The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  A short figure with a receding hairline and an oblong face was looking down from the court’s spectator gallery at the giant cube of graphite blocks. The other scientists, doubtless in a mixture of elation and exhaustion, had all left, but Enrico Fermi leaned on the railing, just staring, apparently lost in thought.

  The beast below was hibernating, all fourteen cadmium control rods having been shoved back in, picas into the hulking body of el toro.

  Leo approached and solemnly offered his hand; Enrico took it. Their names had already been linked forever in history—or would be, once the security was lifted—thanks to the letter to President Roosevelt that Leo had drafted three years ago. That letter, signed by Einstein himself, had begun:

  Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future.

  “Well, we did it,” said Enrico, with his Italian accent. But this was only the beginning, and they both knew that. The Einstein letter had gone on to say:

  This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.

  “Yes,” Leo replied, “we did.” He let go of Enrico’s hand and shook his head slowly, looking at their creation below. “This will go down as a black day for mankind.”

  Chapter 4

  1943

  History, though coy, needs truth to be her handmaiden.

  —Haakon Chevalier

  “... some sunny day!”

  Kitty Oppenheimer and Barbara Chevalier reached the song’s rousing conclusion. Their husbands applauded, Oppie clamping his cigarette between his teeth so he could do so with gusto. Kitty rose from the piano bench, and the two women bowed theatrically.

  Oppie got up from the living-room couch, clutching his empty martini glass, and said, “Another round?” He knew the answer: their two dinner guests considered his martinis legendary; Oppie himself took them as evidence that although he’d settled on physics, he’d have made a damn good chemist, too.

  Kitty, a brunette, merely raised her thin eyebrows in a “need you even ask?” expression, and Barb, blonde with green eyes, declared an enthusiastic, “Yes, please!”

  Oppie collected the other glasses on a sterling-silver tray. He was about to turn toward the kitchen door when, to his surprise, Haakon Chevalier, an inch taller than Oppie’s six feet, lifted himself from the couch. “I’ll give you a hand.”

  “Forsaking the company of two beauties for me?” said Oppie. The tension between Haakon and Barb had been palpable all evening; the singing had helped, and Oppie hoped his remark would lighten the mood even more. He motioned with his head for Haakon to get the door, and the two of them entered the spacious kitchen, the smell of an almost-ready suckling pig greeting them. The heavy wooden door swung shut.

  “We’re going to miss you,” Haakon said as Oppie put down the tray of used glasses, Kitty’s and Barb’s obvious by their bright-red lipstick marks. “Berkeley won’t be the same without you.”

  Oppie had a second set of long-stemmed conical glasses in the freezer. He pulled them out and—his signature flourish—pressed each one facedown as though it were a cookie cutter into a shallow pan filled with lime juice and honey. He was conscious of Haakon’s eyes on him, watching the master at work.

  “Any hint of where you’re going?” Haakon asked.

  Having now set the glasses down, Oppie poured Black Bear gin into his cocktail shaker then, with a practiced flick of his wrist, added a splash of vermouth. He thought about replying, “Somewhere even drier than my martinis,” but, no, that witticism had to die unspoken in the name of security. It was such a strange thing to get used to—and, really, if he couldn’t trust Hoke, his closest friend, whom could he? “Sorry,” he said affably. “My lips are sealed.”

  Haakon smiled but tipped his head toward a vodka bottle sitting next to the sink. “Genuine Russian, I see. Thank God we’re not at war with them.”

  “Ha,” said Oppie as he expertly manipulated the shaker.

  “Speaking of the Russians, Robert, do you know George Eltenton?”

  Eltenton was a chemical engineer at Shell Development. Was Haakon taking a dig at Eltenton’s Communist leanings? That wouldn’t be in character; Hoke was as Red as anyone. “Not well,” Oppie replied, apportioning his potent mixture among the four glasses. “But he’s been to this very house. He’s a member of FAECT”—the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians—“and came to a meeting here a couple of years ago; I was trying to get the boys at the Rad Lab to join the American Association of Scientific Workers.”

  “A good union man,” Haakon said, nodding his approval, but Oppie wasn’t sure if he meant him or Eltenton.

  “It didn’t go anywhere,” continued Oppie. “Just as well. Lawrence blew a gasket when he found out—wanted me to give him the names of those who’d been at the meeting. Naturally, I refused.”

  “Commendable,” said Haakon. “Anyway, it’s good you know George. He and I move in some of the same circles”—meaning, Oppie knew, the Communist Party—“and a fellow at the Soviet consulate in San Francisco had a word with him.”

  “Yes?” said Oppie, deploying olives now.

  “Well, we’re all on the same side, and the Soviets—no, one is plenty—well, the Soviets have gotten wind, I guess, of what’s been going on at our university. You’ve never said, but everyone assumes it’s of great importance.”

  Oppie made no reply.

  “And so George was wondering if, you know, in the spirit of openness, if you were so inclined—that is, if you wanted to—well, any technical information that went to him would very discreetly find its way to your scientific colleagues in Russia.”

  The wall clock ticked off seconds. Oppie kept his tone as even as he could. “That’s treason.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Chevalier. “I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “I want nothing to do with anything like that.”

  Haakon nodded and helped himself to one of the glasses. He took a sip. “Perfect, as always.”

  #

  In May 1943, Oppie, Kitty, and their son Peter, who had just entered the terrible twos, arrived at the place that would variously be called Site Y, the Hill, the mesa, or, in commemoration of the poplar trees that abounded here, Los Alamos. Oppie knew this part of northern New Mexico well. He’d spent the summer of 1922 here, an eighteen-year-old kid in need of toughening up following a string of illnesses before entering Harvard that fall. He had learned to ride horses then and ever since had been in love with the austere, feral countryside.

  He’d returned to this area with his younger brother Frank in the summer of 1928, leasing a rustic cabin made of halved tree trunks held together by adobe mortar, a cabin Robert continued to rent to this day. Upon first learning of its availability, he’d exclaimed “Hot Dog!” and the Spanish equivalent, Perro Caliente, had become the place’s name.

  So, when he, Leslie Groves, and a few others had begun scouting a location for their secret atomic-bomb lab, Oppie had led them to what he and the general quickly agreed was the perfect spot: a boy’s ranch school situated atop the two-mile-long Pajarito Plateau, 7,300 feet above sea level. Groves acquired it by eminent domain, and Oppie snared for his family one of the six existing houses, originally occupied by the school’s masters, on what came to be known as Bathtub Row. Other accommodations—rude and shoddy since they were only expected to last the duration of the war—were soon under construction; they would have only showers.

  General Groves could have claimed one of the Bathtub Row houses for himself, but he wouldn’t normally be on the mesa; his principal office was in the War Building in Washington. But he was there the day Robert ch
ose the Oppenheimer abode. “Very good,” he said. “I’d have picked that one, too.” The general paused—something he rarely did—then said, “I’ve got you a little house-warming present.” He handed a small tin case, less than an inch wide, to Oppenheimer.

  “Snuff?” said Oppie. “General, I—”

  “No, not snuff.” And then Groves made an odd sound, which Oppie supposed was his chuckle. “Well, it’s for snuffing, but ...” He pointed at it. “Open it up.”

  Oppie dug a fingernail under the case’s cover. It hinged back, revealing a small brown oval capsule surrounded by soft padding.

  “Potassium cyanide,” said Groves. “You’re to carry it with you until the war is over, and, yes, before you ask, I’ve got one, too.” He patted a pocket. “Everyone at the top levels is getting them.”

  “Good grief, General, isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

  “What do you think all this talk of security has been for? The Germans are doubtless trying to build an atomic bomb; so, I’d bet my life, are the Russians. But we’ve got the best minds, and the easiest thing for them to do is kidnap you or other key members of your team. If you’re captured, they will torture you, and they will succeed in getting you to talk—unless you take that first. It’s glass, covered in rubber to help keep it from breaking accidentally. Don’t swallow it; it’ll go right through your system intact. Instead, chomp down on it. You’ll be dead in a matter of minutes.”

  Oppie looked at the capsule. It was only the size of a pea, but it reminded him of an apple from long ago.

  Chapter 5

  To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage.

  —Jean Tatlock

  Groves and Oppenheimer soon realized that their original plan of having only a few hundred people on the mesa had woefully underestimated the complexity of the task they were undertaking. Los Alamos quickly became a town of thousands, albeit one surrounded by barbed-wire fencing.

  Although Oppie had been open to commissioning the scientists into the military, most of them had objected to that notion. Still, they were living on a de facto army base. A shrill siren sounded at 7:00 a.m.—“oh seven hundred,” as he was learning to call it—to rouse the scientists; they were expected to, well, to be sciencing by oh eight hundred. Oppie had quickly fallen into the habit of being the first to arrive at the technical area each morning and very often was the last to leave, coming home by moonlight or the blaze of the Milky Way. There were no street lamps allowed, lest the facility they were taking such pains to keep secret be noticed by an airplane.

  By the time he got back to Bathtub Row one particular summer evening, he found Kitty on the white couch, her legs, in blue jeans and bobby socks, swung up on the upholstery, a tumbler in hand, and a bottle of bourbon on the oval table in front of her, next to an overflowing ashtray.

  She didn’t get up. “Dinner takes forever to cook at this altitude,” she declared. Water boiled at just 198 Fahrenheit; bread never rose. “If I don’t know when you’re coming, I can’t have anything ready.”

  Robert put his porkpie hat down and poured himself a Scotch. “Sorry. Work was difficult today.”

  “What work?” she demanded.

  “You know I can’t tell you that. We’re not supposed to discuss—”

  “It’s me, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes,” Robert said, taking a sip. It was indeed her: the volatile and capricious hellion he’d married on the rebound after Jean had dumped him for the final time—but also the fiercely intelligent nonconformist who had devoted herself to his career. “You know my field,” he said. “You can ... guess what we’re working on.”

  Kitty lit a cigarette. “‘Guess,’” she repeated derisively, sending the word aloft in a plume of smoke.

  “There’s a war on.”

  “I know that,” snapped Kitty. She’d been born in Germany, although her family had come to the States when she was two. Her mother’s first cousin—estranged from her even before the U.S. had entered the war because Kitty had married a Jew—was a Nazi field marshal named Wilhelm Keitel; he was chief of staff of the Wehrmacht.

  “Many other women have husbands who have gone overseas,” Oppie said. “At least yours is home each night.”

  “Don’t take that line with me, Robert. I lost Joe in a war, remember.” Kitty’s second husband, a staunch Communist, had left her behind to go fight alongside the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “—to be dismissive? No, of course not,” she said in the tone she sometimes used that left him unsure of whether she was being sincere or sarcastic.

  “The war can’t last forever,” Oppie said. “And, when it’s over, things will be so much better for us. I do wish I could tell you just how important my work is.”

  “I can do important work, too. I was embarking on a Ph.D. in botany when I was with Richard.” Husband number three, the one she’d divorced after getting pregnant by Oppie. “I could make a real contribution here.”

  “You will make a contribution. You’re my wife. You’ll host parties, be the center of the community we’re building.”

  Kitty poured herself more bourbon and took a swig. “For Christ’s sake, Robert.”

  #

  Soon, the sprawling mesa was feeling crowded. Thousands had moved here: scientists and soldiers; doctors and domestics; those in makeshift offices who counted beans, those in well-equipped labs who tallied Geiger clicks; children who found it all a grand adventure, adults who grumbled about the lack of even rudimentary comforts. Jeeps careened along winding dirt roads, while people hustled on foot between semi-circular Quonset huts and slapped-together cubic structures.

  The chill and hoarfrost of winter gave way to spring and its pointillist wildflowers. Then May—had Oppie and Kitty really been here a year already?—followed by the long days and short nights of June.

  As time went by what would have been outrageous indignities became the accepted norm: Oppie now thought nothing of receiving each day’s mail already opened. He was surprised, though, to get a note with his own former residence on Shasta Road in Berkeley as the return address. Ah: it was from Mary Ellen, his erstwhile landlady and inveterate party hostess. And bless her heart for trying to be discreet: she’d written, “JT needs to see you.” Of course, Peer de Silva—who, Oppie thought, had a rather appropriate first name for a security officer—had surely checked the contents before releasing it, and would have cross-indexed the initials with a list of Oppie’s known associates. Although there were a few who sported that pair, only one of any closeness was in Berkeley: Jean Tatlock.

  Jean, who had broken his heart.

  Jean, who had twice refused to marry him.

  Jean, who he saw each night in his dreams, needed to see him—in person. In the middle of war-time, while he was sequestered here, among the literal eagles and figurative hawks, when every day counted and every hour was crucial.

  Of course, he’d demur.

  Of course, he’d stay at his post.

  Of course ...

  She had wanted to see him one last time before he’d departed for here, but Kitty had thrown a fit, leading to Oppie leaving Berkeley without so much as a goodbye.

  But he knew Jean and she knew him. They had made a distinction, clearly understood by both of them, between those times when one of them wanted to see the other and those when they needed to. And Mary Ellen, writing on behalf of Jean—why? Because Jean was so low, so far down, that she couldn’t compose a letter herself? Mary Ellen would have conveyed Jean’s precise intent: Jean needed to see him.

  Of course ...

  Of course he would go.

  What else could he possibly do?

  #

  For safety’s sake, General Groves forbade key personnel to fly, and Robert couldn’t book a train ticket to Sa
n Francisco, where Jean lived, without arousing suspicion. But to nearby Berkeley? That wouldn’t raise eyebrows; it was easy to concoct a list of tasks for him to do at the Rad Lab, including conferring with Ernest Lawrence.

  After his long Pullman trip from New Mexico (and, for appearance’s sake having first done a couple of things on campus), he slipped away from Le Conte Hall in the evening and took the streetcar across the Oakland Bay Bridge.

  Jean had driven to the terminal to meet him. It was a quarter to ten when his long legs, running now, closed the distance between them, and he swept her into his embrace. They drove in her green Plymouth coupe along the Embarcadero then turned onto Broadway. Oppie noticed in his side mirror that behind them a brown Ford, so studiously unremarkable as to be the Platonic ideal of nondescript, made the same turn.

  She posed no questions about where he was living now, and he didn’t volunteer. Someone—Hoke, perhaps, or maybe even her father—had probably whispered that he was involved in a secret war effort that he couldn’t talk about; she might ask him to compromise his marriage but never his work.

  In the seven years they’d known each other, Jean had changed little physically, although she was now a resident pediatric psychiatrist at Mount Zion Hospital. But Oppie had given up his former wild mass of wiry hair in favor of a close-cropped look better suited to his new role as the scientific director at Los Alamos.

  They arrived by 10:00 at the Xochimilco Café—their place—and, after drinks, inevitably, no other alternative ever being discussed, they left for her home on Telegraph Hill. Walking arm in arm from her car to the front steps, laughter lubricated by liquor, Jean dropped her key, and Oppie gallantly picked it up for her.

  They climbed to the house’s top floor, which contained Jean’s rented room, little more than books, a bed, and a couch. Clothes slid off. His long-fingered hands lifted her heavy breasts, thumbs brushing her hardening nipples. Soon she was flat on her back, and he climbed atop, slid inside, and joined with her.