She checked her watch. First, she had to get home before curfew. Next, she had to tell her mother in the morning that she wasn’t marrying Sam, and if she didn’t like it… Well, that was too bad. After that, she’d put her plan into action.

She fairly skipped all the way home. By gosh, Mary Elizabeth Trask was going to make her own way. Look out, world!

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nora picked her way carefully across the muddy street. So far, Dr. Ludlow—Del he had told her to call him—had shown her fully a half-dozen buildings under construction. He called the buildings by odd names: Alpha this and Beta that. Sometimes, he referred to the same buildings by numbers: 9201-something, and 9204-something. Now, they were on their way to Building 9731, apparently also known as the Pilot Facility. Her head spun with myriad details she was sure she’d never remember.

“I hear you’re fresh out of Columbia.”

“Correct.” Nora sidestepped another puddle.

“You studied under Fermi?”

“Yes.” Nora hoped her monosyllabic answers would discourage Del from questioning her further. That morning’s lectures about secrecy were fresh in her mind.

“Dr. Lawrence sent me here specifically to train you, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He doesn’t really believe a bunch of teenage girls can successfully operate the calutron machines. Heck, we’ve barely mastered them in the lab at Berkeley, and we’ve got all guys with graduate degrees working on them.”

They arrived at Building 9731, a drab, unremarkable structure that sat perpendicular to several other large, partially built facilities.

“Make sure your badge is visible, and unless you want to get stuck on a massive magnet, you’ll want to take off any jewelry,” he warned.

Nora’s first glimpse of the massive XAX prototype model calutron machine nearly took her breath away. The scale dwarfed the cyclotron she’d experimented with at Columbia.

Del laughed. “You should see the expression on your face. It’s priceless.”

“The alpha calutron units are substantially larger than this?”

“Massive.”

Nora studied the prototype in front of her. It was a modified mass spectrometer designed to separate uranium isotopes, different in size and scope, but not in theory, to what she’d been working on in the lab at Columbia. She thought about the work Lawrence was doing, what he’d said to her in his letter, and the meeting with him, Oppenheimer, and Groves. She added into the mix the partially completed construction she’d witnessed here and the talk of Alpha and Beta machines. Could it be that the intent was to create enough highly enriched uranium—to separate enough fissionable U-235 from the more common, harmless U-238—to fuel a giant chain reaction in the form of a bomb?