The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  Edward Teller (1908-2003): Hungarian-born physicist, often called “the father of the hydrogen bomb.”

  Charles Tobey (1880-1953): United States senator.

  Harry S. Truman (1884-1972): 33rd President of the United States, in office 12 April 1945 to 20 January 1953.

  Harold Urey (1893-1981): American physical chemist; 1934 Nobel laureate.

  Joseph Volpe (1914-2002): legal counsel for the Atomic Energy Commission.

  Magnus von Braun (1919-2003): younger brother of Wernher von Braun.

  Wernher von Braun [“VAIRN-er fon Brrrown”] (1912-1977): German rocketeer.

  John von Neumann [“von NOY-man”] (1903-1957): Hungarian-born American mathematical physicist.

  Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965): vice-president of the United States under Harry S. Truman.

  Author’s Note

  Every character in this novel was a real person and, with the exception of Peter Oppenheimer, is now deceased. The Manhattan Project and Project Orion both really existed as described here, and the Institute for Advanced Study still exists.

  The chapter-head quotes are all real, and, thanks to the published recollections of the participants, official transcripts, illicit recordings, and so on, some of this novel’s dialog is real, too.

  That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man, what made him act, what he did, and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here. You are writing a man’s life.

  —I.I. Rabi, testifying at Robert Oppenheimer’s security hearing

  Prologue

  What pithy words should one use to sum up the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer before dropping the urn with his ashes overboard?

  Do you wax poetic about the precocious child who, at age twelve, gave a lecture to the venerable New York Mineralogical Club? Perhaps you’d discuss his rise to fame in 1945 as “the father of the atomic bomb”—and then lament the McCarthy Era witch-hunt that later sought to strip his security clearance? You might even include a word or two about his supposedly quiet twilight overseeing the monastic Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

  In the end, Kitty Oppenheimer, the compact alcoholic for whom Robert had been the fourth—albeit longest-serving—husband, said nothing while raindrops fell like bombs from the heavens. She let go of his urn seconds after dangling it over the gunwale of the motorboat that she, their twenty-two-year-old daughter, and two friends had taken out from the Oppenheimer beach house on Hawksnest Bay that monochromatic afternoon in February 1967.

  Surprisingly, the urn didn’t sink at once. Rather, it bobbed up and down as if empty, the waves themselves giving the storied physicist a final sinusoidal eulogy before the container, taking on water, at last sank beneath the choppy surface.

  Chapter 1

  1936

  I have to explain about Oppie: about every five years, he would have a personality crisis; he would change his personality. I mean, when I knew him at Berkeley, he was the romantic, radical bohemian sort of person, a thorough scholar ...

  —Robert R. Wilson, American physicist

  “You’re bad luck for me,” said Haakon Chevalier. “I hope you know that.”

  Robert Oppenheimer looked at his friend, seated next to him on the pink-and-green living-room couch as the party bustled about them. Oppie’s sense was the exact opposite: Hoke had brought him nothing but good fortune, including getting him into this offbeat rooming house here on Shasta Road. “Oh?”

  “Absolutely. When I go places without you, I’m considered the attractive one.”

  Oppenheimer made a small chuckle. Chevalier, who had just turned thirty-five, was three years his senior, and was indeed movie-star handsome: gallant, as befitted his last name, and long of face, with wide-spaced eyes and sandy hair swept back in a slight pompadour.

  By comparison, Oppie knew he himself was scrawny, his tall body angular, his coarse black hair a wild nimbus, and his duck-footed gait awkward—one friend had described it as a constant falling forward as if he were forever tumbling into the future.

  “See that one over there?” continued Hoke, with a subtle nod. “She hasn’t glanced at me once since we got here, but you—” Chevalier shook his head in good-natured exasperation. “It’s those goddamn eyes of yours, I tell you. Fucking opals.”

  Oppie was used to compliments about his pale blue eyes: he often heard them called “transparent” or “luminous,” but this metaphor was new to him. He smiled as he turned to look at the woman Hoke had indicated, and—

  And, my God, he’d seen that lovely face before—he was sure of it. But where? “Wow,” said Oppie softly.

  “Wow, indeed,” agreed Hoke. “And she keeps looking your way. You should go over and say hello.”

  “I ... um ...”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Robert, go! You study the mysteries of the universe; girls are simple by comparison.”

  Hoke taught French literature at the University of California’s Berkeley campus; Oppie was a professor of physics there. Normally, members of such diverse faculties would have little to do with each other, but Oppie loved French poetry, and the two men had become great friends. One advantage Hoke had was a lot of female students—he’d married one, in fact—whereas in Robert’s circles, women were rare. “Come on,” said Hoke. “Give me a story to tell Barb when I get home. Go try your luck.”

  Luck. Einstein said that God didn’t play dice with the universe—but, then again, God probably wasn’t itching to get laid. “All right already,” Oppie said, unfolding himself from the couch. Of course, he couldn’t just go up and say hello, but Mary Ellen, his landlady, was swirling by in one of her floor-length batik dresses. She threw many parties, often as fund-raisers. This one was for the Republicans in Spain—or maybe it was for the Spanish Nationalists? Whoever the good guys were, anyway; Oppie had come downstairs from his room for donuts and drinks, not the cause.

  “Say, Mary Ellen, I wonder if you might—”

  “Robert! So good of you to pull your nose out of your books and join us! But your glass is empty. Let me—”

  “No, no; I’m fine. But if you could ...” He gestured feebly at the busty young woman seated by the fireplace.

  “Ah!” said Mary Ellen, her wide face splitting in a grin. “Yes, of course!” She took Oppie’s hand and pulled him across the crowded room. “Jean,” she said, and the woman looked up, “this is my best tenant—oh, hush, Fred; you know I love you, too! This is Robert. He teaches physics. Robert, Jean here is studying to be a doctor.” Mary Ellen managed to make an art-deco chair appear out of nowhere and maneuvered Robert onto it so that he was facing Jean. “Now, let me get you a drink!”

  “A doctor,” said Oppie, impressed, smiling at Jean.

  “Yes. A psychiatrist, in particular.” Jean’s voice was warm. She was, as he’d noted from across the room, beautiful—even more so close-up. “I’m fascinated by Freud,” she continued. “Do you know his work?”

  Well, well: look at those dice. Six the hard way! “I do indeed. In fact, I know Ernest Jones.”

  “Oh my!” said Jean. “Really?”

  “Yes. We, ah, met when I was at Cambridge in 1926.” Jones, a great friend of Freud, was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and had become its chief proponent in the English world.

  “Tell me—my God, tell me everything about him!”

  Mary Ellen fluttered by again, giving Oppie a bourbon and a wink, then went upon her way. “Well,” said Oppie, “he was practicing in Harley Street ...” As he spoke, he continued to study her smooth, classically beautiful face and striking green eyes, emeralds to his opals. Jean wore her black hair short and had a slight dimple in her chin. She was probably a decade younger than he was.

  They talked for most of an hour, and the conversation slipped easily from topic to topic. He was enthralled by th
at hauntingly familiar beauty of hers and by her nimble mind and ready wit, and yet she was mercurial. One moment she’d seem animated and boisterous, the next fragile and sad. Still, against a noisy background of someone banging away on the piano, dozens of overlapping conversations, and the clink of glasses, he listened attentively, although at one point he had to hold up his hand to stop her. “My family,” she said, “moved out here from Massachusetts just before the crash, and—”

  “You were in an accident?”

  She looked at him for a moment, puzzled. “No. The stock-market crash.”

  Oppie shook his head slightly.

  “The stock-market crash of 1929. The beginning of the Great Depression.”

  “Oh—ah, yes. Yes, of course.”

  “You don’t know, do you?” Jean looked amazed. “Where have you been?” He wished she’d gone on to add the words all my life, but instead she finished by observing: “Born with a silver spoon in your mouth, were you?”

  “Well, I—I mean, my father did all right.” Then he added, as if somehow it explained his ignorance: “He invested, but mostly in art, not stocks.”

  She tilted her head again, and the light from the porcelain table lamp hit her just so, and he suddenly realized where he’d seen that face before. Oppie’s favorite book was Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal. The shape of Jean’s face and the curve and length of her nose were identical to that of the woman in the etching accompanying Baudelaire’s heartbreaking “Une Martyre” in the glorious 1917 edition. He frowned, ousting the thought. That etching was gruesome: the woman’s head had been severed, a beauty cut down in the flower of youth as her older lover traveled the world.

  The evening at last wound down, and Oppie, four drinks in, was ready to ask the young lady out. “And so, Miss ...” he began.

  “Tatlock,” she said, and the crisp syllables hit him like bullets.

  “Are ... are you related to John Tatlock?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “John Tatlock? The medievalist at Berkeley?”

  “Yes, why? Do you know him?”

  Oh, yes, thought Oppie. John Strong Perry Tatlock was an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer, a towering presence at Berkeley faculty-association meetings, a loud voice often heard booming across the Faculty Club dining hall—and a raging anti-Semite. That wasn’t unusual at Berkeley; when Robert had tried to get his student Bob Serber a job there, the physics chairman had said that having one Jew in his department was quite sufficient. But ... damn.

  “Ah,” said Oppie, his stomach knotting; he hadn’t mentioned his own last name. He got up from the funky chair. “Well,” he said sadly, “it was nice meeting you.” He made his way toward the staircase that led up to his lonely room.

  #

  Jean was present at the next party Mary Ellen hosted, and the one after that, each time just as lovely, just as magnetic. Finally, her father’s prejudice be damned, Oppie mustered the courage to ask her to dinner.

  “Where would you like to go?” she replied, and he was flustered again. Did that mean her acceptance was a given, or that it was now contingent on him naming a suitably posh place? “I, um, well—”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter!” she said, smiling. “Do you like spicy?”

  “Very much so.”

  “There’s a place over in San Francisco, the Xochimilco Café. Do you know it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, good! Then it can become our place! Saturday night? Or—or do you ...?” The question, he realized, was a belated reference to his Jewishness.

  “No, Saturday is fine.”

  And it was. The café, which had a name more appropriate to the Southwest he’d loved in his youth than the Northern California he was in now, was a dive. Not that it mattered; she’d been right that money wasn’t a concern for him—he’d happily have taken her to the most-expensive seafood place on the wharf. But the booth they found was suitable for conversation, the carne adovada agreeably piquant, and the tequila strong and plentiful.

  She was, he discovered, a member of the Communist Party and wrote for its newspaper, The Western Worker. When she spoke of downtrodden people, of the fight for liberty—common coin on the Berkeley campus, stuff he’d previously tuned out as background noise—he found himself listening, nodding, and repeatedly interjecting, “Yes, yes, yes!”

  That night, he walked her home. After a block, she reached over and took his hand. When they arrived at the entrance to the small building she lived in, they could hear a jazz recording through a neighbor’s open window; she told him it was Benny Goodman’s latest, “The Glory of Love.” Oppie pulled her near and, bending his head down, he kissed her for the first time, starting slowly, gently, but, as she responded, growing more and more passionate.

  They began dating regularly. A few years before, he’d given a talk entitled “Stars and Nuclei” to the Caltech astronomy club; he’d studied the largest and smallest of objects, but, until Jean, he’d missed seeing the human world all around him.

  Still, it wasn’t long before he learned of the darkness that chased her inner light—her mood swings, her nightmares; she was a chimera, angel and demon in one body, the would-be psychiatrist who had long seen a psychiatrist of her own. Despite it all, he came to love her unwaveringly, and she, with the deeper feelings both high and low that heaved and tossed her spirit, perhaps loved him even more.

  After only a few months, they were engaged ... and then, bewilderingly, Jean broke it off. “Not ready,” she said, and “Too soon.” They continued to date, though, and he finally worked up the courage to ask her a second time to marry him. She agreed, but then, weeks later, once again changed her mind: she did love him, she insisted, but said he deserved more, better, and his protestations failed to sway her. Robert, heartbroken, started seeing other women, including Kitty, the petite temptress, the flirtatious vixen, the skilled horsewoman who could, or so it seemed, break any stallion. To his surprise at the time, she was soon pregnant. He did the honorable thing—did his duty—and married her.

  But it was winsome, bittersweet Jean Tatlock, not Kitty, who was forever in his heart, his mind, the soulmate he could never have.

  Chapter 2

  Six Years Later: 1942

  Question: What is an optimist? Answer: One who thinks the future is uncertain.

  —Leo Szilard

  Leo Szilard, still cherubic at forty-four, had been warned about this visit. General Leslie Groves was coming to the Metallurgical Laboratory, the drab code name given to the facility at the University of Chicago that studied the fissionable elements uranium and plutonium. The man who’d been merely a colonel days ago had apparently leveraged a promotion to go along with being appointed head of—what the hell were they calling the overall bomb effort now? Ah, yes: “The Manhattan Engineer District.”

  Leo suspected he’d soon have some obscure code name himself. His preference would be “Martian Number One.” Enrico Fermi, who believed the universe should be teeming with intelligent life, had exhorted Leo to explain the absence of these advanced visitors, which, for lack of a generic term, Enrico had taken to calling “Martians.” Leo had quipped, “Oh, we are here—but we call ourselves Hungarians.”

  Szilard had already bestowed nicknames on others, which he mostly kept to himself. His largely platonic girlfriend Trude, a dozen years younger, was “Kind,” the German for “child.” Eugene Wigner, a fellow Martian, was “Pineapple Head,” in honor of his oddly prolate noggin. And he’d decided the best name for this general who had burst into their seminar room in Eckart Hall was “Bumpy,” commemorating both his lumpy exterior and his bumptious nature. Leo couldn’t fault a person for being overweight; his own fondness for pastries and rich sauces had made him, as Trude affectionately chided from time to time, more than a little rotund. But a man’s clothes should fit, for God’s sake, and this blustering martinet
’s jacket seemed at least one size too small.

  The general and his military aide had been brought to see this group—the Met Lab’s fifteen most-senior scientists—by Arthur Holly Compton, the jutting-jawed director of the laboratory. The seminar room was large and luxurious with built-in glass-fronted bookcases, plush maroon leather furniture, and two blackboards, one wall-mounted and another that had been wheeled in. A central mahogany table was strewn with papers, dog-eared journals, and coffee mugs.

  Thirty-two-year-old Luis Alvarez, lanky and intense, was trying to answer the general’s slew of questions by writing equations on the built-in blackboard, but that oaf had the gall to interrupt him. “Just a second, young man. In the third equation, you’ve got the exponent as ten-to-the-minus-five, but then it magically becomes ten-to-the-minus-six on the next line.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” replied Alvarez sheepishly, rubbing out the mistake with his thumb and writing in the correct value. “Slip of the chalk.”

  “That raises a question,” Groves said to the whole group. “Your estimates for how much fissionable material you’ll need—how accurate are they?”

  Leo, with his shoeless feet propped up on a vacant chair, shrugged slightly. “Within a factor of ten.”

  “A factor of ten!” exploded Groves. “That’s idiotic! That’s like telling a wedding caterer to prepare for a hundred guests when the real number could be anywhere from ten to a thousand. No engineer can work with sloppy figures like that.”

  “General ...” said Leo, giving him his newfound title in hopes of placating the brute, “you have to understand—”

  “No,” snapped Groves. “All of you have to understand. This isn’t a theoretical project; it’s a practical one. I have to build actual working bombs.” He took a deep breath then let it out loudly. “Now, you lot may think engineers are just technicians”—Leo had the good sense not to interject—“and you may know that I don’t have a Ph.D. Colonel Nichols here has one, but I don’t. But let me tell you that I had ten years of formal education after I entered college—ten full years. I didn’t have to make a living or give up time for teaching. I just studied. That’d be the equivalent of about two doctorates, wouldn’t it?”