Work Text:
Oppenheimer doesn't like sports, but he still tunes the radio until the baseball broadcast comes in loud and strong. He spends an hour of waning sunlight working over his usual stack of paperwork while the game plays on in the background. In the summer night air, as the signal wafts through the open window, it just feels natural: a baseball game, a strong drink, the darkness clawing its way across the floor as the sun sets.
Baseball felt like a luxury during the war. Hell, everything felt like a luxury during the war, but extracurriculars felt even more so, an unapologetic break from the seemingly unending work. He could still see the young men on the mesa tossing baseballs across the pounded dirt of the technical area, catching fly balls before they threatened to roll into the depths of Ashley Pond. In those moments, the war was far beyond and behind them, the future still open as the blue New Mexican sky above them.
In Robert's mind, he is watching the boys at the lab from the open window of his office, and by coincidence the action matches what is playing on the radio: Fermi pitches; Feynman bunts, makes it to second; his brother Frank tags out Serber at third. Or something like that. The rules of baseball never made much sense to Oppie, despite his brother's best efforts to get him acquainted. Robert preferred the esoteric world of particles and subparticles, the behaviors of gravitational contractions in the fabric of spacetime, all of the things better experienced on the pages of the many journals and technical papers lining the man's New Jersey office shelves. Better to get lost in the details of the universe than squabble over who's on first.
Back to reality; in his darkening room, the radio cuts to a reading of a local car dealer sponsorship, breaking the reverie. Oppenheimer stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray on his desk and stands to leave for the day. Some dead ashes knock loose in the wind and brush across Lewis Strauss' glowering face on the front page of the day's paper. Another banner day for AEC's favorite rising star.
As his thumb digs down across the ashes to put them out, he actually realizes whose face he's smudging. A sharp gust of wind cuts through the room and a cold shudder hits Oppie, like a premonition of things to come. There was a man, he thought, who knew how to play the game. Baseball, of course.
Nothing more patriotic than baseball, he thinks. It would be un-American to think otherwise.
He reaches for the radio just as a surprise home run gets the announcers on their feet as it passes across the stadium - it's going, it's going, it's gone - and with a sharp click of the dial, the world falls to silence.