The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  She glanced at the napkin and shook her head.

  “Make you a deal,” he said. “You see what’s interesting there, and I will buy you a drink.”

  He was violating the rule a bartender back in Albuquerque had taught him in 1946. Never give girls you want to sleep with anything, never buy them anything. When everyone else is, they’ll become obsessed with the guy who isn’t. But Dick figured he was making a safe bet, and—

  “Wait a minute,” said Heidi. “You said time was going from the bottom to the top, right?”

  His heart jumped. “Right.”

  “And so the electron is going forward in time—as well as moving to the right in space.”

  “Correct again.”

  “But you’ve got the anti-electron, the—what did you call it?”

  “The positron.”

  “Going left across the page and down. You’ve got it going backward in time. That can’t be right!”

  Feynman may not have known the girl’s name but he knew the bartender’s well enough. “Mike?”

  The lanky guy came over. “Another one?”

  “For me, yes—and whatever she’d like for the lady.”

  “A martini, please,” said Heidi.

  I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

  A martini. Which, of course, brought Oppenheimer—the master—to mind, and took Dick right back to the humiliation in the Poconos.

  “That’s what I put on the chalkboard during a conference I was just at,” Dick said. “A positron going back in time. And Dirac—Mr. Anti-Matter himself!—leaps to his feet and says what you just said: ‘That can’t be right.’ To which I say, no, it is right—a positron is nothing more than an electron moving backward in time. And, of course, he brings up causality—that you can’t have an effect happening before its cause—and I say who says so? And he calls out, ‘Is it unitary?’ And I didn’t know what the hell that means. The Brits use that term more than we do, apparently; turns out it means, do the probabilities all added together equal one. But I didn’t know that, so I simply said, ‘I’ll explain it to you, so you can see how it works. Then you can tell me if it’s unitary.’” Dick took a sip of his old beer and nodded thanks at the bartender who had delivered a new one along with Heidi’s martini. “The whole thing was a fiasco.”

  “What a wonderful notion, though!” Heidi said, after her first sip. “If you could go back in time, what would you change?”

  My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead.

  What would he change? Well, for one, he’d have prepared a better introduction to his new way of diagramming quantum-electrodynamical interactions for that conference! And—

  And—he wouldn’t have hit on Professor Smith’s wife, especially not while being his house guest.

  And he wouldn’t have gotten those two girls—the waitress and the student—pregnant last year.

  And, yes, he might have refused to work on the atomic bomb.

  But he still would have married Arline, married her even though he knew she was dying of tuberculosis. Their marriage had been the happiest, and, true, the saddest, time of his life, but oh so worth it.

  P.S.: Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.

  When she’d finished her martini, the young lady held out her hand. “Susan,” she said.

  He had signed that unsent letter, penned a year and a half ago, “Rich,” but that was the short form he saved solely for her, for his darling Arline, for his Putzie, for his wife. “Dick,” he said, shaking Susan’s hand.

  “Well, Dick, it’s getting late. Walk me home?”

  There was no turning back time, no changing what was always going to be. He rose and offered her his arm, and they made their tipsy way out, blackness overhead, and he knew he’d do what he’d done so often since Arline’s passing: try once again to fill the ravenous void.

  #

  Work continued apace on the Arbor Project for the rest of 1948, the various teams separately pursuing their assigned lines of research. Although he was still fond of management by walking around, Oppie rarely visited the Compact Cement division where Feynman, Gödel, and Szilard did what they did best: thinking up wild ideas—“botching,” as Leo called it. Partly it was so he wouldn’t be seen as undermining Kitty’s authority as head of that group, and partly it was because they were housed in a separate building, far from Fuld Hall.

  Still, Leo Szilard was as given as ever to perambulation, and running into him as Robert made his way from Olden Manor to his own office was a common enough occurrence.

  “Guten Tag!” declared Leo as he approached. He preferred to speak German with those who knew that language.

  Oppie replied in the same tongue. “How are you?”

  “Good, good. Did you hear the news? Blackett won the Nobel.”

  Oppie’s heart kicked his sternum. “Patrick Blackett?”

  “Yes,” said Szilard. “For his work on cloud chambers and cosmic rays. I’d kind of thought it would go to Yukawa for his prediction of the pi meson, but I suppose it’s too soon after the war for even the neutral Swedes to honor a Japanese, and ...”

  Leo went on, but Oppie ceased to listen.

  Patrick Blackett.

  His old tutor from the Cavendish back in 1925.

  His old unrequited love.

  The man he’d tried to poison with a deadly apple.

  This year’s Nobel laureate.

  “Robert?” said Szilard, touching the sleeve of Oppie’s jacket. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “No,” said Oppie. “Not a ghost.” He blinked a few times. “I’m happy for him.”

  “Who?” said Leo. His chatter had apparently veered off in another direction while Oppie had been lost in his own thoughts, and so he had to give voice to the name again, a name he hadn’t spoken in two decades. “Blackett.”

  “Ah, yes!” declared Leo. “May we all be so lucky some day, eh, Robert?”

  Oppie looked down at his feet, splayed left and right like clock hands at ten and two. “He had his chance.”

  Leo’s tone was puzzled. “Now, now, Oppie. After all, you were just on the cover of Time! Glory enough for us all.”

  Oppie gave Leo a curt “auf Wiedersehen” and began walking off, his mind thousands of miles away and decades in the past.

  Chapter 39

  1949

  [Oppenheimer] certainly did not suffer fools gladly—and there are lots of fools. He could be extremely cutting and he was especially cutting to people in high positions whom he considered fools.

  —Hans Bethe

  After staring into an atomic fireball, Oppie mused, you’d think flashbulbs wouldn’t bother me. But they did, each little explosion stinging his eyes and leaving an afterimage that lingered like guilt.

  Robert strode into the massive, marble-walled caucus room on the second floor of the senate office building, six Corinthian columns along each of its long sides, feeling alive and important. He smiled at or shook hands with a phalanx of reporters, many of whom had previously written fawning pieces about him.

  At the front of the room there were six long mahogany tables forming three sides of a square. The five members of the Atomic Energy Commission sat at the middle table, ordered, it amused Oppie to notice, left to right by increasing degree of baldness and right to left by seated height. At the far right was Lewis Strauss, and that positioning tickled him, too.

  Oppie’s world-line intersected frequently with that of the fifty-three-year-old Strauss. In additi
on to his role as an A.E.C. member, Strauss was also one of the trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study. In November 1945, Truman bestowed upon him the rank of rear admiral in the Navy Reserve—essentially an honorific now that the war was over—and, in the months soon following, Strauss had supported Einstein’s suggestion of Oppenheimer for the I.A.S.’s directorship, perhaps thinking that Oppie in peacetime would follow an admiral’s instructions as obediently as he’d followed a general’s during the war. But Robert had firmly rejected Strauss’s meddling for two and a half years now—partly because Strauss wasn’t privy to the Arbor Project, and partly because Oppie found the pompous, thin-skinned businessman irritating.

  Even his name irked Oppie. Robert had met many a Strauss during his time in Göttingen, but the admiral, born in Charleston, had a Southern drawl that elongated his surname to “Straws,” any hint of the Teutonic buried under hominy and huckleberry. Each time Oppie heard him say it, he winced.

  As a teenager, Oppie knew, Strauss had wanted to become a physicist, but he’d managed only a high-school diploma before his father put him on the road selling shoes. During World War I, though, Lewis ingratiated himself into a position as an aide to future-president Herbert Hoover, and, after the war, with Hoover’s help, he landed a job at a New York investment-banking firm. Ever the opportunist, Strauss married the daughter of one of the partners, and come the year of the great crash—the one that had originally sailed by Oppie unnoticed—he was a partner himself, raking in more than a million dollars annually. Strauss had his claws firmly dug into business and government, equally at home on Wall Street and in the West Wing.

  But it was the Southerner’s efforts to play in the arena he’d never actually gotten around to studying—physics—that truly made Robert angry. Lewis Strauss was the sole member of the Atomic Energy Commission who opposed the exporting of radioisotopes produced by U.S. reactors to friendly powers for use in medical and industrial applications. As Oppie understood it, Strauss felt that, by definition, an atheist nation such as Russia couldn’t possibly be moral, and any isotopes that left U.S. control were bound to eventually end up in Soviet clutches.

  Of course, the U.S. didn’t export U-235 or any plutonium, but iron isotopes such as Fe-59? There was no sane reason to withhold them from allies. Still, Strauss had taken his fight against exports to the press, which was out in force today, and also to Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, an Iowan who looked like Central Casting’s notion of an accountant.

  Hickenlooper was immediate past chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the body that oversaw the A.E.C., and he was jealous that Joe McCarthy, a senator from the neighboring state of Wisconsin, was getting so much press attention for his hearings. After being coached by the admiral, Hick—as his constituents called him—accused the rest of the A.E.C. of “incredible mismanagement” for having let some two thousand shipments of isotopes go overseas. In response, the new chair of the Joint Committee, Brien McMahon, called precisely the sort of public hearing Hick wanted—and, to best McCarthy, this hearing was open to the public, with klieg lights blazing to aid the newsreel cameras.

  Today, Oppie had been summoned to provide his expert opinion. Although not a member of the A.E.C., he was chairman of its group of scientific consultants, the General Advisory Committee; the other members had sneakily voted him chair at their first meeting while he himself had been stuck in traffic, thanks to a snowstorm.

  Oppie took a seat at another one of the mahogany tables, next to the A.E.C.’s general counsel, a wavy-haired New Yorker in his early thirties called Joe “The Fox” Volpe. After a bit of preliminary material, Hick looked over at Strauss, and Oppie noted a smug little nod pass between them. The senator called Oppie to the settee reserved for those speaking. A carved eagle was perched on its backrest, poised to pounce on anyone wavering from the patriotic good.

  Admiral Strauss was president of the Reform temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, the same synagogue that Felix Adler had abandoned to found his Ethical Culture Society and its primary and secondary school at which Oppie had been a student. Adler’s position—and Oppie’s own—was the opposite of Strauss’s: morality could indeed be established without any recourse to theology. McMahon wasn’t requiring the swearing of oaths, although in this case, Oppie thought, the Rubber Bible, that giant compendium of chemistry and physics data, would have served admirably as scripture: facts, after all, are facts. He might defer to Lewis on picking a pair of shoes, but when it came to science, the businessman really needed to shut the hell up.

  “When we furnish isotopes to other nations,” said Hickenlooper, rising to face Oppie, thumbs hitched into suspenders, “we are embarking on a program which I believe is inimical to our national defense.” He fixed his eyes on Robert as if to make sure the scientist understood what he was supposed to say, then asked his question: “Dr. Oppenheimer, on this matter of exporting isotopes, surely you agree with Admiral Strauss here”—he said the name the way Lewis himself did as he indicated the man, who was leaning forward earnestly, chin supported on arms held up by the polished wood in front of him—“that there’s some possibility of them being used not for peaceful manufacturing or medicine but for atomic processes—first, atomic energy, and then, possibly, atomic bombs. Surely that objection is well-founded, sir, wouldn’t you say?”

  Oppie looked out at the faces, the crowd, the audience, and spread his arms wide, palms up, an imploring Christ. “No one can force me to say that you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy,” he said. He paused, making sure every eye was on him. “You can use a shovel for atomic energy; in fact you do.” There were a few laughs. “You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy; in fact, you do.” More laughter, the holdouts from a moment earlier now emboldened. “But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part and, in my knowledge, no part at all.”

  He had them, Oppie knew, had them in his thrall. “My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than, oh, electronic devices but far more important than, let us say ...” He made a show of seeking a word, then delivered it like a punch line: “... vitamins.” Open guffaws. To milk the moment, he added with dancing eyebrows, “Somewhere in between.”

  Hick was frowning and his face had grown red. He dismissed Oppie, and Robert strode across the room. “Well, Joe,” he said, grinning, as he sat back down in his previous seat, “how did I do?”

  Volpe shook his head left and right, left and right, oscillating in anguished discomfort. “Too well,” he said. “Much too well.” The lawyer cast his gaze across the room at Lewis Strauss, and Oppie turned to look in that direction.

  Robert’s throat constricted. He’d faced down rattlesnakes on the mesa, coyotes in the scrub, buzzards in the desert. He knew the expression of something that wanted you dead. But Lewis Strauss’s face, red with rage, taut with humiliation, was worse than that, a look Oppie had only ever seen once before, a look telegraphing not just wanting him dead—of that there was no doubt—but of wanting to see him suffer first, to have Oppie know who it was who had destroyed him. He knew the look because he’d seen it himself, years ago at the Cavendish, as he glared in the shaving mirror, straight razor scraping flesh, on the day he’d tried to kill Patrick Blackett with a poisoned apple.

  Oppie shuddered, turned away, and more bulbs exploded in his face.

  Chapter 40

  Four Years Later: 1953

  I have to put a stop to it. Ike has to know what’s really going on. This is the biggest mistake the United States could make!

  —Admiral William “Deak” Parsons, on hearing that President Eisenhower had ordered Oppenheimer cut off from classified information; Parsons died the next day of a heart attack before speaking to the president

  “Ah, Robert, thank you for coming by.”

  “Sure,” said Oppie. “Glad to.�
�

  The Atomic Energy Commission boardroom in Washington was octagonal, with a long wooden table so highly polished that one could use its surface as a mirror. Lewis Strauss had risen from the head of the table as Oppie entered. Ken Nichols, squinty-eyed and now sporting a pencil-thin mustache, was also there, standing by the window. The slats of the Venetian blinds were open, and the sun was already low on this, the shortest day of the year.

  “Did you hear about Admiral Parsons?” said Strauss, shaking Oppie’s hand with an unpleasant lack of pressure.

  Oppie nodded. “Deak? Yes. So sad. Just fifty-two; far too young. Kitty sent Martha some of her best orchids and a card.” Bill Parsons—“Deak,” short for “Deacon,” a pun on his last name—had proved, as Groves had said he would, an invaluable Navy liaison for the Arbor Project, often visiting the Oppenheimers at Olden Manor. He had recently written Oppie about the McCarthyism hysteria sweeping the nation, opining that “the anti-intellectualism of recent months may have passed its peak.” Robert hoped that was true.

  “General Nichols,” said Oppie, eyeing the man who had been Leslie Groves’s assistant during the war years. Oppie recognized the look on Nichols’s face, the same naked hatred he’d seen that day they’d met for the first time eleven years ago, when Groves had humiliated the doctorate-holding district engineer by dispatching him to do his dry cleaning. Hundreds of others must have witnessed Groves treat Nichols poorly, but those others would have been fellow soldiers, uniformed men and women who understood that some Dicks were dicks, and that you took orders—sir, yes, sir!—no matter what. But Oppie was a civilian and, if not an actual card-carrying Communist, close enough in Nichols’s simplistic world-view.