The Oppenheimer Alternative Page 10

  And, as it happened, Oppie and Teller were engaged in one of these conferences—Teller sitting, Oppie standing by the opened window—when a soldier brought them an envelope from Einstein. Although it was addressed in Einstein’s hand to Oppenheimer, Oppie knew better than to be the one conveying bad news. He handed the mailer to Teller and let the man remove the page from the end that had already been slit open by Peer de Silva.

  Oppie watched as Teller’s eyes zipped not just left and right but up and down, taking it all in. And then, to Oppie’s surprise, Teller’s normally downturned mouth inverted into a wide grin. “You see!” he crowed, rising and handing the letter to Oppie. “You see!”

  Oppie took the paper. Einstein always stretched words horizontally as if they were being pulled by some invisible mass off to the right. The letter, in German, not only affirmed that Teller’s math was impeccable—something, Oppie had to admit, rarely said of his own—but that, having been moved to go to his bookshelf and consult his back numbers of the Physical Review, Einstein had spotted the fundamental flaw in Hans Bethe’s pioneering work. Bethe had believed the temperature at the sun’s core was some twenty million degrees Celsius, which would indeed have allowed for the much-more-efficient carbon-nitrogen-oxygen-cycle fusion he’d assumed for his equations. But old Sol (and here Einstein added a puckish parenthetical saying he was referring to our star, not his great-uncle) wasn’t quite as massive as Bethe had thought and so likely has a core temperature of “merely” fifteen million degrees, which could support only inefficient proton-proton fusion. Teller’s model used the correct solar mass, Einstein said, and was therefore more accurate.

  Oppie looked up from the page. Teller was staring at him, shaggy eyebrows raised expectantly. “Just as I said, is it not?”

  “Yes,” replied Oppie and he tried to muster his most charming smile. “Well, I guess congratulations are in order.”

  #

  A short time later, Oppie stepped into Bethe’s lab. “I thought I’d give you advance warning, Hans, before you run into Teller. Einstein has written back about his fusion equations.”

  Bethe spread his arms. “Don’t worry about bloodshed here on the mesa. I shall be magnanimous in victory.”

  Oppie held a match to the bowl of his pipe and, between puffs to get it going, said, “I’m afraid ... that good doctor Einstein ... has concurred with ... our friend Edward.”

  “What? That can’t be.”

  Oppie had brought the letter with him—after convincing Teller there was no chance Hans would rip it up. “Here,” he said, proffering the sheet.

  Bethe’s blue eyes scanned the page, and his normally unwrinkled brow creased below his short, stiff hair. “Nein,” he said. “Herr Einstein ist ein—”

  “If you’re about to call him a Dummkopf, Hans, you might want to think twice.”

  “But what he says cannot be!”

  “Don’t take it so hard. We all make mistakes with our figures.”

  “You make mathematical mistakes,” Bethe said. “Teller makes such gaffes. But I do not.”

  “Well, Einstein says you had the sun five million degrees too hot.” Oppie shrugged slightly. “You must have guessed wrong about its temperature.”

  “Guessed?” repeated Bethe. “I do not guess. I based my studies on specific, actual solar spectra. I derived the temperature I cited from the spectra.”

  Oppie frowned. “Did you analyze the spectra yourself, or did one of your grad stu—”

  “Of course myself. Absolutely. At Cornell.”

  “Well, when the war is over, you can double-check ...”

  “I will double-check now!” declared Bethe. “I’ll get one of my colleagues there to send the plates here.”

  “It’s not that important—”

  “Have you seen Teller gloat? It absolutely is that important. If, as Einstein says, the sun is too cool for CNO-cycle fusion, then what accounts for the carbon lines I detected?”

  “Well, assuming they are actually there—”

  “They are, Oppie!” Bethe’s frown deepened to a protractor-like semi-circle. “But if the sun has always been that cool—just fifteen million degrees—then ...”

  “Then there should, at best, be only trace amounts of carbon in its spectra, inherited from the protostellar nebula,” supplied Oppie. He took a contemplative draw on his pipe. “It never should have been able to produce any of its own.”

  “Exactly!” said Bethe.

  “So the carbon spikes you think you saw?” Robert shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “Eppur si muove,” said Bethe, throwing in an Italian accent for good measure.

  Oppie snorted. And yet it moves. What Galileo reputedly whispered after being forced to recant his claim that the earth revolves around the sun. Facts are facts, Bethe was saying.

  “All right, Hans. But when your spectra arrive from Cornell, show them to me first, not Edward. I’d rather this whole fight went away, and if you shove them in his face we’ll get to see up close what one of his super explosions would be like.”

  #

  And suddenly, Kitty’s voice, airy and bright: “Honey, I’m home!” She bustled through the doorway on Bathtub Row hauling a suitcase.

  So fucking prosaic. So goddamned ordinary. Like she’d just nipped out to the corner store for a loaf of bread. But there was no corner store—just the two base PXs—and Kitty had been gone almost three months now. There’d been news of her family—her first cousin once removed, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, had signed the final terms of surrender on V-E Day in Berlin—but nary a word from her.

  Oppie stubbed out his cigarette, rose from the living-room couch, and started toward the front door, but was intercepted by Peter barreling in toward him. His son, whose fourth birthday had passed while he was away with his mother, had grown in height at least as much as Oppie had lost in girth; he’d had to drill new holes into his belts again last week. Robert wanted to lift the boy up—really, he did—but he just didn’t have the strength. But as Peter’s arms encircled his legs, he tousled his son’s hair.

  Kitty, in a beige blouse and green slacks, looked rested and well fed, and Oppie was grateful for that. He thought, perhaps, her first question would be about Tyke, but, no, of course it wasn’t. Closing the distance and giving him a kiss on the cheek, she said, “So, how about a drink?”

  Had she known, he wondered, that she was ill-suited to being a mother when she got pregnant the first time? The first time with him, he meant, although she had also told him of her actual first pregnancy, which occurred when she was married to husband number one, the musician Frank Ramseyer. The security man here, Peer de Silva, would have laughed at the simplicity with which Ramseyer had tried to keep his dark secrets: he had composed his diary in mirror writing, Leonardo da Vinci fashion, with backward characters written from right to left. Kitty stumbled across it (literally: when drunk, one doesn’t remember which nightstand is one’s own), got a mirror, and—talk about falling through the looking glass!—discovered who her husband really was: a drug addict and a homosexual. Both the pregnancy and the marriage were dispensed with in short order.

  Marriages two and three produced no children. But Kitty had deliberately gotten pregnant early in her relationship with Oppie. She’d wanted him then, and, apparently, she’d wanted the child—the boy who turned out to be little Peter—too. But theory does not always conform to reality; hypotheses are as often disproven as they are validated.

  Not the attached kind. Like neutrons in a nucleus; oh, they’d hang around together unless perturbed, but they had no charge, no positivity on one and negativity on the other to draw them together, no bonding, no binding. Just a mysterious strong force, a literal and figurative chemistry that acted solely when they were in very close proximity.

  Oppie got up to get his wife the drink she’d asked for, and to make one for himself, ice c
ubes, most of their substance below the surface, clinking in the glasses. “Welcome ...” he said but made a tiny mental edit before he added “home,” since it really wasn’t much of that. “... back.”

  Chapter 15

  I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.

  —George Kistiakowsky

  At 5:29 on Monday morning, July 16, 1945, the one-minute-warning rocket twisted up into a predawn sky, adobe-pink to the east, stygian to the west.

  “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart,” Oppie said as much to himself as to the other men present—and then, tilting his head, conceded that there really had never before been such an affair. He gripped a rough-hewn oak beam with one hand, his fingers wraith-like. With his other hand he held the four-leaf clover Kitty had given him before he’d left for this test site, a place he himself had code-named “Trinity.” Although a trained botanist, his wife still felt there was luck in a mutant plant.

  Thirty seconds later, four blood-red lights flashed on the console in front of Oppie in the concrete bunker ten thousand yards south of—a neologism, words shoved together like protons in a nucleus—“ground zero.” On his right a young physicist from Harvard stood by the knife switch that if opened would abort the test. The thing had its own momentum now, an electric timer ticking away; no one would go down in history as the individual who had set off the first atom bomb, but one man could still stop it.

  The team at Los Alamos had come up with two different bomb designs. The first was a simple uranium-gun scheme deemed so foolproof that, as Leo Szilard had observed to Oppie, it didn’t require any testing. But Uranium-235, despite all efforts to efficiently separate it from U-238, was still available in such minuscule amounts that a second system was developed that instead used plutonium, which could be produced in comparatively large quantities. The alternative design required much more complex bomb hardware, and that was what they were about to test. Bob Serber had dubbed this spherical bomb type “Fat Man,” after the Sydney Greenstreet character in The Maltese Falcon. It used a revolutionary implosion system perfected—or so it had seemed until two days ago—by George Kistiakowsky. But a trial run early Saturday in the Pajarito Canyon, using a dummy Fat Man with a core of conventional explosives, had failed.

  In the real Fat Man to be fired today, the plutonium core had been molded into a sphere the size of a softball. Surrounding it was a shell of thirty-two explosive castings called “lenses” because they’d been engineered so that the force of their explosions would be focused on the central sphere. With each lens detonating simultaneously, the spherical shockwave blowing inward should implode the core to tennis-ball size, forcing the plutonium into criticality. But the lenses in Saturday’s test bomb had apparently developed astigmatism.

  Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, and Vannevar Bush, in charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and therefore its civilian head, had arrived as scheduled Saturday noon, and both were furious at the news.

  Oppie tried to keep his cool in front of them—in front of everyone—but it finally all proved more than he could take. So much work, so much time, so near to success, but instead of a bloom of light, nettles in his fist. He’d broken down in front of Kistiakowsky, his tears the only moisture this desiccated area inauspiciously known as La Jornada del Muerto, The Workday of the Dead, had seen in weeks.

  Kisty contended the failure was perhaps due to the use of substandard lenses, the best castings—free of significant bubbles and cracks—having been saved for the real thing, and he bet Oppie a month’s salary against ten dollars that everything would go fine today.

  Late last night, Oppie, having recovered his composure enough to wax philosophic, had shared his own translation of a passage from the seven-hundred-stanza Bhagavad Gita with long-faced, bespectacled Vannevar Bush and visiting advisor I.I. Rabi, compact and trim, who had won last year’s Nobel Prize in physics:

  “In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

  “The good deeds a man has done before defend him.”

  But rain, sheets of it, torrents, had begun at oh-two-hundred hours, the very heavens weeping.

  Right now, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were arriving at Potsdam, near Berlin, for the first Allied-leaders’ summit since the Nazi surrender. Truman desperately wanted a successful test so that he—the Commander in Chief, as Oppie had said, not some back-door sneak—could tell the Soviet premier that the Americans now had a working atomic bomb whose imminent use on Japan would surely end the Pacific war. The test had to go ahead now—but rain would drive radioactive particles down to the ground instead of letting them dissipate.

  Groves loudly excoriated the meteorologist—who had, in fact, clearly warned the general days ago of the impending storm. Still, the man now felt the torrent would abate by dawn. Groves growled, “You’d better be right or I’ll have you hanged,” and he made the hapless soul sign his written forecast.

  Then, just before 3:00 a.m., Groves got on the phone to the Governor of New Mexico, a servant rousting the sixty-six-year-old from bed. Oppie heard only the general’s side of the conversation: he told the governor, who was learning of the imminent test for the first time, that he should be prepared to “invoke martial law come dawn if the thing does more damage than we anticipate.”

  Oppenheimer and the rest stepped outside, leaving only the person manning the abort switch. Groves, Teller, Feynman, and Fermi—the Italian navigator himself, who had moved to Los Alamos from Chicago last year—were scattered along with many more men at three of the cardinal points; the general had insisted on dispersal of the team so that if something did go wrong at least some essential personnel might survive.

  At 5:29:50—with a mere ten seconds to go—a final warning gong sounded, an Oriental instrument signaling looming American triumph. Oppie took his piece of #10 welder’s glass from his pocket. “Five!” said a male voice over the external loudspeaker. “Four!” Oppie found his lungs paralyzed. “Three!” His heart, though, was pounding hard enough to shake his whole body. “Two!” He held the deep-amber glass up, his blue eyes reflecting back at him as green—“One!” —the same green, he realized with a start, as Jean Tatlock’s.

  Light! Fierce. Pure. Blinding.

  The cruel brightness, immediately unbearable, kept increasing. Silent light, holy light—not a sound to it yet but an intensity no one on earth had ever before experienced. For the first time, humans were doing what only the stars themselves had previously wrought, converting matter directly into energy, Einstein’s E=mc2 graduating from mere textbook formula into a devastating weapon.

  The dome of blinding light grew and grew; Oppie estimated it was now a mile, now two, now three in diameter. And the color, which had started as pure white, then yellow, then a cacophony of hues, had now settled on an actinic purple, a radiant bruise on the firmament.

  And then the light rose up—by God, yes, on a giant stalk, the hemisphere being pushed higher and higher, hell meeting heaven. Oppie hadn’t expected that; no one had. It looked for all the world like an incandescent parasol, a mushroom of flame, miles tall.

  And, at last, a thunderous crack! as the sound of the explosion hit them. Hands flew up to ears; eyes that had endured the brightness behind opaque glass winced at the volume. Oppie had done the math in advance: he knew it was therefore now twenty-five seconds after the timer had reached zero, but it felt like many minutes.

  Next came the blast’s scalding wind. Robert, incredibly, managed to keep erect; the more substantial Kisty, off to one side, was blown over but soon picked himself up and pushed against the gale to make it over to his boss. “You owe me ten bucks!” he shouted, his balding head split by a wide grin as he slapped Oppie on the back.

  Oppie pulled out his wallet only to find it empty. “You’ll have to wait!” he shouted.

 
; Someone else was making his way over to him: Ken Bainbridge, the test-site director, with a serpent-like mouth. “Now we’re all sons of bitches!” he yelled over the roar.

  Yes, thought Oppie. We surely are. We’ve changed the world, won the war, and thrown down a marker in time: the whole, vast past was prologue; everything henceforth is part of a new epoch, a new period, a new era. The previous eras had been named for the ever-more-sophisticated animal life that had emerged in them: Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic. But this new one had as its hallmark not unbridled biology but harnessed devastation.

  The crowd around him was jubilant. Everyone was going to want to speak to him, he knew: to shake his hand, to offer congratulations, to share their views. But he needed a moment of peace as the weapon to end all war continued to assault the very sky in front of him. Oppie stepped away, walking sideways, keeping his eyes, no longer requiring the protective glass, on the great bulbous apparition.

  Now ...

  Such a devilish thing! There were still afterimages, true, but there was also, superimposed in Oppie’s mind, a conjured city centered at ground zero, ceasing to be, incinerating into nothingness.

  Now I am ...

  Robert’s primary education, at Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture School—the abstract made concrete, that school of philosophy given brownstone-and-mortar reality—had elevated his thinking, and Hindu mysticism had given him insights few of his Western contemporaries shared.

  Now I am become Death ...

  Oppie had studied Sanskrit under the great Arthur Ryder so he could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original, and he thought as easily in that Hindu tongue as he did in English ... or French, or German, or Dutch. He suspected that whatever language he used shaped his thoughts: German, with its compound nouns, was appropriate to the unification of physical forces; English, with its heavy freight of adjectives, was about one thing modifying another.