The Girls of Atomic City (18 page)

She thought the goal was to say as little as possible but to wrap that lack of information in as many sentences as you could. Each day, scads passed her eyes and ears, but as far as she could tell, they made no sense.

Today’s latest trip to serve coffee to Mr. Diamond and his out-of-town visitors was followed by a visit from Sergeant Wiltrout.

“Toni,” he began, “do you know why Mr. Diamond always asks you to get coffee when he has guests?”

“No,” Toni answered. She hadn’t given it a second thought.

“Well,” Glen continued. “He asks you to bring it in because he said he wants his guests to hear how the natives speak.”

★ ★ ★

On a typical day, women who worked as cubicle operators arrived by bus at Y-12 and passed through yet another set of armed gates. There
was an around-the-clock bus system on the Reservation. Bus trips to the plants were free, otherwise you could buy bus tokens to travel to places like Knoxville for shopping or a movie. Commuters living off the Reservation might have caught a bus at 4
AM
to arrive in time for a 7
AM
shift.

CEW may not have officially existed, but it had a bus system the size of which rivaled some of the largest cities in the entire United States. Buses were packed, reminding cramped riders of the origin of the term “cattle car.” Some were retrofitted flattop trailers. Part of the transport fleet had originally been used in the World’s Fair in Chicago. Many buses had benches running down either side of the car and a wood-fired stove right smack in the middle. This was good, if crowded, in winter. In summer, sweltering, sweaty bodies swayed and jostled along roads that were dusty or muddy, depending on the weather.

Guards checked badges at every turn. There were fences within fences here, with individuals monitored almost as closely as the Tubealloy they were processing. In addition to a resident’s pass that let workers roam freely about the nonworking areas of the Reservation, workers had badges dictating which plants or buildings they were allowed to enter. Coded by number or color depending on where you worked, badges announced to anyone looking—and someone was always looking—where you could work, which bus you could ride, and even which bathroom you could use. Near the entrance to the plants, guards would stop and board buses, shining their flashlights up and down the aisles if it was nighttime. Once through the plant entrance, a stop at the change house was first for some women, including Helen, an Alpha-3 cubicle operator. There she changed into zippy blue pants and a top. Calutron cubicle operators reported to their assigned buildings, depending upon which units, Alpha or Beta, they were operating.

Cubicle control rooms were immense. Rooms were long, ceilings high, and the noise, at times, quite jarring. Piercing light, sparking sound. Cavernous. The soaring ceiling heights and concrete and metal surroundings of the vast rooms generated a cacophony of
sound—work boots pounding concrete mixed with the chattering of voices, and was occasionally accompanied by an electrical short or the scrape of grounding hooks against metal.

These women had never seen, let alone laid hands on, contraptions of such complexity and enormity. It may have been a day’s bus ride from a farm in western Tennessee to the guarded gates of the Y-12, but it was a world away in scientific development from just about anywhere in the world, no matter where you hailed from.

Panels lined both sides of the room, creating a gauntlet of technology in which the women sat throughout their shift. There they monitored the instruments that controlled, as most of the workers called them, D units. They knew also that the units they monitored were arranged in something called the racetrack, which was located nearby, in an even larger room. The women were not supposed to venture there, though some did. Shifts were eight hours, but often seemed longer when you were perched on a stool the entire time. Operators usually minded at least two panels, each covered in knobs, dials, gauges and meters, all of which had to be carefully watched.

Dot, Helen, and the other young women monitoring panels had been trained to keep their needles and gauges within a certain visual range. The basic operations explained to the women in training had been fairly straightforward: If your needle veered a bit too far to the right or left, a knob was adjusted until the needle fell back within the acceptable range. Most of the work was done by sight alone, though disruptive crackles might indicate a unit needed adjusting. Each young woman had four or five gauges or “needles” to monitor. And each control room had a supervisor who watched panels of their own at the back of the long room and monitored the women’s performance, troubleshooting when necessary. The supervisors weren’t completely in the know, either. No one in the cubicle control room had all the pieces of the puzzle of which they were an integral part.

When needles started going haywire, sparking could start. For some women, this took getting used to. It sounded as though a breaker were blowing and if the correct adjustments couldn’t remedy the issue immediately, the unit itself might stop working completely.
Each unit operated on a charge that would last for only a specified amount of time. Once the unit shut down, operators would pick up the phone next to their panel and call the men to come and empty what they called E boxes.

They didn’t know what was in those E boxes, but it needed to be emptied regularly.

Dot and Helen heard other letters thrown around as well, including Js, Ms, Qs, and Rs. When a needle on one of the gauges veered too far from center, the corresponding knob was adjusted. Helen didn’t know what the letters stood for, but she knew the idea was to get as much R as possible so that when the men came to empty the E boxes of the D units there would be a nice amount in there.

But it could be tricky. The cubicle flew into what she started calling a “flurry”—the voltage kicking on and off, sometimes accompanied by what sounded like electrical charges—and the supervisor would have to leave and come to check and see what was happening.

What’s in the E boxes?

What does Q stand for?

Smart girls didn’t bother asking. Those who asked too many questions or hazarded answers or theories were soon gone.

But little bits of information did trickle about, words and phrases passed around.

You wanted your R high. That was better than Q. There was a charge near the bottom of the D unit. Something was vaporized. There was a Z. The E box caught everything. Open the shutters. Maximize the beam. Supervisors spoke of striking a J. M voltage. G voltage. K voltage. And if you got your M voltage up and your G voltage up, then Product would hit the birdcage in the E box at the top of the unit and if that happened, you’d get the Q and R you wanted.

It was that simple.

There were always men milling about, fixing this or that, trying to talk to the roomful of fetching operators. Dot was adapting quite well to the social life in her new home. Dating, completely forbidden her by her stricter-than-usual father back on the farm, was now an option. When you weren’t allowed to date, stealing a kiss in the middle
of the road or the back of the bus on the way to football games was your only option. Not here.

Here, her life and possibilities were wide open. Shift work didn’t just apply to her own individual schedule at the plant, it applied to her social schedule as well. Three shifts meant three times the dating opportunities, she liked to joke. But amid all the available men, the one that caught Dot’s attention was a young supervisor named Paul Wilkinson.

When the machines started sparking or making noises, Dot would think to herself,
What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get this thing to keep quiet?
Then one day Paul walked the length of the room and sat on the stool next to her. Dot introduced herself and watched as he took over her panel. He had the nicest hands she had ever seen, almost like a surgeon’s. And his fingernails—so clean! Boys back home in Hornbeak never kept their nails groomed like that—they always harbored a week’s worth of dirt from farms and cars.

From then on, whenever Dot had a problem, Paul would sit next to her and massage the knobs and dials until the machine subsided, purring like a kitten. Dot did not believe she had the same magic touch. It seemed to her that no sooner had she taken over than the machine would go berserk. However, it was nice to know that any problems she was having, Paul would come fix. Maybe the machine going haywire had its benefits. Paul had gone to college. He was well mannered. Dot took one look at him and thought he might have some real potential.

Helen never told anyone she met that she was a cubicle operator. After her experience with the two men who recruited her to spy, she knew better than most that people were always listening, people you might never suspect. She noticed things, though. Helen had been told not to go back on the racetrack, but she occasionally walked back there anyway to fiddle with the units that her panels were controlling. Normally, you could pick up the phone at your panel or even yell back to one of the men who monitored the racetrack. But they weren’t always there. She knew she was not supposed to do this, but if there was no one back there to help out, what was her choice?

Above the racetrack was a catwalk. She always tread carefully and was sure never to wear any metal. Much may have been secret about those units, but the magnets were common knowledge and terrifyingly strong.

DANGER! KEEP WATCHES AND IRON OUTSIDE RED LINE!

She and others had been warned about the magnets during training. They would pull bobby pins right out of your curls, unhinge the workings inside your watch, and pin you against the wall if you were forgetful enough to have worn a belt buckle. Woe betide the maintenance man with a nail or two stuck in his shoe—he could find himself rooted to the spot.

Helen peeked, too, when men came to pull trays out of the units and scrape what looked to her like some sort of dust out of them. The E boxes. Sometimes the maintenance men who worked back on the racetrack would add what some of the women heard called 714 to the unit. They carried it around in a bucket, smoky fumes rising from it. (Over at the K-25 plant, Colleen noticed that they used 714 too . . . Only where she worked they called the substance by a different code: L28.)

The eight-hour shifts, if everything went smoothly, ran from 7
AM
to 3
PM
, 3
PM
to 11
PM
, and 11
PM
to 7
AM
. The watching and twisting and turning and staring kept going shift after shift until the charge for a calutron unit ran out. Throughout the day and at the end of their shifts, Helen and Dot wrote down readings from their various dials and gauges in a notebook that sat next to their stations. At the end of a shift, a courier came to collect them and whisk them away. The cubicle operators did not know the significance of the data or where it was being taken; they just knew that whatever they were writing down in those books was important to someone, somewhere.

Though the importance of secrecy was drilled into everyone at CEW, people couldn’t help guessing what might be going on. Helen remained remarkably immune to this spirit of inquiry: The two men who had approached her at her dorm wanted her to report back
to them about just such conversations. Helen cared about earning a steady paycheck, playing ball, and helping end the war. But for others, it was a natural curiosity, a course of amusement to hazard guesses at what might be going on.

Some of the young women joked that—judging from the color scheme that surrounded them on the Reservation—CEW was manufacturing drab green paint. After all: such a huge factory, so much activity and maintenance and they never saw anything leave the Y-12 plant. As for Dot, she was sure that the twisting and turning of the knobs and dials must have had something to do with making those informational war films they played at the movie theater before the main feature. After all, she thought, the plant was being run by Tennessee Eastman. They made film, didn’t they?

It seemed only logical.

★ ★ ★

After the Tubealloy was cleaned out of the E boxes, a slew of chemists sized it in its various incarnations, assessing the percentage of all Tubealloy present and
assaying
samples to determine what percentage was the desired T-235. Virginia, who had finally landed in a lab at Y-12, was one of those chemists.

Virginia had left personnel when it came to her attention that she was being held back for promotion. It was odd: After consecutive A evaluations, she received a D. Shocked, she tried to figure out what went wrong. Word around the office was that in order to avoid giving raises and promotions, supervisors tried not to give too many glowing evaluations. To keep things in check, a bad one would be thrown into the mix. This pattern continued until they were willing to offer a raise. Then Virginia learned she would not be eligible for a promotion because she was not working in her designated field. So she asked for a transfer to a lab—any lab—so that she could finally do the work she had expected to do all along.

Virginia’s life at Y-12 had nothing to do with voltage or E boxes or Qs or Rs. Her world was one of dry boxes and cakes. Virginia called the product she worked with yellowcake. No matter what name she or anyone else in her lab called it, Virginia, like some other scientists,
knew precisely what the Tubealloy/yellowcake/Product was. She did not know where it had been before it landed on her lab bench or where it was going once her analysis was complete. Some daring chemists made the trek over to the University of Tennessee to page through
Mellor’s Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry
, where one could read all about Tubealloy (listed, of course, under its real name). None of the chemists lingered there too long—you never knew who was watching—but ink smudges on the page and a well-creased spine would later tell the story of that volume’s popularity.

Even those who managed to work with Tubealloy and knew what it was were instructed, and agreed, never to use its name. So even if you had figured out part of THE BIG SECRET—or thought you had—there was no reason to use transparent language in public, since you would never get confirmation about whether you had, truly, determined why CEW and all its plants existed. Loose lips!