The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Oh, there are many differences,” said Oppie.

  “True, true,” agreed von Braun amiably. “To a European, a hundred miles is a big journey; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.”

  A long time. Yes, it was useful to have Europeans on this project. They could bring the sense of urgency it so desperately needed and that Oppie had been having trouble instilling in American scientists. A hundred years could pass very quickly indeed, eighty-odd years even more rapidly.

  Oppie knew that his own feet stuck out as he walked; for his part, Wernher von Braun had a commanding strut. The two of them must have been an odd sight for the various soldiers milling around the base: one duck-footed, the other practically goose-stepping. Wernher put a friendly arm around Oppie’s narrow shoulders and said, “You and I are cut from the same cloth. If it were not for that pesky war, we would have been friends long before this.”

  Oppie was taken aback. Although as tall as von Braun, the stocky German outweighed him by over a hundred pounds and was eight years younger. They were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, too—not to mention that von Braun probably had never had many friends with names like “Oppenheimer” even before becoming a born-again Christian last year here in Texas. “How do you mean?”

  Wernher spread his arms as if it were obvious. “Both of us the brains behind massive technological efforts. Each with his sometimes benighted military supervisor—you with Groves, me with Dornberger. Both now celebrated for our war-time accomplishments. And both with a larger purpose, science—” Von Braun stopped, but the lilt of his voice suggested he’d originally intended to utter more. Oppie suspected the rocketeer had halted before the words “über alles” could pass his lips.

  Oppie didn’t mind the typical Germanic bravado; he’d gotten used to it during his years at Göttingen. Nor could he fault anyone who hadn’t personally started it for being on the losing side of a war. And although the idea had failed to fly, Oppie would indeed have been proud to wear an American service uniform at Los Alamos. But there was a world of difference between U.S. Army green and Nazi S.S. black; he’d seen the photos that had emerged of Schutzstaffel Sturmbannführer von Braun peacocking about in that fetishistic garb.

  “It’s been brought to my attention that there were ...” Oppie began and then paused as he sought a politic word: “... oddities, shall we say, about the V-2 production facility at Dora.”

  “At Mittelwerk,” corrected von Braun. Mittelwerk—the Middle Works, named for its central location in Germany—was an innocuous and soulless moniker, the kind of banality that a civil servant in any bureaucracy would have been proud of. The transcripts about Dora from the Nuremberg war-crimes trials had been suddenly classified; apparently the American government wanted nothing to call public attention to the backgrounds of the 115 German rocket scientists now here at Fort Bliss. But Oppie had received a full briefing, courtesy of Dick Feynman’s prodigious memory of a secret file he’d seen, about what had gone on in the 7.5 miles of dank and stinking underground tunnels that composed the hidden factory. Even Albert Speer had called the conditions barbarous. Cumulatively 60,000 prisoners had toiled there, a third of whom had died, literally worked to death. That statistic was staggering: more people perished building von Braun’s V-2 rockets than were killed by them as weapons.

  Hitler had vowed in December 1941 to exterminate all Jews within Germany’s reach, so by the time Mittelwerk completed its first batch of V-2s, on New Year’s Eve 1943, there were few Jews left at the Dora concentration camp, the facility that fed Mittelwerk’s voracious appetite for slave labor. Oppie had never felt a close connection to European Jewry, but Leo Szilard and I.I. Rabi did. They’d brought the deprivations at Dora to his attention after Szilard had heard about them from Feynman. To their credit, Szilard and Rabi’s outrage abated not at all when they found out that von Braun’s slaves were mostly Christian prisoners of war from Poland, France, Belgium, and Italy. “We cannot be in bed with this man,” Szilard had said, and “Even war has rules of decency,” insisted Rabi.

  That was true—and the distinction von Braun was making was disingenuous. The Dora camp and the Mittelwerk complex were adjacent facilities; you couldn’t visit one without being aware of the other. Von Braun claimed to have only rarely entered the subterranean factory himself but, as he’d said, he and Oppie were of a kind: administrators of giant technological undertakings. And although Oppie had thrown a single sheet of paper at his assistant in 1943, shouting, “Here’s your damned organization chart!,” he did know where every one of the 8,200 residents of his Los Alamos facility had come from and what they did; you couldn’t not know and still administer such a place effectively. He knew, and von Braun had to have known, too.

  “Very well,” said Oppie. “At Mittelwerk, if you prefer.” There was a sour taste in his mouth. “But slave laborers in the tunnels. The horrific environment. Prisoners flogged and hanged.”

  Oppie liked people who took their time before replying; to him, silence meant thoughtfulness. But von Braun was not reflective, and there was no careful consideration before he spoke. “Oppie, you had a war to win and so did I. As it happened, neither of us succeeded. Your bomb wasn’t ready to use against us, and my rockets were not enough to subdue the Allies. And perhaps there were deaths: you say there were some at Mittelwerk; I remind you of the tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  “Yes, but ...” said Oppie, falling into that very trap of beginning to speak before he’d composed his own thoughts. He sought a distinction—a principled distinction—between what he had facilitated and what this robust German had done. But the words that came to mind were the same ones that had haunted him so often since August of two years ago. Those poor little people. He closed his mouth and they walked on in silence.

  Silence, however, didn’t appeal to the boisterous engineer. As they approached the PX, the big man gave Oppie a good-natured slap on the back, which damn near sent him face-first into the dirt. “All sins forgiven, eh, Oppie? Come, let me buy you a drink!”

  #

  Nineteen Forty-Seven was coming to a close. The first babies of Kitty’s predicted post-war boom were beginning to walk, and the Arbor Project was starting to bear fruit. Although the recovered V-2 rockets were of obvious benefit to the New Names effort, fascinating discoveries about how to build long-term sealed habitats had also been made examining German U-boats, particularly of Type XXI, the original Elektroboot, the first submarines to operate submerged most of the time instead of only performing short emergency dives. Under the terms of surrender, all U-boats in home waters had sailed to the British submarine base at Harwich. Freeman Dyson, always happy for a trip back to England, spent weeks there and returned to Princeton with reports of useful technology that could be applied to building space ships. Oppie loved the historical resonance: Harwich was almost certainly where the Mayflower had set sail to bring Pilgrims to the figurative new world; secrets uncovered there would now aid in the transportation of refugees to a literal one.

  He was still upset, though, by his meeting with von Braun, three months ago now. Much of the information about him was still classified, but there were public accounts. Von Braun was of Junker stock, the Prussian landed aristocracy, well known for producing high-ranking civil servants and military officers. Still, wearing blinders wasn’t his birthright. And Oppie had certainly met many an intellectual of his stripe: lacking in empathy and sharply focused on a narrow area of interest. But the sheer callousness of the man grated.

  On November 25, Oppie gave a public lecture at M.I.T. entitled “Physics in the Contemporary World.” As with so many of his speeches, it was partially from notes and partially extemporaneous. This was the annual Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture, a big deal, but Oppie was confident the right words would spill forth from his mouth. And, for the most part, they did. He lamented the derailing of pure-science research because of the war but spoke soaring
ly about the turnaround since: “It has been an exciting and an inspiring sight to watch the recovery—a recovery testifying to extraordinary vitality and vigor in this human activity. Today, barely two years after the end of hostilities, physics is booming.” The audience members—a mix of students, academics, and the social elite of Cambridge, Massachusetts—were clearly with him, and he was happy to stoke their excitement for a new renaissance in his field.

  But ...

  But it wasn’t really a time for just pure research—not that this audience, or anyone in the general public, would ever know. Now there was another demand on physicists and, for all the distance between them, von Braun’s Ph.D. was in physics, with his 1934 dissertation focused tightly on his personal obsession: Konstruktive, theoretische und experimentelle Beiträge zu dem Problem der Flüssigkeitsrakete—“Constructive, Theoretical, and Experimental Contributions to the Problem of the Liquid-Fueled Rocket.” The thesis had been quickly classified secret by the Nazis, but now that it could at last be freely read, von Braun was eager to have people do so, and he’d pressed a copy of it onto Oppie when he’d visited Fort Bliss. Oppie had duly turned it over to Rabi’s NN team.

  And, as all members of the Arbor Project—von Braun included, even if he was off in Texas—set about to do their research, it seemed to Oppie that they had to reflect on the moral questions.

  He looked out at his audience in the M.I.T. auditorium. The room was darkened but light from the stage bounced off spectacles in the blackness, round disks, hundreds of full moons in an ebony sky. And he let the words come: “Despite the vision and far-seeing wisdom of our war-time heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons.”

  He could hear the rustling of the audience and a few surprised whispers. It was, indeed, an apparent non sequitur, a veering off from the direction he had previously been headed. But von Braun, even if he wasn’t there, needed to hear this; the world needed to hear this. He went on, the words spoken aloud the moment they bloomed in his mind: “In some sort of crude sense,” he said, looking out, “which no ...”

  He sought a word.

  “Vulgarity ...”

  He shook his head slightly, tried again: “... no humor ...”

  All eyes on him. The speech would be widely reported, and M.I.T. would transcribe it for the archives. He would make sure von Braun got a copy.

  “... no overstatement can quite extinguish ...”

  He was doing it again, he knew, saying more than he should, but he couldn’t help himself; the words were a chain reaction, one rebounding off another and setting a new one free, and it had to run its course: “... the physicists have known sin.” He took a deep breath, a pause. All sins forgiven, my ass.

  There was no turning back, no regaining the garden, no reclaiming innocence in either sense of the word.

  “And this,” he said with finality, “is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

  The great hall was silent, but Oppie’s own pulse thundered applause in his ears.

  Chapter 38

  1948

  I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.

  —Richard Feynman

  Dick Feynman’s talk at the Pocono conference had been a disaster. He’d driven the three hours back to Ithaca without saying a word, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on the radio when they could get reception, while Hans Bethe alternately snoozed in the passenger seat and stared out at the springtime countryside of Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Dick dropped Hans at his house, then, without going home himself, he headed straight to his favorite bar, three blocks from the Cornell campus. It was a Saturday night; something had to be going on.

  I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

  “You’ve been ignoring me all evening,” said the blonde in the form-fitting silvery dress as she slipped onto the barstool next to him.

  Feynman had a taste of his beer. “Not all evening,” he said, looking off in the distance. “You came in here at 9:44.”

  “So you did notice!”

  It was a little after midnight now. “And you’ve been with five guys since.”

  “Only four!” Her blue irises rolled up a bit as she mentally counted. “No, you’re right. Five.” She gave him a half smile. “But not you.”

  “Each of them bought you a drink,” he said. “I’m not going to.”

  She swiveled her hips on the stool, facing him more closely. “Why not?”

  He pointed up at the ceiling fan with its trio of light bulbs, each in a tulip-shaped holder, each casting a conical beam in the smoky air.

  “You know,” he said as if it had been the topic of conversation all along, “you could argue that light is the hardest-working thing in the universe. After all, it goes faster than anything else—almost seven hundred thousand miles an hour. But it’s actually lazy. It does it by taking the easiest possible path. That’s something called the principle of least effort. I subscribe to that, and so all you’re getting for free is that one physics lesson.”

  Her nose wrinkled as she studied him. “You’re a physics student?”

  Feynman often answered yes to that question—there was another week before his thirtieth birthday, and he looked younger than his age. Undergrads were far more likely to let him pick them up if they thought he was still a student. But, after the humiliation of the Pocono conference, he felt an urge to assert his status. “No, I’m a physics professor.”

  She twisted her mouth sideways as she studied his face, presumably for wrinkles. “Maybe,” she said at last.

  It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years—but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

  “In fact,” said Dick, looking the blonde full in the face for the first time, “I worked on the atomic bomb.”

  “Now I know you’re kidding. That was Hans Bethe, and, one, that’s a New York accent you’ve got there, not a German one, and, two, you aren’t nearly old enough to be him.”

  Feynman felt a rueful smile creasing his features. Yes, here in Ithaca, Bethe was the famous physicist, formerly head of the Technical Division at Los Alamos. But Dick had come to think of Hans and the others who’d been at the Pocono conference, including Bohr, Dirac, Oppenheimer, Rabi, Teller, and Feynman’s old doctoral supervisor, John Archibald Wheeler, as peers, as colleagues—as though he were now their equal. But Edward Teller had challenged him at Pocono almost as soon as Dick had started to explain his new method for diagramming particle interactions under quantum electrodynamics.

  “What about the exclusion principle?” Teller had demanded.

  Dick had shaken his head. “It doesn’t make any differ—”

  “How do you know?” roared the Hungarian.

  “I know. I worked from a—”

  “Neh!” exclaimed Teller. “How could it be!”

  Dick had tried to go on, tried to explain the simplicity, the clarity of his new method, but the assembled geniuses just weren’t getting it. He turned to look at the girl next to him. She was somewhere between pretty and beautiful, twenty, twenty-one, with a sort of Dutch air to her. He hadn’t asked her name and certainly wasn’t about to proffer his own if it was inevitably going to be greeted with a “never heard of you,” so he decided to mentally call her Heidi.

  But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you
I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

  “Do you know who Paul Dirac is?” Dick asked, expecting and receiving a shake of Heidi’s lovely head. “Well, he won the Nobel prize in physics. Among many things, he’s responsible for the concept of anti-matter.”

  “Oh, really?” Heidi said. “I’m pro-matter myself.” She winked. “It’s better than nothing.”

  The girl was clever! He laughed, and she took that as a sign of encouragement, rotating slightly on her stool to bring her right knee, in that silky dress, into contact with his left, covered by his jeans.

  “Anti-matter is like regular matter,” Dick said, “except it has the opposite charge.”

  There was a pile of white paper napkins on the bar counter; it was almost as if this place were meant for doing physics. Dick grabbed one and took a beat-up fountain pen out of his breast pocket. He printed a lower-case e in the lower left of the napkin, the indigo ink spreading to mostly fill in the enclosed part of the letter, then he drew a superscripted minus sign next to it. “That’s an electron—negative, see?” In the lower right, he printed another little e but gave this one a superscripted plus sign. “But this guy, he’s got the same mass but the opposite charge. He’s an anti-electron, or, if you prefer, a positron.”

  He drew lines diagonally upward from each one converging in the center of the napkin.

  “A collision!” said Heidi. “Opposites attract.”

  He looked at her and thought, Indeed they do.

  When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now, yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

  “But I left out a couple of things,” Dick said, and he pulled the napkin toward himself and began marking it up some more. “A graph needs axes. This one, going up—the y-axis—is time, and this one, across, is space.” She nodded, but her gaze was wandering a bit, presumably scanning the bar for a better prospect. “Oh, and of course there are directions of movement.” He drew a little arrowhead pointing diagonally upward in the middle of the diagonal line coming from the electron—and one pointing diagonally downward in the line connected to the positron. “See what I did there?”