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What does such a man think, confronted with death, a man with his head so full of ideas, so wise in so many directions? What goes on behind those eyes that were once so brilliantly blue, now rather bleary with pain?
—David Lilienthal, chairman, Atomic Energy Commission
At least they died quickly.
It had been three weeks since Oppie’s doctors had told him that the radiation therapy was no longer working—and it had been a full year now since he’d first been diagnosed with throat cancer.
The irony was not lost on him: the very fact that such a thing as nuclear medicine existed was largely his doing, and the isotopes that had initially kept the tumors in check were precisely the sort Lewis Strauss had wanted to ban exports of—God, was it really eighteen years ago?
Isotopes are far less important than electronic devices but far more important than vitamins. Somewhere in between.
Somewhere in between.
Of course, Oppie had been talking then about their potential for use in weaponry, not in holding the insatiable crab at bay. For that, they had been, until recently, the most important thing. Now that they’d stopped working for him, they would try chemotherapy, but the prospects, he knew, were meager; physics trumps chemistry any day.
Oppie wasn’t the first Manhattan Project scientist to benefit from radioisotopes. Leo Szilard had gone down this path already, organizing his own experimental treatment for bladder cancer at Sloan-Kettering in 1960. Six weeks of radiation bought him years of remission; he’d lasted until 1964, passing away at the age of sixty-six. The year the treatments began, Szilard’s turn for the Einstein Award had come. Trude, finally his wife, had remarked on how impressive the list of previous winners was, and Leo, from his hospital bed, had quipped, “Yes, and it is getting better and better!”
Oppie missed flamboyant Leo, and Einstein the eccentric, gone a dozen years now, and the taciturn Fermi, who had passed five months before Einstein. Intellects vast and cool but oh so sympathetic, born in the last years of the nineteenth century—or, in Enrico’s case, the first of the twentieth—intelligences greater than the common man’s and yet as mortal as ...
... as his own.
If the battle for life had truly been a game of chess with Death—akin to that Bergman film—Oppie had no doubt that his departed friends would have won; Death was evil, and evil, he was convinced, was stupid. Then again, so, it turned out, was smoking. Way back at Leiden—four decades ago now!—Paul Ehrenfest had droned on incessantly about the dangers of tobacco. Oppie had finally kicked his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit three years ago, although he still smoked a pipe. But even doing that was hard now. Just breathing hurt his throat. Day after day of decline, week after week of decay, month after month of agony.
The thought came to him again: at least they died quickly.
They were the three Apollo 1 astronauts. Chaffee, White, and ... what was it, now? Griffin? No—Grissom. Gus Grissom. Yesterday, January 26, 1967, they’d been incinerated in their space capsule—not on re-entry, which had always been a valid fear, but in a routine ground test before they’d even gone up.
“Flame!”
“We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”
“Open her up!”
And a scream.
Oh, yes, it had been painful, but it had been over in minutes if not seconds. By the time the ground crew got the command module’s door open, all three men were dead, the nylon spacesuits melted into their bodies, skin flayed from bone. He hadn’t seen pictures yet—and the public never would—but von Braun, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, thoroughly American now in all but accent, was his conduit to NASA information. The corpses, he’d said, looked like—
—like the corpses in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki.
A spark inside the capsule, yards of flammable Velcro stuck to every bare surface, and a foolishly ill-conceived test of a pure-oxygen high-pressure atmosphere.
God only knew how long this disaster would delay Apollo.
Oppie was sitting in his living room at Olden Manor; Kitty was in the attached greenhouse he’d had built for her as a birthday present, tending her orchids. For fuck’s sake, he thought, there should have been greenhouses—and humans!—on Mars by now. If only they hadn’t canceled Orion.
He looked down at the little table next to his chair, and the circular glass ashtray, filled with pipe dottle and Kitty’s butts. If only he hadn’t smoked himself to death.
The sun shone through the brown curtains, a thousand pinpricks where its rays found holes in the weave. If only even one of their mad schemes to shield the earth had panned out.
In the bookcase next to him sat his copy of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire’s astringent verse illustrated with etchings by Tony-George Roux. He reached for the book, even such a small effort almost too much for him now. It fell open in his lap to pages 204 and 205, the poem “Une Martyre” and the picture that reminded him so much of ... of ...
He snapped the fifty-year-old book shut. If only he’d been there for Jean the night everything had proven too much for her.
In the same bookcase, but on the bottom shelf, at the far left, politics trumping alphabetical order, were two volumes by his erstwhile friend Haakon Chevalier: the clumsy roman à clef from 1959 called The Man Who Would Be God and the more on-the-nose work of nonfiction—or so Hoke would have it—from just two years ago, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship.
If only he’d turned Chevalier in immediately upon that approach in the kitchen at Eagle Hill—or, he supposed, if only he’d never mentioned Chevalier at all. Odd, he reflected, that the options occurred to him now in that order. It seemed part of him still was that unctuous, repulsively good little boy he’d been during his sheltered New York childhood, a childhood that hadn’t prepared him for a world full of cruel and bitter things. It had given him, as he’d told Time magazine two decades ago, no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.
If only.
If only.
At the end of a life, Oppie supposed, that’s all there was: regret.
Of course, he’d left his mark. No trip to Stockholm, no Nobel, but he’d changed the world more than most of the laureates—including the Peace Prize ones—ever had, changed it even more than Alfred Nobel had with his invention of dynamite. Still, if sheer destructive power were the measure of greatness, it’d be Teller whose name would live on.
Live on for whatever little time earth had left.
Oh, maybe one of his Arbor Project teams would find a solution. Orion had looked so promising, but there was no point persevering to save the world from a natural catastrophe less than six decades hence if human folly would have destroyed it sooner. It had been the right decision to ban atmospheric nuclear tests, to bar nukes from space, to take at least one small step back from the precipice.
Still, if only they had succeeded. If only—
The doorbell rang. Robert knew from long experience that Kitty couldn’t hear it in the odd glass acoustics of her greenhouse. He slipped Baudelaire back onto the shelf and, using his two twig-like arms, managed to get himself to his feet. It was a painful shuffle to the foyer and an effort even to turn the brass knob. The door creaked open.
And there, with the magnificent trees of the Institute for Advanced Study as a wall behind them, stood gangly Richard Feynman. Next to him was much-shorter Kurt Gödel, his wide-spaced eyes behind horn-rim glasses, bundled up against a February cold that he imagined should be present although Robert felt no chill in the air.
“My whole life I’ve wanted to say this,” said Feynman, a grin stretching his mouth, “and I figured you deserved to hear it.”
“Yes?” said Oppie.
“Eureka!” exclaimed Feynman. “Or,” he said, draping a friendly arm around Gödel’s narrow shoulders, “more precisely, we have found it.”
“Found what?”
Gödel, ordinarily reticent, spoke up. “For God’s sake, Robert, let us in. We’ll catch our deaths out here!”
Oppie stepped aside and gestured for the two men to enter. Automatically, he offered, “Drinks?”
“Absolutely,” said Feynman. “This calls for your best bottle of champagne!”