Self Portrait

By BERNARD WOLFE
Illustrated by MARTIN SCHNEIDER
In the credo of this inspiringly selfless cyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues in science. Much too good for them !
October 5, 1959
Well, here I am at Princeton. IFACS is quite a place, quite a place, but the atmosphere's darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they're not puttering in the labs they're likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course, but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the MS end, whatever that is. You'd think fellows in something secret like that would dress and behave with a little more dignity.
Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the pre-faded kind.
October 6, 1959
Met the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut, wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.
Parks, he said, you can count yourself a very fortunate young man. You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch in some of the background of the place.
That would be most helpful, I said. I wondered, though, if he was as naive as he sounded. Did he think I'd been working in cybernetics labs for going on six years without hearing enough rumors about IFACS to make me dizzy? Especially about the MS end of IFACS?
Maybe you know, he went on, that in the days of Oppenheimer and Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies. It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets, egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency, so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced Cybernetics Studies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now, pret -ty keen.