Kitty’s tone was fierce. “I’m a scientist, too, damn it.”
Oppie held his tongue. She’d been becoming a scientist, true, and had been a lab assistant for a biology professor before the war, but she still had no Ph.D. Of course, the years they’d spent at Los Alamos had afforded no opportunity for her to continue work toward that degree. But her science was ...
“Botany,” Robert said.
“Yes, damn it. Botany. It’s as much a science as physics—more, actually, if you count the unsolved mysteries. How life began—plants came before animals, remember. How genetic information is encoded and passed from one generation to the next. Precisely how plants turn sunlight into food. I wish botany could be reduced to a handful of particles and a few laws.”
“All right,” said Oppie. “Point taken. But the I.A.S. has no department devoted to any sort of natural history.”
“I don’t care. I suffered through Los Alamos without knowing what the fuck was going on. If we’re moving to this vaunted Institute of yours—if we’re going down this goddamn road again—then I demand to be in the know. You tell me everything, and I have an active role. Back on the mesa, you made Charlotte Serber a group leader, for Christ’s sake.”
That was true. Charlotte had been the only female one, by virtue of her position as site librarian. She’d had no special qualification for that job; Oppie could have as easily given it to Kitty, but he’d wanted Kitty to take the—to him—even more important public role of director’s wife.
“I spent three damn years on that hilltop,” Kitty continued. Oppie’s first thought was that it had only been thirty-one months. His second was that out of those, she’d disappeared for three months after Toni had been born, meaning, for her, it was closer to two years than three. But he said nothing. There weren’t going to be any more babies—they’d agreed on that and, unlike before their marriage, were now taking precautions—so hopefully depression would never hit her so hard again.
He thought once more of Casablanca. They’d sat together at that screening in the Los Alamos camp theater, holding hands after they’d finished the slightly burnt popcorn. She was part of his work, the thing that kept him going. And, unlike Rick and Ilsa, where he was going she could follow—and what he had to do she could be part of.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll tell you all of it; everything.”
Her mica-dark eyes went wide as if she hadn’t expected to win this fight. “Well, then,” she said, moving over to the hotel-room’s couch and sitting with arms crossed in front of her chest, “go ahead.”
Oppie nodded. “Give me a minute. I’m going to need a drink, too.”
Three martinis later, she knew everything he did. He’d paced and smoked while telling her; she’d been on the couch the whole time, letting him refill glasses as necessary.
“And this is what you want to devote years to?” she asked. “Some fool’s errand? How can you possibly succeed?”
Oppie finally sat down on the sofa, but there was a distance between them. “I don’t know. I have no idea. But it’s a sweet problem, isn’t it? If there were a straightforward solution, it ...”
He stopped himself, realizing he was echoing what Edward Teller had said back in the summer of ’42 at that first meeting of the Luminaries: “An atomic-fission bomb,” he’d announced, “is straightforward; your grad students could make one. But a bomb based on nuclear fusion? That is a challenge worthy of us.”
But no. Building a fusion bomb wasn’t worthy then and it wasn’t now. But this—this!—was. Rabi had said years ago that he didn’t want the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a bomb. But outwitting the sun, outwitting nature, outwitting God himself, surely that was fitting. He lifted his shoulders slightly. “I’m going to do this.”
“But why?”
“‘O Arjuna, perform your duty with equipoise. The sacrifice made as a matter of duty by those who desire no reward is of the nature of goodness.’”
“The fucking Gita, again? Robert, we’re talking about your—our—future.”
He looked up. “Yes. Yes, we are. And our son’s, and our daughter’s, and their children’s, too.”
Kitty seemed to consider this and, when she spoke again, her voice was calmer. “True. And ... and maybe I ...”
She said nothing more, but Oppie could read it in her face: Maybe I do owe them something. She couldn’t give Peter or Toni love or affection—neither could he, really—but she could help give them a future. “All right,” she said. “I’m in.”
Oppie was surprised at how good this felt. “Excellent. And, I promise, you will fully participate.”
Kitty took a sip of her drink and stared out the hotel room’s window at a chiaroscuro Manhattan. But when she turned her eyes back to Oppie she startled him; she’d obviously been recalling the same night at the movies he’d been thinking about a while ago. “Louie,” she said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Chapter 27
Hell, this is a mecca for intellectuals, and we were reading in the New York Times every day that Oppenheimer was the greatest intellectual in the world. Of course we wanted him—then.
—Anonymous I.A.S. faculty member
In the 1939-1940 academic year, I.I. Rabi had been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, so he knew the place better than Oppenheimer did. At Einstein’s behest, he’d come to Princeton now to help Oppie get oriented, although Rabi intended to keep his home base at Columbia, an hour and a half away.
Frank Aydelotte had originally intended to stay on as I.A.S. director until June 30, 1946, the magic date that would entitle him to a full pension. But he’d been persuaded to step down sooner in exchange for a guarantee that his retirement stipend wouldn’t be reduced; as Einstein had said, they couldn’t let a prize replacement such as Oppenheimer slip through their fingers by delaying. Even so, Aydelotte would not be out of the actual director’s office until January 31. Until then, Oppenheimer was situated in room 118 and didn’t have a secretary, and so, with no warning except a perfunctory knock, his door swung wide open.
“General!” exclaimed Oppie, his face splitting in an affectionate grin. “What are you doing here?” He and Rabi had been talking, pipes aglow, while standing by the small room’s single window, gazing out at the snow-covered grounds.
“Oh, Washington isn’t that far,” said Groves, shouldering his way into the room, followed by Ken Nichols. Both were wearing civilian clothes. “And I heard you were here.” He looked at the other man. “Dr. Rabi,” he said, mispronouncing the name as if it were the word for a Jewish cleric rather than a homonym of Robby. They’d met only a few times, when their infrequent visits to Los Alamos happened to coincide—most significantly five and a half months ago for the Trinity test. “Perhaps you know my assistant, Colonel Nichols?”
Rabi nodded at the younger man. “Colonel, good morning. And good morning to you, General.” Oppenheimer noticed that the professor’s tone was wary. Rabi clearly suspected that Groves had an ulterior motive—a thought that hadn’t even occurred to Oppie. There was some antipathy between the two men: Rabi along with Bob Bacher had convinced Oppenheimer that Groves’s notion of making Los Alamos a military laboratory, with scientists commissioned and given ranks, would never work since too many good men would refuse to participate under such circumstances.
“Dr. Rabi,” the general said, “I’m counting on your discretion. You’re still subject to the same security oath you took for your work on radar and that pertained when you visited Site Y.” Groves, chilled from being outdoors, rubbed his hands together. “Let’s have seats.” There were three chairs in the room: two bare-bones wooden ones and a leather-padded executive’s chair. Groves helped himself to the latter and swiveled it to face the scientists, who took the other two. Nichols stood near Groves, his bespectacled face impassive.
; “I’m sure you remember,” Groves said to Robert, “how Richard Feynman liked to pick safes at Los Alamos, and how he took delight in slipping out through the perimeter fence and then startling the gate guards by coming back in without ever having logged out. Made it look like we were quite incompetent in matters of security, no? Except we weren’t—and we aren’t. If you’ll forgive the expression, gentlemen, we have it down to a science. I won’t say that I know everything that’s going on, but Colonel Nichols and I have got a very good idea now.”
“Have you bugged my apartment?” said Rabi, his face reddening. “I know that the F.B.I. is playing foolish games these days, but if you’ve done it, General, by God, I’ll go straight to the president and—”
“Relax, Doctor. No, we haven’t. We have no reason to. Oh, you had a brief flirtation with socialist ideas in your youth, but unlike our friend here, you had the good sense to stay clear of all that Commie garbage for decades now.” Groves looked at Robert. “You, on the other hand, have attracted a lot of attention. Did you know that J. Edgar Hoover sent a summary of your file to the president and the secretary of state on November fifteenth? Thank God I was alerted and so the bugging of your hotel room in Manhattan was handled by my office instead of Hoover’s. So far, only Colonel Nichols, myself, and two others at the M.E.D. have heard the tapes or read the transcripts, and Hoover knows nothing of ...” Groves paused; he was clearly aware that both Robert and Rabi were wondering exactly how much he had sussed out. “... of the impending photospheric ejection and the subsequent destruction of our planet.”
Oppie exhaled a giant cloud of smoke. Christ, he’d told Kitty everything in that hotel suite. And, of course, Groves would have understood even the technical matters. As he’d famously said to Szilard three years ago, “That’d be the equivalent of about two Ph.D.’s, wouldn’t it?”
“General,” said Rabi, “for all the same reasons I articulated in 1943, this can’t be a military undertaking.”
“Relax. I’ve no intention of putting people in uniform, not now that the war is over. But you’re going to need me and everything I have access to. For instance, Dr. Rabi, there’s no reason you should have heard about them, but were you aware of the Alsos missions?”
Rabi sounded irritated. “No.”
Groves leaned back in the swivel chair. Oppie, feeling a need to pace, got up and returned to the window, coolness radiating from the glass, the view outside framed with ice. “There were three of them,” Groves said. “They followed right behind our Allied troops. The first went into Italy; the second, France; and the third, at last, into Germany itself. Their purpose was to determine how far along the Nazis were in developing an atomic bomb of their own.”
“Ah,” said Rabi.
“Do you know what ‘Alsos’ means?”
Oppie spoke up even though Groves was still looking at Rabi. “It’s Greek for ‘grove.’”
The General turned to him. “Exactly. I didn’t choose the name—G-2 did—and I didn’t like it, but it was indeed a reference to me. I was in charge of the missions, and your friend Boris Pash led them.”
Pash. It’d been over two years since the lieutenant colonel had grilled Oppie at Berkeley about who George Eltenton’s intermediary had been. Robert knew the third Alsos mission had entered Germany late in February of this year, but he’d been too busy racing to get the bomb finished to pay much attention. He’d had only a vague awareness when the mission was underway and no idea that Pash had gone overseas.
Groves made a gesture toward Nichols who reached into the inside pocket of his civilian suit jacket and pulled out a piece of beige paper; Oppie recognized the general’s handwriting with its tall ascenders. Nichols handed the sheet to Groves.
“Do Jews make Christmas lists?” the general asked. “No, I don’t suppose they do. Well, they’re lists of things you might like to receive as presents, see? Let’s just say I took the liberty of drawing one up for you, Robert. A little late, I know, but still.” Groves held up the paper and Oppie strode over to take it. It consisted of ten surnames, one per line:
Bagge
Diebner
Gerlach
Hahn
Harteck
Heisenberg
Korsching
von Laue
von Weizsäcker
Wirtz
German physicists. Two he knew personally from his time at Göttingen: Werner Heisenberg, who’d gone on to win the 1932 Nobel Prize for the creation of quantum mechanics, and Otto Hahn, who had been named the 1944 winner of the chemistry Nobel for his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei.
“What about them?” said Oppie, handing the list to the still-seated Rabi so he could have a look, too.
“We have them,” said Groves. “We have them all. Oh, they’re in England right now, at a place called Farm Hall, but they’re under my jurisdiction—and they will be for another five days. On January third, they’re to be repatriated, part of the post-war reconstruction of Germany. Unless ...”
“Yes?” said Rabi.
“Unless you want any of them.” He looked at one scientist and then the other. “We don’t have time to debate this, gentlemen. Our window is closing. Once they’re back in Germany, they’re lost for good.” He crossed his arms in front of his giant chest. “This is why you need the government, the military, me. Take your pick. As long as they’re still in custody, I can order them sent anywhere I want—anywhere you want.”
“My God,” said Oppie. He turned to Rabi.
I.I. turned both eyes on the general. “You’re serious?”
But before Groves could answer, Oppie chimed in. “He’s always serious.”
“Well, goodness,” said Rabi, “I mean, of course we could use Heisenberg. And—heavens!—imagine having Otto Hahn!”
“Carl von Weizsäcker, too,” said Oppie. Groves looked at him questioningly. “He’s an expert on stellar fusion. Before the war, he was collaborating with Hans Bethe on that very topic. If we’ve got any hope of preventing the photospheric purge, or even just pinning down precisely when it will occur, we need him.”
“Done, done, and done,” said Groves, a satisfied smirk on his face. He took the sheet back from Rabi, swiveled to face the nearby desk, and, with a fountain pen retrieved from his pocket, put bold check marks next to the three names. “Anyone else you want?”
“Not especially from that list,” said Oppie. He looked at Rabi, who nodded his concurrence.
“From anywhere—well, at least anywhere outside Russia or China.”
“George Volkoff,” replied Oppie. His own interest in astrophysics had been kindled by a talk Volkoff had given entitled “The Source of Stellar Energy” at Berkeley in 1937.
“He’s at the Montreal laboratory,” supplied Nichols.
“I know that,” snapped Groves. “Get the R.C.A.F. to fly him down here.”
“And,” said Oppie, “we should try again for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.”
“Who?” asked Nichols, who was now jotting things into a small notebook.
“An Indian-born physicist,” said Oppie. “Been at the University of Chicago since ’37. Everyone calls him Chandra for short—well, everyone but his students; they have to graduate before he lets them do that. Anyway, just write that: C-H-A-N-D-R-A.”
“Is he with you at the Met Lab?” asked Nichols, looking at Rabi.
But it was Groves who answered. “No. Robert wanted him out at Los Alamos, but he refused to work either place.”
“Chandra’s an atheist,” Oppie said, “but he was raised Hindu. He found our goal ... unpalatable. But now perhaps he’ll feel differently.” He’d seen Groves frown at the mention of atheism. “He really is one of us: ‘Subrahmanyan’ is Sanskrit for ‘Luminary.’”
“And he’s a world-leading expert on stellar physics,” added Rabi. “The Oppenheimer-Volkoff limi
t is a lovely companion to the Chandrasekhar limit: the former gives the maximum possible size of a neutron star; the latter, the maximum for a white dwarf.”
“All right,” said the general. “We’ll get him.”
Oppie looked at Nichols, then Rabi, then Groves. “And speaking of people from Chicago—”
“Fermi,” said Groves, bunching his chins together as he nodded. “No problem. If we can’t arm-twist the University of Chicago to cover his salary, I still have an open budget at the M.E.D. Anyone else from there?”
“Wigner, too,” said Rabi, indicating that Nichols should write down that name as well.
“And ...” began Oppie.
Groves looked at him. “Yes?”
“And Szilard.”
“For God’s sake, Robert.”
“He’s already in this,” Oppie said. “Hell, he’s the reason we’re getting to headquarter everything here in Princeton. Plus, no one has a more nimble interdisciplinary mind. And no one is more committed to saving the world.”
“And no one is a bigger pain in the butt,” said Groves.
“And yet—”
“And yet nothing, Robert. No Szilard—no way, no how. Not ever.”
Chapter 28
The physicist has become a military asset of such value that only with the assurance of peace will society permit him to pursue in his own quiet way the scientific knowledge which inspires, elevates, and entertains his fellow men.
—I.I. Rabi
“They’re squeezing me out,” said Edward Teller, and then with a bitterness he rarely gave voice to, he added, “again.”
Mici Teller sat beside her husband on the threadbare couch in their Los Alamos home. They’d never rated a place on Bathtub Row, although with so many people abandoning the mesa, Mici had suggested they put in their name for one of the inevitable vacancies. But Edward could be the very embodiment of inertia; he simply didn’t want to move. “Who is?” she asked.
The Oppenheimer Alternative Page 18