Free American Prometheus by Kai Bird Page B

sudden I noticed his hair was standing straight up, responding to the static. Marvelous.” When they finally rode into Los Pinos that night after dark, Katy Page’s windows were lit. “It was a very welcome sight,” Horgan said. “She received us and we had a beautiful time for several days there. She referred to us always then and afterward as her slaves. ‘Here come my slaves.’ ”
    While Mrs. Oppenheimer sat on the shaded, wraparound porch of the Los Pinos ranch house, Page and her “slaves” went out on day-long rides in the surrounding mountains. On one of these expeditions, Robert found a small, uncharted lake on the eastern slopes of the Santa Fe Baldy—which he named Lake Katherine.
    It was probably on one of these long rides that he smoked his first tobacco. Page taught the boys to ride light, packing the bare minimum. One night on the trail Robert found himself out of food, and someone offered him a pipe to quell the pangs of hunger. Pipe tobacco and cigarettes quickly became thereafter a lifelong addiction.
    Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. “Rutherford wouldn’t have me,” Oppenheimer recalled. “He didn’t think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.” In the event, however, Rutherford passed Robert’s application along to J. J. Thomson, Rutherford’s celebrated predecessor as director of Cavendish Laboratory. At sixty-nine years of age, Thomson, who had won the 1906 Nobel Prize in physics for his detection of the electron, was well past his prime as a working physicist. In 1919 he had resigned his administrative responsibilities, and by 1925 he came into the laboratory sporadically and tutored only the occasional student. Robert was nonetheless greatly relieved when he learned that Thomson had agreed to supervise his studies. He had chosen physics as his vocation, and he was confident that its future—and his—lay in Europe.

CHAPTER THREE
    “I Am Having a Pretty Bad Time”
I am not well, and I am afraid to come to see you now for fear something melodramatic might happen.
    ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, January 23, 1926
    HARVARD HAD BEEN A MIXED EXPERIENCE for Robert. He had grown intellectually, but his social experiences had been such as to leave his emotional life taut and strained. The daily routines of structured undergraduate existence had provided him with a protective shield; once again, he had been a superstar in the classroom. Now the shield was gone, and he was about to undergo a series of nearly disastrous existential crises that would begin that autumn and stretch into the spring of 1926.
    In mid-September 1925, he boarded a ship bound for England. He and Francis Fergusson had agreed that they would meet in the little village of Swanage in Dorsetshire, in southwest England. Fergusson had spent the entire summer traveling about Europe with his mother and was now eager for some male companionship. For ten days they walked along the coastal cliffs, confiding to each other their latest adventures. Though they had not seen each other for two years, they had kept in touch through correspondence and remained close.
    “When I met him at the station,” Fergusson wrote afterwards, “he seemed more self-confident, strong and upstanding . . . he was far less embarrassed with mother. This, I afterwards found out, was because he had nearly managed to fall in love with an attractive gentile in New Mexico.” Still, at the age of twenty-one, Robert, Fergusson sensed, “was completely at a loss about his sex life.” For his part, Fergusson “unfolded to him all the things that had pleased me, and that I had to keep quiet about.” In retrospect, however, Fergusson thought he had unburdened himself too much. “I was cruel and stupid enough,” he wrote, “to go over with Robert [these things] at length, finally completing what Jean [a friend] would have called a first-class mental rape.”
    By then, Fergusson had spent