Seventy-five years ago, on July 16 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested. It’s one of the key events in Robert J. Sawyer’s new novel The Oppenheimer Alternative, published to mark the anniversary of Oppenheimer’s most remembered achievement. During lockdown, Paul Simpson chatted with Sawyer about the challenges and insights that writing about The Manhattan Project and so much more brought…

 

 

The last time we spoke you finished by saying you always try to do something different and The Oppenheimer Alternative is certainly that. When did your interest in Oppenheimer begin? Not in creating a book around him but the character himself.

It was actually the character of Leo Szilard who caught my attention because there was a UK playwright, a very fine playwright named Jem Rolls, touring fringe festivals all over the world with a one man show called The Inventor of All Things. It was about Leo Szilard and a friend of mine who’s a huge theatre buff said, ‘You’ve got to go see this show. If you see one fringe show this year, this one was written for you.’ I said I’d heard of this character Leo Szilard but I didn’t know anything about him. ‘No, you’ll love it’.

So I went and absolutely, I was captivated. But as soon as you start reading about Leo Szilard – who is a character in my novel, who is the guy who envisioned the nuclear chain reaction that gives rise to uncontrolled fission explosion, who is the guy who ghost wrote the letter that Einstein signed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt urging the establishment of an atomic bomb development program – as soon as you start getting into his life it very quickly intersects with J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer captivated me even more. I thought, ‘OK I’ve read a little bit about him’ – and of course ultimately for writing the novel I read everything about him including the autobiography of Leo Szilard. But Oppenheimer, this guy who would go around quoting Hindu scripture, this guy who was active in every progressive left wing cause there was… in other words, the quintessential guy who, had he been born a generation later, would have been the peace march protester fighting against the atomic bomb instead of being the genius who’s responsible for its creation – that was the path for me. This incredibly complex, incredibly contradictory character of J. Robert Oppenheimer just grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go until I had written his story out of my system.

Obviously, because of the elements that we get in the post-war period it’s not a biography per se, yet it is in a way. Did you find when you were writing that there were moments where you wanted to be able to rewrite his life and justify it within the nature of the plot that you did? Obviously without giving away anything, you do give him his druthers.

That’s right – his redemption, I hope.

But before that, the period up until then, the period during the war when he’s at Los Alamos, when he’s with Harry Truman, all of those times where he basically screwed himself…

Oh absolutely. So, let me address this in a couple of points.

First you said ‘almost writing his biography’: well, the thing about writing prose fiction is in a sense, even though it’s fictitious, you’re still writing autobiography because you get inside the character’s head. You’re not saying, ‘Here’s what so and so said about him and here’s the transcript of the speech that he gave’. You actually get to hear the inner monologue the character had and then acted. As for rewriting Oppenheimer’s life, Oppie himself would have done that.

As you know, he loses his security clearance in a humiliating trial review board. What he did was cover up the fact that his best friend had approached him to see if he might be amenable to sharing atomic secrets with Russia. Then instead of covering it up completely, which actually would have been fine too, he dropped little provocative hints to military security without being willing to come clean about how he knew there might be a leak.

And what was Oppenheimer’s answer when he’s being drilled in the best prosecutorial fashion by Roger Robb? “Why did you do this sir?”

“Because I was an idiot.”

There are at least a half dozen major points in Oppenheimer’s life, the first really drastic turning one when Oppie – who was probably predisposed to be bisexual, even if he never acted on it – was spurned by his tutor at Cambridge. In response he laced an apple with cyanide to kill said tutor. It was only because Oppie’s father (the J in J. Robert Oppenheimer is Julius for Oppie’s father) was a man of great wealth that he was basically able to buy his son out of prison by donating enormously expensive pieces of original master artwork to the university.

Oppie would rewrite his whole life if he was given the opportunity, I think.

One of my favourite films is Alien; one of my least favourite films is Prometheus because in Prometheus the characters do incredibly stupid things. ‘Let’s lean into this thing and take off our masks on this alien planet just so it can grab onto our faces.’ They do nothing except what’s called advancing an idiot plot, i.e. the plot would not advance if they did not make idiot moves.

Oppenheimer’s life would not have unfolded had he had not made idiot moves. So, if I wasn’t writing a real character, instead of the reviews being the wonderful ones that you’ve given me and Publisher’s Weekly and Amazing Stories and so many other places, they would have been terrible. They would have called it, quite rightly, a plot driven by unbelievable acts of stupidity by what’s supposed to be one of the brightest men in history.

Bit like writing the history of 2020 I think is going to be..

No matter how bad we thought it was going to be, it’s turned out worse than we ever thought it would.

I wrote a novel four years ago, Quantum Night, about the rise of a psychopathic American president. Actions surrounding him spark worldwide riots. Mostly it got very good reviews, starred review in Publisher’s Weekly and so forth, but some people said, ‘Oh come on, that could never happen’. I can’t tell you how many fan letters I’ve had in the last few months that have said, ‘Oh my god, I told my wife Sawyer had lost it this time when I read Quantum Night four years ago and now I recognise how prophetic you were.’ Well, I’m glad to be thought of as prophetic but I would gladly trade it for a saner world.

We’re going to talk about a pre-2020 world and post-2020 world. I have an eighteen year old daughter; her adult life is going to be spent in a completely different world than the one she spent her childhood in.

You’re absolutely right and it’s going to scar us. My mother was born in 1925, so she lived through the Great Depression. My whole lifetime she was a woman of economic means, but she couldn’t ever finish a meal. There always had to be leftovers to be put away because you never know tomorrow there may be no food. It scarred her for life and she lived into her 90s. This is our generation’s war, this is our generation’s Great Depression. This will mark our psyche for the rest of our lives.

I just turned 60. I thought with great joy I’d missed out on having to live through a world war or having to live through a huge pandemic or a huge economic collapse. Well, no – we were just out of nowhere hit with this pandemic.

The apple that Oppie gives to his teacher and his bisexuality – where did that come from? Is there stuff from him that talks about his feelings in a way that can be interpreted that way or are you to an extent putting a 2020 filter on that behaviour and seeing what it was subconsciously?

Sure. So part of the deal when Oppenheimer was bought out of trouble at Cambridge was that he would undergo psychiatric evaluation. Now this was, remember, the 1920s, so he was treated by one of the very first English speaking disciples of Sigmund Freud. Now, we all remember Freud today as the guy who always felt there was a sexual undertone. So yes, if you read, for instance Ray Monk has written a terrific biography of Oppenheimer, more of a scientific biography. The more famous biography is American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin but Ray Monk who is a UK writer wrote a book – in the UK it’s called Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer – and he certainly touches on this, and of course Oppie’s psychiatrist, given the psychiatrist’s Freudian predilections, definitely interpreted it this way.

It would have been, at that time, an accusation. Today kids say to their parents ‘I’m out’ and the parents say ‘Ha ha, as if we didn’t know… let’s go have dinner, who cares?’ But then, it was more shameful than Oppie’s communist associations and those were considered enormously shameful. So, you may be right. Not that it’s a big point in the novel….

No it isn’t, it’s an intriguing one though because his life was affected so much by his relationships: he loses Jean Tatlock and has a fiery relationship with his wife Kitty. It does seem like he was very much somebody who had a lot of head in the game, so to speak, but allowed a lot of his decisions to come from his heart.

You obviously know the man better now than you did five years ago, and I do now. Would you say that was a fair assessment of him? Or do you think that science was more important to him overall?

You ask a very good question. First, I want to just backtrack slightly because there’s a quantum physics metaphor here, ironically, when you’re writing historical fiction.

What you have to do is look at all the possible interpretations that are in the literature, so there are some that lean towards Oppie having been bisexual, or maybe even a closeted homosexual with no real interest in women except as they represented status. In society at his time beautiful women were who he surrounded himself with.

So you have to collapse all those possible realities into one concrete choice. The author is the observer, reality collapses and you present one concrete choice. Not necessarily the only reality – there are other Oppenheimer novels.

Now, as for your second question, about his heart. Very interestingly there, I’m not the first guy to write an Oppenheimer novel. There’s a really gonzo bizarre weird one, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart [by Lydia Millet] about J. Robert Oppenheimer and I recommend it. It’s not a science fiction novel at all but I recommend it as a piece of literature but a very different interpretation of Oppie.

Our kind of hard SF geeky ideal is that in the future we’ll become pure intellect. Brains in jars – if we can preserve the brain. Oppenheimer was, what was it – three or four pounds of brain? And he’s a skinny guy so 105,110 pounds of everything else. That ratio of everything else – the hormones, the genitalia, the drives and desires – absolutely were responsible for a lot of the misery in his life. He wasn’t a romantic, in the sense of having an emotional heart. As you know from reading my novel, and this is absolutely true, he offered up his own daughter for adoption and when asked why, he said, ‘Because I cannot love her.’ Incapable of that emotion.

You mentioned Jean Tatlock – it’s no secret that she committed suicide and Oppie’s rejection of her may have been a significant contributory factor. What I don’t touch on in the novel because it happened years later is Oppie’s daughter went on to commit suicide too. You don’t come out of interactions with J. Robert Oppenheimer a healthy human being. You come out damaged human beings.

His son Peter is still alive.

Did you have any communication with him about the book?

I did not and the reason I did not is pretty straightforward. You can get in tousles or rows with the estates of deceased people about their representation of those people. It is a fact that you cannot libel the dead. If you want to say of a dead person whatever you want, there is no legal recourse. The dead have no rights of reputation, right? Anybody can do that.

That said, to engage with his son and say, ‘I’m going to go through the incident where Oppie’s genitals were painted green and he was left in the ice box at summer camp and where he callously discarded Jean Tatlock without saying goodbye, and where he put your own sister, please forgive me for bringing her up because she committed suicide later, up for adoption’ and so on… Peter might very well have said, ‘Ahh geez gosh, I wish you wouldn’t’. Me being a nice polite Canadian would have had to say, ‘Oh OK, alright I won’t.’

I couldn’t set myself up for that circumstance. Peter appears in one scene in the novel, which is where Oppie is floored, as the whole world was, by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. He gets the word from Walter Cronkite, the great CBS news anchor, as so many Americans did, that the president is dead and Oppie is devastated and on that day his son Peter really did come and really did say, according to several of the biographies of Oppenheimer, the words I have Peter say.

So Peter is accurately and fairly portrayed, with no extrapolation or embellishment in the novel but I had to feel morally clear to do what I felt as an artist, and again as a pseudo-biographer, to do to his father.

We’ve talked about it much more as if it is a biography in a way but of course it’s a Sawyer novel so there’s going to be a hard SF element to it, there’s going to be an alternate take. You’re very much a ‘what if?’ person, with your novels. With this one, where did the ‘what if?’ question come from? Was it something that arose from the research or is it the contrast between ‘death, destroyer of life’ and ‘life the bringer of light.? Is that where it came from?

Exactly. My degree is in broadcasting and radio and television arts, and one of my minors was English Literature. It’s often said in English literature classes that all great literature is the story of redemption and I came to realise that Oppenheimer never had a redemption story.

Famously – as you alluded to in your question – in relation to the Trinity test when he and his team that he led unleashed the potential of nuclear annihilation on the human race, he was quoting the Bhagavad Gita Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. I thought, ‘Flip that on the end.’ If he is going to have a redemption, he and the others – who were just as complicit as the test site director who said to Oppenheimer that same day “Ha, now we’re all sons of bitches” because they’d pulled it off – have to be able to declare ‘Ha, now we have become life, the saviours of the world’

So I had that as the template and then I went digging and what did I discover? He’s only known now as an atomic physicist, but prior to the war Oppenheimer was an astrophysicist. He’s the man who first conceived of the notion of what we now know as black holes. Who was working with him? Hans Bethe, also an astrophysicist, the single greatest expert at the time of the Second World War in how stars produce their energy.

And yet, lo and behold, the articulation of that that Bethe had put forward at that time, even though it was world acclaimed, was wrong. He said our sun produces its energy through carbon nitrogen oxygen fusion, and it really doesn’t; it produces it through hydrogen hydrogen fusion. The sun isn’t hot enough for the much more efficient carbon nitrogen oxygen fusion. How did he possibly get that wrong?

So armed with those armfuls of facts – it has to hinge on Oppie being an astrophysicist, Bethe the greatest expert really did misunderstand or maybe really correctly understood and the sun changed subsequent to his measurements – cascading like dominoes, I had my plot.

The final element, the one that solves things, it was quite interesting that that was really only brought in very late in the day in the book. We had a lot of foreshadowing with the situation with the sun and what the problem was going to be and yet the solution really is in the last 35 or 40 pages.

It probably is and you know, I’m so blessed in my best secular way to have some spectacular beta readers, people who read the novel in manuscript and give feedback. One of the guys who read my book in manuscript before it was published was Andre Bormanis. Andre was the science advisor for every Star Trek series starting with The Next Generation and now he’s a co-executive producer of The Orville, Seth MacFarlane’s love letter to classic Star Trek, and a producer on the Cosmos series. He said, ‘You know what I would love, Rob? I would love this scene and this scene and this scene’, and I said, ‘You’re right, they’re great scenes in a hard science fiction novel but it would have been a tonal right turn to put those things in the manuscript.’

This book I hope will appeal to not just my core audience of hard SF readers, people who love physics and love the philosophy of science, but also to history buffs and people who are interested in nuclear disarmament, all that sort of thing. To keep the book tonally and essentially the melancholy life as one of the great scientists, I had to focus on the events that he directly personally could influence and I think it works. But there’s definitely room for, not so much a sequel but a parallel novel that talks about how the solution was engineered in much greater detail than I go into in the current novel The Oppenheimer Alternative.

Was there another character in that that has grabbed you in the way that Oppie did?

As I said at the outset, I am fascinated by Leo Szilard but there is one character who I have wrestled with my whole life. One of my top three favourite films is Doctor Strangelove, subtitled Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Who was the progenitor of Dr Strangelove – who did Kubrick model him on? It’s probably an amalgam of a variety of people but one name that is cited more often than any other is Edward Teller who was Oppie’s friend originally. Oppie recruited him to come to the Manhattan Project but then Teller brought about the downfall of Oppenheimer at his security hearing by testifying against him.

That character lived longer than almost anybody else in the book; he lived into his 90s and never had his redemption story. To the end Teller was advocating what’s called preventive war, meaning first strike against the Soviet Union, and I would love to try and find some human rationale for why he behaved the way he did. A fascinating character as you know from the little tidbits that are in the book: he lost his foot, so he was the man with a mechanical foot, already something arguably less than human symbolically from his early 20s. A man who said in the middle of all this said, ‘No amount of fiddling will save our souls at this point.’ He really said that. A man who went to the man known as the Pope of Physics, Enrico Fermi, on Fermi’s deathbed and said, ‘I’ve come to confess my sins to the Pope.’ We don’t know what he said but those intriguing little hooks that a novelist could dig into, I would love actually to write. I’ve got The Oppenheimer Alternative and the sequel, if there ever is one, will be The Teller Redemption.

There is a fascinating amount of amorality in Oppenheimer..

That’s right and amorality is a very interesting word because it’s not immorality. I mean Oppenheimer did things that people might argue were immoral, he cheated on his wife.

No genius is neurotypical in that geniuses are an outlier neurologically anyways but a lot of geniuses are on the autism spectrum – Asperger’s or further onto the spectrum – including many of the Manhattan Project scientists. The number one determinative trait of autism is a difficulty with interpersonal relations and empathy. Not meaning that they don’t have a heart, enormously warm hearts in many cases, but simply a real difficulty mapping the emotional state of somebody else onto their own emotional state and understanding what somebody else is feeling. So these characters are predisposed in many cases to not be empathetic, which is a cousin of amorality, as we define morality these days in most Western cultures. Spock says it well: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. If you’re empathetic, if you are a moral person, if you are moral then you are of course worrying about what the impact is on other people.

Oppie had his turning point where he went from amoral to moral; you can point to the day it happened. It happened August 9th 1945, just about 75 years ago. Up until and after the bombing of Hiroshima he was amoral to this topic, smacking down Leo Szilard and others, from his point of view quite rightly. “We scientists have no special insight into policy matters, wiser heads than us in the matter of military and political issues will make the decisions, ours is not to reason why ours is just to reason.” He did one of these boxer struts at the amphitheatre at Los Alamos National Laboratory on the day they succeeded in bombing Hiroshima

Three days later, when it was done a second time [with the bomb dropped on Nagasaki], Hiroshima was in ruins and burning, many people were dead, there was no TV, the telegraph and phone lines were down, so people had to get on rubble-strewn roads physically from Hiroshima to Tokyo by foot or by car to actually brief Tokyo High Command and the Emperor on this unprecedented weapon that nobody knew the nature of.

Seventy-two hours is not enough reaction period for Tokyo to say, ‘Oh my god, we’ve assessed the damage, you’re right, they’ve got this weapon, we stand down. We can’t compete, you win, just don’t do it again.’

Were we going to give them that chance? I say “we” very advisedly: you’re a Brit, I’m a Canadian and Oppie was an American, those were the three international partners, the three countries, the only three who knew the secret of what was going on. Principally the United Kingdom started this effort with the Tube Alloys Project that was folded in, Canada was involved with the Montreal Laboratory which was our atomic effort and was folded in and of course Canada provided most of the uranium that was used in the atomic bomb effort, we just happened to have it.

So our three countries, as Oppie said, “have blood on our hands” but when it happened the second time – and this sounds racist to us today but it is what he actually said – he kept just muttering, “Those poor little people”. Oppie was a tall man and at that time the Japanese were known for being of short stature.

He got word that they’d done it again, and went to Edward Teller’s office, in the Los Alamos National Laboratory out in the desert of New Mexico and said ‘I’m done, Ed. Can’t do it, no more. I’m not working on this ever again because we did it just to test whether the Fat Man design worked.’

We’d dropped Little Boy, which was foolproof. So sure were the physicists and the military types when the Enola Gay dropped it on Hiroshima, that was the first time the Little Boy bomb had ever been used because they knew it was going to work. It was flawless in its design. Theoretically nothing at all could go wrong and it didn’t.

But General Groves wanted to test Fat Man too, in combat on a largely untouched city, and rushed doing so, in 72 hours, because his meteorologist told him there were thunderstorms all the next week – ‘either do it today or you wait a week’. Groves knew that with another week on top of the three days that had already lapsed, High Command in Tokyo would have had a chance to do a proper assessment and would have stood down. The war would have been over and he never could have tested that horrific bomb.

I wrote a history of spying in the Western world from 1945 onwards, the prelude to which covered what was happening towards the end of the war and I remember being quite surprised during the research about just how much there seemed to be a general belief amongst the Japanese at the beginning of August that the US had just one device. I am absolutely certain that the Groves element is there as well but part of the argument for them proceeding was the fact that they needed to show Japan and potentially Russia that the US didn’t just have the one bomb and it wasn’t an empty threat.

Very true and in fact it was one of the arguments Leo Szilard used. He had a petition that General Groves marked Top Secret to stop him from being able to circulate, that he had been circulating amongst the scientists saying, ‘For God’s sakes, don’t drop it on a city. Invite as many Japanese as you want, scientists, journalists, what have you and American journalists if you want, to some safe location, set it off at a safe distance as we did with the Trinity test, let them see what we’ve got. And they can report back to the Emperor and the Prime Minister and say they’ve got this thing, we don’t want to mess with them anymore.’

And one of the rebuttals was, ‘Yes but they’ll think we had one thing and we showed it to them and they’ll say “Well, no way they’ve got a second one of those puppies, that must have cost a fortune”’.

In fact, they only did have two. Groves took a big gamble because, if he had been required to drop them on a 72-hour basis, one every three days until surrender, the Japanese would have realised three days after Nagasaki there wasn’t a third bomb and six days after that there wasn’t a fourth and there were no other bombs. The US had quite literally shot its wad, sexual metaphor intended, in using its two bombs as quickly as they did. But that second bomb, if I can continue in my base analogy, was premature ejaculation.

Discussing the Second World War, that’s a slightly different metaphor from the usual.

After 75 years believe me, it’s hard to come up with a new analogy. (laughs)

On a technical thing, in the text you refer to him as Robert or as Oppie interchangeably. What governed that? Was it just as you wrote what felt right or did you actually go back in and redo some of them? It’s unusual to have a protagonist referred to by two such interchangeable names. You might have the surname being used and the forename being used but not forename and nickname…

This is a Sawyer-ism. I’ve done this in other books. You as an editor, if I handed you a paragraph where I used the word atomic three times in the paragraph, would say, ‘You know Rob, it’s tired prose. Say atomic here, say fission here and say the forces of nature here. Be more vigorous.’

No one ever says if you have a paragraph that has Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer or a page where there is alternating dialogue and you’ve got six ‘Oppenheimer says’, you’ve got to fix that.

To me, it’s the same prosody, the sound and look of words on the page issue, and it goes way back to when I tried my hand in 1982 at writing a Star Trek novel (which is a whole other story). I thought, ‘Am I going to call him Kirk throughout the narration?’ Everybody knows his full name is James, by that point we all knew Tiberius, Kirk. ‘Am I going to say Kirk when I’ve got synonyms that I can employ to make the prose more vigorous? Call him Jim and Kirk interchangeably?’ Spock is the difficult one. He only has one name that we know of but Bones or McCoy or the doctor…not to be confused with the British Doctor, Doctor Who. Perfectly valid synonyms.

Now that said, you’re absolutely right. I went through and I interrogated every single use of whether it was Oppie, whether it was Robert, whether it was Oppenheimer, whether it was the professor or the director… whatever it was to make sure a) that it sounded right in the sentence I was using and b) that it had the correct emotional impact.

You can’t call somebody Oppie, which is diminutive; Dutch is where it originated, Dutch colleagues who shortened his name from Oppenheimer. It’s like calling me Bobby or Robbie instead of Robert, right? As soon as you’ve used that term, you’ve made me a little less formal, maybe a little less in charge, a little less an adult. So when I used Oppie, I had to make sure that it was in the right circumstance. You can’t say ‘”General Groves, no way in hell I will ever do this, no matter what,” said Oppie’, right? That doesn’t play. It has to be ‘said Oppenheimer’, in that circumstance.

I know you always like to challenge yourself with every project, so what was the biggest challenge that you weren’t expecting?

Of course I had the challenges I was expecting; setting a book in the past and all the characters being real. The challenge was once I had set myself the goal of finding a threat to the human race that Oppenheimer and the others, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe even Edward Teller and even Wernher Von Braun could rally around trying to solve in concert. I had many false starts, I have a Patreon account to see some of my drafts as I wroite them, and I would try…’What about this?’…’No no, it’s weak or it doesn’t make sense.’ I knew it was but you try things, see what you can get away with but I knew I was doing that, it wasn’t good enough.

It took months to come up with a scenario that would pass muster. Not just with a guy like me who’s a science buff but with actual scientists. As I say, amongst the people who read this were Andre Bormanis; astronomer Dr Gregory Benford who wrote his own very fine alternate world war two novel The Berlin Project, but was Edward Teller’s grad student and is a high energy physicist of very significant renown; Dr Doug Beason, also a physicist and also incidentally the former associate director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Real scientists reading this stuff and saying yes, this version passes muster. That was the biggest challenge

Any idea where you’re going next?

That’s a very interesting question. I don’t know. I am doing tons of research on an aspect of artificial intelligence, which many of my previous books have dealt with, but has never explored before. I’m following my nose, I think there’s something there, not sure that it’s going to pan out, not every idea that I pursue – you find the bone, is there meat on the bone? Enough meat to make a stew out of? I don’t know how many metaphors I’m mixing here! (laughs)

But at the moment I’m doing tons and tons of research about the relationship between humans and computers, and humans and domesticated animals. I think there’s something there.

My dog, who’s been on my lap half the time, jumps off hearing that – obviously not keen on the idea!

It’s an incredible symbiosis that exists nowhere else because it’s a manufactured symbiosis. There are remoras that feed on sharks, like cleaning the shark’s hide so the shark doesn’t eat them and there are birds who do that to alligators and so forth. But we set out as a deliberate act and it seems that wolves set out as a deliberate act to co-domesticate each other and make a win win scenario. If an alien showed up and had to guess which of us was the master species, I would put money on the aliens saying ‘You see the ones who are pooping and those who are picking up the poop? The pooper is the master species (laughs) and the other…’ We’re a little further down the food chain there.

Read our review of The Oppenheimer Alternative here

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