The Atomic City Girls: A Novel

by Janet Beard

  On Sundays, church services were held all day long in Oak Ridge. One week she had the wild idea of not going. It was such a strange feeling to know that she didn’t have to go to church; no one was here to make her or look down on her if she didn’t. But it was sinful to take such pleasure in the idea of missing church, so she went to the Chapel on the Hill, which held worship for many different faiths. When she got there, a Lutheran service was beginning. She was going to leave, but the usher insisted that all Christians were welcome. Afraid to seem rude, she stayed and sat in the back of the chapel. At first the service was mostly familiar Bible passages and prayers, but then it came time to take communion. June froze in her seat, unsure of what to do. The congregation was going up row by row and kneeling at the front of the chapel, and they all seemed to know the procedure. As the usher approached her row, June panicked and bowed her head in prayer, pretending not to see him.

  At the end of the service, June slipped out quickly to make her way home to the dorm and Cici and probably another dance at the canteen. She wearily thought of the rut she was in: picking up Cici to go to the cafeteria, setting her alarm and getting up in the morning, sitting at her cubicle, staring at the meters, the war continuing on and on, Ronnie still gone, still dead. It wasn’t that this was a bad life—her job was fine, and so was the town. But sometimes the same walks and bus rides every day, the same thoughts going through her head, the routine of doing her hair, making the bed . . . sometimes it just felt unbearable. She knew she had nothing to complain about, really, so she felt guilty for feeling as she did, but if she was honest with herself, though she didn’t think she was unhappy, she couldn’t quite say she was happy either.

  As soon as she got home, June noticed that Cici was acting strange. She was sitting in front of her mirror but not applying any makeup or doing her hair, just staring absently at her face.

  “Do you have a date tonight?” asked June, trying to sound cheerful.

  “No.” Cici didn’t look away from the mirror.

  June laid her pocketbook on her bed and sat. “Do you want to go to the canteen later?”

  Cici turned away from the mirror slowly to face June. “I don’t think so. I feel . . . tired. Do you mind?”

  June actually felt relieved. “No, that’s fine. Maybe I’ll go to the cinema. Or is it too late?”

  “Or maybe we could just go for a walk or something? Would you mind that terribly? I don’t feel like being alone tonight.”

  It was surprising to see Cici this way. She was usually so controlled, so put together, like a picture of a lady in a magazine, hardly real. They walked along the boardwalks, past the canteen and rec hall where they usually went to dance. Even though it was after midnight, there were still people out in the streets, others like June and Cici, just getting off the evening shift. A sliver of moon shone from behind the clouds, and June shivered in the cold night air. It was winter now, and Christmas was just a week off.

  “You think it’s safe to walk around at night like this?” asked Cici.

  “I reckon so. Lots of folks are out and about.”

  “Did you hear about that girl in Lafayette Hall? They say she was murdered.”

  “What?”

  “The girls at work told me about it. Her boyfriend strangled her. My friend Jill was in the room right next door when it happened.”

  “That’s awful!” June was taken aback, but she wondered if this was true or just gossip. “How’d he get into the dorm?”

  “Must’ve slipped past the front desk. Worst part of it, security took away her body, and they haven’t told anyone what happened. It’s like she never existed. She just . . . disappeared.”

  They walked along the boardwalk in silence for a moment, past trailers stretching on as far as the eye could see in either direction. “Do you ever think about dying?” Cici stopped in front of a small patch of woods left standing between the trailer park and a housing subdivision.

  “Sure. I think about Ronnie a lot. I wonder where he is, and if I’ll ever see him again.”

  Cici nodded, but her gaze was fixed on the trees in front of her. “You heard the news from Europe?”

  “Yeah.” June hadn’t had a chance to listen to the radio news that day, but she had seen the headlines and heard folks talking on the bus. The Germans had launched a surprise offensive, and there had been heavy fighting. People had thought the German army was in bad shape, that it was only a matter of time till the Allies made it to Germany. But this meant more bloody fighting. It felt like the war would never end.

  Cici dug her hands into her coat pockets. “I used to work in a restaurant in Nashville, and we kept pictures of all the boys from the neighborhood who were overseas, you know, under this big flag. Whenever a boy died, me or one of the other girls had to return his picture to his family. We had to return so many pictures.”

  Cici started walking again. “Let’s go home. I’m worn out.”

  They walked silently toward the dorm. It was unusual to spend a quiet moment with Cici. June wondered about her fancy way of talking and dressing; it seemed strange that she’d ever worked in a restaurant. The way Cici went on, June assumed she had come from a well-off family. But if she’d had to work as a waitress, maybe she wasn’t as rich as she acted. Cici never did talk about her family or the past. And occasionally she said things that confused June. One of the boys she’d been talking to at a dance a few days before had made a joke about Brutus and Julius Caesar, when his friends all got up to dance without him. Cici had clearly not understood what he was talking about. June had read Shakespeare’s play in high school and would have thought Cici’d done the same if she went to a fancy Nashville school.

  Cici had become her best friend, that was for sure, but sometimes June wondered if it hadn’t been by default. Cici could be selfish; she ignored June when she was focused on boys, then used June to get their attention when it suited her. She had a habit of laughing at people, which could be cruel, and didn’t seem to spend much time considering what it might be like to be less beautiful than she naturally was. But at other times, when she chose June to confide in or spirited her away on an adventure, it felt wonderful. Everyone looked at them, because Cici was beautiful; everyone, other girls and all the boys, wanted to be at their table, because Cici automatically gave it an air of glamour and elegance. In those moments, June felt so special. She’d look over at Cici, and Cici would wink back, and the world would know they were best friends.

  (Courtesy of the Department of Energy)

  (Courtesy of the Department of Energy)

  Chapter 5

  CHARLIE AND ANN HAD BEEN OFFERED A TWO-BEDROOM HOUSE just one month after adding Sam to their application. It was perched on the side of a hill covered with identical structures; each resembled a small child’s drawing of a house, a plain white rectangle with a slanted roof. The only accessory was a small porch, just big enough for a bench, which jutted out beside the doorway. Besides one tree that had been spared by the construction crew, the yard consisted entirely of mud. Charlie had carried Ann over the threshold even as she yelled at him, “I have my boots on! I can walk through a little mud,” laughing all the while. Sam had volunteered to help them move; his own possessions were easily hauled over from the dorm in one trip.

  When Charlie let her down in their new living room, Ann sighed. “How will I ever keep these floors clean?”

  “We can leave our boots by the door,” suggested Sam.

  “Somehow it doesn’t work,” replied Ann. “We tried everything in the trailer. Sometimes I think the mud actually has a mind of its own and crawls into the house.” Ann was thin with sharp features that could look severe when her expression was serious. But when she smiled, which luckily was often, her features relaxed, and her face became welcoming.

  “It’s cold in here!” said Charlie. “Better go take a look at the furnace.”

  “I’ll do it,” volunteered Sam. “You finish up with the moving.” Sam went past the utility room, wh
ich housed a coal furnace, and out a back door to the coal box. He opened it, began loading coal into a small bucket, then hauled it inside to the furnace.

  It was wonderful to be out of the dorm. Every day he got new roommates, and they had gotten progressively worse. Last night two of them stayed up until two playing cards, while the third snored at an inconceivable volume. As if that weren’t enough, his room was flooded with light at night because of the construction going on down the road. On his way to the bus stop in the morning, Sam would see the shells of new buildings that had literally gone up overnight.

  Ann stuck her head in the utility room. “I hope you can eat supper with us tonight, Sam. I think we should have a celebration.”

  “Sounds great, Ann.”

  She flitted off, looking far too delicate in her white satin blouse for this dirty town. Sam slapped his hands together to knock off the coal dust and looked around. Charlie and Ann had managed to bring some nice things with them that made the house look livable. Charlie was hanging up framed prints of flowers in the living room while Ann arranged a lace tablecloth on the dining table. Their efforts at decorating were endearing, though completely foreign to Sam, who had never bothered to do a thing to his apartment in Berkeley during his years of living there. He went down the hall to his room. It was small but comfortable, furnished with a simple dresser, table, and bed. He unpacked easily, flopped back on the bed, and stared up at the ceiling, beginning to relax for what seemed like the first time since he’d arrived in Oak Ridge.

  On the first day of his new job, Sam had spent ten minutes wandering through a sprawling parking lot—buses snaking in and out—before he found the sign for Y-12, the facility where he would be working. A distressing number of people were already waiting. Bus service in Oak Ridge was free, but everyone had to show their badge as they got on to prove they were allowed into the Y-12 area. Sam stood in the midsection of the bus as he watched the Negroes make their way past the sign that read COLORED. This was his first time in the South, and though he hadn’t exactly spent his youth palling around with the locals in Harlem, the explicitness of segregation here startled him. Charlie had told him that there was a whole other section of housing that hadn’t been on his official Army tour, where the colored construction workers lived in tiny shacks.

  Sam looked out the window at a train carrying an endless line of identical trailers. It was starting to rain. The bus wound through the security checkpoint, and he finally saw Y-12, a series of large, warehouse-looking buildings.

  The plant was designed to enrich uranium. For the weapon the Army was trying to make, the uranium isotope U-235 was required, and needed to be separated from U-238. The top physicists in America had spent the past few years trying to figure out the best way to do this. At Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence had designed the calutron, which used magnets to get the job done, and this was the method employed at Y-12. Sam had worked with him, experimenting and designing the prototype for what would now be used on a massive scale here in Oak Ridge. He could hardly keep from running straight into the plant, he was so excited to see what they’d been working on for so long.

  Once he made it through security, Sam reported to his new supervisor, Dr. Armstrong, a stocky man of about forty, who gave Sam’s hand an aggressive shake and led him down a long corridor. “It’s good to have you here, Dr. Cantor. As you can see, the facilities are operational, but we’re having a lot of difficulties.”

  He opened the door to his office for Sam and closed it behind them. “Please sit down. In a nutshell, we’ve been asked to achieve the impossible here. We’ve built an enormous facility without knowing how it’s going to operate, and so far it’s been little short of disastrous. You’ve been briefed on the plant’s operations?”

  He had. The day before, a thick envelope marked Top Secret had been hand-delivered to him, which included a blueprint of the entire Y-12 facility and outlined its operations.

  “We’re adjacent to the Alpha 1 building now,” continued Dr. Armstrong. “Would you like to take a look at the racetrack?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You might want to leave your watch here. The magnets can destroy it. And if you have any other metal on you . . .”

  “I don’t think I do.” Sam laid his watch on the desk.

  The uranium began the enrichment process in the Alpha buildings, which were referred to as racetracks because of their ovular shape. This racetrack contained ninety-six calutrons. In the calutron, a vaporized sample of uranium was bombarded with electrons and became ionized. Next, the ions were injected into a vacuum chamber, accelerated, and sent through a strong magnetic field, which forced them into radial paths. The lighter U-235 traveled on a smaller radius than the heavier U-238, and in this way, the isotopes could be separated.

  Dr. Armstrong took Sam into a nearby building, which looked like a typical factory from the outside. After passing through two more security checkpoints, they went into the production area, and Sam got his first look at the racetrack. The calutrons were arranged around a powerful electromagnet in an oval for maximum efficiency. The oval was about forty yards long and twenty-five yards across.

  “Come on, I’ll take you for a closer look.” Dr. Armstrong led him to one of the calutron inspection windows. Behind heavy glass Sam saw it—the strange blue glow that he knew to be uranium. It was beautiful.

  Next, Dr. Armstrong led him up a staircase to the catwalk above the racetrack. Large steel beams rose above them. Stepping onto the catwalk, Sam felt a tugging at his feet like he was walking through chewing gum. Dr. Armstrong saw his look of alarm and shouted, “The nails in your shoes are being pulled by the magnets.”

  He could look down on the calutrons now, though there wasn’t much to see. It was what was going on inside them that was miraculous. When they descended, Dr. Armstrong took him out to the operating cubicles, a long hallway filled with control panels, where young women sat on stools, carefully monitoring the dials. At Berkeley, graduate students had been in charge of operating the calutrons. These girls looked like they belonged in the halls of a high school rather than at the center of the world’s most sophisticated scientific operation. They ignored Sam and Dr. Armstrong and stayed focused on the controls.

  As they walked back to Dr. Armstrong’s office, the older man seemed to perceive Sam’s thoughts. “We need manpower to run the facility, but obviously, there aren’t any men around. So we have eighteen-year-old girls out there operating these things.”

  “Do they have any inkling of what they’re dealing with?”

  “Of course not. Even if we wanted to explain it to them, do you think these girls would understand? Most of them come from local communities and have no more than a high school education, which is substandard at that. So we tell them to watch the meter and adjust the dials to keep them in the right spot. They do as they’re told. We haven’t had any problems yet, except with the occasional girl crying when the magnets pull her hairpins out.”

  They arrived back at Dr. Armstrong’s office, and he ushered Sam inside. “Let me tell you, Dr. Cantor, these girls are the least of our problems. Building the facilities has been a challenge every step of the way. The amount of money already spent here is staggering. Have you wondered, for instance, how we ever got enough copper to produce the electromagnets?”

  “How?”

  “We didn’t. Instead of copper, we’ve used silver. Fourteen thousand tons of it borrowed from the U.S. Treasury.”

  “My God.”

  “I cannot stress to you enough how high the stakes are here. The government has invested a monumental sum of money and manpower in this project. And as I’m sure you know, we have every reason to think that Hitler has done the same.” Dr. Armstrong had worked himself up. His blue eyes glistened, and Sam could hardly stand to hold his stare.

  “I’m ready to help in any way I can.”

  “Good. We’re losing far too much material, and what we’re producing isn’t enriched enough. The racetracks are in con
stant peril of breaking down. We’ve already had vacuum tanks leaking. Mistakes have been made at all levels of operations: electrical circuits have shorted, and welds have failed. I’m afraid you have climbed aboard a sinking ship, but I hope we can bail ourselves out yet.”

  “These sorts of problems had to be expected with a project of this scale.”

  Dr. Armstrong gave him a bemused half-smile. “As far as the Army is concerned, problems are never expected. Now, I know you’re probably disappointed about not being down in New Mexico with the big shots designing the weapon. But let me assure you that Y-12 needs a physicist like yourself with experience in the rad lab. If we don’t sort things out here, our boys in Los Alamos won’t have anything to make their bomb out of. We have a research wing in this building, and I am putting you in charge of the laboratory there. I promise you, Dr. Cantor, the next few months are going to be very busy.”

  Sam felt like a soldier with a mission. To be given a research project of this scope was thrilling. What did it matter if he was living in a dorm as long as he had a laboratory? He would essentially live in the lab anyway, and he wanted to start this minute. He had the wonderful certainty that he was doing the very thing that he was born to do.

  The conviction stayed with him throughout his busy first day. It kept him happy and focused as he went about his work, sure of himself and what he was doing. It wasn’t until late that night in his dorm room that he began to doubt. He lay in bed, unable to sleep. Images of softly glowing uranium plasma danced in his head as he contemplated what building this bomb would mean. It was by no means the first time he had thought about it, but it also had never seemed so real as it did today, standing face-to-face with one of the most expensive government projects in history, all aimed at gathering a handful of uranium isotopes. Dr. Armstrong worried that Y-12 would never be functional, but Sam didn’t doubt for a minute the project would succeed. There was a certain momentum to something this big. With these many minds, this much effort, a bomb was inevitable.