By DENNIS OVERBYE There is no question about what happened to Louis Slotin in a shed in the Parajito Canyon, on the outskirts of Los Alamos, N.M., at 3:20 p.m., on May 21, 1946. Indeed, scientists think they know down to the last flicker of the Geiger counter what happened as Dr. Slotin, a Canadian physicist, slipped the pieces of an atomic bomb closer and farther apart, flirting with the moment when the assembly would be tight enough to achieve "critical mass" and a runaway nuclear reaction would occur. Richard Feynman once referred to such experiments as "tickling the dragon's tail." This time the dragon bit. Dr. Slotin's screwdriver slipped and the assembly clicked together. A blue glow enveloped the shed and the eight men inside. Dr. Slotin pulled the bomb apart, but he knew it was too late. He died nine days later. What scientists still do not know half a century into the atomic age is what meaning, if any, should be ascribed to Dr. Slotin's death. Was he a hero, who saved the lives of the others in the room by quickly dismantling the bomb? Was he a "cowboy" who got caught showing off? Was his death a symbol of the loss of innocence of American scientists grappling with the apocalyptic force they had ushered into the world? Those are some of the questions raised by a new play, "Louis Slotin Sonata," which explores Dr. Slotin's life as a walking dead man. The play, written by Paul Mullin of New York, was performed last year in Los Angeles and opens at the Ensemble Studio Theater next week as part of the First Light 2001 festival of works about science or technology, sponsored by the theater and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. But it arrives on wings of controversy from Los Alamos, cradle of the bomb itself, where some scientists have complained that the play was anti-science and impugned the honor of the bomb-builders. "I am become death, shatterer of worlds," intoned J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, quoting the Bhagavad- Gita on the occasion of the first atomic explosion, called Trinity, in the New Mexico desert. His colleague Kenneth Bainbridge was more direct: "Now we're all bastards." Both lines echo throughout the play. As the fictional Dr. Slotin imagines and reimagines the critical incident, the action veers between the stark realism of the lab hospital and surreal black humor. Oppenheimer, Einstein (playing dice) and God (dressed as Harry S. Truman) appear in Dr. Slotin's dreams. So, most notoriously in the eyes of Mr. Mullin's critics, does Josef Mengele, the Nazi death camp doctor, who in one dream sequence arrives in Hiroshima to watch "what took us years to do in stinking, filth-filled camps" be performed in milliseconds. The emotional climax of the play comes when Dr. Slotin's best friend, Phil Morrison, has to persuade Dr. Slotin's father, Israel Slotin, to authorize an autopsy on his son even though as a Jew he is opposed to such disfigurement of the body. Since experiments and repeated calculations had allowed his dosage to be precisely determined, Dr. Slotin's body had a lot to teach. Israel Slotin finally relents out of respect for his son's scientific attitude. Subsequently the pathologist reads his report from one side of the stage, while on the other side, Israel Slotin says Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for his son. Mr. Mullin, the son of a physicist, is 35 and lives with his wife in Brooklyn. He said he had tried to hew closely to the historical and technological facts, basing his work on documents, magazine accounts and interviews with physicists, including Dr. Morrison, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wrote to Los Alamos and got back a three-inch-thick file of photographs and documents, including the autopsy report, whose language he found "quite poetic." "I vowed to tell it like it was," Mr. Mullen said. "Anything less would just be grave digging." Louis Slotin was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1910 and studied physical chemistry at King's College in London before making his way to Enrico Fermi's lab in Chicago, where the first controlled nuclear reaction was achieved in 1942, and then on to Los Alamos. Marguerite Schreiber, whose late husband, Raemer Schreiber, was in the room with Dr. Slotin when he had his accident, recalls the 35-year-old bachelor as a quiet, thoughtful, well-educated man. "We all loved Louis," Mrs. Schreiber recalled. It was Dr. Slotin's job to do the dragon-tickling experiments in order to make sure that new bombs would work. On the day in question, Dr. Slotin was demonstrating his technique on a bomb core nicknamed Rufus to a colleague, Dr. Al Graves, who would be taking over while Dr. Slotin went out to the Pacific for a series of bomb tests. Rufus was already a killer. It consisted of a pair of plutonium hemispheres, weighing about six and a half pounds apiece. In order to achieve critical mass, the two hemispheres not only had to be joined together, but they also had to be surrounded by some material that bounced neutrons emitted by the radioactive plutonium back into the core where they could cause more atoms to split. In August 1945, a friend of Dr. Slotin's, Harry Daghlian, was using tungsten carbide bricks as neutron reflectors when he dropped one right on top of Rufus, causing it to go critical in a burst of radiation. Dr. Daghlian died 28 days later. It is said that Dr. Slotin visited him daily. In Dr. Slotin's experiment — which he had done many times, perhaps, some say, too many times, before — a thin shell of beryllium was the neutron reflector. Wooden spacers between the two halves of the shell normally kept it from closing all the way on the plutonium sphere and bringing on criticality, but Dr. Slotin had removed the spacers and was using the blade of a screwdriver to separate the beryllium halves. According to later experiments and calculations, in the millisecond after the blade slipped and the shell closed, Dr. Slotin received more than 2,100 rem of radiation — more than three times the lethal dose. A fraction of a second later the reaction shut stopped on its own accord when heat swelled the plutonium beyond the critical point. The next largest dose, 360 rem, was absorbed by Dr. Graves, who was standing behind Dr. Slotin and was thus shielded; he and the other six men survived, and most lived long, healthy lives. While Harry Daghlian's death had been swathed in wartime secrecy, by 1946 the Army, which ran Los Alamos, felt compelled to release a statement to the press about Dr. Slotin. Maj. Leslie Groves, the chief of the Manhattan Project, credited Dr. Slotin with saving the lives of the other scientists. After the autopsy, Dr. Slotin's body was flown home to Winnipeg, where he was given a hero's funeral. Mr. Mullin's play raises anew a question that has haunted historians: why Dr. Slotin was doing the dangerous "crit test" to begin with since equipment was already being designed to do it by remote control. But risk was part of the culture of the lab and part of what had made the Manhattan Project such a success. "We were highly reckless," Dr. Morrison said. "It was the end of the war, we were used to being in a hurry. More sober people said, stop, but it was not easy to convince us that we could delay." The impression that Dr. Slotin and other scientists acted cavalierly was one of the things about the play that angered some Los Alamos veterans. Another was the appearance of Dr. Mengele. "I take umbrage at anyone in American science being mentioned in the same breath as Mengele," said Dr. Donald Petersen, a retired biologist from Los Alamos. The cast of the Ensemble Studio Theater was invited to fly to Los Alamos and do a reading of the play at the suggestion of Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the nuclear age. Mr. Rhodes was planning to give a lecture there in support of an effort to preserve some of the historic lab sites, and he is also a consultant to the Sloan Foundation. "We didn't set out to make fireworks," said Doron Weber, who directs the science and technology efforts of the Sloan Foundation. But the play caught the attention of the Los Alamos Education Project, a group of about two dozen mostly older lab veterans who watch for what they consider antinuclear bias. Critical faxes streamed east. Art met science on March 24 at the Duane Smith Auditorium in Los Alamos. "They were running into us, the illusionists," said Curt Dempster, artistic director of the Ensemble Studio Theater. "We were running into them, reality." In a panel discussion moderated by Mr. Rhodes, Dr. Stratton, the retired criticality expert, read a statement summarizing the views of members of the education project. "To many of us, it was and is downright confusing," he said, quoting letters that criticized everything from the play's "pretentious sonata form," to the imputation that Manhattan Project physicists were surprised by the bombing of Hiroshima. There was no medical evidence, he said, that Dr. Slotin had suffered hallucinations, wondering why the play would want to make his death seem even worse than it was. Noting that the purpose of the Sloan Foundation was to increase public understanding and awareness of science, Dr. Stratton concluded that the play did nothing of the sort, "terming it a disservice to the Manhattan Project and not a credit to the Ensemble Theater." Another critic was Louis Rosen, senior fellow emeritus at Los Alamos, who said his main worry was that the play would encourage "the antinuclear crusade," which he said had contributed to the energy crisis in California. They were followed by more than a dozen audience members who rose in support of artistic license and said that they had enjoyed the play and that it made them think about important issues that were part of the heritage of atomic work. Among the supporters was Neal Davis, an engineer and Dr. Slotin's former office mate, who declared emphatically that the critics were not speaking to him. "I was there and I am not offended," he said. Another enthusiast was Mrs. Schreiber, who said in a subsequent interview that the play gave "a very sympathetic portrait of that particular time." In an interview before the Los Alamos reading, Mr. Mullin said it would make him sad if the play was interpreted as antiscience. "I'm asking different questions than science would ask," he said, "not how it happened by why it happened, what it means that it happened. There are certain questions science can't ask because it can't answer them. That's a good thing, it's not an indictment of science." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company