The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Oppie wished the image had been facing outward; he wanted to look into the man’s eyes. Nobel had received a gift few men ever did: he had learned what history would think of him. In 1888, when he was fifty-seven, six years before he actually died, a French newspaper, confusing him for his brother Ludvig who had just passed away, published an obituary for Alfred under the headline “Le marchand de la mort est mort” —“The merchant of death is dead.” What had started for Alfred as a puzzle in chemistry had turned into the manufacture of armaments and weapons.

  With this foreknowledge, Alfred had decided to change his future—and that of the world. Childless and unmarried, he revised his will, bequeathing ninety-four percent of his fortune to fund annual awards in physics, chemistry, literature, physiology or medicine, and, significantly, “to the person who shall have done the most or best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

  Oppie rubbed the medal between thumb and forefinger, an atom or two of gold transferring to him, a few molecules from his body making a new home on the disk. Soon, he hoped; soon.

  Prince Arjuna had questioned his duty; Alfred Nobel had changed his fate. But although the former had beheld unearthly visions and the latter had preceded Oppie as creator of the greatest man-made explosive in history, neither had stared into the very fires of hell as Oppie had. And, sure, Nobel had seen his own premature obituary, but Oppie had recently gotten advance word of the demise of the entire world, although—

  “Don’t bite it.” Rabi’s voice. “I guarantee it’s real. Twenty-three carat, they tell me.”

  Oppie whirled around, feeling heat in his cheeks. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said Rabi, who was the better part of a foot shorter than Oppie. “Margaret wanted to take it in for show-and-tell. In the old neighborhood, not a chance. In this one? Mothers wear earrings worth more.”

  Oppie smiled wistfully and gently put the medal back down.

  Rabi, forty-seven, looking a fair bit like Leo Szilard might if he got in shape and lost the mischievousness in his eyes, took a chair and motioned for Oppenheimer to do the same. “Where were we?”

  “International control,” said Oppie. “It’s been two months since I met with Truman. He still thinks the Soviets will never have atomic weapons of their own, but—”

  Rabi nodded. “But of course they will. Right, okay. So shall it be the United Nations?”

  Despite all his weariness, such talk gave Robert a frisson of delight—which he hoped he hid better than his embarrassment of moments ago. Paying a visit to the president; dining with statesmen and captains of industry; heady talk, as now, of how to set the world straight—if those boys who had thrown him with painted genitals into the icebox; if Patrick Blackett, who’d avoided Robert’s apple and had since moved from Cambridge to Manchester; if Jean could see him now ...

  Well, all but Jean would. His picture had been in newspapers worldwide; his name daily on a hundred thousand tongues. He’d known that riches material and reputational would accrue to whoever succeeded in creating an atomic bomb. That’s why he’d maneuvered for the position: to satiate Kitty’s appetites and, yes, even his own. But when Hitler, with Soviet troops a mere two blocks from the Reichskanzlei, had put a Luger shot through his own skull, Oppie had felt those rewards slipping away even as the Allies held victory parades.

  Yesterday, Christmas Eve, had been twenty weeks to the day since their Little Boy had obliterated Hiroshima: a hundred and forty nights of tossing and turning; a hundred and forty morning newspapers and evening radio reports—startling how quickly finding one’s own name in the news could turn you into an avid follower of the fourth estate. He’d even seen speculation that he’d be Time’s Man of the Year, following Ike, who’d taken that honor last year, and George, who’d earned it the year before.

  Ike.

  George.

  It wasn’t an affectation; it really wasn’t. That’s how he thought of them, how he knew them: General Dwight D. Eisenhower; Army Chief of Staff George Marshall.

  And now here he was, sitting with a Nobel laureate, planning a new world order—and, unlike Hitler’s mad designs, a benign one. Last month, the Association of Atomic Scientists had come into being, and Oppie was already working on his essay for their proposed book, One World or None. He and Rabi, Szilard and Wigner, Bohr and Bethe, plus so many others, had quickly agreed that the only path that would avoid an insane arms race would be to put control of atomic matters into the hands of an international body, and the nascent United Nations, all of two months old, did appear to be the most likely prospect.

  “Yes,” said Oppie, after relighting his pipe. “The U.N. seems the proper choice. The General Assembly will have its first meeting in—what?—sixteen days.”

  “We’ll have to convince the right people to put the idea forward,” said Rabi. “I hear Dean Acheson is likely to ask David Lilienthal to head the committee advising the president.”

  Oppie nodded. “I’ve never met Lilienthal, but I spoke to Dean late in September. I told him most of us on the Manhattan Project were strongly disinclined to continue weapons work, told him it was against the dictates of both our hearts and spirits.”

  “Most,” said Rabi, emphasizing, rather than questioning, Oppie’s word.

  “Well, there’s Teller, of course, and—”

  “Teller.” Rabi almost spat the name. “I’ll never understand his position.”

  “Nor I,” replied Oppie. He heard a distant buzzing sound and raised his eyebrows questioningly at Rabi.

  “Helen will get it,” his host said and then he took a draw on his own pipe. Apparently it was empty, so he rose and headed over to his desk to refill it from an ornate tobacco jar. On his way back, he paused by the large window, and Robert saw him bathed in amber light. “Oh, Oppie, come see!”

  Robert got up and went to stand next to Rabi. The sun was setting, and the ice floes on the Hudson were no longer white but flamingo pink and canary yellow. Of course, to Rabi the sun was merely a celestial artist, painting the landscape; he knew nothing of the impending solar crisis. To Robert, the chromatic transformation was the work of a trickster, a cosmic cheat.

  Rabi’s handsome face had taken on the same tint as Alfred Nobel’s stamped on the medal; he looked beatific as he gazed at the wide river.

  “One approach would be to denature uranium all over the world,” Oppie said.

  Rabi gestured at the spectacle before them and sounded annoyed. “You spoil a beautiful moment. And, besides, even if you could contaminate the world’s entire supply of uranium so that it wasn’t suitable for fission, surely it could be, well, ‘renatured’ and—”

  There was a knock at the study’s door, then after a couple of seconds, the door opened, and Helen, Rabi’s brunette wife, stuck her head in. “Boys, you’ll never guess who’s come for a visit!” She stepped aside, and Oppie felt his jaw drop.

  “Hydroxyl, hydroxyl, hydroxyl!” said the elderly, paunchy white-haired man with a twinkle in his eyes.

  Rabi got it first: “And HO, HO, HO to you!” And then, in German, “Mein Gott, what brings you here?”

  “The train from Princeton,” replied Einstein. “And I want to catch the last one back tonight.” He stepped fully into the room, and Helen smiled and withdrew, closing the door behind her. “Maja”—Einstein’s sister, who had lived with him since 1939—“is waiting for me in a little deli down the street. Thank God for us Jews, eh? Almost nothing was open today!”

  The great physicist must have already doffed his coat, although there was still a rosiness to his craggy cheeks—it was a bitterly cold day. He was wearing a cranberry sweater and beige slacks. “May I sit? We have much to talk about!”

  Rabi kept a neat house, Oppie had observed, but, like every academic, he had books and papers piled on unused chai
rs. He quickly relocated the stack from the last remaining seat in the study onto the floor, and took that chair for himself, gesturing for Einstein to claim the more comfortable one he’d vacated.

  “I heard you were out this way,” Einstein said, looking at Robert. “I imagine your house is bugged—by the F.B.I., at least, if not the Soviets. Mine is, too, of course. But, so far as I’ve been able to determine, Rabi hasn’t attracted that schmuck Hoover’s special attention. I’m hoping we can speak freely here.”

  “About what?” asked Rabi.

  Einstein looked at Oppie, then at Rabi, then back at Oppie. “You haven’t told him? About the fate of the world!”

  Rabi said, “We’ve been working on a solution to take to—”

  “No,” Oppenheimer said, interrupting. “That’s not what he’s talking about.”

  It was Rabi’s turn to shift his gaze from face to face. “What then?”

  “You discovered it, or so Szilard told me,” said Einstein, looking at Oppie. “You tell him.”

  Oppie hesitated. He trusted Rabi wholeheartedly—even as much as he trusted his own beloved brother. And in the almost two months since General Groves had tried to get him to disclose what was going on, Oppie had succeeded most of the time in putting it out of his conscious mind, locking it away next to other largely banished thoughts, including the horrific pictures Serber and Morrison had brought back from their visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He looked over at the window; the sun had set. Out of sight, out of mind.

  “All right,” said Robert. “Rabi, you were at the Trinity test. Did you meet William Lawrence?”

  “The science guy from the New York Times?”

  “That’s him. He was with us for quite some time—promised an exclusive in exchange for keeping things secret until we gave the okay. Anyway, he taught me something we academics never seem to know: don’t bury the lead with long-winded explanations of context. Just go straight to the punch, and so ...” Oppie took a deep breath. “And so, as Herr Doktor Einstein will confirm, here it is. The sun is struggling with an internal instability that will cause a photospheric ejection within eighty-odd years; the world is doomed.”

  “Das ist wahr,” said Einstein, his hair a bobbing white cloud, and then he repeated it in English: “It’s true.”

  Rabi’s jaw slackened, lengthening his squarish face for a moment. He removed his glasses and pulled out a handkerchief to polish the lenses—a habitual move, a grasp at the ordinary, as he let it sink in.

  “And Earth won’t recover?” asked Rabi.

  “The atmosphere will be blown away,” said Oppie. “The oceans? Probably boiled off.”

  “And I don’t suppose surface habitats under, say, protective domes, or maybe subterranean cities could survive?”

  “Not a chance,” said Oppie.

  Rabi was quiet, staring out the window. It was so dark the Hudson might as well have been the Styx. Oppie and Einstein had both absorbed the same awful news earlier; they knew better than to rush him. After a time, Rabi turned back to face them, all color gone from his cheeks, his eyes looking unfocused, his mouth downturned. “Well, then,” he said. After another moment he slowly began asking a series of technical questions, which Oppie answered with occasional additions from Einstein. Shock gave way, as the clock hands moved along, to grim acceptance. Understanding it all was, as Sherlock Holmes might have had it, a three-pipe problem—three apiece, that is—but at last, the younger Nobel laureate knew as much on the topic as the older one did, and almost as much as Oppie himself.

  “All right,” said Rabi. Some pink had begun to return to his face. “But what in God’s name do we do about it?”

  “I’m going to do nothing,” Oppie replied flatly. “First, because I doubt anything can be done. And, second, because I’ve seen how it takes hold of minds—Szilard’s for one. It becomes an obsession that causes people to ignore the real problems of the here and now. If we don’t prevent a nuclear arms race, it won’t matter a tinker’s damn what’ll happen in a hundred years because there will be nobody left by then.”

  “But someone has to direct the effort, co-ordinate it ...” said Rabi.

  “Szilard has all but anointed Teller,” said Einstein.

  “Teller!” exclaimed Rabi. “You can’t be serious.”

  Einstein replied: “Of course, no one at the Institute for Advanced Study—that’s where Szilard proposes the effort should be centered—wants Teller; he wouldn’t even be considered for a position there.” Oppie had been to the I.A.S. once, a decade ago, before the war, before the bomb—a simpler time. Then, the idyllic spot had seemed unreal, a luxurious retreat from reality. But now? Just last month, the 1945 Nobel in physics had gone to Wolfgang Pauli; although many who had been recruited by the Institute over the years were already Nobel laureates, that was the first time someone had received the prize while at the I.A.S.

  Einstein went on. “No, Teller will never do. I’ve been asking around; we’re going to need a new director anyway, since the incumbent is retiring, and everyone agrees on who it should be.”

  “Ah,” said Oppie. “Yes, of course. Rabi, you’d be perfect. You know I wanted you as associate director back at Los Alamos, and with that nifty coin”—he pointed at the Nobel medal, back on the shelf—“you certainly have the necessary prestige now, if you didn’t already before. Plus—”

  “Nein,” said Einstein. “Nein, nein. Not Rabi—with due respect—but rather you, Robert.”

  “I don’t want the job.”

  “But you are the best qualified for it.”

  “I doubt many will think so.”

  “Wouldn’t have thought so, perhaps, when you began at Los Alamos,” said Einstein. “But now? There can be no doubt: you are the finest scientific administrator in the world.”

  To be praised thus by Einstein! Oppie fought to keep from beaming. “Nonsense. It was the quality of the team; anyone could have succeeded with such men beneath him.”

  “Robert,” said Rabi, “modesty was never your strong suit. Dr. Einstein is right. You. You’re the man. It has to be. Remember what Truman said of your last job: ‘The greatest achievement of organized science in history.’ And you were the organizer.”

  “Come, Robert,” said Einstein, “it’s almost New Year’s. Time for a resolution: resolve to do this.”

  They’d been sitting for a long time. Oppie got up and looked out the window. Night in Manhattan was nothing like night on the war-time mesa. Lamps blazed at street corners and in windows; if the stars were out, one couldn’t tell through the glare.

  He thought about Teller, about his strange love for ever bigger explosions, about that day he had come into Teller’s office, the day that all of this solar madness had begun. On the blackboard had been Teller’s chart of weapon ideas, the final row showing a delivery method of “Backyard.” A man obsessed with destruction on a planetary scale could hardly be in charge of preventing such a thing from happening.

  And Oppie thought about Trinity, here, befitting the holiday, fleetingly of the Christian version of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and, of course, about the Hindu one, the Trimurti of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. And he thought about the three of them in this room—if not an actual Holy Trinity of physicists, three wise men for Christmas, at least. And, most of all, he thought about the Trinity test, the first time the sun had touched the surface of the earth. He recalled the thought that had come into his mind then, the words that four-armed Vishnu had used to persuade the reluctant prince Arjuna to do his duty, to discharge his obligation, to take upon himself the role he’d been born to.

  Now ...

  Now I ...

  Now I am ...

  Oppie shook his head slightly and looked out the window again, its borders veined with frost.

  No, not I. Not alone.

  And not D
eath. Not this time.

  Behind him, out of sight but not out of mind, the greatest physicist since Isaac Newton, and the trusted friend Oppie had turned to for counsel so many times before.

  His heart pounded. He turned around, faced them, faced himself, faced the future. All right, then. All right.

  He spoke firmly, with conviction and—yes, damn it, yes; he was going to be in the center again—with elation. “Now we are become Life, the saviors of the world.”

  Chapter 26

  Mrs. Oppenheimer impressed me as a strong woman with strong convictions. It requires a very strong person to be a real Communist.

  —John Lansdale, head of Manhattan Project security

  “No. Damn it, no. Not again. I won’t go.”

  Kitty Oppenheimer stood framed in the Manhattan hotel suite’s master-bedroom doorway. While Oppie had been meeting with Rabi—and unexpectedly with Einstein—Kitty and the children had been enjoying a Christmas holiday. Today, though, Kitty’s mother, who had come in by train from Pennsylvania, was off with the children seeing the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. Kitty’s legs were spread to give her balance but she still swayed. Oppie had hoped when they’d descended from the mesa, dropping 7,000 feet, that booze wouldn’t have continued to hit his wife quite so hard. Oh, she could handle it—she could handle just about anything—but life would have been easier for them both if she were just a little less tipsy most of the time.

  Unlike many others, she hadn’t minded the climate at Los Alamos—they’d vacationed for years in nearby Perro Caliente, after all. But Olden Manor at the I.A.S. would be a big step up from Bathtub Row, or even from their villa with the red-tiled roof and whitewashed walls back on Eagle Hill in Berkeley.