The oddly elusive brunette

By JOHN VICTOR PETERSON
It was love at first sight—all over the world!
Certainly a faithful representation of a male simian cast in brass would, granted reasoning powers, have felt unusual trepidation if exposed to the Wisconsin weather that fateful winter morning.
I myself was inordinately glad that I lived in the project's Bachelor Officers Quarters only a short block from the UNACMEA/WAGS installation and that my first experience with Wisconsin winter three years before had prompted the purchase of the thermo-parka I was then wearing.
UNACMEA/WAGS is, I realize, a formidable array of letters. Though quickly recognizable, of course, from constant stereonews repetition, it is usually not immediately decipherable except by the UN which spawned it and the eggheads who maintain it.
I help maintain it. I also maintain that I'm not an egghead. Literally, that is. I do have a bushy albeit greying head of hair and a reasonably handsome (Mom always said) face beneath; otherwise the brunette might have—but first I must translate UNACMEA/WAGS. It's important.
When the United Nations finally established worldwide atomic control three years ago—in '65—it created the Atomic Control Monitor Establishment at its New York Headquarters with an Alternate installation here near Racine. Piecing together most of the capitals, the alternate set-up comes out UNACMEA. The WAGS, of course, is easy. W for Wisconsin. AGS for Alternating Gradient Synchrotron.
Everyone knows what an AGS is from the publicity given to the 25-Bev unit which went in at Brookhaven National Laboratories back in the International Geophysical Year. Pix of that 700-foot diameter horizontal doughnut were in all papers, mags and fax when it started producing anti-protons, anti-neutrons and, among the Long Island neighbors, a few tremulous anti-science folk.
Despite the parka I was shivering like a displaced Hottentot on Pluto at aphelion as I approached the UNACMEA building next to the 1400-foot diameter rings of WAGS. Activating the Harlan sphincter, I stepped into the console room. I'd activated the parka's auto-open when I realized that the last man out the night before, taking some dimpled weather gal's prognostications as utter veracity, had apparently kicked off the thermostat; the room was only slightly less frigid than external Racine.