The salvage yard at Los Alamos is open from noon to 4 p.m. on Thursdays. The regulars start arriving early, staking out their positions at the head of the line, which by noon stretches across the parking lot. When the door opens, they trot forward, gaining speed as they gallop through the warehouse, swerve around the cash register and slide past a World War II-vintage sign of a cutout policeman holding up a warning DO NOT RUN OR PUSH. One by one they pop out into the yard, their shirts and hats festooned with bits of masking tape made into instant claim markers. SOLD: JDGL. The rule, only occasionally broken, is that the person who marks it first gets it. What they do with "it" after that is their problem. Sometimes the problem is figuring out what "it" is, among the refuse of the work of the lab, the source of the material on sale.
"It's a gamble," says SOLD: JDGL, who is Jim Lindsay, a retired physicist. His wife Jeanette, a retired schoolteacher, is reassuring: "It looks like a dogfight, but there is a lot of sharing too. People help each other." The Lindsays have been regulars for 20 years. The 12-ft. butcher-block counter they bought today for $50 will go under, or on, or behind the piles of salvage that fill their own basement and the basement in the house next door.
Salvage day is a social and psychological event in Los Alamos. Once upon a time, before Galileo changed everything, the people who are now seduced by salvage would have worn long, pointy sorcerers' hats and worried about perpetual-motion machines and the best way to turn lead into gold. Nowadays they call themselves scroungers and arrive for the weekly salvage ritual in white pickup trucks, wearing clothes suitable for labor in a wood lot. Many of them also wear Los Alamos National Laboratory security badges on their down vests and flannel shirts. Their reflexive tendency on being introduced, to reveal whether or not they have a Ph.D., hints that this is not just another junkyard.
This junkyard of high-tech effluvia is 7,500 ft. above sea level, occupying three acres of the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico. The Jemez Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo range rise from the Rio Grande Valley, the gray-green slopes splashed with yellowing aspen. The incomparable clouds of the high desert float over the city on the hill. Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb, is a 40-year-old company town (pop. 17,500). The company is the U.S. Government, and the main business is nuclear weapons. The lab's Bradbury Science Museum has all kinds of hands-on exhibits explaining peacetime uses of magnetically confined plasma, inertial fusion and lasers. But weapons are the cornerstone, accounting for more than half of this year's $517 million budget. Scarcely anyone would live on the hill if it were not for weapons.
In July a White House Science Council review of the quality of the work done at most of the major national laboratories, including Los Alamos, pointed out serious deficiencies. Last month the man who originally requested the review, the President's science adviser, Dr. George Key worth II, a former physics-division leader at the lab, warned the badge holders to prepare for changing times. The lab should "deeply think through its mission," he said in a speech at Los Alamos.