The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Doctor,” said Nichols, by way of greeting: a title they were both entitled to use, but Nichols made it sound like a diminutive, dismissing snot-nosed Bobby out of hand.

  “So, listen,” drawled Strauss, “we’ve got a thorny problem here related to your security clearance. You’ve got a Q level”—access to all nuclear-weapons information—“and that’s raising some eyebrows. President Eisenhower has issued an executive order requiring re-evaluation of all individuals whose files contain derogatory information, and, well ...”

  “And my file is bursting with just that,” said Oppie good-naturedly, “if viewed in the wrong light.”

  “If viewed in any light,” snapped Nichols, but Strauss shot him a look.

  “And, unfortunately,” continued Strauss, “we have to move yours to the top of the heap. A former government official has submitted a letter that suggests, well, it ...”

  “It says,” Nichols supplied with relish, “‘that more probably than not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.’”

  Oppie felt his jaw slacken. “But that’s absurd!” Had he been seen all those years ago meeting with Stepan Zakharovich Apresyan? If so, why wait until now to make such a wild claim?

  “Of course, of course,” said Strauss as if waving away a trifle. “Still, I’m afraid the letter caught the president’s eye, and so ...” Strauss paused dramatically, and Oppie got the solid impression the older man was enjoying himself mightily. “... and so the A.E.C. has prepared its own letter.” He hefted a document and riffled its many pages as if he himself were shocked at how lengthy it was. “Naturally,” he said, “this is just a draft. It will require General Nichols’s signature, as general manager of the commission, but he hasn’t signed it yet.”

  “Yet?” repeated Oppenheimer.

  “Here,” said Strauss, handing it over. “Have a look.” He gestured for Oppie to take a seat at the mirror-like table; Robert did so. As was his habit with lengthy correspondence, he went straight to the end, which said:

  ... in view of these allegations which, until disproved, raise questions as to your veracity, conduct and even your loyalty, your employment on Atomic Energy Commission work and your eligibility for access to restricted data are hereby suspended, effective immediately.

  “This is contemptible,” Oppie said, looking up.

  “‘Comprehensive’ would be a better word, I think,” said Nichols. “Twenty-four charges, I believe.”

  Oppie went back to the first page and started reading—quickly as always; he could absorb a paragraph at a glance. “Well,” he said, “some of this I simply deny.” He flipped the page. “And some is flat-out wrong.” Flip. Flip. Flip. “But I suppose bits of this do fall into the category of nolo contendere.”

  Neither Strauss nor Nichols had any Latin, apparently, or any legal training; both were frowning at him. “That is,” Oppie said, “I would choose not to contest some of these—” he hated the word Nichols had used; a summary of a man’s life is not the same thing as a list of charges “—points.”

  “That would be wise,” said Nichols. “There is extensive documentation for each one.”

  Oppie had reached the last page again and he pointed to the space for Nichols’s signature. “But, as you said, it hasn’t been signed.”

  “No,” agreed Strauss, frowning—but the frown looked like a smirk in the reflection from below. “And, of course, it doesn’t have to be. I mean, there’s no need for a full investigation unless ...”

  “Unless I want to keep my security clearance and my consulting position.”

  Strauss smiled—a vile, reptilian rictus—and leaned over, tapping a part of the final page. “In which case, I believe this paragraph applies.” Oppie read it:

  To assist in the resolution of this matter, you have the privilege of appearing before an Atomic Energy Commission personnel security board. To avail yourself of Atomic Energy Commission hearing procedures, you must, within 30 days following receipt of this letter, submit to me, in writing, your reply to the information outlined above and request the opportunity of appearing before the personnel security board.

  “So, if I go quietly ...?” said Oppie. “If I resign ...?”

  “Then we burn that letter of charges, and General Nichols doesn’t have to autograph anything.”

  “But I have the ...” he paused, then spit out the word, “‘privilege’ of defending myself in a hearing, if I choose to fight?”

  “Those are indeed the alternatives,” said Strauss, “but we—they—did take the liberty of drawing up a letter of resignation for you.” He took a sheet off his desk and pulled a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his jacket pocket. “Sign this one, and no one will ever have to see that one again. But if you don’t—well, there’d have to be an investigation into each one of the—how many did you say, Nick?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  The West Virginian frowned again as if the number were bigger than he’d remembered. “They’d have to investigate each of the twenty-four charges. Review all the available documents, question witnesses—colleagues, family, friends. A trial, as it were.” Strauss adopted an avuncular tone. “So much bother, really; hardly worth it.”

  Oppie wasn’t smoking but he did blow out air. “Boy, you guys really play for keeps, don’t you?”

  Strauss had a wry smile now. “Yes, Dr. Oppenheimer. Of course we play for keeps.”

  “Do they know about this up on Capitol Hill?”

  A twitch of the mouth. “Not yet.”

  “How long do I have to decide?”

  “Oh, there’s no rush,” said Strauss, now the soul of magnanimity. “Take your time. I’ll be home at eight tonight. Why not call me then with your answer?”

  “Tonight?” Oppie felt his eyes widening. “It’s already”—he looked at his Timex “—almost four. I ...” He swallowed then found some strength. “I need to talk to my lawyer.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Strauss. “You took the train in from Princeton, I imagine. Do you need a lift? I’ll ask my chauffeur to drive you wherever you wish.”

  Would he? thought Oppie. Would he drive me all the way to Perro Caliente? Drive me far, far away from all this madness? Drive me to somewhere peaceful and calm?

  “Thank you,” Oppie said stiffly as he rose. “That’s very kind of you.” He reached for the letter of charges, but Strauss put a hand on Oppie’s forearm.

  “Oh, I’m afraid we can’t let you have that. Wouldn’t do to have an unsigned version floating around—could cause all sorts of confusion.”

  “So I’m to go by my memory when discussing this with counsel?”

  “Doctor, a man of your intellect? You must remember every little thing, no?”

  No, thought Oppie, looking at Strauss. But apparently you do.

  #

  Kitty had come to Washington with Robert. That evening, he rendezvoused with her at the home of his lawyer, Herbert Marks, in Georgetown; Herb’s wife Anne had been Oppie’s secretary back on the mesa.

  “It’s bullshit, is what it is,” Herb said. “You saved this country, and now some frothing megalomaniac is trying to bring you down.”

  “You can’t just give in,” said Kitty. Herb and Anne were not privy to the Arbor Project, so Kitty added vaguely and yet pointedly, “Not with everything that’s at stake.”

  Anne agreed. “You’re half the reason there are atomic secrets to begin with! Without what we accomplished under you at Los Alamos, there’d be no atomic bombs.” They were seated around a small table with folding legs, the kind used for playing bridge. Oppie was in the east position. Anne, at north, put a hand on his forearm. “Resigning would be just plain wrong. Eisenhower has far too many warmongers whispering in his ear; he needs to hear your voice.”

  “I don’t know,” Oppie said, sounding bone-weary even to himself. Words that were familiar
to him, but not anyone else at the table, bubbled up and out, a phrase from Jean’s suicide note of years ago: “I am disgusted with everything.”

  “It’s all right,” said Herb. “We’ll draft a response, let them know that you want—hell, demand!—a hearing. No one sweeps J. Robert Oppenheimer aside!”

  Oppie tried to lift his lips in a smile, but he doubted he succeeded. Still, Strauss could stew by his phone all night; the reply would be delivered, in writing, tomorrow.

  It took hours to craft it. Oppie felt increasingly disoriented, so Kitty took charge, vetoing anything that was wishy-washy legalese. He would refuse to resign, and Strauss and Nichols—nasty, conniving bastards, the pair of them—would know why. “Take this down,” Kitty said to Anne, who was skilled at shorthand: “‘I have thought most earnestly of the alternative suggested. Under the circumstances this course of action would mean that I believe—’”

  “‘Accept and concur,’” proffered Herb.

  “Yes, yes,” said Kitty: “‘... that I accept and concur that I am not fit to serve this government that I have now served for some ...’ Robert?”

  He managed to get the figure out: “Twelve years.”

  “‘—for some twelve years. This I cannot do.’”

  “Exactly,” said Anne as she wrote. “Fuck them.”

  Kitty nodded and went on. “‘If I were thus unworthy I could hardly have served our country as I have tried—’”

  “‘Or been director of—’” said Herb.

  “Right,” said Kitty. “‘... or been the director of our Institute in Princeton, or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of science.’”

  “‘And our country?’” suggested Anne.

  “Yes!” said Kitty. “Perfect. ‘... in the name of our science and our country.’”

  “Oppie?” asked Herb. “Does all that sound good to you?”

  I wanted to live ... and to give ... and I got paralyzed somehow.

  Robert rose. “I’m dead,” he said. They’d already arranged to spend the night. He summoned what little strength he still had and trudged up to the guest bedroom.

  #

  Kitty was in the Marks’s kitchen, pouring herself another glass of wine, when she heard the crash. She raced to the stairs and beat Anne and Herbert to the top. The guest room was empty, but the adjacent bathroom had its door closed.

  “Robert!” Kitty called, rapping knuckles on the white-painted wood. “Robert!”

  There was no reply. She tried to open the door, and at first thought he’d locked it—but no. Something was blocking it. Oh, God! It was Robert’s body. He had fallen or collapsed.

  With Anne and Herb’s help, she managed to push the door—and her husband!—enough that she could slip inside. Robert was a heap of long limbs on the floor, but, yes, he was breathing. They’d all been drinking, Robert even more than usual, and—shit!—there, open and—fuck!—empty: Kitty’s bottle of prescription sleeping pills.

  “Call a doctor!” she shouted. “Quickly!”

  Anne ran off to do that, and Kitty and Herb got Robert to his feet. They walked him to the short leather couch in the guest room and got him to sit up on it. He soon roused a little but was mumbling, his words almost impossible to make out. Kitty thought she heard “ease” or maybe “appease” and “your awful pain” and something crazy like “you gaunt terrible bleeding Jesus.” But she couldn’t be sure.

  Chapter 41

  The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government.

  —Albert Einstein

  A shabby room, thought Oppie, for a shabby bit of business. The hearing was being held on the second floor of a building simply called T-3, one of a flock of dilapidated temporary structure slapped together early in the war on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

  Gordon Gray, the president of the University of North Carolina, was chairing the security-clearance review board. At forty-four, Gray was five years younger than Oppie. He rapped a wooden gavel against its circular stand. “The hearing will now resume. I should like to ask Dr. Oppenheimer whether he wishes to testify under oath in this proceeding?”

  Oppie nodded. “Surely.”

  “You are not required to do so,” said Gray.

  “I think it best,” said Oppie, rising.

  “J. Robert Oppenheimer, do you swear that the testimony you are to give the board shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  God, he suspected, probably didn’t feel He owed Prometheus any favors—but Robert supposed it couldn’t hurt to ask. “I do.”

  Roger Robb, lead counsel for the Atomic Energy Commission, was a sharp-featured forty-six-year-old with slicked-back dark hair. When he smiled, it looked pained, like he’d just taken a football to the gut. “Doctor,” he said, “let me ask you a blunt question. Don’t you know, and didn’t you know certainly by 1943, that the Communist Party was an instrument of espionage in this country?”

  Gray and the other two board members sat at a baize-covered mahogany table, black binders full of classified documents piled in front of them. Two more tables, pushed together along their short edges ran down the middle of the room, with Oppie’s lawyers and Kitty on one side, and, on the other, Roger Robb plus squinty-eyed C. Arthur Rolander, the A.E.C.’s deputy director of security, who had helped prepare the case against Oppenheimer.

  Oppie tried for a conversational tone. “I wasn’t clear about it.”

  Robb rose and moved close to Oppie. “Didn’t you suspect it?”

  A small shake of the head. “No.”

  “What did you know about George Eltenton’s background in 1943 when this Eltenton-Chevalier episode occurred?”

  Oppie ticked off facts on long fingers, starting with the tobacco-stained index one and working his way toward the pinkie, with its charred tip, the effect of his habitually using it to brush ash off his burning cigarettes: “That he was an Englishman; that he was a chemical engineer; that he had spent some time in the Soviet Union; that he was employed, I think, at Shell Development Company.”

  “How did you know all those things?”

  Oppie lit his pipe. “Well, about the Shell Development Company, I suppose he or someone else working there told me. As for the background in Russia, I don’t remember. That he was an Englishman was obvious.”

  “Why?”

  “His accent.”

  “You were fairly well acquainted with him, were you not?”

  “No. I think we probably saw each other no more than four or five times.” Or six.

  “When did you first mention your conversation with Chevalier to any security officer?”

  “I didn’t do it that way. I first mentioned Eltenton.”

  “Yes?”

  “On a visit to Berkeley.”

  “Was that to Lieutenant Johnson?”

  “I don’t remember, but it was to a security officer there.”

  “If the record shows that it was to Lieutenant Lyall Johnson on August 25, 1943, you would accept that?”

  “I would accept that.”

  “I think your first interview with Johnson was quite brief, was it not?”

  “That’s right. I think I said little more than that Eltenton was somebody to worry about.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I was asked: why did I say this?” He waited for Robb to prod him to go on, but the—the prosecutor; he was that in all but title—simply stood, waiting for Robert to continue. And, at last, an acidic taste in his mouth, cramps in his stomach, he did so. “Then I invented a ...” Damn it, damn it, damn it. He exhaled, inhaled, and finished the thought: “... a cock-and-bull story.”

  Robb nodded, but there was a restrained glee in his eyes, the ki
nd he might have shown when someone agreed to sell him an item for five dollars that he knew was worth fifty. “You were interviewed the next day by Colonel Pash, were you not?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That was quite a lengthy interview, was it not?”

  “I didn’t think it was that long.”

  “Did you tell Pash the truth about this thing?”

  The room was arranged—no doubt at Robb’s urging—so that from Oppie’s point of view there was a window behind the tribunal; the background was brighter than the foreground, and it was giving Robert a headache. Perhaps, under better circumstances, he’d have found a way to give nuance to his response. But all he did was utter, “No.”

  “You lied to him?” said Robb, in a mock perish-the-thought tone.

  Misled, perhaps; misinformed, like Rick had been about the waters in Casablanca. But lied? Such a bald label. Oppie tipped his head. “Yes.”

  “What did you tell Pash that was not true?”

  Another inhalation, then: “That Eltenton had attempted to approach three members of the project through intermediaries.”

  “Three members of the project?”

  “Through intermediaries.”

  “Intermediaries?”

  “Through an intermediary.”

  “So that we may be clear, did you disclose to Pash the identity of Chevalier?”

  “No.”

  “Let us refer, then, for the time being, to Chevalier as X.”

  “All right.”

  “Did you tell Pash that X had approached three persons on the project?”

  Oppie crossed his legs one way, then the other. “I am not clear whether I said there were three Xs or ... or that X approached three people.”

  “Didn’t you say that X had approached three people?”

  Oppie looked down. “Probably.”

  “Why did you do that, Doctor?”

  Why did he do that?

  That was indeed the question.