The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Dick hated serving on committees but the one that set the clock intrigued him. What an interesting notion, that we didn’t know what time it is until we had a group consensus. And what of the dissenters? Just as—who was it now? That guy who’d sent him to the dictionary to look up “escutcheon.” Ward Evans, that was it: just as Ward Evans had dissented at Oppenheimer’s security-board show trial those many years ago, what if the majority of the Bulletin’s committee voted for, say, three minutes to midnight, but the remainder felt two minutes was the more appropriate setting?

  It was somewhat like the observation phenomenon in quantum physics—the cat alive and dead until someone checked on the poor beast’s health—but, instead of the first observer creating a reality all subsequent ones were stuck with, the minority view meant that, although for most it was this time, for some it could instead be that time, and—

  And, Jesus H. Christ, where the H doubtless stood for Heisenberg, that was it! That was exactly what was needed: an experiment, a device, an instrument, a machine that collapsed not into one reality but into two, being both this and that, or, more precisely, more importantly, more powerfully, being both now and then, simultaneously the present and the past.

  A buzzer sounded from Verna Hobson’s black phone and she picked up the handset. When she’d put it down again, she turned to Feynman and said, “Dr. Oppenheimer will see you now.”

  Dick got to his feet but headed not toward the inner door that led to the director’s office but to the one that led out into the ground floor of Fuld Hall. “No,” said Feynman, “he’ll see me then!” And he sprinted into the corridor and up the stairs, heading for Kurt Gödel’s office.

  Chapter 52

  From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time—two o’clock Eastern Standard Time—some thirty-eight minutes ago.

  —Walter Cronkite

  Vindication at last! Oppie sat at his desk in Fuld Hall, drafting his acceptance speech. Teller might have extorted the Einstein Award, and, yes, it had been Teller himself who had also received this honor last year. But now, finally, it was Robert’s turn: next week, he’d receive the Enrico Fermi Award, named for the Italian navigator who had passed away nine years ago. That it came with a tax-free $50,000 check was nice. The news announced just this morning, that President Kennedy would personally present the award to him, was definitely sweet. And the gold medal with Fermi’s likeness, looking down and to the left with that slight, shy smile Oppie remembered so fondly, would certainly be a keepsake.

  But what mattered most was the organization that was sponsoring the award. The A.E.C., the goddamned Atomic Energy Commission, the same body that had stripped Oppie of his security clearance nine years ago, had now done a complete one-eighty and was about to bestow its highest honor, its prize for lifetime achievement, on J. Robert Oppenheimer! He’d be back in the canon of nuclear giants along with the previous recipients: Fermi himself (the only posthumous laureate), then von Neumann, Lawrence, Wigner, Seaborg, Bethe, and, yes, Teller.

  Glenn Seaborg, who had shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of plutonium, was the current A.E.C. chair, and Oppie had no doubt that it was he, along with Oppie’s White House supporters including Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had ensured Oppie would be this year’s recipient: a full, public, presidential acknowledgement that the commission had been wrong, wrong, so-fucking-wrong in stripping him of his Q clearance. Seaborg had told Oppie that, when he informed his predecessor, Lewis Strauss, about the upcoming award, Strauss had looked like Seaborg had punched him in the face.

  Verna was out, and she’d left the inner door to Oppie’s office open, but Oppie heard a knock on the outer door and, without looking up from the blue-lined pad he was writing on, he called out, “Come in!”

  “Dad ...”

  He saw his son Peter, now twenty-two, tall and lean, a look of pure shock on his face. Oppie pushed back his chair, got up, and strode into the secretarial office. “Is Kitty—”

  Peter raised a hand. “She’s fine. Dad, I just heard it on my car radio. President Kennedy has been shot.”

  Robert felt as if a bullet were tearing into his own flesh. He averted his gaze and took hold of the edge of Verna’s desk to steady himself. “I—I need a drink. Peter?”

  “God, yes.”

  He staggered into the walk-in closet where a few bottles were always kept, and—

  A bullet. A single bullet. History didn’t turn on atom bombs; it pivoted on shots from guns, whether it was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand beginning the First World War, or Hitler’s own bullet to the brain ending the Second in Europe, or, now, with the person who’d challenged the nation to put a man on the moon by the decade’s close, who’d stared down Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world was truly at the brink of nuclear annihilation: shot, fate unknown. Alive; dead. Schrödinger’s cat, with the future hanging in the balance.

  “Dad ...?” said Peter. Oppie heard him but still just stood there, staring at the bottles arranged on the top of a small safe, glass rockets poised for launch.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” said Peter again. “Never mind, then.” Oppie felt his son’s hand on his forearm leading him out of the closet into the room and helping him find a seat.

  Verna came running in. “My God, did you hear?”

  Oppie raised his head but he sounded far-off even to himself. “Peter says the president’s been shot.”

  “Not just shot,” said Verna, her voice breaking. “They just announced it. He’s dead.”

  Oppie sat for a moment listening to the barrage of his own pulse. “Well, then,” he said, his head swimming. “Well, then.” He was quiet for a time but at last rallied some strength. “Verna, can you knock on all the office doors? Tell everyone to go home, be with their families.”

  She nodded and left.

  “And, Peter, maybe ... maybe you can drive me home?”

  “Of course, Dad.”

  But Oppie continued to just sit there, face propped up by his hands, bony elbows on the chair’s arms. “Now,” he said softly, “things are going to come apart very fast.”

  #

  The choice of Oppie was controversial among die-hard McCarthyites, and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper publicly turned down the invitation to the award ceremony, sniffing that it was “unthinkable” that the medal go to Oppenheimer. But miraculously, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, stayed the course, personally presenting the Fermi Award to Oppie at a gala in the cabinet room of the White House. The ceremony was held on December second, the twenty-first anniversary of Fermi’s original sustained nuclear reaction beneath the bleachers at Stagg Field in Chicago.

  Kitty and their children—son Peter and their daughter Toni, almost twenty—were beaming with pride. So were General Groves, who was now sixty-seven, retired from Sperry Rand and slipping into frailty, and Isidor Isaac Rabi, going strong at sixty-five. Leo Szilard, also sixty-five, had lost much of his bulk during his recent self-directed radiation therapy for bladder cancer, but his smile was as angelic as ever. Last year’s Fermi Prize winner, though, stood alone by a floor-to-ceiling black velvet curtain, his face as dead as his artificial foot.

  Oppie stared for several seconds at the plaque Johnson handed him. “I think it is just possible, Mr. President,” he said, appearing, he knew, feeble and scrawny next to the ruddy six-foot-three Texan, “that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today.” Robert paused and looked out at the faces: scientists and politicians, humanitarians and statesmen, the best and the brightest. “That would seem to me a good augury,” he concluded, “for all our futures.”

  Chapter 53

  Two Years Later: 1965

  “Who’s interested in the Mars atmosphere or the initial thrust of a satellite? The story lacks a girl!”

&n
bsp; —Wernher von Braun, summarizing the eighteen editors who rejected his novel Project Mars

  While other ex-Nazis were trying to slide quietly into anonymous post-war life, Wernher von Braun was reveling in his new-found celebrity. Between 1954 and 1956, Collier’s published a wildly popular series of cover stories about exploring the solar system featuring commentary by him. Subsequent appearances on Walt Disney’s television show, accompanied by his trademark models of futuristic rocket ships and a wheel-shaped space station, made his eager face and thick, high-pitched accent well-known.

  Wernher had been named chief architect of the Saturn V, the giant rocket that, if all went well, would put the first man on the moon, but, to him, that was just one small step. His real goal had always been Mars. And so, of course, he’d arranged to be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for the unveiling of the first-ever close-up photographs of the red planet.

  The initial attempt to get such things had been a bust. The unmanned probe Mariner III had failed just eight hours after launch, its solar panels never deploying, but its twin, Mariner IV, had successfully completed the seven-and-a-half-month journey to Mars. The probe’s black-and-white television camera took twenty-two still pictures, covering, in total, about one percent of the planet’s surface. Yesterday—August 4, 1965—the images, finally decoded from raw numerical data, had been revealed at J.P.L., and today, with glossy eight-by-ten prints of each one, Wernher arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study to share the news.

  A representative from each of the three divisions of the Arbor Project came to meet him. I.I. Rabi, who had turned sixty-seven last week, was there from the New Names group, charged with evacuating the planet. Kitty Oppenheimer, who would turn fifty-five next week, represented the Compact Cement far-out ideas team. And Robert Oppenheimer, now sixty-two but looking older, was there on behalf of Patient Power, the group trying to either fix the sun or shield the earth. They all gathered to meet von Braun in room 108 of Fuld Hall, adjacent to, and accessible directly from, Oppie’s office. It had four windows set in a semi-circular bay giving spectacular views of the wide south lawn, the pond, and the woods. But all eyes were on the photographic prints, each one curling slightly upward. They were spread out, along with several Mars maps, on a long mahogany table.

  “Let’s skip the appetizers and get down to the giblets,” said von Braun, still boyish at fifty-three. “The key photo is this one, number eleven.” He moved it to the table’s center, and the other scientists craned to look at it. Oppie felt his heart jump. He heard Rabi suck in his breath, and Kitty muttered, “Shit.”

  “That was taken at a distance of seventy-eight-hundred miles,” said Von Braun, who stepped back now so the others could see the photo better. “East to west, it covers a hundred and seventy miles. North-south, one-fifty.”

  “Where?” demanded Oppie. “What co-ordinates?”

  Von Braun consulted a series of stapled sheets he had brought with him. “It’s centered on thirty-one degrees south and one-niner-seven degrees east.”

  Oppie turned his attention to the giant 1962 Air Force map of Mars, flattening out its creases with his palm. He quickly found the spot. On the map, a canal cut diagonally across the middle of that area starting in the southwest and running up to the northeast as if flowing from Mare Cimmerium to Mare Sirenum.

  And in the Mariner photo, maybe, just maybe, if he really, really, really willed himself to see it, there was a diagonal line, although at a less steep angle, running ... no, not into a sea, or even a plain, but into—

  There was nothing else it could be, was there?

  —into a crater. Only one-half of its rim was clearly visible, like the bowed part of a capital D, but it dominated most of the frame. And the bloody thing wasn’t alone. Oppie quickly counted seven—no, eight!—other craters in photo eleven. Given the size of the area being portrayed, the D crater was perhaps eighty miles across, the one adjacent to it was maybe thirty, two were twenty, and the rest were ten down to as little as five.

  Oppie knew that Mare Cimmerium was named in honor of the Cimmerians, a people Homer mentioned in the Odyssey who lived in perpetual darkness. And after three and a half centuries of looking at the red planet through telescopes, that darkness had finally lifted, and mankind was at last seeing the true face of its celestial neighbor.

  It was heartbreaking.

  It was like looking at the goddamned moon.

  In photo eleven, there were small craters within large craters, and some craters overlapped and obliterated parts of others. And, once you’d seen them in this, the sharpest of the pictures, you couldn’t help seeing them in the other photos, too. Craters everywhere.

  But no sign of water.

  No sign of water erosion.

  Just dusty death.

  Even worse than that. Death implied there’d once been life, but this planet’s surface looked ancient, untouched for millions or billions of years. Barren, sterile.

  With von Braun’s guidance, Oppie next located the spot on the Air Force map captured by picture eight. That area was bisected by Erinnys, one of Percival Lowell’s more prominent canals, which, according to him, flowed from the west end of Mare Sirenum to Titanum Sinus in Memnonia. But this photo, too, depicted nothing but craters, albeit none as large as the one that dominated picture eleven.

  “And there’s more,” said von Braun.

  “Oh, joy,” said Kitty.

  “Mariner IV didn’t go into orbit,” said von Braun. “It was a fly-by mission. Still, it did pass behind Mars from earth’s point of view, and just before it did so—and just after it emerged on the other side—its S-band radio, beaming toward earth at twenty-three hundred megahertz, passed through the Martian atmosphere. There was no specific occultation experiment aboard, but we can make some reliable conclusions thanks to the amplitude and phase changes that were detected. Based on them, we were able to confirm that the Martian atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide. That, of course, suggests that, despite our best hopes, the polar caps don’t contain any appreciable amount of frozen water—which could have been melted for drinking or irrigation, or electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel—but are almost exclusively dry ice.”

  “Which is fun at a kid’s birthday party or to shatter a goldfish,” said Rabi, “but otherwise pretty damn useless.”

  “Yes,” said von Braun, nodding. “And the occultation also let us get a handle on the density of the Martian atmosphere. It’s thin—even thinner than we’d thought. Somewhere between four and six millibars.” Earth’s was roughly a thousand millibars, one bar originally having been defined as earth’s sea-level atmospheric pressure. The red planet had an atmosphere about one-half of one percent as dense as earth’s—and what little of it there was consisted of poisonous CO2. Oppenheimer felt light-headed.

  “The bad news isn’t over yet,” said von Braun. “Mariner IV had a helium magnetometer aboard. As it approached Mars, we expected it to detect the planet’s magnetic field. The sooner it detected it—that is, the farther from Mars Mariner found it—the stronger the field must be. We knew Mars couldn’t have as strong a field as earth. But based on the planet’s mass and rate of rotation, we figured it might have a magnetic field about one-tenth as powerful as earth’s, and so we expected Mariner to encounter the shock front many hours before making its closest approach to the planet. Now, I won’t say we didn’t find anything. There was one little hiccup slightly after closest approach that might have been the shock front. If it was, well, then Mars has a magnetic moment 0.03 percent of earth’s—and if it wasn’t, then it’s even less, or perhaps totally nonexistent.”

  Oppie found a chair and collapsed into it, stunned. With such a minuscule magnetic field, Mars couldn’t possibly have anything akin to earth’s Van Allen belts. That lack helped explain the incredibly tenuous Martian atmosphere Mariner IV had detected—nothing to deflect the ever-present solar w
ind from stripping it away. But it also meant that any life on the surface—be it native lichen or refugee humans—would be pelted by long-range alpha particles that were always spewing out of the sun. The surface of Mars wasn’t just sterile; it was constantly being sterilized.

  Oppenheimer looked from person to person. Von Braun’s eyebrows and arms were lifted in the classic don’t-shoot-the-messenger plea. Rabi, frowning deeply, was chewing at the edge of his thumbnail. Kitty was shaking her head slowly left to right.

  “Well,” said Oppie, when he could at last find his voice again, “that’s just devastating.”

  “It’s bullshit is what it is,” said Kitty. “Jesus Christ.” She pointed at the big Mars map Oppie had been consulting. “How old is that thing?”

  “Three years,” Robert replied.

  “Three years ago, the best map ever made still showed canals! But in reality—”

  “In reality,” said Rabi, “it’s a dead world. There’s no way any but a tiny number of humans could ever live on Mars, and even then they’d have to be in some sort of sealed habitat.”

  “Or maybe underground,” said Kitty, “to shield against the radiation. Shit. It’d be impossible to sustain anything more than a tiny colony there, and then only in what might as well be catacombs.”

  “So what now?” asked Oppie. He felt bone-weary, as ancient as the surface in the photographs.

  Rabi was pacing. “We can’t go to any of the moons of Jupiter: the radiation it puts out, plus its strong magnetic field concentrating that radiation in the orbital paths of the largest moons, make them uninhabitable. And now, pretty much the opposite problem: Mars has too little of a magnetic field, meaning solar radiation showers down upon it unchecked.”

  “And so we can’t go there, either,” said Kitty.