The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Chapter 50

  1959

  [With Project Orion,] we could get a colony of several thousand people to Alpha Centauri, about four light-years away, in about 150 years [of travel time]. These numbers represent the absolute lower limit of what could be done with our present resources and technology if we were forced by some astronomical catastrophe to send a Noah’s ark out of the wreckage of the solar system.

  —Freeman Dyson

  “Hydrogen bombs are the only way we know to burn the cheapest fuel we have, deuterium,” said Freeman Dyson. He was at the podium in the lecture hall of the circular library that shared a diameter with the planned Orion vessel. “Now,” he continued, the usual twinkle in his unblinking blue eyes, “I do not know exactly how efficient hydrogen bombs are, and, if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you.” All fifty General Atomic employees working on Project Orion were there, and just about every one of them laughed. “So, as we proceed, I’ll put upper and lower limits on the number we’re not supposed to know exactly ...”

  It was Dyson’s farewell lecture; he was heading back shortly to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study. But he was leaving behind feasibility studies that could, as promised, get manned Orion spaceships to Mars within the next six years, by 1965, and to the moons of Jupiter just five years later. If any of those were to be the new home for humanity, the Orion team would be ready, and well before von Braun’s chemical rockets might be able to put humans on the dead—and soon to be even deader—terrestrial moon.

  #

  Dick Feynman, holding a scientific journal, came into Oppie’s office. “Forget about humanity going to Europa,” he announced.

  Oppie had been working on budgets. He finished tallying the figures in front of him and used a fountain pen to jot down the seven-digit total. Leslie Groves had left the army to take a vice president’s role at computer-maker and military-contractor Sperry Rand but still managed to keep the black-money spigot open. “Why?” Robert asked, at last looking up at Feynman, who was now leaning against the doorjamb.

  “Too much radiation.”

  Oppie tapped out his pipe into an ashtray. “Are you talking about Burke and Franklin?” Four years ago, in 1955, those two had discovered decametric radio emissions coming from Jupiter, extending up to forty megahertz. “Their work implied a powerful magnetic field—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Feynman. “Perhaps even exceeding ten gauss. And last year, Explorer discovered the Van Allen radiation belts.”

  The whole world knew Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, which went up in October 1957. Already forgotten by most was Explorer 1, the first American satellite, launched just 119 days later. But Explorer 1 had made an astounding discovery: earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. In the nine months since then, physicists had determined that the toroidal belts, which trapped highly charged particles from the solar wind, were key to our planet retaining its atmosphere; without them, the solar wind would have scoured most of it off long ago. They were also vital to protecting those on the surface from harmful radiation.

  “Highly charged particles around earth,” stressed Oppie.

  “Sure. But if earth’s magnetic field gives us such radiation belts, any planet with a strong bipolar magnetic field is likely to have them—and Jupiter’s field is gigantic, at least ten or twenty times earth’s.”

  “But if there’s only decametric radiation coming from the planet itself—”

  “Yeah, that wouldn’t be so bad.” Feynman held up the latest Astronomical Journal, dated October 1959. “But Frank Drake’s got a note in here. He found decimetric radiation coming from Jupiter. Deci, not deca; DIM, not DAM.”

  Oppie frowned. “So, a hundred times shorter than the earlier discovery, which—shit. That would mean it’s—”

  “Bingo. Synchrotron radiation, emitted by electrons hurtling at relativistic speeds in the Jovian counterpart of the Van Allen belts. Radiation a million times more intense than that in our own belts. And, before you ask, I already worked it out: Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and even Callisto, probably, orbit within Jupiter’s Van Allen belts. Maybe Europa does have an ocean, as some have suggested, but its surface has to be uninhabitable. We might as well try to relocate humanity inside nuclear piles.”

  Oppie gestured for Feynman to hand him the journal. Dick had placed a slip of paper in it to mark the page, but Robert was momentarily confused. There were two notes from Frank Drake published in this issue, one after the other. The first was irrelevant, but the second—“Non-thermal microwave radiation from Jupiter”—was the one Feynman was concerned about. It actually had a co-author, which the journal listed as S. Hvatum. Oppie figured the initial was a typo; he knew the first name of Drake’s colleague at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank was Hein. Sadly, the rest of the brief piece—just three paragraphs, taking up much less than a full page—was harder to find fault with. Drake was a good empirical research scientist: steady, reputable, occasionally brilliant. His conclusion, presented in the usual dispassionate passive voice of such things—“a total number of particles 106 times greater than in the terrestrial system will suffice to explain the observations”—meant that Feynman was right. There was no way any biological molecules could long survive on the surface of Europa or the other major Jovian moons. Oh, Oppie supposed, Europa might have deep-sea life, shielded by many tens or hundreds of meters of water, if life exists at all beyond earth and if Europa actually has an ocean. But as a second home for humanity? Impossible.

  “Well, then,” said Oppie, closing the journal, “that’s that. If we’re going to any solid body in the solar system, it just has to be Mars.”

  “Or one of Saturn’s moons. Titan, for instance.”

  “Right, true. But I’m still putting my money on the red planet. Thank goodness it, at least, appears somewhat hospitable.”

  Feynman shrugged philosophically and said, “Where there is life, there is hope.”

  #

  A week later, I.I. Rabi came into Oppie’s office holding a chipped Masonite clipboard with some papers clamped to. “Would you like to fly out and see the latest Orion test?” He glanced at the topmost page. “It’ll be at Point Loma on the Pacific coast near San Diego next Saturday.”

  Still, after all these years, mention of a trip to California brought Jean to mind, even if San Diego was about as far as one could get from San Francisco and still be in that state.

  “I suppose it’d be a good idea,” replied Oppie. “Get a real sense of the damn thing.”

  “I should warn you, though,” said Rabi, holding up the clipboard, which presumably contained the news. “Rolander might be there.”

  Oppie’s stomach clenched. C. Arthur Rolander, who’d sat next to Roger Robb during Oppenheimer’s trial, had been the A.E.C.’s security weasel who had helped stack the deck against him. “What in hell would he be doing there?”

  Rabi shook his head. “Would you believe it? He’s vice president of General Atomic now.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Oppie. “I was planning on the next time I saw him being when I piss on his grave.” He shook his head. “No, I’ll stay here. But Szilard’s often out that way. Ask him to attend, would you?”

  #

  “Three!”

  It amused Leo Szilard, standing on the warm hillside covered with cacti and flowering shrubs overlooking the Pacific, that they were starting things with a countdown. It was a German invention to have such a thing before a rocket launch, but it wasn’t the work of Wernher von Braun, or even of von Braun’s great predecessor, Hermann Oberth, but rather of the screenwriter Thea von Harbou who wrote Fritz Lang’s 1929 science-fiction movie Frau im Mond.

  “Two!”

  Indeed, science-fiction influences were ubiquitous this day. The meter-long test-flight model Orion looked for all the world like the ship described in Jules Verne’s 1865 novel De l
a terre à la lune—a stubby bullet shape—and plans for the full vessel involved clever shock absorbers, just as Verne’s own vessel did.

  “One!”

  Even the propulsive methods had an explosive commonality. Verne’s ship was impelled by one giant kick from a gargantuan ground-based canon. A full-scale Orion would employ myriad thermonuclear-bomb detonations, and this test vehicle, nicknamed Putt-Putt, would use grapefruit-sized balls of C-4, ejected through a hole in its pusher plate.

  “Zero!”

  The first explosion was—

  Mein Gott!

  Leo thought for sure the test model must have been blown to bits. But no! There! Just above the great cloud of black smoke: the U.S.S. Putt-Putt, its fiberglass hull intact, and—

  Another explosion!

  Another black cloud.

  And, again, triumphantly, the projectile-shaped craft emerging from the top of the cloud.

  Blam!

  And again, the little ship going higher and higher still, climbing toward the sky.

  It seemed to fly on forever, although, as Leo later learned, the actual ascent had only lasted twenty-three seconds. In that time, though, Putt-Putt had risen up fifty-six meters, more than fifty times its own height.

  When the chain of explosions ended, Leo applauded with the others as a parachute was deployed. Putt-Putt descended slowly from the heavens, an angel of mercy coming down to save mankind.

  Chapter 51

  Four Years Later: 1963

  We were a bunch of crazies, in a certain way, and it was an unusual time when crazy people were actually given a chance to do their stuff.

  —Freeman Dyson

  Eighteen years, thought Oppie. Time enough for a boy to become a man. Oh, the anniversary wasn’t technically until tomorrow, but that was only an error of 0.015 percent—good enough, as the saying went, for government work. But the coincidence of dates was too tasty a morsel for any newscaster to pass up: eighteen years between August 6, 1945, when Enola Gay had dropped the first Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima, and today, August 5, 1963, when, at last, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom became the initial signatories to the world’s first nuclear treaty—with, it was hoped, all other nations soon following suit. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was in Moscow right now, putting the eight letters of his name on the document, signing next to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Foreign Secretary Alexander Douglas-Home.

  Oppie knew he should be elated. Since Day One, since Hiroshima burned, he had pushed and fought for nuclear-arms control, for rational men and women to pledge never again to use the weapons he’d made possible. And now, at last, it was here—a treaty! Oh, there was much, much more to be done before the world would be safe from nuclear bombs—as President Kennedy said in announcing the treaty, “According to the ancient Chinese proverb, ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.’ And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”

  Yes, he should be thrilled for this—this thing that the news-readers were variously referring to as the Limited Test-Ban Treaty and the Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, all because its full title had more syllables than the American public would sit still for: Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water. Without a Q clearance, Oppie had gotten wind only of the title long before he’d had a chance, along with the rest of the general public, to see the full text, and he’d hoped for a loophole. Yes, tests would be outlawed, but practical uses might still be permitted. But, in fact, article one of the treaty explicitly dashed that hope: “Each of the Parties to this Treaty undertakes to prohibit, to prevent, and not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion, at any place under its jurisdiction or control in the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer space; or under water, including territorial waters or high seas.”

  And that, as the saying went, was that. Oppie thought again of his favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, who had been a visiting artist at the Institute for Advanced Study for thirteen months starting in October 1947; of Eliot’s master work, “The Hollow Men;” and of its concluding stanza:

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  No, not with a single explosive bang, and not with the tens of thousands of nuclear blasts that would have propelled a spaceship full of refugees to humanity’s new home. With a trio of autographs, two in the Roman alphabet and one in Cyrillic, Project Orion had inadvertently been killed.

  #

  Although Princeton never got as hot as Los Alamos in summer, it attained much greater levels of humidity, and, as Oppie walked along the grounds of the Institute, he felt sweat beneath the brim of his hat.

  He hadn’t been paying much attention to what was up ahead; his gaze was mostly downward at the earth, a prisoner of gravity whose escape tunnel, carved out a spoonful at a time, had collapsed. And so he was startled when suddenly Leo Szilard, in a three-piece blue suit and a jaunty fedora, was in front of him.

  “Why so glum, Robert?”

  “Oh, hi, Leo.” He told him about the impact the test-ban treaty would have on Orion.

  Leo surprised him by not seeming concerned. The Hungarian had been wandering aimlessly about the grounds, as usual, and reversed his course, falling in next to Oppie and walking beside him. “Bah, it never would have flown anyway,” he said.

  “Why not?” asked Oppie. “You saw the test yourself, and as far as I could tell the physics was elegant.”

  “It never would have flown anyway,” Szilard repeated, “because you killed it years before it even got started.”

  Oppie raised his eyebrows, astonished. “Me? How?”

  “That closed-door Senate hearing, remember? Not long after Hiroshima, back in 1946.”

  “What about it?”

  “You were asked if three or four men could smuggle atomic bombs into New York and blow up the whole city, remember? And what did you say?”

  “I said, sure, of course it could be done.”

  “And when a senator asked you what instrument you’d use to detect an atomic bomb somewhere in a city, what did you say to that?”

  Oppie smiled slightly. “A screwdriver, to pry open each and every suitcase.”

  “There, you see!” crowed Szilard. “You were talking about tiny bombs thirteen years ago—and those were fission bombs, atomic bombs. But Orion would have used thousands—millions!—of tiny fusion super bombs. Tiny, delivered by a souped-up Coca-Cola machine! Von Braun isn’t going to lose an entire rocket, but the Orion people, keeping track of countless bombs? If a handful of them, or even one, ended up in the hands of a crazy individual or the next Hitler—ka-boom!”

  Oppie felt his smile slip into a frown. Leo was right. In fact, after that Senate session, at Oppie’s recommendation, physicists Robert Hofstadter and Wolfgang Panofsky were commissioned to prepare a study, inevitably nicknamed the “Screwdriver Report,” enumerating methods to prevent such an act of atomic terrorism. At least up until when Oppie had lost his Q clearance, that report had still been classified—because, of course, it had shown there were no effective ways.

  Szilard continued: “No matter how important Orion might have been to getting humans off earth in the next century, we never would have survived even to the end of this century if we started cranking out tiny supers. Someone, somewhere, somehow would have gotten his hands on them and that, my friend, would have been the end of us all.”

  #

  Dick Feynman picked up the magazine on the table in Oppie’s secretary’s office. It was the October 1963 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, just out. As it often did, the cover depicted the doomsday
clock, showing how close humanity was to nuclear annihilation. The clock face was dusty rose this issue, a shade Dick knew well from Los Alamos sunsets. As always, there were no numerals on the face, and no minutes and only four hours were marked, each by a black circle: nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. But, unusually, there were three hands on the clock: a short black hour one pointing, as it always did, at midnight; a longer white minute hand aimed at the forty-eight spot—in other words, at twelve minutes to midnight; and also a black outline of a minute hand, filled with the same color as the rest of the clock, pointing at seven minutes to midnight.

  Dick snorted slightly. You’d think the inventor of the Feynman diagrams, a system that could explicate any reaction in quantum electrodynamics, could figure out what such a simple graphic was trying to convey but, for the life of him, he couldn’t. He opened the cover and there was the explanation, beginning right on page two. The editorial began:

  Conclusion of a limited test-ban treaty is an encouraging event. It strengthens the slim hope that mankind will escape destruction in a nuclear war, and justifies the moving of the Bulletin’s clock a few minutes back from the hour of doom.

  The lord giveth, Feynman the atheist thought, and, as he knew all too well, the lord taketh away. Of course, the treaty was an important breakthrough, but it had killed Project Orion. In any event, the Bulletin’s graphic designer could certainly take a lesson from Feynman diagrams. A simple arrowhead going counter-clockwise from the outlined minute hand to the solid white one would have made the intended meaning clear: that we’d backed off five more minutes from midnight.

  Apparently, the clock had last been reset, with its hands positioned at seven to midnight, in 1960. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board met only twice a year to assess whether fiddling with the minute hand was appropriate, and so the Cuban Missile Crisis of a year ago, for all that the hand probably should have jumped to one minute before doom, began and ended in its entirety between two board meetings and therefore had had no effect on the clock.