The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “I hate to agree,” said von Braun, “but yes. Mars doesn’t seem to hold our answer.”

  “There has to be another possibility,” said Rabi. “There has to be something we haven’t thought of.”

  But Kitty was back to shaking her head. “You want my considered opinion?” She waited until all eyes were on her then said, “We’re pretty much fucked.”

  Chapter 54

  Two Years Later: 1967

  What does such a man think, confronted with death, a man with his head so full of ideas, so wise in so many directions? What goes on behind those eyes that were once so brilliantly blue, now rather bleary with pain?

  —David Lilienthal, chairman, Atomic Energy Commission

  At least they died quickly.

  It had been three weeks since Oppie’s doctors had told him that the radiation therapy was no longer working—and it had been a full year now since he’d first been diagnosed with throat cancer.

  The irony was not lost on him: the very fact that such a thing as nuclear medicine existed was largely his doing, and the isotopes that had initially kept the tumors in check were precisely the sort Lewis Strauss had wanted to ban exports of—God, was it really eighteen years ago?

  Isotopes are far less important than electronic devices but far more important than vitamins. Somewhere in between.

  Somewhere in between.

  Of course, Oppie had been talking then about their potential for use in weaponry, not in holding the insatiable crab at bay. For that, they had been, until recently, the most important thing. Now that they’d stopped working for him, they would try chemotherapy, but the prospects, he knew, were meager; physics trumps chemistry any day.

  Oppie wasn’t the first Manhattan Project scientist to benefit from radioisotopes. Leo Szilard had gone down this path already, organizing his own experimental treatment for bladder cancer at Sloan-Kettering in 1960. Six weeks of radiation bought him years of remission; he’d lasted until 1964, passing away at the age of sixty-six. The year the treatments began, Szilard’s turn for the Einstein Award had come. Trude, finally his wife, had remarked on how impressive the list of previous winners was, and Leo, from his hospital bed, had quipped, “Yes, and it is getting better and better!”

  Oppie missed flamboyant Leo, and Einstein the eccentric, gone a dozen years now, and the taciturn Fermi, who had passed five months before Einstein. Intellects vast and cool but oh so sympathetic, born in the last years of the nineteenth century—or, in Enrico’s case, the first of the twentieth—intelligences greater than the common man’s and yet as mortal as ...

  ... as his own.

  If the battle for life had truly been a game of chess with Death—akin to that Bergman film—Oppie had no doubt that his departed friends would have won; Death was evil, and evil, he was convinced, was stupid. Then again, so, it turned out, was smoking. Way back at Leiden—four decades ago now!—Paul Ehrenfest had droned on incessantly about the dangers of tobacco. Oppie had finally kicked his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit three years ago, although he still smoked a pipe. But even doing that was hard now. Just breathing hurt his throat. Day after day of decline, week after week of decay, month after month of agony.

  The thought came to him again: at least they died quickly.

  They were the three Apollo 1 astronauts. Chaffee, White, and ... what was it, now? Griffin? No—Grissom. Gus Grissom. Yesterday, January 26, 1967, they’d been incinerated in their space capsule—not on re-entry, which had always been a valid fear, but in a routine ground test before they’d even gone up.

  “Flame!”

  “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”

  “Open her up!”

  And a scream.

  Oh, yes, it had been painful, but it had been over in minutes if not seconds. By the time the ground crew got the command module’s door open, all three men were dead, the nylon spacesuits melted into their bodies, skin flayed from bone. He hadn’t seen pictures yet—and the public never would—but von Braun, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, thoroughly American now in all but accent, was his conduit to NASA information. The corpses, he’d said, looked like—

  —like the corpses in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki.

  A spark inside the capsule, yards of flammable Velcro stuck to every bare surface, and a foolishly ill-conceived test of a pure-oxygen high-pressure atmosphere.

  God only knew how long this disaster would delay Apollo.

  Oppie was sitting in his living room at Olden Manor; Kitty was in the attached greenhouse he’d had built for her as a birthday present, tending her orchids. For fuck’s sake, he thought, there should have been greenhouses—and humans!—on Mars by now. If only they hadn’t canceled Orion.

  He looked down at the little table next to his chair, and the circular glass ashtray, filled with pipe dottle and Kitty’s butts. If only he hadn’t smoked himself to death.

  The sun shone through the brown curtains, a thousand pinpricks where its rays found holes in the weave. If only even one of their mad schemes to shield the earth had panned out.

  In the bookcase next to him sat his copy of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire’s astringent verse illustrated with etchings by Tony-George Roux. He reached for the book, even such a small effort almost too much for him now. It fell open in his lap to pages 204 and 205, the poem “Une Martyre” and the picture that reminded him so much of ... of ...

  He snapped the fifty-year-old book shut. If only he’d been there for Jean the night everything had proven too much for her.

  In the same bookcase, but on the bottom shelf, at the far left, politics trumping alphabetical order, were two volumes by his erstwhile friend Haakon Chevalier: the clumsy roman à clef from 1959 called The Man Who Would Be God and the more on-the-nose work of nonfiction—or so Hoke would have it—from just two years ago, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship.

  If only he’d turned Chevalier in immediately upon that approach in the kitchen at Eagle Hill—or, he supposed, if only he’d never mentioned Chevalier at all. Odd, he reflected, that the options occurred to him now in that order. It seemed part of him still was that unctuous, repulsively good little boy he’d been during his sheltered New York childhood, a childhood that hadn’t prepared him for a world full of cruel and bitter things. It had given him, as he’d told Time magazine two decades ago, no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.

  If only.

  If only.

  At the end of a life, Oppie supposed, that’s all there was: regret.

  Of course, he’d left his mark. No trip to Stockholm, no Nobel, but he’d changed the world more than most of the laureates—including the Peace Prize ones—ever had, changed it even more than Alfred Nobel had with his invention of dynamite. Still, if sheer destructive power were the measure of greatness, it’d be Teller whose name would live on.

  Live on for whatever little time earth had left.

  Oh, maybe one of his Arbor Project teams would find a solution. Orion had looked so promising, but there was no point persevering to save the world from a natural catastrophe less than six decades hence if human folly would have destroyed it sooner. It had been the right decision to ban atmospheric nuclear tests, to bar nukes from space, to take at least one small step back from the precipice.

  Still, if only they had succeeded. If only—

  The doorbell rang. Robert knew from long experience that Kitty couldn’t hear it in the odd glass acoustics of her greenhouse. He slipped Baudelaire back onto the shelf and, using his two twig-like arms, managed to get himself to his feet. It was a painful shuffle to the foyer and an effort even to turn the brass knob. The door creaked open.

  And there, with the magnificent trees of the Institute for Advanced Study as a wall behind them, stood gangly Richard Feynman. Next to him was much-shorter Kurt Gödel, his wide-spaced eyes behind horn-rim glasses, bundled up against a February cold that he
imagined should be present although Robert felt no chill in the air.

  “My whole life I’ve wanted to say this,” said Feynman, a grin stretching his mouth, “and I figured you deserved to hear it.”

  “Yes?” said Oppie.

  “Eureka!” exclaimed Feynman. “Or,” he said, draping a friendly arm around Gödel’s narrow shoulders, “more precisely, we have found it.”

  “Found what?”

  Gödel, ordinarily reticent, spoke up. “For God’s sake, Robert, let us in. We’ll catch our deaths out here!”

  Oppie stepped aside and gestured for the two men to enter. Automatically, he offered, “Drinks?”

  “Absolutely,” said Feynman. “This calls for your best bottle of champagne!”

  Chapter 55

  Each observer has his own set of “nows,” and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time.

  —Kurt Gödel

  “Where’s Kitty?” asked Gödel.

  “In the greenhouse,” replied Oppie. “Why?”

  Feynman smiled. “Kitty is our group leader at Compact Cement, you know. She should hear this first—or, at least, at the same time you do.”

  Oppie nodded and started shuffling toward the back of Olden Manor. But apparently his slow pace, the best he could manage these days, was not sprightly enough for his impatient visitors, who clearly didn’t want to wait for him to get Kitty and return; they fell in behind him, Feynman giving a lupine “Hey, there!” as they passed the Oppenheimers’ pretty maid.

  There was a door going from near the kitchen into the greenhouse. Oppie led the way in, the warm, muggy air a sweltering contrast to the dry coolness of the mansion proper. Kitty was there, clad in blue trousers and a loose-fitting white blouse with the sleeves rolled up. She was using a hose to water beds of plants.

  Neither Gödel nor Feynman had been in the greenhouse before, and Dick immediately went over to look at a long metal box filled with plants sprouting around a packing mixture of pearlescent beads. “What’s this?”

  “Hydroponics,” replied Kitty, shutting off her hose. “That’s what I’ve been working on in my spare time: plants that we could grow on Mars or aboard a space habitat without soil. The ones I keep out here need a lot of sunlight, but I’ve got more in the basement that are getting by with just dim bulbs.” She smiled. “And speaking of dim bulbs, what brings you two here?”

  Gödel merely blinked behind his thick glasses, but Dick laughed. “Well, you know what Kurt and I have been fiddling around with,” he said.

  “Yes, of course,” replied Kitty. “Don’t tell me something’s actually come of it!”

  “Yes,” said Dick. “I didn’t believe the numbers being spit out by Johnny von Neumann’s computer at first, but I had two of our younger members—that bright boy and girl you brought in from Stanford last month, Oppie—double and triple check everything, and it’s solid.”

  “That’s amazing,” said Kitty.

  “Wait a minute,” said Robert. “Guys, she may know what you’ve been working on, but I don’t.”

  “True!” said Dick. “You will, but not yet—that damned linearity of time, eh, Kurt?” He nudged the shorter man.

  “Except it’s not linear,” Gödel said. “It forms hoops—closed time-like curves.”

  “That’s what he calls them,” said Dick. “But, as far as quantum electrodynamics is concerned, there’s no ‘like’ about it: they are loops in time—and we can, at least in theory, move material objects along a single loop, or through an interconnected series of them, to any point in the past.”

  “So?” said Oppie. “I’ve read all of Kurt’s papers. He’s been saying that for eighteen years now.”

  Kurt nodded. “It was my present to Einstein for his seventieth birthday: a novel solution to the field equations of general relativity.”

  “Which,” Feynman said, a twinkle in his eye, “made Einstein doubt general relativity—his own creation!”

  “Yes,” said Gödel. “But he would not doubt it now. Feynman and I have cobbled together a machine that will actually displace objects to any point along a closed time-like curve.”

  “Seriously?” asked Kitty.

  “Seriously,” said Feynman. His flippant voice wasn’t really up to giving credence to that word, but Oppie decided to take it at face value.

  “You mean you can dial up, say, October fourth, 1957, and go there?” asked Robert, pulling the date the Space Age had begun out of the air. He sat down on the edge of a large planter, his mind racing even as his cancer-ridden body continued to fail him.

  “The device works with relative rather than absolute dates,” said Gödel, “so that would be coded as negative nine years five months, but yes: you could go there.”

  “Have you—my God, have you tested it?” asked Robert, and “Jesus, does it work?” Kitty asked at the same time.

  “It seems to work,” said Gödel. “We tried putting some innocuous things into it—stones from deep in the Institute woods, and so on—and they did indeed disappear, but that doesn’t prove they actually traveled in time.”

  “Did you send them forward or backward?”

  “Backward,” said Feynman. “We haven’t figured out how to send anything forward. Of course, if time is circular, you should be able to send things back so far that they wrap around to the future, but we’ve got nowhere near the energy required for that.”

  “That’s incredible,” said Kitty. “I’m—wow, I’m just flummoxed. But that’s amazing. Good work, boys!”

  “It is amazing,” allowed Oppie, “but I don’t see how it’s applicable to the solar-purge problem.”

  Feynman laughed. “Spoken like a true administrator. ‘Dammit, Smathers, I sent you to Ford’s Theatre to review a play—what’s all this crap about the president being assassinated?’”

  “It’s the answer to everything,” said Gödel. “But, come, can we get out of all this humidity? We’re going to catch something, I’m sure.”

  Feynman moved toward the door that led back into the house. “We’ll be happy to explain,” he said, stepping inside. “And maybe you can get that cute maid of yours to bring us that champagne?”

  Chapter 56

  Quite independently from her drinking I have found Kitty the most despicable female I have ever known, because of her cruelty. To an outsider like me, Oppenheimer’s family life looked like hell on earth.

  —Abraham Pais, I.A.S. physicist

  Robert had flown to Berkeley for the experiment. He still owned the home at One Eagle Hill and it seemed the perfect base of operations for Feynman and company to set up their equipment, away from the prying eyes of institute professors who were not part of the Arbor Project. Gödel, as afraid of flying as he was of just about everything else, stayed back in Princeton, but I.I. Rabi, who would soon succeed Oppie as project head, was already out there, as were Feynman and five of the newer crop of physicists, two of whom were women; the times were indeed a-changin’.

  Oppie had asked Kitty to come along, but she’d refused. She needed him to be either alive or dead, she said, not somehow weirdly both. Where he was going she wouldn’t follow; what he had to do she wouldn’t be any part of. After Oppie had quietly slipped away from Princeton, she had, he’d heard, locked the door to the bedroom he had been resting in these past few weeks and told well-wishers who came by that he wasn’t up to seeing visitors and that she herself simply couldn’t bear to enter it.

  At last, everything was ready on Eagle Hill. Oppie, as always, hoped the right words would come to him in the moment. He was fond for many reasons of Oscar Wilde, and particularly so for the quip sometimes purported to have been his final words: “Either these curtains go or I do!” But although Robert’s next utterance would be his last in linear time, it would not, he profoundly hoped, be his true final pron
ouncement. With the best smile he could muster, and to a round of applause from the small group of scientists, he said: “The American navigator is about to arrive in the old world.”

  The countdown, conducted with gusto by Feynman, was brief: “Five, four, three, two, one,” and then—

  Inside the clear acrylic containment bubble, Oppie found his skin tingling and what wisps of white hair he still had seemed charged with electricity. His sense of balance disappeared; fortunately, he was, in good H.G. Wells fashion, seated on the complicated contraption’s saddle. It seemed as though he were briefly watching a movie in reverse, with Dick counting up instead of down, the monosyllables of “one, two, three, four, five” in bizarre retrograde, like a rewinding tape. During the counting up, one of the young male scientists walked backward from his control console; smoke was sucked into the bowl of Rabi’s pipe; and a young female physicist rose from her chair without having to push up on its arms.

  But soon everything accelerated into a greenish-gray blur with odd spectral flashes at the peripheries of his vision. That lasted—subjectively, of course—perhaps half a minute, and then the same basement room he had been in solidified around him. But no one else was there, although his attention was immediately caught by things that he and Kitty hadn’t bothered to ship to Los Alamos but had subsequently disposed of, including Peter’s stroller and crib. The light, coming in from the high-up windows, had changed both direction and appearance; he’d arrived late, apparently, on a sunny afternoon.

  Oppie just sat for a while, letting his stomach settle and his sense of balance return—and allowing his racing heart to calm at least a little.

  He was here and it was now, and, of all the nows he could have chosen—one in which he might have prevented the dropping of either of the atomic bombs anywhere, another in which he could have facilitated Leo Szilard’s request for a demonstration, a third in which he’d turned down General Groves’s offer to run the damn project—this was the only one that made sense to him, the only one of those he desired that wouldn’t produce expanding ripples resulting in large-scale changes to the history yet to come, that looming future that he’d at last made his uneasy peace with, the forthcoming past that he knew had to be.