Would that really happen? Would such a small cause propagate out to such large effects? Johnny Von Neumann’s massive I.A.S. computer, originally built to perfectly predict the weather, had failed utterly in that task. No matter how much detail Von Neumann provided to his machine, it was never enough: tiny, unaccounted-for factors really did quickly randomize atmospheric conditions. The macroscopic universe wasn’t Newton’s deterministic clockwork, and it wasn’t the indeterminate blur that quantum theory might have suggested. Rather, reality was something else again: it was, as Teller had said of Oppie years ago, complicated and confused.
Or, in a single word, it was chaotic.
The Arbor Project scientists had obviously succeeded. Assuming all had gone as planned, they made—would make, had made—their first changes near the end of the Dark Ages, in the year A.D. 945—or, as Dick Feynman liked to call it, 1000 A.A., for ante atomum. Next year, the one that had been 1945, would now be Year One, and all subsequent years, in this new system, would be designated P.A., for post atomum.
But regardless of the numbering scheme used, nothing had been altered in this rewritten reality until well after the Sumerians had named the drop of blood in the night sky Nergal in honor of their god of plague and war. Mesopotamians saw a red light, too, declaring it to be the star that judged the dead. The ancient civilizations of East Asia saw “the fire star,” and the Greeks and Romans, likewise detecting a sanguinary spot in the firmament, identified it with their respective gods of war, Ares and—the name that finally stuck, the one eventually used by everyone—Mars.
Progress would have been slow, and, from a distance, invisible until very late in the game. A millennium ago, in what would someday come to be known as Tunguska, Siberia, a launch facility would be built, safe in the knowledge that the explosion of an in-falling meteor in 1908 would obliterate all traces of it. From that site, Teller’s super bombs would have been lobbed at the Martian polar caps, liberating the carbon dioxide there. Next, Mars would have been seeded with the cyanobacteria needed to produce oxygen. A giant magnetic parasol at the sun-Mars L1 point, designed by Hans Bethe’s Patient Power group and held steady with occasional rocket bursts supplied by von Braun’s team, would keep the planet safely trailing in its magnetotail, shielded from the normal solar wind that otherwise would have kept stripping off Mars’s steadily thickening and increasingly more breathable atmosphere. Processes set in play a millennium ago would bear fruit—yes, God damn it, literally bear fruit!—in time for humanity to regain the garden.
In 1610, when Galileo became the first person to look at Mars through a telescope, six centuries of transformation had already occurred on that world. But the weak, imperfect lenses in his scope—not to mention the weak, imperfect ones of his own eyes—revealed nothing different than if the Martian soil and sky had remained untouched.
Time marches on, though, and eventually small changes do have big, lasting impacts. When Giovanni Schiaparelli initially looked at Mars through a twenty-two-centimeter telescope in A.D. 1877, Robert Oppenheimer’s father Julius was already six years old, and his mother Ella—the cradle robber, as her family would later joke—had just turned eight. And when Percival Lowell published Mars and its Canals and Mars as the Abode of Life, some thirty years later, Robert Oppenheimer was a precocious toddler.
And so, yes, that the fourth planet from the sun now appeared emerald not ruby, green not red, was as yet of little consequence. Oh, it leant more credence to Lowell’s observations, and to H.G. Wells’s other famous novel and the radio drama Orson Welles had produced from it, but, by and large, the events of the first half of the twentieth century had unfolded in this new reality as they had in the old one it now superseded. The Wright brothers took flight in 1903. Einstein enjoyed his miracle year of physics successes in 1905. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 plunged Europe into war for four gory years. The rise to power of a failed painter and psychopathic madman precipitated an even longer, even larger, even more barbarous conflict two decades later. Whatever effect that pinprick of celestial light, appearing smaller than the smallest butterfly, had on human affairs, the tides of fascism and Nazism, of politics and patriotism, swelled and ebbed much the same way, and, as Wells would have it, with infinite complacency men had still gone to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.
But in the middle of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment: the realization that the sun, which had shone so steadily, was bound to expel its outer surface in an incinerating sphere that would take out rocky Mercury and silver Venus and earth with its wars and so little peace and earth’s craggy dead moon, but would leave intact the planet that Oppie alone remembered as having been red but now shone green.
And so: The Arbor Project.
And so: Project Orion.
And so: Mariner IV, and the first close-up photograph of the Martian surface, and the—
Oppie imagined the scene as it was now bound to unfold: the elation, the joy. The black-and-white pictures painstakingly decoded from numerical data showing—
There could be no doubt.
A river, with dark patches along both banks, its waters flowing into a circular lake, the surface of which was dappled by sunlight.
The Mars of Schiaparelli, of Lowell, of Wells and Welles. Or, at least, a close approximation of it. Waterways, to be sure, and the dimmer areas could be—should be—must be—vegetation.
It was there, the second home humanity needed. Yes, they could have simply (simply!) used time travel to move great batches of humans back into the past, but that would buy only a reprieve not a pardon: no matter what they did, earth would be destroyed before the middle of the twenty-first century. And, anyway, swarms of post-atomic humans in the time of Newton, or Julius Caesar, or Tutankhamen, or Zinjanthropus would chaotically disrupt things, making it impossible to predict how the subsequent centuries or millennia would be rewritten.
Instead, in this revised reality, thanks to Stanislaw Ulam’s original idea for atomic-bomb-propelled space vessels, and Freeman Dyson’s development of that notion, and Edward Teller’s super technology, and the brilliant breakthrough of Richard Feynman and Kurt Gödel, and the organizational acumen of one J. Robert Oppenheimer, the key to survival would be time travel combined with—what to call it? Ah, but there already was a term, coined by the science-fiction writer Jack Williamson working in New Mexico some five years prior to and two hundred miles east of the Trinity blast, a bull’s-eye in cosmic terms: “terraforming,” engineering on a planetary scale, remaking an existing world into a form suitable for life from earth.
The Arbor Project would approach world leaders in the 1960s with word of the impending disaster and beg an exception to the test-ban treaty: there was a second earth waiting, as any decent observatory could now confirm, and they did have the means to get millions or billions of people to it. Forget von Braun’s V-rockets and their paltry capacity. These arks would be Orion vessels, pulsing their way to the green planet, pushed along by necklaces of fusion explosions—an apt, poetic solution to the solar crisis, fighting fire with fire.
#
“This is my bench.”
Robert Oppenheimer had fallen asleep. He woke to the words and saw the form of a man leaning over him, black against black, a void against the Milky Way like the one his calculations predicted might be formed by the death of a sufficiently massive star.
“Sorry?” said Oppie—not an apology but rather a request for a repetition.
“I said, this is my bench. I sleep here. Everyone knows that.” The man’s voice was rough, uncultured, but not angry.
“I’m new to the park,” said Oppie. “I didn’t know.”
“There’s another bench right there,” the man said, and Oppie could dimly make out that he was pointing. “’Course, that used to be Big Jimbo’s bench, but he passed away just before Christ
mas.”
“I see,” said Oppie. He struggled to sit.
“Guys like us, we pass away in the park all the time. City comes and collects the bodies.”
Oppie nodded. “So I’ve heard.”
“But you gotta have your place in the world, right? And this one is mine.” He reached down to help Oppie get up. “My God, bub, you’re skin and bones.” The man walked him the few feet to the other bench. “Here. Just as comfy—hah!”
“Thank you,” said Oppie, lying down.
“You don’t look like you’re long for this world.”
“No, I’m not.”
“That’s a nice hat. Can I have it when you’re gone?”
“Sure.”
“Hot dog!” declared the man, and that made Robert smile. “My name’s Ben. What’s yours?”
Oppie thought about how to reply. The last thing he wanted was for someone to identify him to the police after he was gone—what a mess that would create! He could just say “Robert” or “Bob,” and leave it at that. Or—and this tickled him—he could give his name as Arjuna, the prince from the Bhagavad Gita who had questioned the morality of a great war and had been persuaded by Krishna of the conflict’s inevitability and his obligation to do his duty.
But, in the end, he told the truth. “My friends call me Oppie.”
He heard Ben settling in on his own bench. “Unusual name—but strikes me you’re an unusual fellow.”
“I suppose I am.”
Oh, irony, my old friend—come for one last visit, have you? He’d talked Jean out of suicide, tonight at least, but now he was about to kill himself. Yet this was different; it really was. Whereas her life had just begun, his was going to end soon anyway, and he was tired of the pain, tired of the struggle. Since there was now no way to go back to where he’d come from, tonight, with Ben for company, seemed a fine time to let go. Yes, there’d be no corpse to be cremated in 1967, but covering that up would be trivial among the clandestine tasks performed by members of the Arbor Project. And if people, bringing an end to his story, followed the instruction in his will and tossed an urn supposedly holding his remains into the sea, he hoped they would remember to weigh it down with sand.
Oppie still had the oval capsule, the size of a pea, that General Groves had given him in 1943; it had lived for years in a locked cupboard at Olden Manor, but he’d brought it along on this, his final voyage. It took most of a minute in the cold for his stick-like fingers to dig out the small hinged tin container, to remove the capsule—its rubber covering having long since cracked and fallen away—and to maneuver it with a dry tongue between his decaying teeth.
Potassium cyanide, like that which he’d painted on the apple he’d left for Patrick Blackett in 1925—long ago even when reckoning from here in 1944; even longer from 1967.
An apple. Forbidden knowledge. But there was no such thing in science. If it was knowable, it had to be known. And although the technical problems were often sweet, they were sweetest when they were solved.
Time, he knew, for his final utterance. “Good night, Ben,” he said, the words slightly muffled as he continued to gently clamp his molars down on the thin-walled glass ampoule. “Let us hope for a better tomorrow—and a better world.”
“Sleep well, Oppie.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer, his duty done, clenched his jaw. He found the green planet once more in the sky and let it be his last sight, a beacon of hope and salvation, before he closed his eyes for good.
Bibliography
In creating this novel, I found three websites indispensable: the Atomic Heritage Foundation (atomicheritage.org), Voices of the Manhattan Project (manhattanprojectvoices.org), and Alex Wellerstein’s Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog (blog.nuclearsecrecy.com).
In addition, I relied on the following books:
The Manhattan Project and the Atomic Age
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Powers, Thomas. Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb. Penguin, London, 1994.
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———. The Physics of the Manhattan Project, Third Edition. Springer, Berlin, 2015.
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J. Robert Oppenheimer
Banco, Lindsey. The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City IA, 2016.
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———. The Scientist as Rebel. New York Review of Books, New York, 2006.
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Kunetka, James W. The General and the Genius. Regnery, Washington DC, 2015 [Leslie R. Groves, J. Robert Oppenheimer].
———. Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1982.
Mason, Richard. Oppenheimer’s Choice: Reflections from Moral Philosophy. State University of New York Press, Albany, New York, 2006.
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