The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  He passed her the yellow telegram sheet, which Peer de Silva had delivered a few moments ago.

  BOARD UNANIMOUSLY NAMES OPPENHEIMER MY SUCCESSOR. APOLOGIES FOR CONFUSION. CONFIDENT YOU WILL LAND ON FEET. BEST WISHES FOR NEW YEAR. AYDELOTTE.

  “I’m sure they’d still like to have you as part of the team,” Mici said. She placed the sheet on the coffee table and ran her fingers through his thick dark hair.

  “Under Oppenheimer again?” Edward shook his head. “First he shoved fusion research out of the center; then he put Bethe in charge of the Technical Division instead of me. No, I don’t want to work for him again.”

  “We can stay here, then. I’ve grown used to it.”

  Teller’s shoulders went up and down as he laughed. “You’ve always been a terrible liar, my love.” He pointed at the tiny kitchen. “Our pipes are frozen, and—damn it!—my piano is already en route to Princeton.”

  “We can get it back. I’m sure the I.A.S. will pay the freight under the circumstances.”

  “Perhaps. But even if they are flush, money here is growing tight. Norris Bradbury says the military has only guaranteed six more months of funding for Los Alamos. And he’s made it damn clear that all future work to be done here will be simply refining the plutonium fission bomb, rather than anything to do with the super.”

  “Well, didn’t Mulliken say he’d like to have you return to Chicago?”

  “Hah! Our pipes might freeze there, too!” He shook his head. “But, yes, I could surely get my old professorship back. I hear Fermi will be dividing his time between Chicago and the new Princeton group, so there might be good positioning for someone who can be in Chicago full-time.”

  “Well, then,” said Mici, “perhaps that’s the answer.”

  His shoulders rose again. “Maybe. But what I really need is a laboratory of my own, a place devoted to the super. God only knows whether Oppenheimer and his gang can save the whole world from the sun’s fury, but I at least can save this country from man’s folly. With the super, no one will dare attack us.”

  A sudden crash from the kitchen. Edward and Mici got up and hurried the short distance. Their son Paul, almost three, was sitting surrounded by wooden blocks. Whatever he’d built had come tumbling down around him; Edward knew how he felt. But the boy was good-natured and had already started piling up blocks again. “That’s another reason to go back east,” said Mici. “Not many playmates left here for Paul, although ...”

  “Well, he’ll always have me.” Edward bent low. “Come along, little man!” Paul gleefully scrambled onto his father’s broad back and was treated to a piggyback ride around the living room.

  Mici smiled. “I think he’s going to have even more company by the end of next summer.”

  Edward had finished his second circumnavigation of the living room, and he returned the boy to the kitchen and his blocks, tousling the little guy’s hair after he’d climbed down. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m late,” Mici said.

  Edward lifted his eyebrows. “Late for what?”

  She shook her head fondly. “For a genius, sweetness, you can be awfully thick.” She smiled. “Late. So, you see, maybe we do need the extra room of a place on Bathtub Row.”

  Beaming, Edward closed the distance between them and swept his wife into his arms.

  #

  “But for God’s sake,” demanded Robert Oppenheimer, “how in hell do we break this news to the world?”

  The meeting in his temporary I.A.S. office was well into its third hour. In deference to Groves’s dislike of smoking, Oppie had pushed up the window, dislodging icicles from the slight brick overhang; they’d fallen like failed rockets, piercing the snow. He stood in the cold draft, sending walnut clouds outside; most of it just came right back in. I.I. Rabi, much less addicted, stayed in his seat and simply refrained.

  Groves was still in the swivel chair, but Colonel Nichols, apparently having given up on ever getting an “At ease” from his superior, had finally gone ahead and perched himself on the edge of the mahogany desk.

  The general rubbed his graying temples as if trying to massage away a headache. “Break the news?” he repeated. “This isn’t news—and we never break security.”

  Rabi sounded appalled. “You can’t seriously be proposing that we keep secret that our whole damn world is going to be annihilated?”

  “If it’s going to be, no good can come from telling everyone,” replied Groves. “But the point of this undertaking we’re embarking on is to prevent that, and mindless panic along the way will just impede us.”

  “Granted,” said Rabi, “but the public still has a right to be told.”

  “Rights aren’t my department,” said Groves. “I work on a need-to-know basis, and John Q. Public simply doesn’t need to know.” He raised a large hand. “Yes, yes, you academics are all about openness. But take a step back. Would the public even want to know? Is it in their best interest to tell them?”

  Groves turned his eyes on Oppie. “I hear the Wall Street crash of 1929 sailed by without you being aware of it, Robert; that was nice, I’m sure. But I remember it vividly. There was mass hysteria, people jumping out windows, riots in the streets. Of course, now that we’re past all that, the reaction seems overblown—but then? The desperate response to the headlines was utterly predictable.” His expression became even more dour than usual. “And now we’ve just finished a world war. The property damage is incalculable. It will take decades to rebuild everything that’s been destroyed in Europe.”

  “And in Japan,” said Oppie.

  “Yes, in Japan, too,” said Groves, who had the decency not to sound irritated at Robert’s interjection. “Do you think all that will go on in earnest if we tell people that the world is likely doomed anyway? They’ll wonder, quite rightly, what the point of it all is.”

  “Until the end comes,” said Oppie, “if it comes, people will still require places to live, places to work, infrastructure.”

  “Exactly,” said Groves. “Pressing, immediate concerns—and we need people to focus solely on them.”

  “If they can focus on anything,” said Rabi. “Jews worldwide are mourning our dead, and everyone of every faith who lives anywhere in Europe or Russia or, yes, Japan or China, surely knows someone who was killed.”

  “Indeed they do,” said Groves as if Rabi were making his point for him. “We’re still tallying the figures, but it looks like more than fifty million people were killed worldwide. You really want to tell everybody that those fifty million were just a drop in the bucket? That, if we fail, billions more will follow them into a mass grave?”

  Oppie’s pipe had gone out. As he refilled it, he said simply, “Everyone dies.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Groves. “But not all at once. Robert, I know you’re wringing your hands over what we did in Japan. I’m not; I have a clear conscience. It was war, and American lives were saved, period. And Japan has survivors, far more than it has dead. In the scenario you’ve outlined, this solar purge, everyone dies in a matter of—what? Seconds, minutes? A day at most? Telling people who are still burying their dead or, perhaps worse, living with the false hope that someone missing since the war might turn up alive—telling them that we’re all going to die, with not a single person left alive to grieve, would be downright cruel.”

  “But it won’t happen until the late 2020s,” said Oppie. “That’s far enough in the future that it won’t change people’s behavior.”

  “Oh?” snapped Groves. “You know that for a fact, do you?”

  “Well, no. But it’s like finding out another ice age is coming in a century or so. Or the opposite: that the polar caps are going to melt, and we’ll have coastal flooding and insane hurricanes. What would we do about it? Nothing. Just go on squabbling as usual.”

  “You lived for years near San Francisco,” said Groves, “a city that
will surely be destroyed—again!—by an earthquake in the next hundred-odd years. Not everyone is quite as good at ignoring risks as you.”

  Isidor Rabi pulled his wooden chair around so he could better face Oppie. “The general may be right. Early on, Fermi was talking about the possibility of nuclear chain reactions in public lectures. Szilard and I thought he should keep that idea secret. When I told Enrico, he said, ‘Nuts!’ He felt there was only a remote possibility such a thing could occur, so why hide it? I asked him what he meant by ‘a remote possibility,’ and he said, ‘Ten percent.’ I said ten percent isn’t remote in matters of life and death. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me there’s a ten percent chance I’m going to die of it, I get excited.”

  “Bingo,” said Groves. “This is Pandora’s box. Once the information is out, there’s no way to ever make it secret again, so we’d need a very good, very specific reason—not just some highfalutin moral talk—to justify letting the cat out of the bag.”

  Mentioning both a box and a cat made Oppie think of Schrödinger, of course. But telling people what the sun was going to do wouldn’t force one or the other possibility to be the truth: humanity would still be in superposition, possibly alive, possibly dead, depending on what the scientists here would or would not accomplish in time.

  The general went on. “Your vaunted Szilard wanted to warn the Japanese, remember? A demonstration of the bomb. There were all sorts of sound reasons why we were never going to do that, but number one was that we had no way to predict how they’d react to a demonstration. Would they lay down their arms, as Szilard thought, or would they redouble their efforts, deciding if they were going to go out it might as well be in a blaze of glory, taking as many of us with them as they could? Or, if we merely demonstrated the bomb, would they have then believed we didn’t actually have the spine to ever use it on a city, and so go on fighting even harder?” He made a dismissive gesture. “That was tiny compared to this. Telling all 2.3 billion humans that the planet is doomed would be tantamount to conducting the biggest psychological experiment in history.”

  “There have been doomsayers before,” said Oppie, “and civilization has ... has soldiered on.”

  “Sure,” said Groves with a curt nod. “But they’ve all been crackpots.” He waved a finger between Oppie and Rabi. “Not the world’s top scientists.” Then he turned the finger toward himself. “And not the United States government.” Groves looked at each physicist in turn. “Can you predict the result of letting people know, Dr. Rabi? Can you, Dr. Oppenheimer?”

  He gave them a second to respond, but neither did, so the general went on. “Say you tell me that only ten percent of humanity might react negatively—to use the figure you said Fermi proposed for the likelihood of a chain reaction. Fine, but how big are your error bars? If, as that popinjay Szilard would have it, your guess is correct within a factor of ten, then even at best we’d need to deal with twenty-three million people panicking, and at worst with everyone panicking. Robert, I know how hard you’re pushing for international control of atomic energy. Maybe you’ll get that, maybe you won’t. But we’ve entered a new era, gentlemen, thanks to Robert and me: the atomic era. Soon enough, just one panicking person will be able to set off an escalation that will kill us as surely as your solar purge. I, for one, don’t want to give anybody with that power another reason to be on edge.”

  “He’s got a point,” said Rabi, looking at Oppenheimer. “And remember, we have no idea what percentage of humanity, if any, we’ll be able to save. If getting people off this planet really is the answer, we might be able to move thousands but not millions, let alone billions. There will be riots as soon as we announce who gets to live and who gets left behind to die.”

  Groves nodded sharply. “Precisely. You remember—what was it, seven years ago? That Orson Welles broadcast?”

  “The War of the Worlds,” supplied Colonel Nichols.

  “That’s it,” said Groves. “Remember the panic it caused?”

  Oppie hadn’t been aware of the radio drama at the time, but the putative site of the first Martian landing was just four miles southeast of here, in Grover’s Mill; Einstein had taken great pleasure in pointing it out to him when they’d gone on a drive together.

  “That panic had been over a single one-hour broadcast on one network in one country saying the world was coming to an end,” continued Groves. “Imagine what a constant barrage of such coverage everywhere on the planet for weeks or months would do.”

  “But this does affect the whole world,” said Oppie, “and we could use help from the whole world, or, at least, the whole scientific world.”

  Groves shifted his weight. “I’m getting you the best Germans,” he said. “But even if I thought those in Russia, say, or China, had anything to offer us—and that I doubt—that’s not the issue. It’s not a question of competence; it’s a question, as I said, of secrecy. And not just for the sake of preventing panic. For the sake of getting things done. Robert, you think we’d have gotten to use Los Alamos as a base of operations if Congress had known? The jockeying for political pork—for it to be in this district or that one, irrespective of whether it suited our needs—would have consumed months if not years.” He set his gaze on Rabi. “And you, Dr. Rabi, you mentioned Enrico Fermi. Do you think for one second that he’d have been allowed to build his first atomic pile under Stagg Field—at the University of Chicago, for crying out loud!—if there’d been public oversight? Hell, he didn’t even tell the university’s president! If something went wrong, he might have poisoned or blown up the entire city.”

  “Yes, but he—”

  “No buts, Robert. Did you let the world know when Edward Teller said, back at your Berkeley Luminaries meeting in ’42, that setting off an atomic bomb might ignite the entire atmosphere? Did we tell the world just before the Trinity test that Fermi was taking bets on whether that was indeed true? On whether we’d only wipe New Mexico off the map or destroy the whole planet? The governor of New Mexico only found out just before we set off the bomb there because I myself told him, and the vice president didn’t know a thing about any of our efforts until after he’d replaced FDR.”

  “I had a meeting with Truman,” said Oppie. “He is not ... gifted.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly got no influence left with him,” said Groves. “I do, but you don’t, not after your last visit. ‘Blood on my hands,’ I believe you said. In case you haven’t heard, that did not go over well.”

  The cold was getting too much for Oppie. He pulled the window back down, the wooden frame creaking as he did so, and returned to the chair he’d vacated. Rabi rotated his own seat so that both of them were facing the general again. Groves lifted his eyebrows; Oppie suspected he was thinking that this is the closest he’d ever get to having scientists standing at attention.

  “We spent two billion dollars on the atomic-bomb effort,” said Groves. “Two billion. And, Dr. Rabi, over at M.I.T., your people spent 1.5 billion on radar, a project almost as secret. Those kinds of funds were available because the projects didn’t have to come up before the House or the Senate. I can move mountains as long as we avoid congressional committees, senate debates, and, most of all, a fickle public. Tell the voters you’re spending millions, let alone billions, on anything, and they start screaming it should instead be used to eliminate poverty, or on new highways, or on symphony orchestras, or God only knows what else.”

  Groves rose from his padded throne, forcing Oppenheimer and Rabi to look up at him. “Hear this, gentlemen: I got Robert unfettered access to the deepest coffers in the world before and I can do it again—but only if we keep this whole thing under wraps. Agreed?”

  Oppenheimer glanced at Rabi, who was frowning. “Yes, damn it all,” Oppie said. “Agreed.”

  “All right,” said Rabi, looking up at Groves. “All right.” Oppie watched as his friend shifted his gaze even higher. “But may God have mer
cy on our souls.”

  Chapter 29

  As a direct result of Oppenheimer’s work, we now know that black holes have played and are playing a decisive part in the evolution of the universe. He lived for twenty-seven years after the discovery, never spoke about it, and never came back to work on it. Several times, I asked him why he did not come back to it. He never answered my question, but always changed the conversation to some other subject.

  —Freeman Dyson

  Oppenheimer had experience dealing with squabbling children: Peter was five and a half now and Toni, thirteen months. But, for God’s sake, Leslie Groves was fifty and Leo Szilard would turn forty-nine in February. Oppie, at forty-two, was a good piece younger than either of them, and he had no desire to serve in loco parentis, mediating between the general and the genius, the soldier and the scientist, the militarist and the Martian. But just as they needed Groves, Oppie was still convinced, despite his own conflicts with the man, that they also needed Leo’s insights and inventiveness.

  Teller had once told Oppie that the Hungarian word szilárd could be translated as “rather stubborn,” and Groves, as his surname suggested, was as rigid as clusters of tree trunks. The two men repelled each other like protons itching to burst a nucleus apart, and—pace Pauli—it seemed they couldn’t both be in the same place at the same time.

  If Groves had been a habitual drinker, or Szilard more than a social one, perhaps having both over to Olden Manor, getting them drunk, and letting a bond form over their shared love of rich desserts might have worked. After all, as Oppie said to Kitty, if he genuinely believed he could help bring Russia and the United States, with a combined population of 238 million, onto the same page about arms control, surely he could broker a peace between just two men.