The Mighty One

Collin Minnaar

 

We were discussing the transmutation of elements in the Experimental Physics room when Oppenheimer came in, carrying under his arm what looked like a large sketch. Oppenheimer took drawing pins out of his suit pocket and stuck it to the wall. It was, in fact, an aerial photograph of a city. The photo was of such fine quality, that it occurred to me he must have ordered it from the military. Everyone in the room had stopped talking, as they usually did, and were watching him. He stood with his back to us for quite a while, inspecting the photo with head bent forward, all the while humming. When he turned around, his blue eyes looked at us in anticipation. It was as if he wanted to communicate to us something about the photograph that he thought was obvious, but was waiting for us to notice it. He appeared to be shivering slightly despite the heat of the desert sun on the shingled roof.

Concentric circles were drawn to the edges of the photo. Words in black were all over the photo, upside down, vertical, diagonal, in the jagged lines of Oppenheimer’s writing.

Detonate.
Gamma rays.
Damage measurement.
Earth shock.
Radiant heat.

‘Choice of target’ he spoke softly, in his deliberate monotone, with beautifully pronounced vowels. ‘Tokyo Bay, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima, Kokura, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Sesebo.’ He began to giggle. Perhaps he had not been shivering. His face contorted as he sought to control himself. Somebody stepped closer. ‘This one tickles me to death. Targets already destroyed would be taken off the list.’

‘Hiroshima’, Oppenheimer continued. ‘In the middle of a large industrial area. A large part of the city can be extensively damaged.’ He looked around the room, nodding. ‘High density. Psychological factors. The adjacent hills are likely to produce a focussing effect.’ He had a long wooden ruler in his hand. After every sentence he hit the photo with the ruler, making small indentations in the paper.

‘But first, men of science. We will bring the light from the stars to planet earth, the light from the heavens. On earth. Trinity. Batter my heart, three person’d God.’ Hans and I exchanged glances. Suddenly, he ripped the photo off the wall and walked out of the room, drawing pins flying in all directions.

Did Oppenheimer have another episode? His episodes were meant to have been in his past. I had heard the gossip from other scientists. Those who knew him at Cambridge. About how genius and madness go hand in hand. He had placed a poisoned apple on his tutor’s desk, filled with chemicals. How baroque. What a sense of drama and moment. The tutor did not eat apples. He tried to choke his best friend at the time. Angst, born out of jealousy before collapsing. All of this could be untrue. His psychoanalyst had diagnosed him with symptoms associated with schizophrenia. Quite normal and not unexpected for someone with an intellect on the edge of the bell curve who, you’d expect, should be a challenge for the somewhat crude methods designed to measure human complexity. He was better now. Perhaps the episodes would much later obliquely be referred to in biographies. The pressures on a young genius trying to find his way in the world.

Now the pressure had returned. First the government had given him the research leadership of the ‘Top Secret’ S-1 group. To preliminarily conceptualise the tremendous potential of utilising the lessons that had recently been learnt in further developing the theory of quantum mechanics for the purpose of war. He had been chosen because of his ‘penetrating insight.’ Apparently he had given himself the title of Co-ordinator of Rapid Rupture, something that puzzled those who had anointed him. Let the mad scientist have all tools at his disposal, as long as he lays the golden egg.

He had to have long meetings and planning sessions with military men on the art of war, the men of politics, the guys in charge, whose language he pretended he was able to speak, but whose sensibilities he must have found to be foreign and somewhat odious, emotionally crippled as they were from having to think about various ways to kill humans during the latest instalment of protracted war. He had started polishing his shoes.

And then came leadership of the Manhattan project. Groves, General Groves, the man in charge, had chosen Oppenheimer despite the fact that he had no experience in leading large groups of people, had left-leaning political affiliations, was suspected of being a communist. He was unique and could be controlled by the security apparatus. In my estimation he couldn’t run a hamburger stand. He was the guy walking around campus in a funny hat and scuffed shoes. A highly impractical man. Good at mixing martinis. Groves chose him because he thought of Oppenheimer as a bona fide ‘genius’ who could talk knowledgeably about anything besides sports. He did not know a thing about sports.

Oppenheimer had always wanted to combine his love of the desert with his passion for physics. On the basis of the ‘need for secrecy’ he had convinced the military to move the laboratory to the desert. Oppenheimer was in charge of six thousand men and women at Los Alamos. Three meters of barbed wire fenced laboratories and facilities. From here he could look through the windows at the Sangre de Christo mountains and the Rio Grande valley while working on the problems presented. There was only one dusty road in. It was hard to concentrate in this beautiful desert place with the mountains like sentinels and the pressing silence.

The world’s most brilliant and illustrious physicists had come from all parts of the earth. There was a sense of moment. The army also paid very well. There was a revolt when it was suggested that the scientists wear uniforms. They were provided with all the tools required to express their creativity. There was lots of excitement. There was head shaking and whistling. They spoke with shining eyes into many nights, forgetting to sleep and eat, with chalky hands and blackboards covered with maths. Edward Teller calculated, without it being necessary for the project, that it would take twenty-six pounds of liquid heavy hydrogen, ignited by a fission weapon, to produce an explosion equivalent to one million tons of TNT. The army folk kept hurrying us up. There was a war on after all. They needed to see an explosion.

Oppenheimer and I had gone out looking for a site about a year ago, driving around in a three-quarter-ton army truck in the dry valleys of southern New Mexico. For three days and three nights. With us were some army guys whose names and faces I don’t remember. Also the ubiquitous black suit man, one de Silva, if that was his real name, no role description. I’d been put in charge of the Trinity site. Logistics, operations. The only requirement was to find a site that was sufficiently removed from civilians. Out of sight. A secret explosion of indeterminate size. To me our brief had been to find the middle of nowhere. For two days we had driven aimlessly, or what felt to me like aimlessly, between naked earth and empty sky. Oppenheimer seemed to be waiting for something. It was clear that we were fast approaching the middle of nowhere, someone joked. To me, one site was as good as another, but Oppenheimer insisted that we keep driving, as if he was looking for something in the never-ending nothingness, and would know it when he saw it.

At night we had slept in the truck to avoid rattlesnakes. Oppenheimer had taken me into his confidence, and we had long discussions, but he grew quieter as our time in the desert wore on. After dinner on the second night Oppenheimer had sat, in his own corner, reading. Reading the Bhagavad-Gita. Of all books! I supposed it fit perfectly with what I knew about him, and with his increasing priestly pronouncements. I surmised he wanted to believe that he was following a predetermined path. He had fallen asleep with the book on his lap. I walked over, took a pen from his limp hand and read the words he had underlined:

Vanquish enemies at arms
Gain mastery of the sciences
And varied arts
You may do all this, but karma’s force
Alone prevents what is not destined
And compels what is to be

The next day we had found a place, or rather, were steered towards a place by Oppenheimer, or the forces at work in his head. One moment we had been driving over the flat earth, and the next he had told us to stop, by hitting the roof of the truck rapidly with the flat of his hand. He had barely hit the ground when he looked up at me where I was sitting in the truck. ‘Bainbridge,’ he said, ‘X marks the spot’. We were somewhere between the Rio Grande and the Sierra Oscura. The Jornada del Muerto. Not in the middle of nowhere but in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto.

The next morning I had staked out an eighteen-by-twenty-four-mile area. I had been walking for about two hours with my instruments when I felt my legs go from under me. I was looking up into a cloudless sky. Perhaps I had forgotten to take in enough water. I had been increasingly aware of the silence that had started to build around me ever since I left the truck. I was humming to myself to prevent unwanted thoughts. Thoughts expelled with months of hard, obsessive work and late nights. I remember thinking that the mountains would not be oblivious to the violence on the valley floor but would echo back the thunder, and the sound would rumble an ever-diminishing echo, to be heard somewhere, someday in the universe. When do echoes cease? Or do they continue as witnesses, like the noise from the big bang? I had the words ‘school children’ on my lips. I heard ‘molten flesh’. The words ‘black rain’ were spoken in my head. I closed my eyes and saw the sky boiling. I heard someone say ‘water, water, water. Give him some water.’ I saw the face of Oppenheimer surrounded by a halo. He was standing above me, his shadow shielding my eyes from the sun, holding a water bottle to my lips.

The day before the test I went looking for Oppenheimer around the laboratories and facilities. Instead, I found him at his home at the top of Bathtub Row, the only street in Los Alamos with bathtubs. He was sitting in his chair next to his fireplace, looking through the large plate windows. ‘The door was open,’ I said. It took a long time before he acknowledged my presence. ‘Kenneth,’ he spoke in a soft voice. I went to the kitchen to get a beer. When I came back into the lounge he was standing by the window, looking out. ‘Theoretical physics requires quiet contemplation, an interest in the beauty of pure forms, in prising open secrets. This, what we are creating here, is something else. If we destroy everything, who will be our witness? Why have we been left to our own devices? Perhaps the reason that we have not met extraterrestrial life is because intelligent life, by its nature, will destroy itself before it is able to invent the technology to contact others.’ He put the palms of his hands on the glass. ‘Reports that I’m not supposed to know about says the Japanese are ready to surrender.’ Was he crying? ‘I’ll be world famous you know.’ He looked into my eyes, his body thin against the big window. I stepped closer and drew his frame against my chest. ‘The culmination of three centuries of physics,’ he sobbed.

It was early morning. We were standing in the desert, drinking cups of tea. It had stopped raining. The previous night had seen a tremendous thunderstorm. I had seen Groves angrily listing to Oppenheimer, and anybody who would listen, all the reasons why the test had to go ahead despite the bad weather. Several scientists had organised a betting pool on the exact size of the bomb. Forty-five pounds of TNT, Teller had said. Fermi had offered to take wagers from us on whether the atmosphere could be ignited, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world. They clearly had no idea.

Oppenheimer was lying face down, feet towards the bomb, listening to the final seconds of the countdown. ‘God these affairs are hard on the heart’, he said.

I watched as the ancient thing awoke.

‘So we are all bastards now,’ I half said to myself. I looked down. ‘I am the destroyer of worlds,’ Oppie said in a whimpering little voice, clutching his face, on his hands and knees in the dust.