The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Oppie’s long legs had taken him two yards ahead of the stout Hungarian. He slowed. “What do you mean?”

  “The period following World War II was the first time ever that scientists—not science, but specific, nameable scientists—had been seen as responsible for a turning point in history. Before that, there was precisely one famous living scientist, my dear friend Albert, and even he would admit that he was famed more for his eccentricity and hairdo than anything the masses could actually articulate. But following the war, there were scientists who were world famous. You were on the cover of Time magazine!”

  “I could have done without the most-recent appearance.”

  “Ah, Americans love nothing more than to see a once-powerful person torn down. But don’t you understand? Since the war, we scientists were embraced as public intellectuals. What we said about policy was given as much weight as what we said about physics. We were heard. But this travesty of a security board? It’s shown that if a scientist speaks up—if he does anything but toe the party line—then he will be shut out. The verdict in your trial was—did you hear what Edward said?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I don’t mean at the trial. But before?”

  Oppie shook his head.

  “He wanted you defrocked, you and all the ‘Oppenheimer men,’ the whole ‘Oppenheimer machine.’ By which he meant all of us who dared to question the power of the military to dictate policy. Men like Teller and Lawrence, they’ll gladly give the hawks whatever they wish—and they’ll go to any lengths to shut up those who would challenge that.”

  Oppie resumed walking, and Leo did his best to keep up. “But it’s madness,” Robert said at last. “Teller knows about the photospheric purge.”

  “Yes, and about our project here to preserve humanity that he intended to run until you replaced him.”

  “True, and I suppose being rejected hurt. But, still, he must think about the future.”

  Szilard put a hand on Robert’s arm, and they stopped again. “Oppie, Oppie, you are, if you’ll forgive me, naïve. Me, I’m something different—impractical, perhaps. But you simply don’t see what’s in front of your eyes. Most men in power care only about preserving that power. I’ve read a dozen articles calling you a twentieth-century Faust, but they’re wrong, wrong, wrong. You have made no bargain with the devil; they have—the warmongers who see that now, after Hiroshima, the sky’s the limit—the Eagle will shower them with money. They have accepted earthly pleasures—power, prestige, wealth—in the present, and, even if those few who know our truth believe it to be only for a finite time and that in the end they will be engulfed in flames, at least everyone will meet the same fate. So why not be on top until then?”

  Szilard frowned and went on. “‘Trinity.’ Such an odd name for a Jew to choose. But it was apt, Oppie, so apt. The apotheosis of the scientist; the physicist as Messiah, able to preach to the multitudes.” He shook his head. “But the savior has been nailed to the cross—and all his ilk, too.” He began to walk again, and Oppie did, as well. “And there won’t be a resurrection; even an atomic bomb couldn’t now shift the stone that has entombed liberal science. ‘The Oppenheimer machine?’ There never was such a thing! But the war machine? It is supreme now, with high priests named Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence, and Lewis Strauss.”

  Oppie pulled his pipe from his pocket and set about filling it with his favorite walnut blend.

  “When Groves insisted on keeping the solar purge secret, I balked,” continued Leo. “The military mind! Bah. He was surely wrong then—but circumstances have changed; your hearing was the turning point. No far-off-future concern matters to those in charge, and they’ll shoot down anyone who tries to deflect them from their here-and-now. Overnight, scientists have gone from being unbridled intellectuals, with our views on any topic commanding attention, to hyperspecialists, permitted to speak only about tiny areas and, even within those bounds, our thoughts are to be expressed in a tongue as obscure and rarely understood as—”

  “As Hungarian?” said Oppie.

  Szilard smiled. “Exactly. In the end, you weren’t tried for your past associations; the first twenty-three charges were stage dressing. But that final charge—that you, a scientist, might oppose the policy of those in power, standing in the way of the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb!” They stopped walking again, and Leo scraped the sole of his shoe against a rock as if to dislodge something unpleasant stuck to it. “No, it’s clear that if we are to save them, we must indeed do it in secret.” He looked up at Oppie. “Whether we should save them the way things are now—that’s a question I’ll leave for others to answer.”

  Chapter 47

  One usually reads that dying men confess their sins to the living. It has always seemed to me that it would be much more logical the other way about. So I confessed my sins to Fermi. None but he, apart from the Deity, if there is one, knows what I then told him.

  —Edward Teller

  When Laura Fermi had called, asking Edward Teller to fly to Illinois, she’d warned him what to expect, but it was still horrifying. Teller stood in the doorway to the private room at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital, looking at his old friend. Enrico hadn’t noticed his arrival yet.

  Except, God damn it, he wasn’t an old friend—he was young, just fifty-three, far, far too young to be dying.

  Time seemed to be on Enrico’s mind, too. Clad in pale yellow hospital pajamas, his head leaning against a pillow, he was holding what looked like a pocket watch. A feeding tube ran directly into his stomach, making him resemble an oversized—and horribly malnourished—fetus. Edward had thought Oppenheimer had looked skeletal during the hearing, but he’d been positively robust compared with what was left of Fermi.

  Laura, standing next to her husband, caught sight of Teller first. She had a lovely, broad face and short, wavy blonde hair. “Ed!” she exclaimed. “Thank you so much for coming!” She moved over, hugged him, kissed him on the cheek, and ushered him into the room.

  Enrico, whose smile was restrained at the best of times, managed a small grin. He turned the timepiece around, revealing it to be a stopwatch. “Checking the flow of nutrients,” he said. His voice had lost much of its strength, but none of its Roman accent. Teller noted that Enrico’s ivory slide rule was sitting within easy reach; the Nobel winner clearly still had an active mind even if his body was betraying him. After spending the past summer in Europe, Enrico had returned to Chicago complaining of digestive difficulties. Exploratory surgery two weeks ago, on October 9, 1954, had revealed pervasive stomach cancer that had already metastasized. The diagnosis was terminal, with only weeks or months of life left.

  Laura led Edward over to the bed, and Enrico lifted his right arm. “Don’t worry, my friend,” he said. “I, at least, am willing to shake your hand.”

  Edward took the offered appendage—bone and tendon loosely wrapped in onion skin—and squeezed it gently. “Thank you,” he said because he didn’t know what else to say.

  Laura smiled. “I’ll go now,” she said. “Leave you two alone to catch up.” She kissed Enrico’s forehead and left.

  Fermi stared wistfully after her. “You have no idea how beautiful she was as a teenager. I was the envy of every other boy.” He looked up at Teller. “Don’t be so glum, old friend. I’m the one who’s dying.”

  The two physicists had known each other since the summer of 1932—twenty-two years now—through peace and war and peace again. Edward tried to smile, and Fermi went on. “I’ve now been blessed by a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a Jewish rabbi. Each came and asked if he had my permission to bless me—and I hadn’t even sneezed!” His smile emphasized his skull. “It pleased them, and it did me no harm, so why not?”

  “Well, you are the Pope,” Teller said; Fermi had earned that nickname decades ago for his infallibility in matters of physics. “You can perform your own benediction,
maybe even your own canonization.”

  “‘Saint Enrico,’” Fermi said, but he shook his head. “Sounds too much like ‘Satan Rico.’”

  Edward gestured at his friend’s sunken torso. “Do you suppose it was radiation?” Fermi—the Italian navigator himself—had been present during almost all the early runs of the first atomic pile beneath Stagg Field, and, at both Los Alamos and here in Chicago, he’d always been a hands-on experimentalist.

  “Who knows?” said Enrico. “If so, it’s played a dirty trick on me.”

  Teller’s eyes were stinging. “It’s a dirty trick on your friends.”

  Enrico shrugged philosophically, gaunt shoulders sliding up to touch the bottom of his pillow. “If the cancer was caused by radiation, well, I suppose Oppie would say it was—what’s that Hindu term he likes?”

  “Karma,” said Edward. The word felt heavy in his mouth.

  “Yes. And speaking of ...” Enrico paused; Edward expected him to finish with “... karma,” but instead he said, “Oppenheimer.” Fermi’s downturned brown eyes at the best of times gave him a melancholy air, but here, as he fastened his gaze on Teller, they seemed to convey not just sadness but disappointment. “Look, Ed, I know as well as anyone that Oppenheimer can be difficult to take. People of his ilk, born with money, often are. Arrogant, condescending. But ...”

  He trailed off, and Edward wasn’t sure if it was because his illness had robbed him of further wind or because he was simply gathering his thoughts. At last, though, he went on. “But the things you said at his security-board hearing.” Fermi shook his head again, hair rubbing against the drool-stained pillowcase. “They were ...” Teller braced himself for a mild rebuke; he wasn’t prepared for the term now tossed at him: “... reprehensible.”

  “Enrico, please.”

  “No?” said Fermi. “What word would you use? He brought you to Los Alamos; he gave you free reign to work on the super when everyone else was concentrating on the fission bomb. The stature you have now, and the fact that the super exists at all, you owe to him.”

  “We would have had the super years earlier if he’d shifted our focus to it immediately.”

  “And what would we have done with it? Wipe the entire nation of Japan off the map? Or Germany, if we’d gotten finished even sooner? Japan, at least, has no neighbors that share its borders, but Germany? My God! Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands all touch it, and my Italy is just to the south and your Hungary to the east. You couldn’t use a hydrogen bomb in Europe.”

  “The foes now are gigantic,” said Teller. “Russia, China. There are suitable targets deep inland.”

  “Now, perhaps. But Oppie had to deal with the situation as it was then—and he pampered you at Los Alamos.”

  “By promoting Bethe over me?”

  “Ed ...”

  “Fine, fine.” Teller waved dismissively. “But since the war, you have to agree he’s been obstructionist.”

  “Because he spoke against the fusion bomb? Because he held to his carefully considered opinions? Because he didn’t agree with you? For that, you’d destroy him?”

  “He can still teach, if he wishes.” And if anyone will have him.

  “For a man like Oppenheimer, a man who has had years of a life at the very heart of things, to be cut off from the halls of power is devastating. You know that.”

  “He still has the Institute for Advanced Study—taken from me, I might add—and everything that’s going on there.”

  Fermi lifted his eyebrows, and that just made his eyes look even sadder. “And you and I are among the few who do know what he’s working on and how important it is.”

  Teller glanced out the window: autumn maples, like mushroom clouds, their caps afire. “I’m not to blame, Enrico. He destroyed himself. He lied to the security officials. The night before I testified, Roger Robb showed me the transcripts, and—”

  “And you would posture now that those transcripts altered your feelings? That it wasn’t until you saw them that you’d decided to push Oppie into the path of a speeding ...”

  Enrico paused. They were both speaking English, the language they shared, and Teller had mentally completed the sentence—in the path of a speeding train?—before the Italian went on. When he did, he surprised Edward: “... a speeding streetcar?”

  The Nobelist did know him. Teller rarely spoke of the injury that had cost him his right foot. A foolish stunt, an act of youthful bravado and stupidity. At seventeen, in Karlsruhe, having missed his stop, he’d jumped off the front of a moving trolley car, lost his balance, and fallen. The trolley’s rear wheel ran over his ankle, shearing off his foot.

  “We’ve all made stupid mistakes,” Enrico continued. “At least Oppenheimer’s was made to protect a friend, no? This Chevalier?”

  “Friend,” said Edward. The word sounded bitter, even to him. “I’ve lost so many over this. And—” And now I’m going to lose you, too.

  “If I were you,” said Enrico, his voice growing ever more raw, “I’d lay low for a time. Disappear from public view. Memories fade. And if you can make some amends—”

  “I’m entitled to my opinions, too. And I do think the vital interests of this country are now in safer hands with Oppenheimer out of things.”

  Fermi looked like he was going to object, but to save his dying friend some breath—and to save himself from hearing the objection—Teller went on: “But I have taken a conciliatory step as far as the super is concerned to counter the ... misconception.”

  A brief popular-history book entitled The Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, the Menace, the Mechanism by two Time-Life correspondents had recently been published. It portrayed Teller as a visionary genius and the sole creator of the super, whereas Oppenheimer was relegated to the role of villain and even spy. Moreover, the book said the super had been developed at the Livermore Lab, founded two years ago in northern California by Teller and Ernest Lawrence, not as it actually was at Los Alamos. That infuriated Oppenheimer’s successor there, Norris Bradbury—and, Edward supposed, very likely Oppie himself.

  “I wrote this,” said Edward. He produced a typescript from his inside jacket pocket and passed it to Fermi, who needed the strength of both arms to hold up the dozen sheets.

  “‘The Work of Many Hands,’” said Enrico, reading the title out loud. “What is this?”

  “A correct account of the development of the super. But I don’t know if I should publish it. Lewis Strauss says it’ll just make things worse.”

  Fermi skimmed the article. “Why wouldn’t you publish this? It was the work of many hands. You’d do well to be seen sharing the credit.” He continued leafing through, then went back to the beginning, and quickly scanned the pages again. “There’s no mention of Stanislaw Ulam.”

  Teller felt his abdominal muscles clench. Enrico was not the first person to note that lack. “Ulam contributed nothing! He didn’t believe it would work!”

  “The latter doesn’t imply the former. I saw his equations.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Ed, you are trying to rehabilitate your reputation. Be magnanimous.”

  Teller harrumphed. “I suppose I could insert a mention.”

  “Good,” said Enrico. He made a feeble imitation of the hand sign of papal benediction. “The Pope approves.”

  Edward was weary of—of everything. He looked around the small, ugly room and spotted an appropriately small, ugly chair, which he dragged across the tiles with a chalk-on-slate sound. When it was abreast of Fermi, he lowered himself onto it and let loose a heavy sigh. “There is something I have to get off my chest.”

  “It’s a rare soul who gets to give confession directly to the Pope,” said Enrico, smiling his weak smile.

  Edward shifted his bulk on the wooden seat. His prosthetic foot banged against the metal side railing of the
hospital bed, but he felt nothing.

  “I want to use the bomb,” he said at last. “I want to see every last Communist gone. If there is a hope of saving humanity—of a fresh start on Mars or elsewhere—then we need to begin clean.”

  “You’re advocating preventive war against Russia?”

  “I’m not the only one,” said Teller, and he hated the defensiveness in his voice. “John von Neumann agrees. He says ‘If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?’”

  “Von Neumann puts way too much stock in his theory of games. The Russian people are no different from anyone else.”

  “I hate the Communists,” Teller said.

  “Ed, Ed, even Hitler only killed six million. Would you really wipe out all of the Soviet Union?”

  “Not just them. China, now, too. It would take only a handful of supers to eliminate all the Communists, to give mankind a clean start, a world free of the cancer—”

  He stopped, shocked at his own choice of metaphor. “Forgive me, Enrico.”

  “Ego te absolvo,” intoned Fermi. “For that—but for what you’re proposing? Edward, it’s inhuman.”

  Teller rapped his artificial foot against the bed frame again, deliberately this time. “I’m something a bit less than that. The super can cleanse. Besides, consider how much it will cost to relocate what’s left of humanity before the photospheric purge. Billions, maybe even trillions, of dollars. Eliminate the enemy now and we’ll avoid the financially ruinous arms race everyone fears is coming. All that money can go into funding the—”

  “Exodus?” offered Fermi.

  “Exactly.”

  But Fermi shook his head. “Old Testament; not my department—and certainly not something I’ll live to see.”

  “You will be remembered,” said Teller.

  “Will I?” Fermi seemed to consider this. “Perhaps. For the Chicago pile, maybe. But you know what Leo Szilard said when we finally got it running? ‘This will go down as a dark day in the history of mankind.’ Enrico tilted his skull. “Perhaps he was right, after all.”