The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Oppie looked back at the garden flowers, everything neatly arranged. “And did it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And”—there was still a shred of hope—“what was that story about?”

  “Oh, with all you’ve been up to—all that stuff in New Mexico—I doubt you’d even remember, but ...”

  “Try me.”

  “Well, just before you left Berkeley for there, I was—well, I was here.” He pointed back at the whitewashed villa. “Your going-away party. I asked if you happened to know Eltenton and I, well, I passed on his suggestion—his, notion, really; just a thought—that you might, you know, see your way clear to sharing some information with the Russians.”

  Oppie closed his eyes and nodded. “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well, of course, I wasn’t keen on mentioning my conversation with Eltenton, but the agents kept pressing, and so I told them.”

  Oppie’s heart jumped. “I see.”

  “And then they brought up your name, and, well, I had to admit I’d let you know—that is, that I’d reported to you—the idea Eltenton had mooted.”

  “You told the F.B.I. that?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry if—”

  Oppie took a deep breath. Overhead, birds were circling. “No, no. It was the right thing to do, surely.”

  “Well, good. But they just wouldn’t let up. Hour after hour. Mountain out of a molehill, if you ask me.”

  Robert frowned. “I had to report that conversation we’d had in my kitchen, you know. I mean, the sort of thing Eltenton was suggesting ... well, it might have had serious implications.”

  “I was just keeping you informed,” said Hoke, his tone innocent.

  “Still. Of course, I kept your name out of things.”

  Haakon tilted his head as if weighing this. “Funny, though. They kept insisting I’d approached three—”

  “Robert!” Kitty was calling to him; she’d come out to the edge of the garden. Oppie looked back at her, scowling. “Darling,” she shouted, “the other guests are arriving! You’d better come in!”

  “In a minute!” he snapped and turned back to Chevalier.

  Hoke went on: “As I was saying, they kept insisting I’d approached three scientists, not just one.”

  Oppie swallowed. “Really?”

  “Said they had affidavits from all three of them.”

  Robert was taken aback. “Did you see the affidavits?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Ah.”

  Hoke’s voice was tentative. “But you say you kept my name out of things?”

  “Yes, yes,” replied Oppie. “For many months, but ...”

  “But what?”

  “Well, eventually my old boss—General Groves, you must have heard his name in the news—he ordered me to tell him who it was who had approached me, and so—”

  “Jesus, Robert! And you didn’t think I should know you’d done that?”

  “All mail to and from the mesa—from our lab—was censored. I couldn’t possibly get word out about a sensitive matter.”

  “I wrote you,” Haakon said. “I told you I couldn’t get a job because of some security bullshit. Did you get that letter?”

  “Sure,” said Oppie simply.

  “I didn’t have any on-going work until the Nuremberg trials, and only then because they were desperate for translators.”

  “Yes, that must have been fascinating! I wanted to ask you—”

  “And, for fuck’s sake, now that I’m back here, Berkeley has denied me tenure.”

  “I’m—”

  “Robert!” Kitty again. “You really must come in now! All the guests have arrived!”

  Oppie was aware that his voice had taken on a sharp edge. “I’ll be in shortly!”

  “Really, it’s rude to—”

  “Christ’s sake, you miserable bitch, I said I’ll be in soon! Just mind your own goddamn fucking business!”

  Even at this distance, Kitty’s shocked expression was obvious. She’d closed the door behind herself before calling out, so hopefully none of the guests had heard him just now. Oppie turned to Chevalier, but Haakon, red in the face, just shook his head and headed back toward the house.

  Oppenheimer stood alone among the trees, their perfectly vertical trunks living monuments to rectitude. He patted his pockets, looking for his pipe, hoping to calm himself, but he’d left the damn thing inside.

  Chapter 34

  The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer

  No matter where he was, Oppie often found himself thinking of Jean. Being here in Berkeley, though—his old haunts now haunted by her—brought his lost love to mind even more frequently. Her father, the now seventy-year-old Chaucerian scholar, had retired at the end of this academic year, so there was less chance of running into him on the U.C.B. campus than on previous trips, thank God. Oppie hadn’t spoken to him in the two and half years since Jean killed herself and he had no desire to speak to him now. According to Mary Ellen, Robert’s old landlady, John Strong Perry Tatlock, after breaking into his daughter’s apartment through a window and discovering her dead in the bathroom, had found and burned much of her received correspondence. Whether any of it had been from Oppie, or had been about Oppie from others—He’s married, you know; his work will always come first; for God’s sake, Jean, he’s a Jew!—he chose not to learn.

  He’d done everything he could for her, and yet she was dead—a funeral without him present, a grave marker somewhere he’d yet to visit. And therefore, de facto, Q.E.D., everything had not been enough.

  The Arbor Project, in her honor.

  The Arbor Project, to save those who could still be saved.

  Even so, whatever solution they found—if they found any at all—would change things for her not one iota, one jot, one atom.

  Oppie paced the house on Eagle Hill, encountering his own clouds of pipe smoke each time he reversed course at the end of the main corridor. He should apologize to Kitty for his outburst; he knew that. But now that the party guests were gone, Kitty was upstairs, lying on the bed, finding comfort in booze—more succor than he could ever provide.

  What Haakon had said was disturbing, distressing. The war was over, for fuck’s sake. Couldn’t this—this “Chevalier affair”—be buried along with all the other dead? So what if an overture had been made? Who the hell cared now?

  Oppie had already made the phone call he needed to make; the rendezvous was set. Was it madness that he’d chosen the same location he’d been observed at before? No, no. It was genius, surely. Let them think it a pilgrimage, a sad, empty man’s need to sit where he’d sat before and listen to the echoes of laughter from years gone by. Surely it was better to meet across the bridge, across the bay, in San Francisco, anyway? Neither his home nor ...

  Yes, yes, it made sense. And it was time to go.

  “Kitty!” he shouted, from the bottom of the staircase, “I’ll be back!”

  She replied but he couldn’t make out the words. Too soft, too slurred.

  He sighed. There was no need for a coat in August, and so he simply walked out the front door, got into his car, and drove, fast, as was his wont, toward the bridge. It was all just physics, after all. Acceleration, vectors, friction. Timidity was for English majors.

  The Xochimilco Café at 787 Broadway in San Francisco was as he remembered it from his visits there with Jean, including that final night they’d spent together, even—yes, yes, it was him—even the nut-brown mustachioed bartender was the same. This time of day the joint wasn’t crowded, and the booth he wanted was free: the one where he’d sat that last night with Jean as they drank and flirted and pre
pared to repair to her lair.

  Yellow walls, red tablecloth, leather cushions fixed up here and there with strapping tape, an open area where, later, people would dance. He inhaled the scents of garlic, cumin, cinnamon, and chilies, and ordered a tequila from the boyish Chicana waitress who came floating by in her colorful Mexican skirt.

  Oppie waited, passing the time with thoughts of Jean, of that night, and the nights before it, of her laugh and her voice, and her deep, unfathomable sadness, of his successes at comforting her, and his failures, too.

  Each time the outside door opened, he looked up. Someone asking to use the washroom. A guy delivering peppers to the kitchen. A hooker who looked a question at Oppie, which he replied to with a shake of the head; she sat on a stool and chatted with the barkeep, waiting for a better prospect.

  And then, at last, the person he’d come here to meet.

  He was tall and thin, and Oppie knew he was forty-one. He had a receding chin, a heavy lower lip, a long nose, large ears, and blond hair frosting over to white. It had been—what?—five years since he’d last seen him, at the FAECT union-organizing meeting at One Eagle Hill, and Oppie had to admit the years had been kinder to this man than they had been to himself. He rose and waved a beckoning arm.

  Long strides closed the distance. “Hello, Robert,” the man said, a tad stiffly, in a clipped Manchester accent.

  “Hello,” Oppie replied, taking the single outstretched hand in both of his, skeletal fingers wrapping around normal ones. “So good of you to come.” He sat back down, and George Eltenton, chemical engineer for Shell Development, sat opposite him.

  “Haakon Chevalier tells me he’s been denied tenure,” said Eltenton without preamble.

  “I know,” said Oppie. “I know, and it’s awful. I’ll speak to President Sproul on his behalf, but ...” He shrugged a little. “My power is limited since I left the Berkeley faculty.”

  “They grilled us, you know. Government agents.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry for that, too.” The waitress came and took Eltenton’s order, a bottle of Coca-Cola. She disappeared, and Oppie said, “Have you faced similar ...” He didn’t want to overstate things but there was no better word: “... repercussions?”

  “Besides being harassed by the bloody Federal Bureau of Investigation, you mean?”

  “Yes,” said Oppie, conceding with a nod that that was no small thing. “Besides.”

  Eltenton lifted his hands off the table. “No. Shell is more than content with my work. But they have offices worldwide, and, unlike poor Hoke, I’m not an American. I’ve just put in for a transfer back to England. My daughter Anya is thirteen now, and we think we can get her into Sadler’s Wells Ballet School.”

  Anya. He didn’t make any effort to hide his fondness for all things Russian. “Very good,” said Oppie. Eltenton’s drink was deposited and the waitress disappeared again. “I’m glad you’re landing on your feet.”

  “Unlike Haakon.” Just enough bitterness.

  “Yes,” said Oppie.

  “Anyway,” said Eltenton, “I’m here. What was it you wanted to talk about?”

  Oppie looked around the decrepit room, making sure no one could overhear them. “When you had Haakon reach out to me, he suggested that you had an entrée to the Soviet embassy.”

  “What is this, Oppenheimer? Entrapment? Is there a tape recorder somewhere?”

  “No! Goodness, no. You can ...” But he trailed off, realizing there was no point in saying, “You can trust me.”

  “Then what?” asked Eltenton, his Coke hissing next to him.

  Oppie took a deep breath. “I’d like to make contact with the Soviets.”

  It was Eltenton’s turn to peer around, making sure they had privacy. “Look, the war is over and although I think it’s bollocks, one can no longer really think of the Russians and the Americans as allies.”

  “But you knew—or you knew someone who knew—how to get material to Russian physicists.”

  “And if I did?”

  “Do you still have those connections?”

  “Why? You want to give the Russians the atomic bomb now?”

  “No, no. That’s not for me to decide.”

  “Then what?”

  “I need to ... consult ... with their best physicists. I need to talk to Igor Kurchatov.”

  “I’m not familiar with that name.”

  “Your contacts will be.”

  Eltenton just stared at him.

  “Please,” said Oppie. “It’s a matter of life, not death. Can you arrange it?”

  At last, Eltenton lifted his bottle and took a sip. “It won’t be easy.”

  “And I wouldn’t ask if, honestly, a great many lives—including countless Soviet lives—didn’t depend upon it.”

  The thick lower lip was thrust out farther as he thought; it made the man even look Russian. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Chapter 35

  Haakon, Haakon, believe me, I am serious, I have real reason to believe, and I cannot tell you why, but I assure you I have real reason to change my mind about Russia. They are not what you believe them to be. You must not continue your trust, your blind faith, in the policies of the U.S.S.R.

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer

  “Julius Robert Oppenheimer, what a pleasure, at last!”

  Oppie looked around before taking the outstretched hand. He knew Russians liked to use all three of a person’s names; the man he was greeting had already introduced himself as Stepan Zakharovich Apresyan.

  They were in an open area of grass bordered by trees, and although the park was crowded this August day no one else was nearby. “Actually,” Oppie said, as he released his grip, “the J doesn’t stand for anything.”

  “Ah,” said Apresyan, in the knowing tone of one used to keeping secrets. “No. Of course it doesn’t.”

  Oppie was sure that Apresyan—the Russian-born son of an Armenian priest, youthful and eager at thirty-two—doubtless had reviewed a full dossier on him, just as Oppie had gotten Groves to provide him with the file on physicist Igor Kurchatov, Oppie’s equivalent in the Russian atomic-bomb program.

  “We’ve had our eye on you for a long time,” Apresyan said, looking him up and down as if he were a mythical beast at last sighted in the wild. “You appear, if I may, thin. Are you well?”

  Oppie shrugged—and he could feel how bony his shoulders were as he did so, feel how much of a scarecrow figure he was. The weight he’d lost in war-time was not coming back.

  “I’m fine,” he said, pleased that no cough followed the words. His throat was always raw, but being here, in the company of this man, the vice consul from the Soviet Consulate General in San Francisco, had made it as dry as the sands back on La Jornada del Muerto.

  The two of them were walking west in Golden Gate Park on a sunny afternoon, heading toward Ocean Beach and the Pacific. They quite likely were being shadowed by both the F.B.I. and the N.K.G.B., or whatever they were calling it now, but the park was three miles long, and the air was filled with the sounds of boisterous kids and exasperated parents calling out to them. Like the best of children, Oppie thought, he and Apresyan might be seen but they wouldn’t be heard.

  Continuing along, they came to the California Academy of Sciences, which had been located in the park since 1916 and now consisted of three buildings: the North American Hall of Birds and Mammals, the Steinhart Aquarium, and the Simson African Hall. Nature in all her splendor surrounded here by even more nature.

  The Academy dealt solely with what they called natural sciences: the old-fashioned gentlemanly pursuits of stargazing and weather-forecasting, of studying plants and animals, of collecting rocks and fossils. Physics didn’t fall under its mandate; his field was, Oppie mused, therefore an unnatural science. Perverse. Not in accordance with accepted standards of right and
wrong.

  And this—this—was an unnatural meeting, or certainly would be thought such by many he had to deal with. The J-for-nothing Robert Oppenheimer who had spurned Haakon Chevalier’s overture on behalf of George Eltenton, who had severed his ties with Communist-front organizations, who had counseled his former students to do the same, walking—fucking strolling—along with a Soviet official whose job title everyone knew was simply a congenial public shield for espionage work.

  “Your English is impeccable,” said Oppie.

  Apresyan was handsome with deep-set eyes and full lips. He tilted his head. “Languages are my thing,” he replied, and Oppie smiled at the ostentatious use of Yankee slang, a move worthy of himself. “I speak thirteen of them. Russian, English, Turkish, Arabic ...”

  Oppie could read nine languages, but the pool of ones he could converse in was smaller. “Dutch?” Oppie asked, picking a tongue any random eavesdropper would be unlikely to know.

  “Ja inderdaad,” replied Apresyan.

  “Good,” replied Oppie, also in Dutch. “Let’s speak that then.”

  Apresyan nodded his assent. “I’m pleased you reached out. It’s been a while since you’ve been a party member.”

  Even in Dutch, Oppie felt the need to issue a denial. “I’ve never been a member of the Communist Party.”

  “No? Weren’t you, Professor Chevalier, and, oh, many others, including that history professor, Gordon Griffiths, for one? Weren’t you all members of the Berkeley faculty Communist club before the U.S. entered the war?”

  “Je vergist je,” said Oppie. You’re mistaken.

  “Of course, of course,” replied Apresyan; the knowing tone was the same in Dutch as English. “I must have heard wrong.”

  They walked a few dozen yards along the path, birds hopping out of their way. Oppie was wearing his usual hat, but he could feel the afternoon sun on the back of his hand.

  “Still,” said the vice consul, “there are benefits to being in the Party. And for you there’d be special benefits, including membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. If ‘Comrade Oppenheimer’ doesn’t sit well on the tongue, perhaps ‘Academician Oppenheimer’ does?”