“Not for a decade. September 1956—they always occur in August or September, by the way.”
A dozen large Mars maps and photographs were piled on Oppie’s desk. Topmost was a pen-and-ink map made by Gerard de Vaucouleurs based on observations by himself and four other astronomers during the favorable opposition of 1939 and the ordinary one of 1941; it was the most-recent map of Mars anybody had produced. “What about the canals?” Groves asked, standing now and waving a thick finger over three dotted north-south lines near the center labeled “Phison,” “Euphrates,” and “Hiddekel.” Similar lines appeared elsewhere.
“Good question,” said Oppie. “No one knows. They were discovered in 1877 by Giovanni Schiaparelli, but he called them canali—Italian for ‘channels.’ The idea that they might be artificial canals comes from Percival Lowell two decades later. Of course, even Lowell had to admit that the visible lines are unlikely to be watercourses per se; the narrowest objects we can perceive on the Martian surface are a mile wide, and in the thin Martian atmosphere, shallow water would quickly evaporate away through that much surface area. But they could be narrower waterways bordered on either side by wide swaths of vegetation; in that case, it would be the accompanying green banks that we’re actually seeing.”
Groves pointed at the pile. “Show me a photo of them.”
Oppie, on the other side of the desk, raised thin shoulders. “That’s a problem. Oh, there are a few photographs that seem to show the canals but most of the pictures we have of them are drawings.”
“Why on—on Mars—would that be?”
“Well, see, the difficulty is the lengthy exposure times needed for taking astronomical photos: the longer you keep the lens uncovered, the more the rippling of earth’s own atmosphere blurs things. Lots of observers have seen the canals, myself included. We can see things in the night sky that film simply can’t record.”
“We also are prone to optical illusions,” said Rabi, rather derisively, “as well as optical delusions.”
Oppie turned his torso to face Rabi. “Granted. Lowell was the biggest advocate of the canals, but he’s been dead for thirty years. But there are still many—Earl Slipher at Lowell’s observatory, for instance—who are adamant they’re real.”
Rabi made a dismissive sound. “He’d hardly be the first scientist to champion a mentor’s cause long after it had been discarded by most others working in the same field.”
“But there are areas on Mars that seem to grow and shrink with the seasons,” said Luis Alvarez. “And they are green.”
“True,” said young Freeman Dyson, seated against the west wall. He had a British accent, an intense unblinking stare, and a long face. “Of course, the obvious thought is vegetation.”
“So,” said Admiral Parsons, summing up, “there might or might not be canals; there might or might not be plants.”
“But there are definitely polar caps,” said Oppie. “And they’re at least partially water ice. Sunlight reflecting off water ice and dry ice look the same bright white in visible light, but water ice appears black in infrared whereas dry ice stays white. The Martian ice caps turn black beyond a wavelength of 15,000 ångstroms. The ice caps can’t be very thick, though.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Groves.
“You’re from Albany, New York, right?” asked Oppie. “You know how piles of snow stick around long after the ambient temperature has risen above freezing? That’s because there’s so much of it, and the inside of the piles hasn’t warmed up yet. But on Mars, the caps shrink and grow almost instantly in response to temperature changes; they might be only millimeters thick.”
“I’m hearing an awful lot of mights and maybes,” said Groves. He took out a Hershey bar and broke off a square.
“A lot of what we know about Mars dates back to the 1890s,” said Oppie. “We just haven’t put much money into astronomy this century. The biggest telescope in the world—the Hooker, the one I’ve used at Mount Wilson—went into service in 1917, and nothing has beat it since.”
“Two World Wars ago,” grumbled Groves.
“Exactly.”
“What about Mars’s atmosphere? You said it’s thin?”
“Very—maybe one percent as dense as ours.”
“What’s it made of? Any oxygen? Water vapor?”
“Spectrograms taken from the surface of earth will show lines for oxygen and water vapor, even on the moon, which has no atmosphere at all, because they’re in our atmosphere. But at quadrature—”
“What?”
I.I. Rabi, the radar expert, spoke up. “When a line drawn between the earth and the sun and a line drawn between the earth and Mars intercept at a right angle: that’s quadrature. And at those times Mars is moving fast enough relative to earth that its spectral lines undergo Doppler shifts, which would separate Martian oxygen and water vapor from the tellurian lines—the earth-originating ones—if there were any appreciable amount in Mars’s atmosphere. But no shifted lines for either O2 or H2O appear, so if either is present, it’s just trace quantities.”
“In the atmosphere, that is,” offered Alvarez. “The red color of Mars almost certainly comes from rust—iron oxide. And God alone knows how much water there is locked up in the ground as permafrost or below the surface in aquifers.”
“True,” said Oppie. “Of course, someday we’ll put telescopes in orbit; those will get us much clearer pictures and unpolluted spectrograms. But until then?” He raised both hands in a “what can you do?” gesture.
“Still, we’re talking about a world with an unbreathable atmosphere and no guaranteed source of water,” said Groves. “With conditions like that, we can’t just transport people to Mars.”
“No,” agreed Oppie. “They’d need self-contained habitats with air and water—submarines writ large.”
“Okay, then,” said the general. “Well, Professor Rabi, why don’t you take a stab at picking target landing sites—I know it’s premature, but let’s assume that nearer to canals is better than farther, and closer to the equator, where it’s warmer, is a plus.” He turned to Oppie. “Remember all that hand-wringing over target selection in Japan? At least this time we won’t have to worry about Henry Stimson vetoing the best ones.”
Oppie managed a small smile.
“Now,” said Groves, “back to my first question: what about prospects other than Mars?”
“In our solar system?” asked Alvarez. He’d gotten up and was pacing back and forth along the west wall. “The big four outer planets are gas giants; forget about them. Pluto probably is rocky, but it was only discovered—what?—sixteen years ago. We just don’t know much of anything about it, except that it must be damned cold. At closest approach, it’s still thirty times farther away from the sun than we are.”
“What about other moons?” asked Groves, lowering himself back into a chair.
“There are a few that are quite large,” said Alvarez. “Jupiter’s moon Ganymede and Saturn’s moon Titan are both bigger than the planet Mercury, but we know very little about them, except that Titan, at least, has some sort of atmosphere.”
“All right,” said Groves, breaking off more chocolate. “Given how little we know about the other moons, do we agree to aim for Mars right out of the starting gate? I’ve got to give von Braun and his boys some idea of how far away the target they should be working toward is.”
“Mars is the closest possibility that will survive,” said Rabi. “I vote for it.”
Dyson nodded. “Mars.”
“Yeah,” said Alvarez. “Of course, we should continue to consider other candidates in the solar system, but it may be that we also want to try even farther afield. There just might not be anything suitable here.”
“Another—what would you call it? Another star system?” said Groves, frowning.
“No,” said Oppie. “I mean, yes, that’s what you’d
call it, since ‘solar’ refers specifically to our sun. But I don’t think Louis has the right idea. If there’s no suitable home in the solar system, then we should make one here. It’s far more likely that within eighty years we could build a massive free-floating space colony—maybe even in the asteroid belt, where low-gravity mining will be cheap and easy—than to talk about ... about ‘star ships.’ The sun will calm down after the photospheric belch. If someday we do want to venture to other stars, we can always put engines on whatever refuge we build, but that’s for centuries or millennia down the road. For now, we can plausibly build structures in solar space; we can harvest the sun’s virtually inexhaustible energy; we can mine the asteroids. Within eighty years, all of that is easily doable. Rabi, I think your team should be looking at both those possibilities—Mars, and a habitat orbiting the sun outside the danger zone.” Oppie paused. “I mean, look, if someone said we should put a man on the moon within a decade, I’d balk. But men—and women and children—on Mars, within eight decades? A massive space habitat far enough from the sun to survive the photospheric purge within the same timeframe? Easy.” He looked from face to face, collecting nods of agreement, then turned back to the general, favoring the military man with a wide smile.
Groves heaved himself to his feet, looking pleased. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have just taken a quantum leap into Buck Rogers.”
Oppie smirked. Some objected to that metaphor because quantum leaps are infinitesimally microscopic, but, as most fussbudgets do, they were missing the point. A quantum leap goes from here to there instantaneously, bypassing the steps in between, and this was certainly that. With von Braun’s rockets—and von Braun himself!—the U.S. was suddenly well on its way into outer space, a realm that otherwise might have remained unexplored until the twenty-first century if not the twenty-second.
Oppie thought back to his meeting in the Oval Office, and Truman’s painted-glass desktop sign with its walnut base, and he couldn’t help himself. “Yes,” he said, “I guess the Buck starts here.”
#
On January 24, 1946, following months of negotiations, the United States, the Soviet Union, and several other countries agreed to establish the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. That pleased Oppie, of course, but he was even more delighted when Truman established a special committee to prepare a concrete proposal for the international control of atomic weapons—and he was downright thrilled when that committee’s chairman, Dean Acheson, decided there should be a board of consultants for the committee.
David Lilienthal was named A.E.C. chairman, and he quickly added Oppie as one of the five members of the consulting board. The public transition, at least on this issue, was finally complete: J. Robert Oppenheimer was no longer a scientist devoid of moral responsibility; he was involved directly in policy making, and at the highest levels.
Positive steps indeed. But, as Oppie remarked one night, although Kitty’s divorce from her penultimate husband had been clean and simple even with her being pregnant with Oppie’s child, the breaking up of the war-time alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union was proving to be anything but. On March 5, Winston Churchill, no longer prime minister but rather leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, gave a speech in the gymnasium of Westminster College, which, despite a name that echoed the famed British abbey, was in Fulton, Missouri; his audience there included President Truman. Churchill thundered out:
“It is my duty to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent ...”
Oppie had been hoping for increasing access to Soviet scientists; he was sure the expertise of some of them would be useful to the Arbor Project—Kurchatov, certainly, who had been Robert’s opposite number during the war in the Russian atomic-bomb effort. God only knew who else; little scientific information came out of Russia, although they surely had first-rate minds there. But this “iron curtain”—a catchy name, thought Oppie—would make accessing them even harder.
Still, he was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the first half of the new year went. Those who came from New Mexico to New Jersey seemed to settle in well. And, except for that time Einstein had blown up, the work of the Arboreals, as Szilard had dubbed them, seemed to continue apace without significantly disturbing the Institute’s established faculty.
Rabi’s New Names group was indeed focusing on the engineering problems of getting to Mars, with the assumption that all the same principles would apply to any undertaking within the outer solar system.
Bethe’s Patient Power team had confirmed in multiple ways the reality of the impending photospheric purge, but they were having trouble pinning down precisely when it would occur, since the timing, they’d discovered, would be affected by the solar sunspot cycle. Such cycles had been tracked since 1755, with the one beginning that year designated as Solar Cycle 1; the current cycle, number 18, started in February 1944.
Each cycle begins and ends at a solar minimum, when sunspots have almost or entirely disappeared. In the middle of a cycle there’s a solar maximum, the time of the most sunspots—as well as huge solar flares and vastly increased auroral displays on earth. Various calculations showed the inevitable photospheric purge was most likely to happen during the solar maximum of cycle 25.
But although cycles averaged 11.1 years, ones as short as 9.0 years and as long as 13.6 years had been recorded. If the average prevailed, cycle 25 would begin in the fall of 2021, and the solar maximum, when the purge would be unleashed, would occur around the spring of 2027. But the figure really couldn’t be pinned down until cycle 25 began, decades from now.
As for the Compact Cement team, housed a quarter-mile away from Fuld Hall, well, they were out of sight—and quite possibly out of their minds. While the other two teams had ordered truckloads of back numbers of scientific journals, the CC crew had bought up complete runs of several science-fiction magazines, including Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Startling Stories. If one walked by, the sound of Dick Feynman’s bongos was often heard, and, in all weather, Leo Szilard could be spotted wandering apparently aimlessly around the Institute grounds. Kitty, however, assured Oppie every night that the CC discussions, although “untethered,” as she called them, were spirited and productive.
Oppie expressed his surprise at how well it was all going over lunch one day with Hans Bethe. The blue-eyed Strasbourgian shook his head. “Don’t you see, Oppie? For most of us, Los Alamos was the best time of our lives. Oh, sure, the conditions were appalling, but we were alive. Pursuing a goal! Pure science; pure engineering—no distractions. None of us would say it out loud, but many were sorry when the war was over. Back to teaching? Yes, a noble calling to be sure, but not our true passion. Back to the real world of mundane neighbors and throngs of stupid people, of small talk and popular music? Such vacuity! We were cast out of heaven when the bombs fell—and you’ve given us a new ascension. We should call the Institute’s main entrance the Pearly Gates and you, sir, should be known as Saint Peter!”
Oppie smiled. A server came by with a bowl of fruit, a treat here in winter: apples, oranges, pears, bananas. An apple was out of the question, of course, but he selected an orange, and slowly peeled off the rind, revealing the acidic yet soft interior.
Chapter 33
Do what we may, by your unfathomable folly, you and I are linked together in a cloudy legend, which nothing, no fact, no explanation, no truth will ever unmake or unravel.
—Haakon Chevalier
“Hoke!” said Oppenheimer warmly. “So good to see you! And Barb, you look lovely!”
“Thank you,” Haakon Chevalier replied, but Oppie detected a subtle edge in his old friend’s voice. Although the Oppenheimers’ principal residence had been at the I.A.S. for eight months now, Robert had come back to Berkeley ostensibly to confer with Ernest Lawrence, and Kitty had
tagged along while Pat Sherr, back in Princeton, looked after Peter and Toni. Kitty and Oppie had decided to keep this house on Eagle Hill for just such trips, and today they were throwing a party there in order to see their Bay Area friends.
Barb gave Oppie a hug and a peck on the cheek, and she and Kitty headed off to the living room. They’d asked the Chevaliers to come over an hour before the festivities were to begin so they could have a little private time together. But, as usual, the Chevaliers were late.
“I’m willing to bet,” Oppie said, “that you haven’t had a martini as good as mine since 1943. Let me fix you one.” He headed for the kitchen, and Hoke followed, but as soon as the door was closed behind them, he put a hand on Robert’s arm. “My God, Opje, the F.B.I. hauled me into their offices. They grilled me for six hours!”
Robert’s heart jumped, and he had a flash of memory from this very room three and a half years previously: him, Hoke, the cocktail shaker, more. He held up a silencing finger and motioned for Haakon to follow him. They walked through the Spanish-style villa and came out the rear entrance—and words from that earlier meeting flashed into Oppie’s mind: “I do not feel friendly to the idea of moving information out the back door.” After passing through the garden—Kitty paid for it to be tended when they were not here—they entered a wooded area with ground covered by ivy and oak leaves. “Sorry,” said Oppie. Of course he couldn’t tell Chevalier about the Arbor Project, but there was no doubt that his clandestine activities, despite everyone’s best efforts, were attracting attention. “I suspect the house is bugged.”
“The Russians?” asked Haakon, eyes wide.
“Hoover.”
“Well, the F.B.I. is definitely concerned about something. They hauled me in, as I said. While I was there, the agents kept phoning somebody else—I couldn’t figure out who. But I recently ran into George Eltenton—you know, the chemical engineer from Shell Development—and I’ll be damned if he hadn’t been interrogated by F.B.I. agents the same day I was, and the agents he was with kept taking calls. We figured they were phoning each other to see if my story jibed with his.”
The Oppenheimer Alternative Page 22
