“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

He started to open it, so I began to walk down the hall, because I was a little bit afraid that when he found out who did it to him, I was going to get my throat cut!

Sure enough, he came running down the hall after me, but instead of being angry, he practically put his arms around me because he was so completely relieved that this terrible burden of the atomic secrets being stolen was only me doing mischief.

A few days later de Hoffman told me that he needed something from Kerst’s safe. Donald Kerst had gone back to Illinois and was hard to reach. “If you can open all my safes using the psychological method,” de Hoffman said (I had told him how I did it), “maybe you could open Kerst’s safe that way.”

By now the story had gotten around, so several people came to watch this fantastic process where I was going to open Kerst’s safe—cold. There was no need for me to be alone. I didn’t have the last two numbers to Kerst’s safe, and to use the psychology method I needed people around who knew Kerst.

We all went over to Kerst’s office and I checked the drawers for clues; there was nothing. Then I asked them, “What kind of a combination would Kerst use—a mathematical constant?”

“Oh, no!” de Hoffman said. “Kerst would do something very simple.”

I tried 10-20-30, 20-40-60, 60-40-20, 30-20-10. Nothing.

Then I said, “Do you think he would use a date?”

“Yeah!” they said. “He’s just the kind of guy to use a date.”

We tried various dates: 8-6-45, when the bomb went off; 86-19-45; this date; that date; when the project started. Nothing worked.

By this time most of the people had drifted off. They didn’t have the patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is patience!

Then I decided to try everything from around 1900 until now. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not: the first number is a month, one through twelve, and I can try that using only three numbers: ten, five, and zero. The second number is a day, from one to thirty-one, which I can try with six numbers. The third number is the year, which was only forty-seven numbers at that time, which I could try with nine numbers. So the 8000 combinations had been reduced to 162, something I could try in fifteen or twenty minutes.

Unfortunately I started with the high end of the numbers for the months, because when I finally opened it, the combination was 0-5-35.

I turned to de Hoffman. “What happened to Kerst around January 5, 1935?”

“His daughter was born in 1936,” de Hoffman said. “It must be her birthday.”

Now I had opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was professional.

That same summer after the war, the guy from the property section was trying to take back some of the things the government had bought, to sell again as surplus. One of the things was a Captain’s safe. We all knew about this safe. The Captain, when he arrived during the war, decided that the filing cabinets weren’t safe enough for the secrets he was going to get, so he had to have a special safe.

The Captain’s office was on the second floor of one of the flimsy wooden buildings that we all had our offices in, and the safe he ordered was a heavy steel safe. The workmen had to put down platforms of wood and use special jacks to get it up the steps. Since there wasn’t much amusement, we all watched this big safe being moved up to his office with great effort, and we all made jokes about what kind of secrets he was going to keep in there. Some fella said we oughta put our stuff in his safe, and let him put his stuff in ours. So everyone knew about this safe.

The property section man wanted it for surplus, but first it had to be emptied, and the only people who knew the combination were the Captain, who was in Bikini, and Alvarez, who’d forgotten it. The man asked me to open it.

I went up to his old office and said to the secretary, “Why don’t you phone the Captain and ask him the combination?”

“I don’t want to bother him,” she said.

“Well, you’re gonna bother me for maybe eight hours. I won’t do it unless you make an attempt to call him.”

“OK, OK!” she said. She picked up the telephone and I went into the other room to look at the safe. There it was, that huge, steel safe, and its doors were wide open.

I went back to the secretary. “It’s open.”

“Marvelous!” she said, as she put down the phone.

“No,” I said, “it was already open.”

“Oh! I guess the property section was able to open it after all.”

I went down to the man in the property section. “I went up to the safe and it was already open.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said; “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I sent our regular locksmith up there to drill it, but before he drilled it he tried to open it, and he opened it.”

So! First information: Los Alamos now has a regular locksmith. Second information: This man knows how to drill safes, something I know nothing about. Third information: He can open a safe cold—in a few minutes. This is a real professional, a real source of information. This guy I have to meet.