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Question: What is an optimist? Answer: One who thinks the future is uncertain.
—Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard, still cherubic at forty-four, had been warned about this visit. General Leslie Groves was coming to the Metallurgical Laboratory, the drab code name given to the facility at the University of Chicago that studied the fissionable elements uranium and plutonium. The man who’d been merely a colonel days ago had apparently leveraged a promotion to go along with being appointed head of—what the hell were they calling the overall bomb effort now? Ah, yes: “The Manhattan Engineer District.”
Leo suspected he’d soon have some obscure code name himself. His preference would be “Martian Number One.” Enrico Fermi, who believed the universe should be teeming with intelligent life, had exhorted Leo to explain the absence of these advanced visitors, which, for lack of a generic term, Enrico had taken to calling “Martians.” Leo had quipped, “Oh, we are here—but we call ourselves Hungarians.”
Szilard had already bestowed nicknames on others, which he mostly kept to himself. His largely platonic girlfriend Trude, a dozen years younger, was “Kind,” the German for “child.” Eugene Wigner, a fellow Martian, was “Pineapple Head,” in honor of his oddly prolate noggin. And he’d decided the best name for this general who had burst into their seminar room in Eckart Hall was “Bumpy,” commemorating both his lumpy exterior and his bumptious nature. Leo couldn’t fault a person for being overweight; his own fondness for pastries and rich sauces had made him, as Trude affectionately chided from time to time, more than a little rotund. But a man’s clothes should fit, for God’s sake, and this blustering martinet’s jacket seemed at least one size too small.
The general and his military aide had been brought to see this group—the Met Lab’s fifteen most-senior scientists—by Arthur Holly Compton, the jutting-jawed director of the laboratory. The seminar room was large and luxurious with built-in glass-fronted bookcases, plush maroon leather furniture, and two blackboards, one wall-mounted and another that had been wheeled in. A central mahogany table was strewn with papers, dog-eared journals, and coffee mugs.
Thirty-two-year-old Luis Alvarez, lanky and intense, was trying to answer the general’s slew of questions by writing equations on the built-in blackboard, but that oaf had the gall to interrupt him. “Just a second, young man. In the third equation, you’ve got the exponent as ten-to-the-minus-five, but then it magically becomes ten-to-the-minus-six on the next line.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” replied Alvarez sheepishly, rubbing out the mistake with his thumb and writing in the correct value. “Slip of the chalk.”
“That raises a question,” Groves said to the whole group. “Your estimates for how much fissionable material you’ll need—how accurate are they?”
Leo, with his shoeless feet propped up on a vacant chair, shrugged slightly. “Within a factor of ten.”
“A factor of ten!” exploded Groves. “That’s idiotic! That’s like telling a wedding caterer to prepare for a hundred guests when the real number could be anywhere from ten to a thousand. No engineer can work with sloppy figures like that.”
“General ...” said Leo, giving him his newfound title in hopes of placating the brute, “you have to understand—”
“No,” snapped Groves. “All of you have to understand. This isn’t a theoretical project; it’s a practical one. I have to build actual working bombs.” He took a deep breath then let it out loudly. “Now, you lot may think engineers are just technicians”—Leo had the good sense not to interject—“and you may know that I don’t have a Ph.D. Colonel Nichols here has one, but I don’t. But let me tell you that I had ten years of formal education after I entered college—ten full years. I didn’t have to make a living or give up time for teaching. I just studied. That’d be the equivalent of about two doctorates, wouldn’t it?”
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.”