems analysis. The week before I had requested a brief from Operations Protocol. I reread it now on my phone:
Chief Criticality Officer from 1945 until his retirement in 1983, now 94 years old. Cannot easily walk or stand. His wife, 20 years younger, helps him get comfortable before guests are admitted. Hobby: microminiatures. N.B.: Do NOT raise the subject of the criticality accidents.
    As chief criticality officer, Ogawa’s job had been preventing the occurrence of a criticality accident, which was a pretty way of saying someone, while conducting an experiment, catching a fatal dose of radiation. For four decades, his record promoting safety at the labs had been almost impeccable, except for two early accidents involving a radioactive sphere that had earned the nickname Demon Core. I knew the story from all the Los Alamos history books: a fourteen-pound, melonsized ball of plutonium had gone supercritical in two separate freak accidents in 1945 and 1946.
    Harry Daghlian worked alone on August 21, 1945, just days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He hovered over a nickel-plated plutonium sphere weighing 6.2 kilograms. The sphere had not yet been dubbed the Demon Core.
    Daghlian took several tungsten-carbide blocks and stacked them around the plutonium sphere. He moved a block to take a measurement and dropped it accidentally into the center of the assembly. It touched the sphere. There was a superprompt—that is, micromomentary—spike in the neutron population: radiation, heat, and finally a blue flash when the air became ionized around the neutron burst. His hand shot out in reflex to remove the dropped block, but he was flashed by a