The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  “It is remarkable.”

  “And in all that time, I’ve never once given you an order, Robert. You know that.”

  The general, son of a Presbyterian army chaplain, didn’t smoke, and Oppie tried to respect that by not indulging often in his presence, but he felt the need growing. “True.”

  “So, please, Robert, don’t make me do so now. I’m asking you, man to man. We need to know the name of the intermediary you mentioned to Lieutenant Johnson and Colonel Pash. The colonel’s people have done a lot of digging, and they’ve come up with a list of likely candidates. I’m going to hand you this list, and I’m hoping you will circle the name of the one who was Eltenton’s go-between.” He rotated a sheet of paper in front of him a half turn and slid it across the steel desktop.

  The first name was Joseph Weinberg, one of Oppie’s favorite ex-students; eight other names were listed below Joe’s, one per line—colleagues all. Oppie looked up from the page. “General, in good conscience, I simply can’t.”

  “I’m asking you as a friend, Robert.”

  “And I’m replying as one.”

  “All right, then.” Groves took a deep breath and let it out noisily. “All right.” He locked his gaze on Oppie. “Dr. Oppenheimer, I order you to reveal the name.”

  Oppie closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Hoke, he knew, had repeatedly read Victor Hugo in the original French; he’d understand that you couldn’t let an innocent man take your place.

  “Chevalier,” he said, very softly.

  “Who?” snapped Groves.

  “Haakon Chevalier.”

  Groves pulled back the paper and grabbed a pen. “Spell it.”

  He spelled both names, and the general printed them in capital letters. “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s not a scientist. He teaches French literature.”

  “Good grief,” said Groves. “No wonder they couldn’t find him.”

  “Also,” said Robert, “he’s taken a leave from the university. I honestly don’t know where he is now, but I’m sure he was against all this.”

  “‘Chevalier,’” said Groves, reading his own note. “So, not an American?”

  “Actually, he was born in New Jersey.”

  “Good.”

  “Oh?”

  “American subject,” said Groves. “American justice.”

  Oppie felt his gut clenching. He rose. The general looked up at him, surprised, then barked, “Dismissed”—one last twist of the knife.

  #

  The following week a letter arrived for Oppie, addressed, as all mail for those on the mesa was, to P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The postmark, canceling the three-cent stamp, was New York. The envelope, as usual, had been opened.

  Oppie slipped the two typed pages out and unfolded them. His heart kicked his sternum. It was from Haakon Chevalier and began, “Dear Opje.” Robert had acquired his nickname in 1928, when he was twenty-four, during the term he’d spent at the University of Leiden, and his friends of long standing continued to use the Dutch spelling. Oppie read on:

  Are you still in this world? Yes, I know you are, but I am less sure about myself. I am in deep trouble. All my foundations seem to have been knocked out from under me, and I am alone dangling in space, with no ties, no hope, no future, only a past—such as it is. I am close to despair, and in such a moment, I think of you and I wish you were about to talk to.

  Haakon’s first source of woe, he said, was ongoing strife with Barb. His second source was—

  Hoke must have no idea of what had transpired; none. If he had gotten wind of it, if he’d had a clue, his tone would have been harsh, the French professor shouting J’accuse ...! But instead he seemed genuinely perplexed and forlorn. Chevalier wrote that he’d taken a sabbatical and gone to New York in hopes of landing a translating job with the Office of War Information. He’d cooled his heels in the Big Apple for three months waiting for his security clearance to be processed—something that should have been a routine matter—only to have it denied for reasons no one would discuss, mystifying him. In the interim, with no work, he’d exhausted his funds. The letter concluded:

  I don’t know if this will reach you, which is the reason why I do not write you more. I should like to hear from you if you can spare time for the personally human, in these days when the human seems to become depersonalized.

  And then his signature—first name only—the letters leaning, in a way that Robert used to find amusing but could summon no smile for today, to the left.

  Oppie supposed the acid at the back of his throat was what guilt tasted like. With a shaking hand he set the page down, wondering what Schadenfreude Peer de Silva—who must have been briefed by Boris Pash by now—had felt in sending the letter on to Oppie with nary a word struck out.

  Chapter 8

  1944

  I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. 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.

  —Jean Tatlock

  “Can I have a moment, Doctor?”

  Oppie prided himself on being able to recognize anyone he knew by their voice, and the one belonging to this speaker, deep, a tad oleaginous, made his stomach tighten. He swiveled his desk chair around. “Certainly, Captain de Silva.”

  Peer de Silva had the distinction of being the only West Point graduate stationed at Los Alamos; he’d earned the enmity of the scientists not just by censoring their mail but by confiscating their personal cameras, too. In his mid-twenties but with the brittle demeanor of a cynic a half-century older, de Silva was one of those prickly souls who took offense at everything. He’d once burst into a group-leaders’ meeting to complain that a young engineer had had the effrontery to perch on the edge of his desk. Oppie probably shouldn’t have used the tone he had—the one he normally saved for the thickest of undergraduates, the benighted fools who proved there were indeed such things as stupid questions—when he’d snapped back, “In this lab, anybody may sit on anyone’s desk—yours, mine, anyone’s.”

  As he beheld de Silva now, Oppie noted something odd in the man’s bearing. His face—handsome enough but always lifeless, like a Roman statue—was cocked at a strange angle, and his hands were apparently clasped behind his back as if he were willing himself to appear at ease. “I have ... news,” he said, and Oppie noted the small gap where an adjective—good, bad?—had disappeared under a mental stroke of the captain’s thick black marker.

  “And if you share it,” Oppenheimer offered, trying for lightness, “then we’ll both have news.”

  “It’s about your—” The younger man aborted that run and started again. “It concerns Miss Tatlock.”

  Oppie felt his heart begin to race. He knew that the security people were aware of his relationship with Jean; knew that they knew she was, or had been, a member of the Communist Party; and—yes—knew that seven months ago, when he’d taken that unauthorized trip to San Francisco, he’d spent the night with her. A lot of poker was played here on the mesa, but Robert rarely joined in; still, he was conscious that he was being scrutinized for tells. “Yes?” he said as nonchalantly as he could.

  “I figured you’d want to know,” de Silva said. “I’m sorry, sir, but she’s dead.”

  Oppie’s first thought was that this was some ruse, a test, to see if ... if what? He would flout security again? Surely Jean couldn’t be gone. He’d have expected to hear through mutual friends—the Serbers, perhaps—or directly from her father John, now an emeritus professor.

  “Word just came in,” de Silva said as if he’d read the suspicion in Robert’s eyes. “Honestly, sir, it’s true.”

  That it was de Silva breaking the news meant it was the fruit of surveillance. Had her phone been bugged? And, if so, had that jackass Pash ordered it because of Robert’s last visit—hi
s last visit ever, he realized now—to her back in June? Oppie sagged in his chair. Jean was just twenty-nine and had been in good physical health. That meant something like an automobile collision or—

  Good physical health ...

  “Did she k—was it an accident?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but she took her own life.”

  Both legs and arms went numb, and the world blurred in front of him. “Tell me ... tell me the details,” Oppie said, fishing a Chesterfield from a crumpled pack and lighting it.

  “Apparently, she’d agreed to phone her father last night but failed to do so. He went by this morning to check on her and had to break in through a window. He found her body in the bathtub.”

  Robert exhaled smoke and watched it rise toward the ceiling. Thoughts—some inchoate, some in words—percolated through his mind. Last year, he had paid his fifteen cents to see a recent flick called Casablanca in the base theater; he knew full well that the problems of two little people didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But, still, he’d all but abandoned her, except for that one furtive night, since his move to Los Alamos. Had his desertion—his dereliction of duty—led to that complicated, conflicted woman, the only woman he had ever truly loved, taking her life?

  His heart felt like a crumpled-up kraft-paper bag, each expansion of it scratching his innards. He couldn’t talk to Kitty about this, but he had to talk to someone. “Are you as good at keeping secrets as you are at discovering them, Captain?” De Silva opened his mouth to reply, but Oppie raised the hand holding his cigarette. “No, I don’t expect you to answer that. But let me tell you, Miss Tatlock—Jean—is a remarkable girl. In years gone by, we were close to marriage two times, but ...” Oppie trailed off, surprised by the way his throat caught—more than his usual smoker’s cough; a constriction as if his very core were loath to let out the words. “But both times she ... she took a step back.”

  That much he’d say, but no more—not about her ... or about him. She’d retreat each time she realized she was also attracted to women. And yet they shared so much: tastes, interests. And he could hardly fault someone else for being indeterminate, for being uncertain, for being both simultaneously this and that.

  “I’m sorry,” de Silva said, and Oppie chose to accept the words as sincere.

  “She’d wanted to see me before I came here,” Oppie continued, “but I couldn’t, not then. It was three months before I ...”

  “Yes,” said de Silva softly. “I know.”

  “Of course you do.” Oppie nodded curtly. “I am deeply devoted to her. And, yes, as you also surely know, even after my marriage to Kitty, she and I have maintained ...” He stopped, drew a breath. “... did maintain an ... intimate association.”

  Such measured words, Oppie thought. Why couldn’t he just say it, loudly and clearly? He loved Jean, loved her supple mind, loved her passionate convictions, loved her gentle, artistic spirit, loved—

  The wetness on his cheek surprised him, and Oppie lifted his empty hand to wipe the tear away. But another replaced it, joined soon by many more. “Forgive me.”

  De Silva’s voice was gentle. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  But there was. He had failed her. He’d known all about her bouts of depression. They had discussed them often, and he had talked her back from the brink more than once, even at last sharing the one time he’d contemplated taking his own life, in the summer of 1926, whisked to Brittany by his parents after what had seemed to his twenty-two-year-old self a disastrous year socially and scientifically at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. And still, despite his candor, despite his support, despite his love, Jean was gone.

  She had introduced him to the poetry of John Donne, reciting it often from memory. Batter my heart, three-person’d God, she’d say, and now he knew what that truly meant, the trinity he didn’t believe in inflicting a sorrow he was sure would never pass.

  “Well,” said de Silva—a man’s man, a soldier unused to emotional displays—“I should leave you to your work. Again, doctor, my condolences.”

  “Thank you,” Oppie said. De Silva left, gently closing the naked wooden door behind him.

  The tears were coming freely now. He rarely paid much heed to his chronic cough, but the combination of sniffling and hacking was ghastly, and his hand wasn’t steady enough to operate his silver lighter; it kept spitting flame near but not near enough to the tip of his next cigarette. He swiveled his chair to look out the window, but the view of the mesa was as blurry as it was during a thunderstorm, even though it was a cloudless day.

  There was a rap on his inner office door. He didn’t want to see anyone and so he remained quiet. But the door swung open anyway, revealing Bob Serber. “Have you heard ...?” Serber trailed off as Robert swung around and he took in his face, doubtless red and puffy. Bob was silent for a moment, swimming in Oppie’s vision, then: “Can I get you anything? A drink, maybe?”

  Robert snorted, pulling mucous back up his nose. He shook his head. “It’s just awful, isn’t it?” Serber said. “She was so ...” But no single word could encapsulate Jean, and he settled on “sweet,” Oppie’s own favorite description for an irresistible problem in science. Robert nodded, and, after a moment more and with a wan smile, Serber withdrew.

  Oppie sat for a while—it felt like an hour, although his wall clock said it was only fifteen minutes—then got up. His secretary Vera had returned from wherever she’d been when de Silva and Serber had visited, and she, too, could see that he was distraught, but when she asked what was wrong, he simply said he was going for a walk.

  He headed outside and immediately ran into William “Deak” Parsons, the forty-two-year-old head of the ordnance division and second in command here at Los Alamos. “Hey, Oppie,” Deak began, but he, too, clearly saw the pain on Robert’s face. A good Navy man, conservative and tradition-bound, Parsons was often at loggerheads with the freewheeling civilian George Kistiakowsky, who was spearheading a revolutionary implosion-bomb approach. Oppie, hardly in the mood to hear another plea for arbitration, held up a hand before Deak could speak further. “If it’s about explosive lenses, Kisty wins; if it’s anything else, you win.”

  He continued walking and, even with his splayed-foot gate, he felt unsteady on his feet. There was a crème brûlée crust of snow over the frozen mud, and now that he’d finally managed to light up again, the clouds emerging from his mouth were equal parts smoke and condensation. Ashley Pond was frozen, a giant cataract-covered eye staring heavenward.

  He made his way toward the stables, left over from the Los Alamos Ranch School. There were horses for rent here, but Oppie and Kitty, both accomplished riders, each owned their own. He saddled up Chico, his sleek fourteen-year-old chestnut. On a Sunday, when he had hours to kill, Oppie would take the gelding from the east end of Santa Fe west toward the mountain trails. But he didn’t want to bother with off-site security today. Instead, he rode Chico around the perimeter of the mesa, just inside the barbed-wire fence. Getting out to the edge took care, but Oppie was deft, playing Chico like a musical instrument, bringing each hoof down individually in the perfect sequence to negotiate even the roughest terrain.

  They trotted at first as the horse warmed up, then cantered, then, at last, galloped, faster and faster, and faster still, circumnavigating the facility, an electron in an outermost orbit—no, no, a proton hurtling in a cyclotron: building up speed with each lap, wind whipping Chico’s mane, slapping Oppie’s cheeks, flinging tears from his face and wails from his lungs. He urged his mount to even greater velocities, the horse responding with grim conviction, skeletal poplars racing by them as if one could outrun pain, outrun guilt, outrun love.

  Chapter 9

  1945

  I am about the leading theoretician in America. That does not mean the best. Wigner is certainly better and Oppenheimer and Teller probably just as good. But I do more and talk more and that
counts too.

  —Hans Bethe, in a letter to his mother

  As the months wore on, Oppie struggled to keep his emotions private. He was in charge here; everyone looked to him. When he saw Jean’s face in one of the clouds above the mesa, in the swirl of grain on a desktop, in the dreams that came as he tossed and turned each night, he kept the sadness to himself.

  Days bonded into weeks, weeks fused into months, his sorrow, and maybe even his guilt, lessening slowly, but he knew both were asymptotes: they would continue to abate infinitely but could never fully disappear. Still, here, fifteen months after Jean’s passing, he was functioning, and functioning, surely, was the best one could hope for. And so today he did what he usually did, walking down the corridors of the laboratory section, enclosed by its own additional fence; even the MPs were forbidden entrance. There were always sounds here: equipment chugging, pumps whirring, typewriters clattering, and a welter of voices with accents drawn from across two continents.

  And one of those voices—deep, rumbling—came to Oppie louder than the rest. “No, I have not made a mistake!”

  The accent was Hungarian, and the voice was that of Edward Teller; it was coming out of the open door to Teller’s office, just ahead.

  As Oppie closed the distance, he heard Hans Bethe striving for a soothing, reasonable tone. “Well, you were wrong about the sky possibly catching fire.” In 1942, Teller had suggested that a single blast of a fusion bomb, or even a fission one, might ignite all the hydrogen in the oceans or all the nitrogen in the atmosphere, destroying the world. The then-nascent atomic-bomb effort was almost halted after that, but Bethe had shown that Teller had underestimated the radiative-cooling effects that would prevent such catastrophes.

  “One error in three years!” exclaimed Teller. “These figures are correct.” Teller and Bethe had collaborated on a theory of projectile shock-wave propagation before the war, but Teller was miffed with Oppie for having appointed the sturdy Strasbourgian as head of the Theoretical Division instead of him. Bethe laughed easily at himself and others, while Teller brooded and held grudges.