As she sat, the others from the bus piled in. No one said a word to anyone else beyond a nod or a polite greeting. No one introduced themselves. She noted that all of their badges indicated high clearances, which made sense given who they were meeting with.

“If you all would come with me, please.” The secretary led the way to the makeshift conference room. General Groves, Dr. Lawrence, and the District Engineer, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, were standing over what appeared to be a map of Oak Ridge.

“Come in, come in,” General Groves said. “Take a seat and we’ll get started.”

Nora selected a chair from which she could see the map. The size and scope of the installments surprised her. What didn’t surprise her was that she was the only woman in the room.

“First, thank you all for coming in the middle of the night. We recognize how hard you are working on behalf of the war effort, and we thank you for all you are doing.

“Each of you is here for your unique skill set and your scientific knowledge. Together, we have one goal in mind—to win the war. As you’ve no doubt heard on the news, the tide is turning in our favor, but we are a long way from victory. Time is of the essence, which is why we’ve taken the extraordinary step of bringing you all together at once, rather than addressing you individually. I don’t have to tell you, what we say here, what you see here, what you know here, what we do here, stays here. Now more than ever, your commitment to maintaining secrecy is vital to our success.

“In your own specific areas, you may have been frustrated that we haven’t yet been able to achieve our goals. Yes, there have been setbacks and delays. Yes, our process is not perfect. Frankly, we are learning as we go along. What we thought might work in theory, may or may not prove to be true in reality. That is why we have been simultaneously working on several approaches here at Oak Ridge.

“We have the greatest minds of our time on our side. We will succeed.”

General Groves continued. “I was reviewing the data with some of our best scientific minds, and it occurred to us that we had been looking at this all wrong. We were thinking that what we needed was for a single process to succeed. The truth is, each process has succeeded but not to any appreciable extent. What if we took the slightly enriched Tubealloy you each have been able to produce using different techniques, and cycled it through a second time with what has so far proven to be the most-successful technique, thus further enriching it?”