The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  When they were done, with her nestled into his shoulder, she said wistfully, “I feel so ... so paralyzed sometimes.”

  “I know,” he replied softly, stroking her thick hair, his heart fracturing as it always did when he knew he’d have to leave her. He remembered a poem she’d shared with him years ago, written when she’d been just sixteen but somehow apropos:

  Is even this

  Not enough to appease your awful pain

  You gaunt terrible bleeding Jesus

  “I love you,” he added, and he felt her cheek move against his shoulder as she smiled her shy, tenuous smile.

  Late the next day, having missed his train back to New Mexico, she drove him to the airport, and he booked a flight to—no, not to home, nothing could be more home than this, but to Santa Fe.

  On the way to the airport, he noticed the same, or a similar, brown Ford a few cars behind them. Ah, well; he’d doubtless catch hell for violating General Groves’s no-flying edict.

  Chapter 6

  God knows I’m not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I’m very, very simple.

  —I.I. Rabi

  It had been six weeks filled with frenzied work since Robert had spent that night with Jean. The tasks he performed on the mesa were urgent regardless but the harder he went at them the less time his mind had to wander back to her, to that night, to the life he could have had, his life that might have been.

  And now he had returned to Berkeley again, in part to deal with security matters, including a certain laxness at Ernest Lawrence’s Rad Lab and the indiscretions, which had caught the attention of Army Intelligence, of his former grad student Rossi Lomanitz, still at U.C.B. Every atom of his being wanted to take the Bay Bridge west once more, to hold Jean in his arms again, but ...

  But. He had indeed been observed the last time, and a scandalous report had been filed. Even after Groves had given him the pill to carry around, he hadn’t been conscious before that trip of just how truly pervasive security would be on this project—or, perhaps, as Jean the Freudian would say, he had been suppressing the thought that should have come to any rational man.

  And yet if only he could see Jean again. For her good. For his. And, yes, for the good of the project: get it out of his system, clear his mind, energize his body, reassure himself. The army had always understood the value of a furlough; even General Groves had capitulated when Oppie had insisted back on the mesa that the scientists get Sundays off from their labors.

  Robert drank in the warm August air, pulling it into his lungs. Gaseous diffusion: a molecule or two of oxygen that had once been inside her, living scant miles away, had surely now come within him.

  He could scarcely ask his military driver to take him there now, and he had no car of his own—and the streetcar would be far too easy to tail. But a cabbie should be happy for the fare, happier still with his tip, and in what—an hour?—Jean could be tight in his embrace once more.

  Goddamned security! There were matters that needed to be classified, and he never slipped in those. Although each had its beauty and rhythm, he’d recite only poetry to her, not formulae. Both his work, physics, and hers, psychology, would be left unmentioned, the former because it was now forbidden, the latter because it, too, was explosive where she was concerned. Her intricate, delicate psyche was as fragile as a blown-glass flower.

  Still, it was good to be back in Berkeley, back among deans and dons, classicists and economists, surrounded by young, questing minds. He hadn’t realized that he’d been missing people in their late teens, but their mere presence, their laughter, their raucous talk, was invigorating. The university wasn’t as crowded as it would be next month when the fall term began, but it still buzzed with the fervor of a thousand lines of inquiry and a hundred specialties, instead of a monomaniacal focus, all for one and one for all.

  Robert strode through the granite-clad main entrance to Durant Hall. Oppenheimer’s students were famous for imitating him, down to his gait and gestures, not out of mockery, he knew, but genuine admiration. But in one crucial area they could no longer afford to be copying him: whereas he’d gotten away with his aborted effort at unionization before the war, Lomanitz was pushing for one again now. Oppie had beseeched all his past students to set aside politics for the duration of the hostilities, but hot-headed Rossi was hell-bent on forging ahead.

  As Oppie headed down the corridor toward the room Lomanitz used, he passed by the office of Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, the ex-F.B.I. man who was the army counter-intelligence officer now permanently stationed on campus.

  Or, that is, he should have passed by, but ...

  But the door was open, as were its windows, the occupant trying to get a cross-current going in the sizzle of August. And, well, it probably wouldn’t hurt to check in first ...

  And so he entered, finding Johnson doing a newspaper crossword puzzle. Reading upside down, Oppie offered that six across was “Rubicon,” and added, “I’m going to have a talk with Rossi Lomanitz, if that’s all right with you. He’s a good kid and a good physicist; I’m sure he’ll listen to reason.”

  Johnson offered his blessing for Robert to try to straighten the boy out. Oppie turned to go, but then he thought a sundae needs its cherry, a martini its olive. Yes, disciplining Rossi certainly would show that Oppie had moved beyond his own Red past, but being back here in Berkeley had reminded him of Haakon Chevalier’s visit to his house shortly before he and Kitty had left for Los Alamos. And so, just to drive home the fact that he really was wholeheartedly part of the team, he turned back to Johnson and added: “By the by, there’s a chemist at Shell Development—you know, in Emeryville? Fellow named George Eltenton. Might be worth keeping an eye on him.”

  Johnson had already looked down at his puzzle again, but his head snapped back up. “Oh?”

  “I mean, I don’t know,” said Oppie, “but before I moved to Site Y, I heard a rumor he might have been looking for info about what’s been going on here at the Rad Lab. Eltenton used to live in Russia, so ...” He let the lieutenant connect the dots.

  “Thank you, Professor,” Johnson said, using his fountain pen to jot the name on a piece of buff-colored paper. Again reading upside down, Oppie noted that Johnson got the spelling right on the first try.

  “Anyway, I’m sure it’s nothing, but ...” He tipped his trademark porkpie hat in farewell and headed on down the corridor to see Lomanitz. Behind him, through the open door, he thought he could hear Johnson dialing a phone.

  #

  Later that day, Oppenheimer received a message from Lieutenant Johnson, asking him if he wouldn’t mind popping by his office the next morning. Oppie slept alone that night in his Spanish-style one-story villa on Eagle Hill overlooking Berkeley, a 2.5-acre property kept for the day when he, Kitty, and Peter could return to it for good.

  It had been a restless night, the sheets knotting as his angular limbs flailed. Poor Jean was so close, so very close. Through his window he could see bright Altair. It was sixteen light-years from Eagle Hill to Alpha Aquilae as the photon flies; he could see it, but he couldn’t see her.

  When morning came, he showered, the plumbing taking a while to come to life after weeks of disuse, dressed, and returned to Durant Hall. This time, Johnson’s door was closed. To avoid drawing attention to the secret work being done at the university, regular campus police instead of MPs guarded things, and one was stationed today outside Johnson’s office. The man was apparently expecting Oppie since he acknowledged his approach with a curt “Professor,” opened the door, and gestured for him to enter.

  Johnson wasn’t alone.

  “Dr. Oppenheimer,” said a fit-looking man in his early forties. He had round wire-frame glasses and a receding tawny hairline. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Pash.”

  Robert had heard the name before. Working out of the Presidio, Pash was in charge of counter-intelligence for the Ninth
Army Corps here on the West Coast. Oppie also knew that his first name was Boris, of all things. Although San Francisco-born, the teenager then known as Boris Fedorovich Pashkovsky had spent the First World War in Moscow with his father, a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. When the civil war broke out after the Bolsheviks seized power and denounced the church, eighteen-year-old Boris had joined the White Army to fight them. His hatred of Communists, Oppie had heard, bordered on the pathological.

  Pash rose from behind the desk Johnson had used yesterday; the young lieutenant had taken a creaky wooden chair by a filing cabinet. “This is a pleasure,” Pash said, extending his hand. “I don’t mean to take much of your time.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” said Oppie, enduring the crushing grip. “Whatever time you choose.”

  Pash sat back down and motioned for Oppie to take the vacant chair, a twin of the one Johnson was on, in front of the desk. Oppie did so, balancing his hat on a knobby knee.

  “Mr. Johnson told me about the little conversation you had yesterday,” Pash said. “It’s had me worried ever since he called.”

  Oppie’s meeting with his ex-grad student had not gone well. “I wanted to tell him that he’d been foolish. Some people might have been embarrassed to be confronted thus but, to put it bluntly, he doesn’t seem capable of being embarrassed, so—”

  Pash was frowning. “What are you talking about?”

  “Rossi Lomanitz. He was—”

  “I’m not interested in him,” said Pash with a dismissive gesture. “There’s something more serious. Mr. Johnson said there was a possibility that some other ... entities were interested in our work here?”

  Oppie felt his heart move in his chest, and his mouth was suddenly dry. “Oh, I have no firsthand knowledge that would be useful.”

  “But you had heard something concerning a chemist named George C. Eltenton?”

  Oppie hadn’t supplied the middle initial; clearly, some work had already been done. “Well, yes, apparently Eltenton had, um, had indicated that he was in a position to transmit, without danger of a leak or scandal, any, ah, technical information that one might supply.”

  “Indicated to whom?”

  Oppie fished out a cigarette. His hands were shaking as he lit it. “To members of this project.”

  “Did Eltenton approach these project members directly?”

  “No, through an intermediary.” Oppie spoke quickly, trying to move the focus of the conversation. “Now look, to put it quite frankly, I would actually feel friendly to the idea of the Commander in Chief informing the Russians about what we are working on—they’re our allies, after all, fighting the Nazis, too. But I do not feel friendly to the idea of moving information out the back door.”

  Oppie saw Pash jot the word “friendly” followed by an exclamation mark on the pad in front of him, and then he added “back door” below it, circling the term. “Could you give me more specific information about this ... this ‘back door,’ as you call it? You can surely see that the existence of such a thing would be as interesting to me as the whole project is to you.”

  Damn. He stubbed out the cigarette, only half gone, in a green-glass ashtray and lit another, using the bit of theater as a chance to collect his thoughts. “Well,” he said, looking not at Pash but out the window behind him at sun-baked grass, Sather Road, and Wheeler Hall, “the approaches were always to people who were troubled by them. I feel that to give more than the name I’ve already given you—Eltenton—would be to implicate people whose attitude when approached was bewilderment rather than co-operation.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No, no. To go beyond that would be to put names down of people who are not only innocent but whose attitude was one-hundred-percent appropriate.”

  “But they were approached. When? Where? Any information would be helpful.”

  “These incidents occurred on the order of five, six, seven, months ago. There were, um, three cases, and, ah, two of the men were with me at Los Alamos, men very closely associated with me.”

  Irresistible force; immovable object: “All right, Professor. I understand you wanting to protect the innocent who were merely approached. But surely you see the person doing the approaching on Eltenton’s behalf was complicit. Can you give me his name?”

  Oppie’s voice had risen in pitch. “I think that would be a mistake. I have told you who the initiative came from. Anything else would involve people who ought not to be involved.”

  “I really must insist, Professor. This intermediary poses an obvious security risk. I need you to tell me about him.”

  “Well, he’s ... he’s a man whose sympathies are very far left.”

  “Obviously. And ...?”

  Oppie pulled in more smoke, hoping it would calm him. It didn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I would regard it as a low trick to involve someone when I would bet dollars to donuts that he wasn’t really a problem.”

  “With due respect, that’s not your judgment call to make.” Oppie said nothing. “Professor?” His job title had never before sounded quite so menacing.

  Oppie sighed. “He’s a member of the Berkeley faculty but not part of our project. That’s really all I can say.”

  “And he approached these three scientists simultaneously?”

  Three scientists. Fuck. He had said that. “No, no.” Grasping at straws, gasping for air: “They were contacted within a week of each other but not in each other’s presence.”

  Pash steepled his fingers. “Look, Robert—may I call you that? Look, Robert, without your help, we are going to have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to track down this intermediary. As you can imagine, we’ll all be hot under the collar until we find him; this is a very serious thing. So, again, do you suppose you could help me with the name?”

  “The intermediary thought it was the wrong idea to transmit information; I don’t think he supported it.” Rallying some strength now: “In fact, I know he didn’t.”

  “Now, look, Professor—”

  Oppie cut Pash off, and words spilled out of him. “No, you look. You know how difficult the relations are between these two allies, Russia and the United States. Even though our government’s official policy is one of co-operation with Russia, a lot of our secret information—our radar and so on—just doesn’t get to them. But they’re battling for their lives over there—thousands of their boys are dying every day along the Eastern Front—and they’d surely like to have an idea of what is going on here in America. This overture was just to make up for the ... the defects of our official channels, the fact that there are a couple of guys in the State Department who might block such communications. You see? That’s the form in which it was presented to people.”

  Pash had an incredulous expression but said nothing.

  Oppie really wished he could get the pitch of his voice down to normal. “Now, yes, an overture to share information with the Nazis would have a different color—”

  “Not in my book,” said Pash.

  “—but, even so, I’m sure everyone approached decided that back-door communication with the Russians should not be taking place. No one would have provided Eltenton with what he wanted. It is treasonable.”

  “It most certainly is,” said Pash. “Now, I am not persistent, but—”

  “You are persistent ... and it is your duty. But I take my duty seriously, too. I feel responsible for every detail of this sort of thing down at Site Y, and I will say that everything is one-hundred-percent in order there; that’s the truth.” Oppie pointed in the direction of Le Conte Hall, where Lawrence had his office. “That doesn’t go for this place up here, which is why I came to see Lomanitz, but I would be perfectly willing to be shot if I had done anything wrong.”

  Pash made another note on his pad. “Oh, I doubt it will come to that.”

  Chapter 7

 
; The [Oppenheimer] I had known was gentle and wise, a devoted friend, the soul of honor, a student, a humanist, a free spirit, a man dedicated to truth, to justice, passionately concerned with human welfare, and emotionally and intellectually committed to the ideal of a socialist society.

  —Haakon Chevalier

  “Thank you for coming, Robert. Have a seat.”

  “My pleasure, General.” Leslie Groves had his own office here at Los Alamos, reserved for his frequent trips from Washington. It had a picture of President Roosevelt on one wall, a giant Mercator map of the world covering most of another, and, on his desk, angled enough that Oppie could see it, a photo of the general’s wife, twenty-year-old namesake son, and fifteen-year-old daughter.

  “Robert, I think you know that I trust you; I’ve put enormous faith in you.”

  “I’m very grateful, General.”

  “And I suspect you’re attentive enough to realize that not everyone approved of my choice of you as director of this facility. Some of your ... previous associations, you understand.”

  Oppie had heard much more than that. His employment history included no administrative positions at all; he’d never even been a university department head. When he’d gotten this assignment at Los Alamos, many had been stunned. One of his colleagues at Berkeley had muttered he didn’t think Oppie could even run a hamburger stand. “So I’ve gathered.”

  “But I was sure I was right then,” said Groves, “and I’m sure I’m right now. You’re the best person for the job.” He chuckled. “Don’t let Colonel Nichols know I said that; he thinks I’m chary when it comes to praising—” there was a slight pause, giving a hint of emphasis to the next word, which otherwise was spoken in Groves’s normal gruff tone “—subordinates.”

  “Thank you,” said Oppie, stiffly; the lines were being drawn.

  “And, you know, it’s been fifteen months since we first met, you and I, and look at what we’ve accomplished.” He lifted and spread his arms, a gesture Robert took to encompass the entire mesa.