The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  Leo swung his feet off the chair and leaned forward. “Sir,” he said, the word almost a hiss, “I would never claim your rank—even if you have only just attained it—as my own. But forget doctorates; everyone in this room, save you, has one.”

  “Leo ...” cautioned Compton, thin eyebrows drawn together in a don’t-do-this glare.

  “No, no, no,” said Szilard. “We’re trotting out credentials here, are we not? And you, Arthur, you are none other than the winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in physics.” Leo locked his gaze on Groves. “Maybe you saw him on the cover of Time a few years ago?” Szilard then indicated a slender, balding man seated on the opposite side of the table. “And him? That’s Enrico Fermi. He won the 1938 Nobel. And next to me?” He pointed to an egg-headed man with a mustache. “Say hello to James Franck, the 1925 Nobel laureate. As for me, I have collaborated with—and share patents with!—Albert Einstein.”

  Groves rose, fuming. “I’m going to Berkeley,” he snapped, “but I’ll be back in a few days.” He jabbed an accusatory finger at the blackboard. “And I expect precise answers when I return.” His footfalls on the hardwood floor shook the bookcase glass as he stormed out.

  Leo got up, turned to face his colleagues, and spread his arms. “I warned you how it would be if the military were allowed to take over! How can we work with people like that?”

  Compton had calmed down a bit. “Well, once Groves gets to Berkeley, Oppie will set him straight on the theoretical issues.”

  Szilard frowned. Oppenheimer? Too eager to please, too much of a climber. Oh, sure, charismatic in person—who hadn’t felt that? But as the champion of science and reason against Bumpy Groves? “May God have mercy on our souls,” Leo said, shaking his head.

  #

  Robert Oppenheimer gazed out the mammoth window in the university president’s living room, lost, as often, in thought. Of course he was thinking about the vexing problem of isotope separation, but—

  Isotopes were the same element but different—both this and yet each separately that. Just as it was with the women in his life, both beautiful and brilliant, but different, too: Kitty, who demanded to be satisfied, and Jean, whom he could never fully satisfy. The same and yet not: Kitty, who had been married to someone else when she first began dating Robert and who he’d now learned from friends had bragged that she’d gotten him to marry her “the old-fashioned way, by getting pregnant,” and Jean, still there, still in his social circle, occasionally still in his arms, who ran away from commitment.

  Robert hadn’t been blind as time went on. His former landlady, that whirlwind of energy named Mary Ellen, and the delicate, moody Jean, now indeed an M.D., were more than casual friends. In just one of many ways in which Jean was pulled in multiple directions simultaneously, Mary Ellen—always confident where Jean was often diffident; always a confidant, as close as Oppie himself was—had also taken Jean to bed.

  “Robert?”

  The voice had been that of the reception’s host, President Sproul. He turned. “Yes?”

  Sproul—panther-lean, bespectacled, and wearing a gray three-piece suit—indicated the uniformed man next to him, and Oppie beheld the visitor. “General Leslie Groves, meet Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

  The term “fission” describing how a uranium nucleus could split into two had been borrowed from biology, and Oppie had a sudden flash of micrographs he’d seen of a dividing cell: an entity pinched in the middle to form bulbous halves. Groves’s belt was the constriction and an ample gut billowed out above and below it.

  The general was almost as tall as Oppie, with an elongated head weighed down by jowls and crowned by swept-back hair. Groves sported a short, bristly mustache that had grayed at either side, lending the more-prominent dark part—inadvertently, Oppie was sure—a Hitlerian aspect. Binary stars adorned each side of his khaki collar. Oppie offered his hand, and Groves shook it firmly. “You’re the head theoretician here,” the general said as if it were an accusation.

  Oppie nodded. “My actual job title is—if you can believe it—‘Co-ordinator of Rapid Rupture,’ but, yes, that’s right.”

  “I’m a nuts-and-bolts man myself,” said Groves. His voice reminded Oppie of the sound stones made in his lapidary tumbler. “An engineer.”

  Oppie nodded amiably. “You’re in charge of building the Pentagon.” The massive new structure in Virginia was nearly finished.

  The general’s eyebrows creased his forehead, clearly impressed that Oppie knew this. “Indeed I am.” Oppie left unspoken the fact that Groves had also been in charge of building the internment camps for Japanese Americans. The army man looked around the vast room, apparently uncomfortable with the opulent surroundings. “I was hoping that I’d have earned my pick of assignments after the Pentagon—I wanted to see action overseas—but they gave me this thing.”

  “This thing,” Oppie knew, was being in charge of the atomic-bomb project, including the work here at Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory and that at Arthur Compton’s Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago.

  President Sproul apparently knew the way to this particular man’s heart, at least: “Lunch will be served momentarily.” Groves smiled at that, and Oppie smiled at Groves’s smile.

  “I’m glad they put an engineer in charge,” Oppie said, turning on the charm as Sproul was beckoned away by another guest. “We scientists can spend far too much time woolgathering.”

  The general’s eyes, a darker blue than his own, fixed on Oppie. “Are you free this afternoon? I’d like to talk to you some more.”

  It was all falling into place; Kitty would be so pleased. “Your wish is my command, General.”

  Chapter 3

  The gravitational deflection of light will prevent the escape of radiation as the star contracts. The star thus tends to close itself off from any communication with a distant observer; only its gravitational field persists.

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder

  Groves arrived at Oppie’s office in Le Conte Hall accompanied by a colonel with thinning hair and round glasses—“Nichols,” the general called him, and that let Oppie put a face to the name. This was Ken Nichols of the Manhattan Engineer District, whose office in New York had now lent its name to the entire American atomic-bomb effort. The British counterpart was code-named Tube Alloys, and heaven only knew what bland moniker the Soviet undertaking, if there was one, lurked behind.

  Groves removed his army jacket, revealing a pressed shirt with crescent moons of sweat on either side. He handed the outer garment to Nichols and said, “Get this dry-cleaned.”

  Oppie took a drag on his cigarette. He knew that Nichols had a Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering from Iowa State. Once one received a doctorate, the grad-student lot of being an errand boy traditionally ended—but perhaps, to give him the benefit of the doubt, the general merely wanted privacy. Oppenheimer’s assistant, the shy and lisping Bob Serber, finally granted a job here despite his religion, was working away on the office blackboard. Oppie took the opportunity not only to ensure they were alone but also to reset the karmic balance. “Say, Bob, why don’t you take Dr. Nichols here over to the Faculty Club for a drink? You can leave the dry-cleaning with Becky.”

  Oppie caught Nichols’s eye, hoping for a grateful nod. Instead, what he saw on the man’s bespectacled face was anger that Robert had witnessed his petty humiliation. Serber assented as he rubbed his hands together to disperse chalk dust.

  Once the other two were gone, Oppie sat on the edge of his desk. The ceiling of the white-walled office consisted of two angled sections joining in a central peak. Groves moved to stand against the far wall, the low roof there making him seem even more imposing. “I saw Ernest Lawrence this morning,” the general rumbled, “and his vaunted Calutron. You know how much uranium-235 he’s managed to separate from 238 so far?”

  “None?” ventured Oppie.

  “That
’s right, none. And I was in Chicago a few days ago. That buffoon Leo Szilard and the rest are still just blue-skying instead of getting down to specifics. I’m knee-deep in physicists, and not one of you seems to understand time.”

  Robert admired Szilard’s bounding intellect, but he could certainly see how these two would clash. “Well,” he said, “Einstein wrote FDR in August 1939, urging the development of an atomic bomb. It’s now October of ’42, over three years later, and we’ve barely started on that bomb. I’d say it’s awfully late in the day, General.”

  “At last a practical man!” exclaimed Groves. “All right, Mr. Rapid Rupture, tell me: can it be done? Atomic fission?”

  Oppie frowned. “It’s a sweet problem. The answer is ...” He paused deliberately for dramatic effect, then, firmly: “Yes.”

  Groves nodded, impressed. “How fast?”

  “If we maintain a concentrated effort? Two years.”

  “Straight answers,” Groves said. “I like that.” He eyed Robert for a moment. “Okay, let’s get this out of the way right now. Are you a member of the Communist Party?”

  Oppie had been prepared for that question and kept his tone completely flat as he brushed ash from his cigarette with his pinkie. “No.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “No.”

  “Your wife was. And your brother Frank.”

  “True and true. And you’ll find I’ve supported just about every left-wing cause there is, from the Teachers’ Union to the Republicans in Spain over the last few years. But I’ve never belonged to the Communist Party and I’ve left all of those other things behind. There’s work to be done.”

  “There is indeed,” said Groves, “and there’s no room for Communists in it.”

  “General, I give you my word: I’m not a Communist.” A pause. “I’m an American.”

  “That you are,” said Groves. “Born and raised—but so many of these others aren’t. Germans, Hungarians, Italians, you name it. But Americans like you and me? We’re thin on the ground.”

  Oppie tipped his head to one side but made no reply.

  “All right, Professor, given how much catching up we have to do, how would you get us on track?”

  “A central laboratory,” Oppie said, playing his first card. “Get all us scientists together at one location.” And then, laying the trump: “That’d make security a hell of a lot easier.”

  But Groves surprised him by not being surprised. “Yes, I’ve been thinking of that. Last month I ordered the acquisition of 59,000 acres in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for uranium processing. Might be a good spot.”

  “No, no. It can’t be seen as merely an add-on to an isotope-separation plant. We’re talking about the heart and soul of the bomb effort. It should be a stand-alone facility.”

  The general stroked his jaw. “Maybe you’re right. Who would you put in charge?”

  “My boss here at Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence, is the logical first choice,” said Oppie, pleased that the general and Lawrence had already clashed over the failure to produce any uranium-235. “Then there’s I.I. Rabi at Columbia, or Edwin McMillan.” But Oppie knew they couldn’t be spared from their secret radar work. He threw out a couple more names, just for appearance’s sake: “Or, from Caltech, Wolfgang Panofsky, say, or Carl Anderson.”

  Groves nodded at the mention of Anderson. “He won the Nobel for discovering the positron.”

  “True,” said Oppie.

  “And that raises a point. As I told those clowns in Chicago, I don’t have a Ph.D., but in this project I have to be the leader of countless people who do. That’s not a problem for me as I made it quite clear to them that I’ve got more than the equivalent in post-secondary education. But suppose I decide I want to put you in charge of this hypothetical out-of-the-way lab? You’d be a thornier case. Many of the men you’d be leading have already won the Nobel Prize, but you haven’t.”

  Oppie raised his chin. “Not yet.”

  Groves leaned back and barked a laugh. “I admire a man who has faith in himself.”

  “It’s not a question of faith, General. The work has already been done. In 1938 and 1939, I published three papers in the Physical Review, each with a different one of my grad students. Now, it sometimes takes the Swedish Academy a while to recognize an achievement as Nobel-worthy, and, unfortunately, we were hit with quite a stroke of bad luck: the very day the final and most important of the three papers was published, Hitler invaded Poland, and this damned war began.”

  “September first, 1939,” supplied Groves.

  “Exactly. And the world has been preoccupied ever since. However, once the war is over, those papers will be rediscovered, and their import noted. Then it’s only a matter of when I’ll get the Nobel, not if.”

  Groves made an impressed face, but then shook his massive head. “Well, for my purposes, if you don’t get it until after the war, it doesn’t help. But, okay, I’m curious. What’s this great breakthrough that nobody noticed at the time?”

  “There’s a terrific Russian physicist named Lev Landau. He believed he’d figured out what causes the heat of the sun. He thought the center of the sun is a condensed neutron core. That is, at the sun’s heart, all the orbiting electrons have been crushed down to combine with protons to become neutrons, and those neutrons, plus the ones that had already been part of the atomic nuclei at the core, are all that’s left: solid neutron-degenerate matter. It was a great notion and explained wonderfully how the sun stays warm—the kinetic energy of in-falling matter being pulled down by the ultra-dense core. But Bob Serber—that’s the fellow who I sent off just now with Colonel Nichols—Bob and I realized that Landau had failed to take into account the strong nuclear force. If you factor that in, the sun would give telltale signs of having that sort of core, and it doesn’t.”

  Groves looked at Oppie, clearly unimpressed, but before the general could voice an objection, Oppie raised a hand. “Now, as I said, that was the first paper, and, yes, it wasn’t all that much in itself. But it led directly to the second paper, which I wrote with George Volkoff. In that one, we determined that sufficiently heavy stars will, at the end of their lives, contract indefinitely.”

  Groves frowned. “Indefinitely? What does that mean?”

  “Good question,” said Oppie with a grin, “and the answer was what the third paper was about, a collaboration with my grad student Hartland Snyder. Indefinite contraction, we showed, will lead to a point of zero volume and infinite density, with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light itself, will be able to escape the pull. That’s a whole new class of astronomical objects, and one with properties nobody had guessed at before. A few kilometers from the center, at what’s called the Schwarzschild radius, time itself will freeze, thanks to relativity but, for an in-falling observer, it will continue to pass. There’s nothing intuitively obvious about these ... these ... ‘dark abysses,’ if you will, but they absolutely must exist.”

  Groves leaned back, an expression of awe on his face. “And that’s worth a Nobel,” he said softly.

  Oppie nodded and crossed his arms smugly. “That’s worth a Nobel.”

  #

  “Jim, you’ll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.”

  It was code, of course: the Italian navigator was Leo Szilard’s colleague Enrico Fermi, who had led today’s successful experiment. After months of labor, Fermi’s team had created that which Szilard himself had been the first to envision nine years previously: a controlled nuclear chain reaction. This afternoon, the world’s first atomic reactor had run for twenty-eight minutes—the first, that is, unless Nazi physicists had beaten them to the punch.

  Szilard stood near his boss, Arthur Holly Compton, in the latter’s office at the University of Chicago. Arthur was on the phone with James Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, the org
anization in charge of secret war technology for the United States. Conant must have asked how the natives were because Arthur’s reply was, “Very friendly.”

  Silence while Arthur listened for a moment. “No,” he said into the mouthpiece, “I suspect he’s gone ... back to port.” A pause. “Yes, he’s here; let me put him on.” He handed Szilard the black handset. Never one for formalities, Leo said, “Hello, Jim.” His Hungarian accent made the name sound a bit like “Yim.”

  “Congratulations, Doctor!” The voice was warm although there was much static crackling behind it. “None of this would ever have happened without you.”

  Szilard rubbed his forehead with his free hand and said, because he knew it was what he was supposed to say, “Thank you,” and then he handed the phone back to Arthur.

  Leo liked to think either in his bathtub—he often soaked for hours—or quite literally on his feet. He excused himself and headed out into the cold evening air while Arthur went back to his oblique conversation. As Leo ambled across the campus, he passed many students, some clutching textbooks, a few holding hands, and he felt twinges of guilt. If something had gone wrong today, all these young people at the beginnings of their lives, along with, quite possibly, almost everyone else in Chicago, could easily have been killed.

  Leo’s breath blossomed into clouds in front of him. He hadn’t had a destination in mind, but his feet brought him across the width of Stagg football field. There’d been snow earlier in the week that had melted, leaving the brown grass dry. He made his way toward the concrete rows of angled seating that ran along the west side. The brick structure beneath these bleachers housed various athletic facilities; Leo greeted the guards at the north end and headed into the doubles squash court that had been their experimental working space.