The Oppenheimer Alternative

by Robert J. Sawyer

  When he finally felt ready to do so, Oppie dismounted and exited from the sphere. The machine would return to its origin after twenty-odd minutes—the maximum they could hold this rickety prototype in another time with its modest power supply. Something akin to the spooky action at a distance that Einstein so deplored kept it linked to the base station that would be built in this very basement in 1967, and it would soon be pulled back to then. He figured his old friend Rabi had guessed that it would come back empty, but the others, doubtless, would be shocked.

  Oppie managed the staircase out of the cellar, slowly, a step at a time, and shuffled his way to the room where he kept the mineralogical specimens from his youth. He removed a wooden tray from a cabinet. The tray had a glass window in its hinged lid and twenty-four small compartments within. But this particular tray, labeled “Poconos, September 1916,” only had twenty-one specimens in it, that being the number that had passed young Robert’s exacting standards of collectability. Oppie reached into his pocket and pulled out a translucent green cobble about the size of a large grape. He placed it in one of the empty squares, then closed the lid and put the tray back in the cabinet.

  Before he’d traveled back, Oppie and Feynman had looked in the same case, still kept at Eagle Hill, confirming that it only contained the original twenty-one specimens, but now—then, back, ahead, in 1967—after Oppie’s disappearance, Dick would check again and this time he would find the piece of trinitite, the fused glass created—or that would be created—by the Trinity blast, a year and a half from Robert’s current now.

  Each piece of trinitite was unique, containing distinctive patterns of bubbles and even tiny bits of the actual plutonium bomb or its support tower; there was no way this pebble of it could be mistaken for any other. But when Feynman tested this one, whose exact point of collection was precisely documented, he would find that its radioactive decay had started not twenty-two years ago, as one would expect for trinitite in 1967, but forty-five years ago, reflecting the fact that it had passed through much of the forties, all of the fifties, and most of the sixties twice, thereby proving that this, the initial test of the time machine with a human passenger, had been a success.

  Robert had volunteered to be the guinea pig: the first chronic argonaut, to use Wells’s lovely coinage. His days were numbered, anyway; three, four, surely no more than five. And although he never did get his Nobel, this contribution was one he could still make, ensuring, when the truth eventually came out, that he’d go down in history for, well, going down in history.

  After putting the specimen tray away, Oppie took a cab to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, having the driver drop him by a wooden telephone booth. It took most of Oppie’s strength to push the folding door open. Before he’d traveled back, he and his secretary Verna had gone scrounging for coins dated 1944 or earlier; he had a bunch with him now, along with a small wad of similarly old dollar bills. He fished out an Indian-head nickel and deposited it into the pay phone’s slot. When the operator came on, he said, “Atwater 3-4-1-8, please,” and waited. After three jangling rings, the voice he hadn’t heard for a quarter of a century came on. “Hello?”

  He’d contemplated various openings, ranging from the poetic to the cloying, but in the end settled on a simple, “Hello, Jean.”

  “Hello?” she said again. “Who’s this?”

  He coughed, cleared his throat, and tried to put some strength behind the words. “It’s Robert,” and then, since the only reply was crackling static, he added his last name.

  “God,” said Jean. “What’s wrong with your voice?”

  “I’m, ah, a bit under the weather.” The understatement of the year. “I’m just down the street from your place. May I come over?”

  “You’re here in San Francisco? My God, yes, yes.”

  “I’m on my way.” He hung up then found another five-cent piece, fed the slot, and made a quick, second call. He didn’t expect his voice to be recognized this time, and it wasn’t. But the startled and anxious man agreed to his request. Oppie hung up again and set out.

  The two blocks were excruciating even with his cane, and they were made worse by the steep San Francisco incline. But at last he reached 1405 Montgomery Street. Jean, in a sky-blue robe over a white nightgown, was standing in the narrow doorway. She didn’t seem to realize that this shambling figure was the person she was waiting for until he was only yards away.

  There was a lamp attached to the wall next to the doorway, and its harsh lighting, Oppie was sure, accentuated the crags and sags of his face. “Jean,” he said, between wheezes.

  She peered at him. “Are you—are you Julius?”

  She meant Oppie’s father—and Oppie realized with a start that his dad had died at age sixty-six; he was going to fall short of that figure by four years. “He’s dead, Jean.” A pause for breath, then: “He died in 1939. You know that.”

  “But ... then who?”

  “It’s me, Jean. Robert. Oppie. Bob. It’s me.”

  “No. No, Robert is—”

  “Young. And I’m old. Twenty-three years older, to be precise.” His breathing was returning to its ragged norm. “I’m old, and I’m dying. I’m the one who is supposed to die soon, not you.”

  She narrowed her eyes, the green irises luminous in the lamp glow. “What—what are you talking about?”

  “Please,” he said, pointing to the staircase just behind her. “May we?”

  She hesitated a moment, her expression one of utter bafflement, but then she beckoned him forward and helped him up first one flight and then another to her cramped third-floor studio apartment. She then aided him in sitting on the short couch and brought him a glass of water.

  “It is you, isn’t it?” Jean said, pulling over a wooden chair and sitting facing him.

  “Yes.”

  “But what happened?”

  “Age. Illness.”

  “Age? I don’t ...”

  Oppie tried to cross his legs but it was too painful. He thought about bringing up H.G. Wells, but perhaps the science-fiction writer was too pedestrian for her tastes: Wells, who had predicted, and named, the atomic bomb; Wells, who even earlier, had predicted, and named, time machines. “I’ve come back to see you,” he said. “Come back from 1967.”

  “But ... how?”

  She was staggeringly bright, he knew, but, still, to even begin to explain would take precious hours—hours he didn’t have. “Physics,” he said simply.

  “You have to prove it to me,” she said. “You have to prove you’re who you say you are.”

  He closed his eyes and recited the words:

  “Is even this

  “Not enough to appease your awful pain

  “You gaunt terrible bleeding Jesus”

  And she, the author, the woman who had penned those words when she was just sixteen, added the final French line of that stanza: “Fils de Dieu.” Son of God. She shook her head. “I never shared that poem with anyone but ...”

  “But me.”

  She studied his face some more, her eyes darting left and right, trying to see beyond the wrinkles and folds. Her mouth hung slightly open and her head oscillated in disbelief. But at last she nodded and, in an astonished voice, agreed, “With anyone but you.”

  He smiled warmly. “It’s so good to see you, Jean.” And then a small, affectionate laugh. “But I really should have been here eleven days ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Then I could’ve properly played the role of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.”

  He’d hoped for her wan, shy smile but received nothing. “I know the years have not been kind to me.” He coughed three times then paused as if waiting for a fourth before going on. “And not just the years. Smoking.” He gestured at an overflowing ashtray and a crumpled package of Chesterfields. “Oh, Jean, I beg you to quit. I can’t reveal much about the future,
but it will be proven in the early 1960s that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer.” He paused and waited for the breath his habit had cost him to return. “Funny thing: it’s like the bomb. The Brits were working on this first, too; they announced—will announce—the link between smoking and cancer in 1962. That’ll finally get the Americans going. Our surgeon general will issue a report in 1964.”

  “I’m not worried about the future,” said Jean.

  He reached out, took her hand—young, smooth flesh, warm and vibrant. “I know,” he said softly. “Shall I recite something else?” She looked at him quizzically, and he took that as leave to go on: “‘I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow.’” Her eyes went wide, and he continued: “‘I think I would have been a liability all my life. At least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.’”

  She was silent.

  “Recognize the words?”

  “I—I haven’t ...”

  “Haven’t written them yet. No, but you were planning to—them, or something like them; you’ve doubtless been mulling over what to say. You were going to write that down tonight, after you took the pills.”

  She shook her head. “This is ...” She was a psychiatrist; she had a whole lexicon of lunacy at her disposal. But after a moment she finished with: “... unnerving.”

  “For both of us. But I’ve come, my love, to stop you from taking those pills, from writing that letter.”

  She looked down at the scuffed floorboards. “I just want to be done, Robert. I want all the pain, all the confusion, to be over.”

  He tilted his head slightly. “I don’t think pain and confusion ever end entirely. But they do abate. I’ve tried to kill myself, too—once, as I told you years ago, when I was even younger than you are now, after my horrid year at the Cavendish, and again ...” He closed his eyes, remembering that night—both thirteen years ago and a decade from now—in the bathroom of Herb and Anne Marks, after Lewis Strauss had hit him with that foul letter of charges. “You’re not finished,” he said softly. “There are stanzas yet to write.”

  “Everything is so hard, and you—you’ve been so far away.”

  “I know.” He coughed again, and she squeezed his hand as if she could pump the cancer out of him. “You’re just twenty-nine,” he said, marveling at it. “God, to be twenty-nine again!” He’d been that age in 1933, the middle of the easy-going pre-war years at Berkeley and Caltech. So long ago. The Paleozoic. He looked her in the eyes, painfully conscious that the mesmerizing power his gaze used to have was gone. “Promise me, Jean. Hold on until—let’s see—hold on seven more weeks. Can you do that? Until February twenty-first, until your birthday—for me. At least taste being thirty.”

  She considered this but then shook her head. “Even if I were to do that, where will you be in six weeks? That’ll be—yes—Valentine’s Day. Where will you be? Not this you, but the younger one, the one of this time? Where will he be that night?”

  Yes, the younger one: the other him, the one that also existed. She was sharp. “You know I’m working on a secret project.”

  “Something so important? So desperately important?” She looked at him with imploring eyes. “What is it, then? What is this damn thing that matters more than me?”

  Oppie thought back—thought ahead—to April of 1954 and prosecutor Roger Robb looming over him.

  “You spent the night with her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is when you were working on a secret war project?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you think that consistent with good security?”

  “It was, as a matter of fact. Not a word—”

  And indeed not a word had been spoken about any classified matter. He had always been loyal, always kept secrets, never compromised security, never jeopardized the Manhattan Project. An unctuous, repulsively good little boy.

  But they were going to throw him into the trash anyway. In the most public, most humiliating way possible, the government he had served so well for so long was going to strip him of his security clearance, turning him from a national hero into a national joke. And, if one were going to be punished regardless, one might as well do the crime, right?

  Jean looked at him, jade eyes pleading, the woman who had been planning tonight to become une martyre.

  A woman who loved him.

  A woman he loved.

  But, damn it all, he happened to love this country, too.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. But if you can hold on”—he closed his eyes, did the math—“five hundred and seventy-eight days ... no, this is a leap year, isn’t it? Five hundred and seventy-nine days, I promise you’ll know.” The whole world will know.

  “That’s so far in the future.”

  He smiled sadly. “I was just thinking that’s so long ago. August sixth, 1945.” He shook his head.

  She got up off her wooden chair and sat next to him on the couch. “And if I wait that long, will we be together?”

  He felt his heart kick. There was indeed another Robert Oppenheimer, right now, toiling away in Los Alamos, a young, energetic Oppie who, less than a month ago, had finally given Haakon Chevalier’s name to General Groves. That Oppie would be the one who would be looking to build a post-war life. What choice would he—that other he—make if he had an option? After Kitty had run out on him, leaving behind Tyke, who—God!—wouldn’t be born for another eleven months? He—this Oppie—hadn’t had any choice to make once Japan surrendered; Jean had been long gone for him. But if she had held on, if she’d still been alive when that other Oppie could depart the mesa for good?

  Yes, things would change after that point. But the solar instability had been uncovered before then—and doubtless an effort would still be mounted to save some portion of the human species.

  He turned and hugged her as tightly as he was able, but it was barely enough to compress the fabric of her blouse where it billowed out.

  There are no secrets about the world of nature, he’d told—would tell—broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. There are only secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.

  “Please hang on,” he said, thinking, Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart. “Just hang on. A year and a half. And then, if you’re free and you’re still interested, yes, I’m sure we’ll be together.”

  “Forever?” she asked, burying her head in his bony shoulder.

  He nodded slightly. “Until the end of the world.”

  Chapter 57

  Well—yes. In modern times, of course.

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer, when asked if the Trinity atomic bomb had been the first one ever detonated

  Oppie well knew how long it took to get from the vicinity of Eagle Hill in Berkeley to here, so, when the buzzer sounded down below, he guessed who it must be, rushing over in response to the pay-phone call he’d made. Oppie kissed Jean one last time, long and with as much pressure as he could manage, and then he made his way down the stairs.

  John Strong Perry Tatlock had come at once when the stranger called exhorting him to go see his despondent daughter. He’d been expecting a call from her tonight—probably had thought it was her when the phone rang. But the man with the coughy, wheezy voice who’d simply identified himself as a friend said he should come at once. And so, rather than not hearing from his daughter as promised tonight, rather than receiving no answer when he came to check on her tomorrow morning and therefore deciding to break in through a window, rather than finding her dead in the bathtub, John Tatlock instead passed a wraith-like apparition wearing a greatcoat and a porkpie hat coming out of the building—from which apartment he had no way of knowing. The skeletal figure held the door for him, and Tatlock rushed past, striding up the stairs, heading on to find his Jean, their Jean, alive.

  It disappointed Oppie that Professor Tatlock w
as a Chaucerian; he probably had little affinity for Dickens, the author Oppie had alluded to earlier that evening. But Tatlock was now at the nexus of a literal tale of two cities, this San Francisco, in which Jean lived, and that one, overwritten now and forgotten by all except one complex, tired man, in which she did not.

  It was getting late, but Robert managed to hail a cab, giving the astonished driver all the money he had with him—some forty dollars in notes and change—when he dropped him off in the middle of Golden Gate Park by the Oriental Tea Garden, where one day he would walk with Stepan Zakharovich Apresyan. It was chilly and surely would grow chillier by the hour, but the numbness brought on by the temperature was almost an analgesic, and he welcomed it. Oppie found a wrought-iron park bench. A Japanese pagoda, unilluminated, a silhouette, a ghost, loomed off to one side, and words from the Bhagavad Gita came to him once more:

  Vanquish enemies at arms

  Gain mastery of the sciences

  And varied arts

  You may do all this, but karma’s force

  Alone prevents what is not destined

  And compels what is to be.

  He sat on the bench, exhausted, and tilted his head up. Before his trip he’d checked the astronomical ephemerides for tonight, so he knew exactly where to look. The moon, high in the sky, was two days past first quarter. To the east, Saturn was shining brightly in Taurus. And just about halfway between them, near the Pleiades, there it was.

  An emerald in the firmament.

  There could be no mistake. Oppie knew as much astrophysics as anyone: there was no such thing as a green star.

  No, this was a planet.

  A green planet.

  The green planet—the green planet Mars, shining down on him from above.

  Oppie lay back on the bench, pulling his greatcoat tight about him. He remembered a story by Ray Bradbury—a story the fabulist wouldn’t pen for another eight years—about time travelers who’d gone all the way back to the Mesozoic to see dinosaurs. The humans were supposed to stay on their floating path, disturbing nothing, but one of them had stepped on a butterfly. When they returned to the future, everything had changed.