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I remember one evening our crowd went into a saloon and ordered beer all around, and after we had drank it, I proposed three cheers for the Union, which we gave in a hearty manner, and went out without paying for the beer. You would hardly credit it, but the saloonkeeper, an Irishman named Oppenheimer, became offended, and wanted us to pay cash for the beer.
And many a dreary day of biting cold did Oppenheimer and I forget that and the following winter in the absorption of Cho-Sen chess. But there was no convincing him that I had in truth brought this game back to San Quentin across the centuries.
So intrinsically was this slum-bred convict a scientist, that he had worked out Hamilton's law and rigidly applied it. And yet and the incident is delicious Jake Oppenheimer was intellectually honest. That night, as I was dozing off, he called me with the customary signal. "Say, Professor, you said you saw me wiggling my loose tooth. That has got my goat.
I had mastered the flesh, and the spaciousness of time was mine to wander in, while my poor flesh, not even suffering, lay in the little death in the jacket. Much of my adventures I rapped to my two comrades. Morrell believed, for he had himself tasted the little death. But Oppenheimer, enraptured with my tales, remained a sceptic to the end.
Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back, gingerly took one of his front upper tooth an eye teeth between thumb and forefinger, and consideratively moved it back and forth. Again he yawned, stretched his arms, rolled over, and knocked the call to Ed Morrell. I read the code as a matter of course. "Thought you might be awake," Oppenheimer tapped. "How goes it with the Professor?"
It broke down Warden Atherton. He surrendered to the demonstration that I was unkillable. As I told him once: "The only way you can get me, Warden, is to sneak in here some night with a hatchet." Jake Oppenheimer was responsible for a good one on the Warden which I must relate: "I say, Warden, it must be straight hell for you to have to wake up every morning with yourself on your pillow."
Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull the thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed Morrell, so was I. And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of us the three incorrigibles of solitary. Flesh is a cheap, vain thing.
Why, goodness me, a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, five years ago, in these United States, assault and battery was not a civil capital crime. But this year, the year of Our Lord 1913, in the State of California, they hanged Jake Oppenheimer for such an offence, and to-morrow, for the civil capital crime of punching a man on the nose, they are going to take me out and hang me.
Led by General Groves and Oppenheimer, this widely publicized visit made Trinity front page news all over the country. Trinity Site was later encircled with more than a mile of chain link fencing and posted with signs warning of radioactivity. In the early 1950s most of the remaining Trinitite in the crater was bulldozed into a underground concrete bunker near Trinity.
The prison doctor, a likable chap, has just been in to have a yarn with me, incidentally to proffer me his good offices in the matter of dope. Of course I declined his proposition to "shoot me" so full of morphine through the night that to-morrow I would not know, when I marched to the gallows, whether I was "coming or going." But the laugh. It was just like Jake Oppenheimer.
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