| |
The gravitational deflection of light will prevent the escape of radiation as the star contracts. The star thus tends to close itself off from any communication with a distant observer; only its gravitational field persists.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder
Groves arrived at Oppie’s office in Le Conte Hall accompanied by a colonel with thinning hair and round glasses—“Nichols,” the general called him, and that let Oppie put a face to the name. This was Ken Nichols of the Manhattan Engineer District, whose office in New York had now lent its name to the entire American atomic-bomb effort. The British counterpart was code-named Tube Alloys, and heaven only knew what bland moniker the Soviet undertaking, if there was one, lurked behind.
Groves removed his army jacket, revealing a pressed shirt with crescent moons of sweat on either side. He handed the outer garment to Nichols and said, “Get this dry-cleaned.”
Oppie took a drag on his cigarette. He knew that Nichols had a Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering from Iowa State. Once one received a doctorate, the grad-student lot of being an errand boy traditionally ended—but perhaps, to give him the benefit of the doubt, the general merely wanted privacy. Oppenheimer’s assistant, the shy and lisping Bob Serber, finally granted a job here despite his religion, was working away on the office blackboard. Oppie took the opportunity not only to ensure they were alone but also to reset the karmic balance. “Say, Bob, why don’t you take Dr. Nichols here over to the Faculty Club for a drink? You can leave the dry-cleaning with Becky.”
Oppie caught Nichols’s eye, hoping for a grateful nod. Instead, what he saw on the man’s bespectacled face was anger that Robert had witnessed his petty humiliation. Serber assented as he rubbed his hands together to disperse chalk dust.
Once the other two were gone, Oppie sat on the edge of his desk. The ceiling of the white-walled office consisted of two angled sections joining in a central peak. Groves moved to stand near the far wall, the low roof there making him seem even more imposing. “I saw Ernest Lawrence this morning,” the general rumbled, “and his vaunted Calutron. You know how much uranium-235 he’s managed to separate from 238 so far?”
“None?” ventured Oppie.
“That’s right, none. And I was in Chicago a few days ago. That buffoon Leo Szilard and the rest are still just blue-skying instead of getting down to specifics. I’m knee-deep in physicists, and not one of you seems to understand time.”
Robert admired Szilard’s bounding intellect, but he could certainly see how these two would clash. “Well,” he said, “Einstein wrote FDR in August 1939, urging the development of an atomic bomb. It’s now October of ’42, over three years later, and we’ve barely started on that bomb. I’d say it’s awfully late in the day, General.”
“At last a practical man!” exclaimed Groves. “All right, Mr. Rapid Rupture, tell me: can it be done? Atomic fission?”
Oppie frowned. “It’s a sweet problem. The answer is ...” He paused deliberately for dramatic effect, then, firmly: “Yes.”
Groves nodded, impressed. “How fast?”
“If we maintain a concentrated effort? Two years.”
“Straight answers,” Groves said. “I like that.” He eyed Robert for a moment. “Okay, let’s get this out of the way right now. Are you a member of the Communist Party?”
Oppie had been prepared for that question and kept his tone completely flat as he brushed ash from his cigarette with his pinkie. “No.”
“Have you ever been?”
“No.”
“Your wife was. And your brother Frank.”
“True and true. And you’ll find I’ve supported just about every exleft-wing cause there is, from the Teachers’ Union to the Republicans in Spain over the last few years. But I’ve never belonged to the Communist Party and I’ve left all of those other things behind. There’s work to be done.”
“There is indeed,” said Groves, “and there’s no room for Communists in it.”
“General, I give you my word: I’m not a Communist.” A pause. “I’m an American.”
“That you are,” said Groves. “Born and raised—but so many of these others aren’t. Germans, Hungarians, Italians, you name it. But Americans like you and me? We’re thin on the ground.”
Oppie tipped his head to one side but made no reply.
“All right, Professor, given how much catching up we have to do, how would you get us on track?”
“A central laboratory,” Oppie said, playing his first card. “Get all us scientists together at one location.” And then, laying the trump: “That’d make security a hell of a lot easier.”
But Groves surprised him by not being surprised. “Yes, I’ve been thinking of that. Last month I ordered the acquisition of 59,000 acres in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for uranium processing. Might be a good spot.”
“No, no. It can’t be seen as merely an add-on to an isotope-separation plant. We’re talking about the heart and soul of the bomb effort. It should be a stand-alone facility.”
The general stroked his jaw. “Maybe you’re right. Who would you put in charge?”
“My boss here at Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence, is the logical first choice,” said Oppie, pleased that the general and Lawrence had already clashed over the failure to produce any uranium-235. “Then there’s I.I. Rabi at Columbia, or Edwin McMillan.” But Oppie knew they couldn’t be spared from their secret radar work. He threw out a couple more names, just for appearance’s sake: “Or, from Caltech, Wolfgang Panofsky, say, or Carl Anderson.”
Groves nodded at the mention of Anderson. “He won the Nobel for discovering the positron.”
“True,” said Oppie.
“And that raises a point. As I told those clowns in Chicago, I don’t have a Ph.D., but in this project I have to be the leader of countless people who do. That’s not a problem for me as I made it quite clear to them that I’ve got more than the equivalent in post-secondary education. But suppose I decide I want to put you in charge of this hypothetical out-of-the-way lab? You’d be a thornier case. Many of the men you’d be leading have already won the Nobel Prize, but you haven’t.”
Oppie raised his chin. “Not yet.”
Groves leaned back and barked a laugh. “I admire a man who has faith in himself.”
“It’s not a question of faith, General. The work has already been done. In 1938 and 1939, I published three papers in the Physical Review, each with a different one of my grad students. Now, it sometimes takes the Swedish Academy a while to recognize an achievement as Nobel-worthy, and, unfortunately, we were hit with quite a stroke of bad luck: the very day the final and most important of the three papers was published, Hitler invaded Poland, and this damned war began.”
“September first, 1939,” supplied Groves.
“Exactly. And the world has been preoccupied ever since. However, once the war is over, those papers will be rediscovered, and their import noted. Then it’s only a matter of when I’ll get the Nobel, not if.”
Groves made an impressed face, but then shook his massive head. “Well, for my purposes, if you don’t get it until after the war, it doesn’t help. But, okay, I’m curious. What’s this great breakthrough that nobody noticed at the time?”
“There’s a terrific Russian physicist named Lev Landau. He believed he’d figured out what causes the heat of the sun. He thought the center of the sun is a condensed neutron core. That is, at the sun’s heart, all the orbiting electrons have been crushed down to combine with protons to become neutrons, and those neutrons, plus the ones that had already been part of the atomic nuclei at the core, are all that’s left: solid neutron-degenerate matter. It was a great notion and explained wonderfully how the sun stays warm—the kinetic energy of in-falling matter being pulled down by the ultra-dense core. But Bob Serber—that’s the fellow who I sent off just now with Colonel Nichols—Bob and I realized that Landau had failed to take into account the strong nuclear force. If you factor that in, the sun would give telltale signs of having that sort of core, and it doesn’t.”
Groves looked at Oppie, clearly unimpressed, but before the general could voice an objection, Oppie raised a hand. “Now, as I said, that was the first paper, and, yes, it wasn’t all that much in itself. But it led directly to the second paper, which I wrote with George Volkoff. In that one, we determined that sufficiently heavy stars will, at the end of their lives, contract indefinitely.”
Groves frowned. “Indefinitely? What does that mean?”
“Good question,” said Oppie with a grin, “and the answer was what the third paper was about, a collaboration with my grad student Hartland Snyder. Indefinite contraction, we showed, will lead to a point of zero volume and infinite density, with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light itself, will be able to escape the pull. That’s a whole new class of astronomical objects, and one with properties nobody had guessed at before. A few kilometers from the center, at what’s called the Schwarzschild radius, time itself will freeze, thanks to relativity but, for an in-falling observer, it will continue to pass. There’s nothing intuitively obvious about these ... these ... ‘dark abysses,’ if you will, but they absolutely must exist.”
Groves leaned back, an expression of awe on his face. “And that’s worth a Nobel,” he said softly.
Oppie nodded and crossed his arms smugly. “That’s worth a Nobel.”
#
“Jim, you’ll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.”
It was code, of course: the Italian navigator was Leo Szilard’s colleague Enrico Fermi, who had led today’s successful experiment. After months of labor, Fermi’s team had created that which Szilard himself had been the first to envision nine years previously: a controlled nuclear chain reaction. This afternoon, the world’s first atomic reactor had run for twenty-eight minutes—the first, that is, unless Nazi physicists had beaten them to the punch.
Szilard stood near his boss, Arthur Holly Compton, in the latter’s office at the University of Chicago. Arthur was on the phone with James Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, the organization in charge of secret war technology for the United States. Conant must have asked how the natives were because Arthur’s reply was, “Very friendly.”
Silence while Arthur listened for a moment. “No,” he said into the mouthpiece, “I suspect he’s gone ... back to port.” A pause. “Yes, he’s here; let me put him on.” He handed Szilard the black handset. Never one for formalities, Leo said, “Hello, Jim.” His Hungarian accent made the name sound a bit like “Yim.”
“Congratulations, Doctor!” The voice was warm although there was much static crackling behind it. “None of this would ever have happened without you.”
Szilard rubbed his forehead with his free hand and said, because he knew it was what he was supposed to say, “Thank you,” and then he handed the phone back to Arthur.
Leo liked to think either in his bathtub—he often soaked for hours—or quite literally on his feet. He excused himself and headed out into the cold evening air while Arthur went back to his oblique conversation. As Leo ambled across the campus, he passed many students, some clutching textbooks, a few holding hands, and he felt twinges of guilt. If something had gone wrong today, all these young people at the beginnings of their lives, along with, quite possibly, almost everyone else in Chicago, could easily have been killed.
Leo’s breath blossomed into clouds in front of him. He hadn’t had a destination in mind, but his feet brought him across the width of Stagg football field. There’d been snow earlier in the week that had melted, leaving the brown grass dry. He made his way toward the concrete rows of angled seating that ran along the west side. The brick structure beneath these bleachers housed various athletic facilities; Leo greeted the guards at the north end and headed into the doubles squash court that had been their experimental working space.
A short figure with a receding hairline and an oblong face was looking down from the court’s spectator gallery at the giant cube of graphite blocks. The other scientists, doubtless in a mixture of elation and exhaustion, had all left, but Enrico Fermi leaned on the railing, just staring, apparently lost in thought.
The beast below was hibernating, all fourteen cadmium control rods having been shoved back in, picas into the hulking body of el toro.
Leo approached and solemnly offered his hand; Enrico took it. Their names had already been linked forever in history—or would be, once the security was lifted—thanks to the letter to President Roosevelt that Leo had drafted three years ago. That letter, signed by Einstein himself, had begun:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future.
“Well, we did it,” said Enrico, with his Italian accent. But this was only the beginning, and they both knew that. The Einstein letter had gone on to say:
This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.
“Yes,” Leo replied, “we did.” He let go of Enrico’s hand and shook his head slowly, looking at their creation below. “This will go down as a black day for mankind.”